（Photo Credit: Step by Step Productions） The 40th Regensburg Early Music Festival concluded with a gesture as grand as its milestone year. A performance of Alessandro Striggio’s “Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno”—a 40-part polyphonic mass—transcended the bounds of concert and became a revived rite. Long queues stretched down the street outside St. Blasius Church, as festivalgoers—some wheeling suitcases—gathered as {…}
The Metropolitan Opera’s 2024-25 season attendance dropped in the spring portion, falling below projections. According to the AP News, the company’s season sold 72 percent of capacity, matching the 2023-24 season. That was three percent down from its 75 percent projection from the winter. In February, the Met reported that the first half of the season had seen 70 percent {…}
Opera Italiana is in the Air has canceled its previously programmed performance for Sunday, June 16, 2025. The showcase, which was set to take place at the Lincoln Memorial, will no longer take place due to weather conditions and extensive road closures in the area. Instead, the event will be live streamed from 6:30- 8 p.m. local time. The performance {…}
（Photo Credit: Hanno Meier) Inside the austere, echoing stone of Regensburg’s 12th-century Romanesque Schottenkirche, Barbara Strozzi’s music found a space as resonant and complex as the woman herself. The Hathor Consort, directed by Romina Lischka, and sopranos Dorothee Mields and Hana Blažíková transformed the church’s cool stillness into a charged atmosphere of intimacy and theatrical depth. They allowed her music {…}
（Photo Credit：Sim Canetty-Clarke） In the sombre setting of St. Blasius Church, the Tenebrae Choir—fourteen singers under the direction of Nigel Short—restored clarity, transparency, and delicacy to the music of Palestrina. In contrast to the grandeur and lush resonance of the Dom’s opening concert one day earlier, this smaller-scale a cappella program allowed every line of Palestrina’s polyphony to emerge with {…}
(Photo Credit: Monika Rittershaus) At the 2025 Salzburg Whitsun Festival, “Hotel Metamorphoses” emerged as an ambitious new opera project — a contemporary reworking of the Baroque pasticcio format that splices myth, music, and modernity into an unlikely unity. Conceived over three years of development by director Barrie Kosky in collaboration with Cecilia Bartoli, the production draws from five mythological episodes {…}
The Opéra Royal de Wallonie-Liège has announced that Stefano Pace will renew his contract as General and Artistic Director. Pace’s second term will last five years and will take effect on July 1, 2026 and will run until June 30, 2031. The General Assembly approved the renewal after convening on June 11, 2025, following a proposal from the Board of Directors. The Board of {…}
(Photo credit Raftermen Photography) Your reviewer spent childhood in the hills about fifty miles west of Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta then and Atlanta now constitute two different places. In the before-time that preceded the internet, Georgia’s small-town folk with their gaze fixed towards the rest of the world viewed Atlanta as the portal to everything else, not least by way of {…}
Soprano Laura Ansaldi has been awarded the distinguished Arts-Sciences-Lettres (ASL) medal. The soprano received the honor in recognition of her outstanding contributions to opera and the arts. The medal was presented on October 6, 2024, at a distinguished ceremony held in the iconic Salon Opéra of the Intercontinental Paris Le Grand Hotel, a historic venue that has hosted generations of {…}
Staatstheater Wiesbaden has named Paul Taubitz its First Kapellmeister. Taubitz took to social media and said, “I’m excited to announce that from season 25-26 I’ll be starting as 1st Kapellmeister at the Staatstheater Wiesbaden. Exciting and challenging tasks await me, and I am very much looking forward to them!!” Taubitz recently became the second Kapellmeister and Assistant to the General {…}
I. In a city as operatically overdetermined as Berlin, even a new production of Richard Strauss’s “Die Frau ohne Schatten” might be expected to pass with respectable indifference. But when Tobias Kratzer mounted the late-Romantic behemoth this January at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, capping a Strauss trilogy that had begun with “Arabella” and “Intermezzo,” the result was not just another {…}