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1 week ago | 
parterre.com | John Yohalem
Twenty-six—I think. Or has it been twenty-eight? The number of different Donizetti operas I’ve seen in live performance. Not sure. But then, no one is quite sure how many he composed. Sixty-five or eighty. Something like that. He was a speed demon from his earliest years—it was a joke among the other boys studying under the renowned Giovanni Simone Mayr in Bergamo in the 1810s. You haven’t finished your overture yet? Donizetti’s reached his finale.
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2 months ago | 
parterre.com | John Yohalem |James Jorden
Several years ago I sent a review to parterre that, in passing, mentioned a performance that had starred Kate Lindsay when actually it had been Kate Aldrich. The two mezzos have a similar vocal range, very different musical focus, and are both delightful to encounter in any cast. Luckily our intrepid La Cieca, James Jorden, caught me in the act and altered the copy.
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Jan 30, 2025 | 
parterre.com | John Yohalem
Boris Goldovsky used to give the most fascinating intermission features on the old Met broadcasts. Wish they’d rerun them. One of my favorites was his musical analysis of the Valkyrie scenes from Act III of Die Walküre, how Wagner paired and tripled and quadrupled the counterpoint to keep it interesting, both on their initial entrance and their entreaties to Brünnhilde (not to disobey Daddy) and to Wotan (not to punish big sister).
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Jan 23, 2025 | 
parterre.com | John Yohalem
It’s the same old Show Boat, with the same old plot points that startled folks in 1927, some of them still startling today. How Steve and Julie avoid arrest for miscegenation, for instance—the climax of Act I—or Magnolia’s desertion by Ravenal.
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Dec 23, 2024 | 
parterre.com | John Yohalem
First, there is the countertenor. There used to be very few singers in this category. You could name the notable ones on one hand or less, and they scarcely ever appeared in the opera house. It wasn’t clear how you did use them, since few composers had specified their music for one.
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Dec 5, 2024 | 
parterre.com | John Yohalem
Balletomanes will remember Don Quixote as the 1869 Petipa/Minkus three-acter in which the gaunt knight and his cynical sidekick encounter a barber, a bride and a rich fiancé in a small Spanish town and (with a great many faux-Flamenco dance moves) set all to rights, the girl removed from the suitor’s arms and wedded to the barber she loves. It is popular with aging ballet stars, since the title role doesn’t actually dance much but he gets the big bows.
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Nov 4, 2024 | 
parterre.com | John Yohalem
Strike Up the Band! cried the brothers Gershwin (and book-writers George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind) in the first of their three satirical, vaguely political operettas—sort of jazz Gilbert & Sullivan—that they dreamed up in the late 1920s. Of Thee I Sing is the one you’ve heard of—it was the first musical to win a Pulitzer. Odyssey Opera gave that one and Let ‘em Eat Cake in Boston last weekend.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
parterre.com | John Yohalem
I’ve always been of the opinion that anyone who disdains this great score or thinks the story silly ought to be confined to the TV room during a Marx Brothers retrospective and leave the opera house unsullied (and unsillied). Il Trovatore is a drama about storytelling, and who tells a story better than Verdi does? Though Verdi, on occasion, may omit plot points that he doubts are “musicabile,” in Trovatore, those points usually occur between acts and are narrated later.
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Oct 16, 2024 | 
parterre.com | John Yohalem
With its Louis Comfort Tiffany glass and blue ceramic décor, carved woodwork and Romanesque ivory friezes, the Veterans’ Room of the Park Avenue Armory is one of the most beautiful rooms in New York for the performance of music. The most succinct way to describe Karim Sulayman’s recital there, with guitarist Sean Shibe, last Thursday (repeating an earlier equally sold-out performance on Tuesday) is to say that the music-making was worthy of the matchless venue.
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Oct 4, 2024 | 
parterre.com | John Yohalem
He’s the hunchbacked court jester to the Duke of Mantua, in this staging a 1930s punk tyrant. The jester is renowned for a tongue as barbed and pointed as any stiletto in His Grace’s employ. But, hump aside (and few Rigolettos bother with a visible hump nowadays), he has one weak spot: his pure and innocent daughter. She’s in town on a visit and she’s curious about, you know, boys. Coronet or no coronet. This cannot end well, for anybody.
