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2 weeks ago | 
broadwayworld.com | Richard Sasanow
Macheath’s back in town! Or at least he was for a few short days, when the Berliner Ensemble brought its now-famous Barrie Kosky production to BAM, in association with St. Ann’s Warehouse.
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3 weeks ago | 
broadwayworld.com | Richard Sasanow
What’s a Mozart lover to do? Great music and a more-than-decent cast don’t necessarily add up to an enchanting night at the opera. Yes, it’s true that LE NOZZE DI FIGARO ("The Marriage of Figaro") has some of Mozart’s most delicious music and a strong libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte; there’s no denying that. Where do I start?
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1 month ago | 
broadwayworld.com | Richard Sasanow
Imagine being a rising young opera singer and getting to sing two solos from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, chosen from nearly 1500 applicants and the more than 900 singers who made it into the earlier rounds of the Met's Laffont competition from across the United States, Canada and Mexico. And picture receiving $20,000 for your efforts and the prestige, exposure and networking opportunities that come with it.
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1 month ago | 
broadwayworld.com | Richard Sasanow
Political prisoner is rescued from dungeon by his faithful wife, only to find that she’s pregnant!Not really: Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, who’s shown she indispensable in roles from Tchaikovsky’s QUEEN OF SPADES to Strauss’s ARIADNE AUF NAXOS starts her maternity leave at the end of her Met run of Beethoven’s only opera, FIDELIO, on March 15. She’s proven a fearless singer but in this week’s opening of the Beethoven work, as Leonore, she also showed herself a game actor.
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1 month ago | 
broadwayworld.com | Richard Sasanow
MOBY-DICK--Herman Melville’s epic tale of obsession and man-versus-nature, succinctly adapted by composer Jake Heggie with Gene Scheer’s taut libretto--roared into the Met Monday night and begged only one question: What took so long for it to get here? It had everything that an opera audience could wish for in a rapid-fire evening of singing, dancing and great drama, under Director Leonard Foglia’s superlative job in his company debut.
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2 months ago | 
broadwayworld.com | Richard Sasanow
While opera-lovers wait eagerly for soprano Julia Bullock’s appearance in the latest John Adams lyric drama, ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, at the Met in May, Bullock continues to tantalize us with some other parts of her repertoire: From the Baroque (her recent program with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment) to this past Tuesday’s entry in Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series, HISTORY’S PERSISTENT VOICE, filled with songs and readings about enslavement and incarceration.
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2 months ago | 
broadwayworld.com | Richard Sasanow
The people at Heartbeat Opera--that dazzling reinvention-machine for taking works that you think you might have heard one time too often and making them compelling--must have had a crystal ball when they programmed Strauss’s SALOME long before the current, decadent regime took control in US politics. My only complaint about that is that they couldn’t possibly have pictured the level of corruption we’re exposed to every day, or they would have taken their production one more step over the line.
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2 months ago | 
broadwayworld.com | Richard Sasanow
Michael Hersch took no prisoners with his new opera, AND WE, EACH, a production of the Baltimore musical organization, Mind on Fire, which had its New York premiere on February 6 at National Sawdust in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
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2 months ago | 
broadwayworld.com | Richard Sasanow
Anyone who’s spent enough time watching network TV knows an American criminal justice system that is built around simplistic stories of the good guys (hard-working prosecutors and police detectives) putting away the bad guys (“perps” of all stripes) with the help of brilliant DNA evidence that points the way to the truth.
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2 months ago | 
broadwayworld.com | Richard Sasanow
Even though there’s no shortage of contemporary opera around, we all still long for the rediscovery of a delightful operatic work from the archives, particularly a comedy, of which there is a short supply. Would Opera Philadelphia’s THE ANONYMOUS LOVER (L’AMANT ANONYME)--by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George, a contemporary of Mozart, with libretto by Francois-Georges Fouques Deshayes, Desfontaines--fit the bill? Hope sprang eternal, for me at least.
