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Met’s misguided new ‘Eugene Onegin’

If it ain't broke....

The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Eugene Onegin is full of innovations, almost all of them detrimental.

Steve Cohen

Oct 08, 2013 Articles 4 minute read

Woodhams: Playing for the eye as well as the ear.

Orchestra plays Britten, Strauss and Mahler

Oboist Richard Woodhams took the stage in a tailored blue shirt, worn outside his pants— It symbolizes a change in attitude— a signal that the Philadelphia Orchestra understands its need to experiment and adapt.

Tom Purdom

Oct 08, 2013 Articles 4 minute read

Yannick leads Beethoven’s Ninth (2nd review)

Yannick leaps off a musical cliff

Yannick Nézet-Séguin is emerging as an artist of notable imagination and daring. In the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth he was maybe a little too daring.

Oct 05, 2013 Articles 3 minute read

Yannick: A long sojourn in a serene world.

Yannick leads Beethoven’s Ninth (1st review)

In the quest for goose bumps, size matters

Yannick-Nézet Séguin’s version of Beethoven’s Ninth inadvertently demonstrated that the same work can be performed in radically different ways. He made the most of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s major asset: Its size.

Tom Purdom

Oct 01, 2013 Articles 4 minute read

Catana: Does this look like a bloodthirsty tyrant?

Opera Philadelphia’s ‘Nabucco’ (2nd review)

The mightiest man on Earth? (and other flaws in Verdi’s Nabucco)

Nabucco’s characters lack depth, and the music is less accomplished than what Verdi would write just a few years later. So director/designer Thaddeus Strassberger was indeed clever to mount this Nabucco as it might have been performed in Italy in the 1840s.

Steve Cohen

Oct 01, 2013 Articles 4 minute read

All we need is Boross (above) and a chorus.

Opera Philadelphia’s ‘Nabucco’ (1st review)

Jehovah vs. Baal, then and now

Verdi’s dramatically clunky Nabucco was a broadly drawn metaphor for Austria’s domination of Italy. Thaddeus Strassberger constructs a play around a play in an effort to mask some of the drama’s weaknesses. Its virtues include a fiery new soprano and a final moment of genuine theatrical magic.

Sep 30, 2013 Articles 4 minute read

Philadelphia Orchestra’s Tchaikovsky opening

Back to the future with Yannick and Anne-Sophie

What have the Russians done for us lately? Well, Tchaikovsky is timeless, as the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter reminded us on opening night.

Steve Cohen

Sep 28, 2013 Articles 2 minute read

Orchestra 2001’s opening weekend (2nd review)

Young composer, astonishing head

Sometimes I dread poems set to music. But when it works, it’s art. Chris Rogerson's Fishing was one of three new works, each giving a prominent role to the keyboard.

Lesley Valdes

Sep 28, 2013 Articles 5 minute read