Classical Source Reviews

On the second night of its two-performance visit to City Center Will Crutchfield’s Teatro Nuovo presented Vincenzo Bellini’s melodramatic La Sonnambula. Set in an early-19th-century Swiss Alpine village, the story is frequently criticized for its […]

For the first performance in their two-day visit to City Center, Teatro Nuovo, a company and training institution specializing in bel canto opera established by Will Crutchfield in 2018, mounted an electrifying rendition of Verdi’s […]

For all that Shakespeare’s Macbeth combines something of history and tragedy, it’s probably the play’s elements of fantasy and supernaturalism that stand out most in many people’s minds, and which clearly inspired Verdi and Piave […]

In this superb concert presentation, the cast moved about in front of the orchestra, successfully telling the story with wonderful singing (from memory) and acting. The three principals at the center of the plot brought […]

This recital was a major event in Tanglewood’s celebration of the 150th-anniversary of Maurice Ravel’s birth, Seong-Jin Cho playing Ravel’s works for solo piano in the chronological order of their composition, taking nearly three hours. […]

Sir Bryn Terfel’s focus in the first half of this delightful recital was on the national identity and culture of his native Wales. With Bradley Moore at the piano, Terfel began with three Welsh-language songs, […]

Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande is famously and beautifully a sparse opera, adapting the Symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck whose drama is structured not so much as a continuous narrative as by its succession of episodes […]

Despite containing what is probably Rameau’s best known single piece of music (the keyboard piece Les Sauvages, arranged as the vocal ensemble ‘Forêts paisibles’) this is claimed to be the first fully staged performance in […]

For Handel’s Semele (1744) Oliver Mears and designer Annemarie Woods draw inspiration from the films of Luis Buñuel for their surreal horror. Cross that with The Marriage of Figaro and you get the interpretation they […]

To say that expectations were running high for this new dance version of the extraordinary 1979 film Quadrophenia would be to understate the atmosphere in the audience before the beginning of the show. Not only […]