Opera

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Tod Machover's Death and the Powers, plus Norrington's C.P.E. Bach and the Cantata Singers' B-minor Mass

Robotics
In her director's note for the American premiere of Death and the Powers: The Robots' Opera , Diane Paulus, artistic director of the American Repertory Theater, wrote that this "work of music-theater . . . has brought together artists from the widest range of disciplines — from theater and film to modern dance and the cutting-edge technology of the MIT Media Lab."
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | March 25, 2011

Love and Robots in Death and the Powers: The Robots' Opera

In Tod Machover's new opera, Death and the Powers , high technology meets high anxiety
A third of the way through the opera Death and the Powers: the Robots' Opera , the leading man becomes a machine.
By CHRIS DAHLEN | March 18, 2011

Heavy metal: Opera Boston’s Cardillac

Plus another Levine cancellation, H&H’s Handel, the Takács Quartet, and Dmitri Hvorostovsky
One of the major musical events of the season, Opera Boston’s New England premiere of Paul Hindemith’s Cardillac, was upstaged by the depressing announcement by BSO managing director Mark Volpe, just before the first of the BSO’s four performances of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, that James Levine was not going to conduct.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | March 03, 2011

The Mariinsky In Stravinsky

Coolidge Corner Theatre | February 20, 2011
Live opera — at least, live opera from the Met — has been a huge success in movie theaters. (In Boston, the Fenway routinely sells out two screens.) What about not-quite-live dance?
By JEFFREY GANTZ | March 02, 2011

Opera from BLO, the Met, and Teatro Lirico, plus top-level conducting at the BSO

Good works
Opera in Boston is now back in full swing. Boston Lyric Opera, with a company of singers and designers largely new to Boston led by Boston Classical Orchestra music director Steven Lipsitt, gave a memorable production of the opera that composer Viktor Ullmann and poet Petr Kien created in 1943 at the Terezín concentration camp, The Emperor of Atlantis , or Death Quits .
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | February 15, 2011

Oedipus schmoedipus

Operas at the BSO, plus the Cantata Singers, the BYSO's Macbeth, and Christine Brewer
One of the Boston Symphony Orchestra's most famous concerts was one that didn't take place. Nearly 30 years ago, the BSO announced Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex , to be staged by Peter Sellars, with Vanessa Redgrave narrating.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | January 21, 2011

Live! — sort of

Fela! on screen
The success of the Metropolitan Opera's "Live in HD" experiment augurs well for dance on the big screen. Simulcast at select theaters, with tickets priced higher than for a movie but much cheaper than for a live opera, these events generate a sense of anticipation.
By MARCIA B. SIEGEL | January 14, 2011

Sing, sing, sing!: The 2011 winter opera forecast

Opera is this winter's warmer
For opera lovers, the offerings last fall were at best a little thin. But this winter, it seems, everyone's doin' it.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | December 30, 2010

Review: Jonathan McPhee & the Longwood Symphony Orchestra at Jordan Hall

Where's the audience?
Jonathan McPhee is a hard man to keep up with.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | December 10, 2010

Review: Cappella Clausura in Ordo Virtutum

Cappella Clausura tames the Devil at the First Lutheran Church on November 12, 2010
Sex and the single (it’s the only one we have) 12th-century opera? That’s what an early-music outfit was promising at the First Lutheran Church of Boston this past Sunday.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | November 18, 2010

Feeding frenzy

The media rain on James Levine's parade, plus Boston Midsummer Opera
The media rain on James Levine's parade, plus Boston Midsummer Opera
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | September 03, 2010

A modest epic tale

Steven Jobe’s haunting Joan of Arc
What beautiful voices and music in this event. Steven Jobe’s Joan of Arc: An Opera In Three Acts is at once ambitious and quite modest, but vocally and musically it remains a pleasure throughout its three brief acts at the Blackstone River Theater in Cumberland (through May 23).
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | May 19, 2010

Blythe spirit

Opera Boston’s Offenbach, Thomas Quasthoff, the BSO, Boston Baroque, and BU’s Sondheim
Leaving the Cutler Majestic after the opening night of Opera Boston’s latest Offenbach, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein , you could see the smiling faces of an audience that had had a good time.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | May 17, 2010

Opera singer teaches Sox fans how to scream

You Scream, I Scream Dept.
If Elena Zoubareva had the nerve to admonish boisterous fans outside Fenway Park, she’d offer, calmly, “Don’t scream like that — you’ll strain your vocal cords!”
By MARIANNA FAYNSHTEYN | May 05, 2010

Ye gods!

BLO’s Idomeneo, BU’s Susannah, Garfein’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Zander’s Stravinsky, and Pollini’s Chopin
Much beautiful music turns up in the 18th-century operatic form that’s probably most alien to a modern audience.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | April 28, 2010

The naked truth

Letters to the Boston editor, April 2, 2010
I would like to register my protest against your “Naked Boston” issue’s needlessly titillating cover image of a nude, beheaded woman.
By BOSTON PHOENIX LETTERS | March 31, 2010

Stuff at night

The BSO without Levine, Yo-Yo Ma, the Cantata Singers, American Classics, the Zerounian Ensemble
This week’s health headlines also included the announcement from the Boston Symphony Orchestra that music director James Levine has been sidelined again, from the “excruciating pain” he’s been suffering since his surgery for a herniated disc.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | April 29, 2010

Welsh rarebit

Boston Lyric Opera's imported Ariadne
Boston Lyric Opera hasn't had much success lately with either its home-grown or its second-hand products, but its latest import — the Welsh National Opera's 2004 production of Ariadne auf Naxos, Richard Strauss's third collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, his favorite librettist — is a charmer.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | March 16, 2010

Bach beat

Lions and lambs
Composers John Harbison and Peter Lieberson are big presences this spring.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | March 08, 2010

Interview: Max Raabe

Killer cabaret: bringing Berlin to Boston
"It was so crazy in the '20s, in the Weimar Republic. Everything was so open-minded and wide, and that is why I love that period so much."
By JEFFREY GANTZ | March 02, 2010

Snakebite

Opera Boston presents the world premiere of Madame White Snake; plus the Leipzig Gewandhaus and Boston Philharmonic
"I can no longer stand to let this travesty continue," sings a character in Madame White Snake , the new opera based on an ancient Chinese legend co-commissioned by Opera Boston, which has just presented its world premiere. I'm afraid I shared the sentiment at last Friday's performance.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | March 03, 2010

Bouquets all around

P+J spread the love; haigiography; hate-mongers in the Biggest Little
While it is difficult to be very jolly during February, P+J are in a generous mood and are willing to salute a few people, rather than dissect them. Yes, we are just wonderful.
By PHILLIPE AND JORGE | February 24, 2010

Double trouble

BLO's The Turn of the S crew, Levine's Carter and Simon Boccanegra, Teatro Lirico, the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet, and more
Boston Lyric Opera's debut Opera Annex production was so good in so many ways, it's painful that one bad idea just about sank it.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | February 09, 2010

Portland Symphony Orchestra

Music Seen
At January 24, Merrill Auditorium
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | January 27, 2010

John Harbison plus 10

Picking from a packed concert schedule
Classical music in Boston is so rich, having to pick 10 special events for this winter preview is more like one-tenth of the performances I'm actually looking forward to.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | January 05, 2010

2009: The year in Classical

Beating the quease
This was a queasy year for classical music.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | January 04, 2010

Wanting more

The Borromeo and Emerson String Quartets, Dohnányi with the BSO, and Yiddish operetta at Harvard
After its triumphant traversal of the complete Béla Bartók string quartets at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Borromeo Quartet was back for a free 20th- and 21st-century program at Jordan Hall, leading off with an accomplished recent piece by the 24-year-old Egyptian composer Mohammed Fairuz, Lamentation and Satire.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | December 16, 2009

Almost

BLO's Carmen, the BSO's Beethoven, Emmanuel Music's Haydn and Schoenberg
The Boston Lyric Opera comes maddeningly close to having a good Carmen . (The production continues at the Shubert Theatre through November 17.) Keith Lockhart leads a superb orchestra and chorus and a cast of plausible singers/actors in a compelling if not spine-tingling performance.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | November 12, 2009

Blessings: mixed and otherwise

Boston Baroque’s Amadigi; Opera Boston’s Tancredi; the BSO’s Beethoven; the Borromeo’s Bartók; Brahms from BCMS and BSOCP
By odd coincidence, in recent weeks we’ve had performances of two important operatic rarities, landmark early works a century apart: 30-year-old Handel’s Amadigi (1715) and 20-year-old Rossini’s Tancredi (1813, his 10th opera!).
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | October 28, 2009

The roar of the crowd

‘Opening Night at Symphony,’ Russell Sherman, the Discovery Ensemble, Boston Musica Viva, and the Bostonians
I wasn’t there, but the opening-night dissatisfaction with the Met’s new Tosca was widely reported.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | October 13, 2009

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