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Met Opera 2024-25 Review: Moby-Dick
The vast sea breathes in gentle, rhythmic swells. Stars, twinkling aloud, wheel overhead, constellating until they form the mast, sails, and ropes of the whaling ship Pequod. This is the seascape that greets you in the overture of Jake Heggie’s monumental Moby-Dick.
Met Opera 2024-25 Review: Aida
New stagings always carry the weight of expectations, but Michael Mayer’s new Aida has the burden of replacing one of the Met’s most beloved productions. This staging had a fairly bumpy road; it was originally scheduled for 2020, but was axed due to corona. Now, it’s finally here, and quite remarkable. Hang on to your amulets!
Met Opera 2024-25 Review: Ainadamar
“That. Was. Glorious,” an anonymous voice behind me gushed when the curtain dropped. Indeed, Ainadamar’s genre-fusing combination of great voices, historical elegy, and explosive flamenco dancing is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
Met Opera 2024-25 Review: Les Contes d’Hoffmann
Jacques Offenbach‘s Les Contes d’Hoffmann is opera’s equivalent of The Tortured Poets Department, only 14,592 times better. The music brims with kaleidoscopic vibrancy and the story of Hoffmann’s three loves is delightful, though dizzyingly strange at times.
Album Review: Mozart, You Drive Me Crazy!
Golda Schultz’s voice is reminiscent of a vibrant flower opening its petals toward the sun, and Mozart, You Drive Me Crazy! is an exquisitely juicy album from one of the world’s most exquisite sopranos.
Met Opera 2023-24 Review: Roméo et Juliette
Romeo and Juliet reliably make you swoon and weep, but a truly worthy cast should make the “sweet sorrow” fresh each time. The cast the Met has assembled for Roméo et Juliette blows these and other standards away.
