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1 week ago | 
parterre.com | Eli Jacobson
Small local opera companies are like delicate exotic flowers: They blossom for a short time under unstable conditions and wither away when the cold winter of economic insecurity and vagaries of artistic endeavor hit them. They come and they go, providing valuable experience for budding young talent and leaving broken dreams and some dreams that came true behind.
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2 weeks ago | 
parterre.com | Eli Jacobson
Get our free newsletter Opera's top reads delivered to your email weekly…ish. Join over 100k readers.
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1 month ago | 
parterre.com | Eli Jacobson
Leonore’s great aria “Abscheulicher! Wo eilst du hin? …Komm Hoffnung” comes from Act I, Scene 6 of Fidelio and is the defining locus of the heroine and therefore the opera.
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2 months ago | 
parterre.com | Eli Jacobson
That is what Maestro William Christie is doing on his 80th birthday – touring his Les Arts Florissants ensemble around the world and throwing himself a party in each city with a career retrospective program of operatic excerpts from the French Baroque masterpieces by Lully, Rameau, and Charpentier. Les Arts Florissants (LAF) put these masterpieces back on the musical map starting back in 1979.
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2 months ago | 
parterre.com | Eli Jacobson
Get our free newsletter Opera's top reads delivered to your email weekly…ish. Join over 100k readers.
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Jan 15, 2025 | 
parterre.com | Eli Jacobson
John Adams’s oratorio El Niño I had the pleasure of reviewing last Spring at the Metropolitan Opera in an operatic form, fully staged and costumed. Julia Bullock, who portrayed Mary I in that staging, also (in tandem with her husband, the conductor Christian Reif) condensed, rearranged, and revised Adams’s two-act opera into a concert oratorio El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered.
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Nov 1, 2024 | 
parterre.com | Eli Jacobson
The Foundation has kept itself afloat unlike several other operatic institutions and presented their annual gala at Carnegie Hall on Sunday evening, October 27, 2024. As they did last year, there was no orchestra just piano accompaniment, which takes a lot of the gala out of the gala. This year, the Foundation did award a Richard Tucker Award Winner, as usual, to someone who is already well-established and successful in the opera world: the heldentenor Clay Hilley.
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Oct 29, 2024 | 
parterre.com | Eli Jacobson
Nadine Sierra seems to be the current French/Italian coloratura of choice with management (no argument with that). Meanwhile Oropesa is triumphing in Lucia di Lammermoor, La Sonnambula, Les Huguenots, I Masnadieri, Alcina et al. on European stages. I have no complaints about Erin Morley either, but surely there must be room on the roster for this internationally renowned artist with deep roots at the Met.
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Sep 27, 2024 | 
parterre.com | Eli Jacobson
Yet it has a fascination and allure that few other operatic masterpieces have that are structurally more perfect and polished. This masterwork returned to the Metropolitan Opera this past Tuesday in a revival of Bartlett Sher’s 2009 production, a bit of a frustrating puzzle in and of itself. Interest centered on the hot new (to New York) French tenor Benjamin Bernheim, who indeed was the most interesting and effective component in the evening’s success.
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Aug 30, 2024 | 
parterre.com | Eli Jacobson
And the answer is basically yes, when some other arts presenter can back them with funding and a venue. Michael Capasso, general director of the company NYCO Renaissance, an organization that obtained the rights to the name and assets of New York City Opera, was a known quantity in the New York opera world. In fact, a little too well known from his days as founder of the DiCapo Opera. He was known for fighting with colleagues and, unfortunately, not paying his artists.
