Richard Sasanow

The Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center—an unfamiliar name for an orchestra that was around for over half a century, as the Mostly Mozart Festival

Saying that Giacomo Meyerbeer's LE PROPHETE is long is like calling the Grand Canyon a pothole: It doesn't begin to describe the experience, though they both sometimes have a rocky landscape.

A match made in heaven? Girl meets boy. Girl meets baby. Girl meets drone. Girl meets court-martial.

Last Friday night at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre, I saw a preview of its latest production, MCNEAL, directed by Bartlett Sher, which moved like the wind and was fun to watch and hear.

It's fascinating that within two weeks, as the new US opera season began in earnest, Northeast operagoers heard a pair of new (or new-ish) operas

“This is not a cathartic tragedy or a tale of noble sacrifice. There are no admirable characters here, no moral lesson, no redemption, and no silver lining.

Osvaldo Golijov’s AINADAMAR, which made its Met debut this week, with a libretto translated by the composer from the English original by David Henry Hwang, isn’t the first Spanish language opera at the Met, but it’s certainly the first to sound that way.

I must admit that the Met’s current revival of IL TROVATORE--with RIGOLETTO and TRAVIATA, considered the great creations of Verdi’s middle period--made me think of another masterwork, “A Night at the Opera,” my favorite of the movies by those champions of silliness, the Marx Brothers.

As usual, the gala concert of the Richard Tucker Music Foundation started off with an interloper from the golden age of opera: Richard Tucker himself, singing Mascagni’s “Addio alla Madre” from CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA. A tough act to follow for those singing live at Carnegie Hall, but happily no one seemed daunted by it. That doesn’t mean everything went smoothly at the gala concert, which is par for the course of the annual event. Despite the prestige of the Richard Tucker Awards, the world doesn’t stop when the Tucker Foundation comes a calling.

Richard Strauss’s DIE FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN (THE WOMAN WITHOUT A SHADOW), with a libretto by his long-time collaborator, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, has made a triumphant return to the Met with a stellar cast and the Met Orchestra in peak form under Yannick Nezet-Seguin. It dazzled and glowed like few other evenings in recent memory, in a production by Herbert Wernicke, who died young, not long after its debut in 2001.