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Moses in Egypt
With the parting of the red curtain last week at City Center, The New York City Opera returned home from its long exile to Lincoln Center and other venues. The music to Rossini’s MOSES IN EGYPT is lovely, and among the performers Sian Davies as Elcia and Wayne Tiggs as Pharoah made a particularly strong…
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The Turn of the Screw
The aesthetics of the ghost story and of horror in general are essentially those of the Symbolist movement that spanned the 19th and the 20th centuries. Phenomena that are perceived by the senses, say the sight of a ghost or the sound of a raven tapping on the chamber door, intimate the existence of a…
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Orpheus
The New York City Opera has been on an Odyssean voyage since setting sail from the financially burdensome port of Lincoln Center, with “its return to its birthplace, New York City Center” set for next April, according to the teller of tales that is next season’s brochure. The journey has been a chance for artists…
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Prima Donna
Pictured is the lobby ceiling at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the new home for the New York City Opera: I post this great full sail of an image on the occasion of having seen and enjoyed PRIMA DONNA, a modern opera by songwriter and folk music scion Rufus Wainwright. As usual, part of the…
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A Quiet Place
The Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Wadsworth opera A QUIET PLACE was not well received when it premiered in 1985, but after seeing its first New York performance on Wednesday night, by the New York City Opera, I suspect that historical distance was the missing ingredient a quarter of a century ago. Alternating between the 1950s and the…