The New York Times’s classical music and opera critics see and hear much more than they review. Here is what has hooked them recently. Leave your own favorites in the comments. ‘The Barber of Seville’ For an opera lover seeking a bit of escapist fun, Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” …
The director R.B. Schlather gathered the cast of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare” for a quick pep talk before running through the opera last weekend. Not all the costumes were ready, and not everyone in the orchestra could be there, but they were about to see whether the show they had been …
Instead of finishing his masterpiece “Khovanshchina,” Modest Mussorgsky is drunk in a ditch. His friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov urges him to compose, using a walking stick to tickle him awake. But Mussorgsky would rather stay in the ditch, drunk. That’s fiction: a scene from “Moscow-Petushki,” a 1969 satire by the Soviet …
Theaters are never truly dark. In between performances, a simple floor lamp is placed onstage and switched on. It’s called a ghost light, and depending on whom you ask, it’s either a practical safety measure or a way to ward off spirits. Some say it actually welcomes them. As audience …
It was five years ago today — March 12, 2020 — that the widening coronavirus pandemic forced Broadway to go dark, museums to shut their doors, concert halls and opera houses to go silent and stadiums and arenas to remain empty. At the time, they hoped to reopen in a …
A lonely schoolboy named Bertil makes a magical friend who goes by Nils in “Nils Karlsson Däumling,” a children’s opera by Thierry Tidrow based on a fairy tale by Astrid Lindgren. Nils teaches Bertil to change his size by singing a spell-like song. For contemporary classical composers, writing children’s opera …
When “Moby Dick” opens at the Metropolitan Opera this week, audiences will experience a deeply American story of unchecked ambition, fomented grievances and a self-destructive desire for revenge. Based on Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, the opera delivers an economical and resolute retelling of the fateful tale of the Pequod, a …
When “The Threepenny Opera” returns to New York this spring, for an all-too-brief visit to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it will be notable for a few reasons. For one, it will be a homecoming. Although “Threepenny” was born in Berlin, an artifact of Weimar-era culture, with music by Kurt …
“Vanessa” had the kind of pedigree you rarely see in a world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera. Samuel Barber, who was already famous for his Adagio for Strings, composed the score. Gian Carlo Menotti, his partner and an experienced hand at opera, wrote the libretto and directed. Cecil Beaton, mere …
Broadway OPERATION MINCEMEAT A sneaky compassion lies at the heart of this caper of a show, a deliciously eccentric London import that won the 2024 Olivier Award for best new musical. Starring the original West End cast, it’s a riff on a bizarre true story from World War II, when …