Opera

Opera Album Review: Two Composers — One Vivid French Baroque Opera, Based on Euripides

May 31, 2025
Posted in , , ,

Two-plus hours of delight  for anybody interested in Baroque opera, or willing to try it. 

Read More

Opera Album Review: It Takes a Village to Revive a Once-Beloved Eighteenth-Century Opera

May 11, 2025
Posted in , , , ,

Pietro Auletta’s “L’Orazio” (1737), with substitute arias by other composers, gets a first-rate performance from the renowned Valle d’Itria Festival.

Read More

Opera Album Review: In a New Recording, Faust Is Damned Again — Early-Modernist Style

May 9, 2025
Posted in , , , ,

Ferruccio Busoni’s century-old (or -young) Doktor Faust, inspired by Christopher Marlowe and other pre-Goethe sources, offers a fascinatingly hellish ride.

Read More

Opera Album Review: A Delightful Three-Character Opera by Paisiello Recieves Its World-Premiere Recording

April 10, 2025
Posted in , , ,

A renowned 18th-century master struts his stuff, helped by a skillful young Italian tenor, in an opera first performed in Russia.

Read More

Opera Preview: “The Seasons” — A Fascinating and Disturbing Weather Report

March 8, 2025
Posted in , , ,

“I wanted, with this opera, to see if audiences and collaborators could feel something about our changing weather, in an artistic space.”

Read More

Opera Album Review: Racine’s Tragedy “Andromaque” Finds New Life in Rossini’s Splendidly Serious “Ermione”

January 16, 2025
Posted in , , ,

Another excellent recording from the “Rossini in Wildbad” festival, with spellbinding vocal performances by Congolese tenor Patrick Kabongo and other powerful young singers.

Read More

Opera Review: Conductor Frieder Bernius Continues to Strike Gold with “Der Taucher”

January 6, 2025
Posted in , , ,

Any opera lover will find much to admire and enjoy in this work, based on a famous 27-strophe poem by Friedrich Schiller that Schubert set in its entirety to music.

Read More

Opera Album Review: A Splendidly Engaging New Opera — “The Leopard”

December 15, 2024
Posted in , , , ,

 I encourage anybody interested in the current state of opera to get to know Michael Dellaira’s “The Leopard”.

Read More

Locke’s 2024 List of Notable Operatic Recordings and a Few Non-Operatic Ones

December 3, 2024
Posted in , , , , ,

The opera repertory is so much richer than what gets staged nowadays; many of the most exciting recordings that came my way are of somewhat or entirely forgotten operas from past eras.

Read More

Opera Review: Boston Lyric Opera’s “Aida” — Intimacy Rather than Excess

November 18, 2024
Posted in , , , ,

The only serious flaw in Boston Lyric Opera’s stripped-down staging approach to Aida was that not all the participants were quite up to the organization’s usual standards.

Read More

Recent Posts

Popular Posts

Categories

Archives