Tuning in to Opera

February is Black History Month - in the US since the Civil Rights movement of the 60s, and lately in Canada, UK and other countries. ...

In Wagner's operas redemption recurs as a grand and triumphal core. Nietzsche commented nastily. “Somebody or other always wants to be...

Operas abound about women demanding to know who this bloke really is, but Semele's punishment was particularly harsh. She was the only...

Turn off the news and relax with some of opera's best romantic departures from reality. this week, Romeo and Juliette star at San...

Epic rivalries at the Met this week - and it's all about the women. Tuesday, January 5 Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur Starring Anna...

Luciana Pavarotti was possibly the most popular opera singer in the postwar years. With his brilliant tenor voice and famous smile, he...

Here's to happy opera! Happy for the end of this challenging year, and for the festive season. Celebrate, among other things, the...

Ending an epic year, the Met is screening epics, and in Met style of old, they are not light or nifty. But there's some great myths and...

... create operas? Well they can, but it's rare for English operas to be featured, and rarer for an opera company, especially an...

‘We won’t keep quiet,’ says the promotional material from Dutch National Opera for the original piece they produced and performed when...

It was (arguably) the first opera - as we know opera. Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (1607) shifted music drama from 'intermedio' - music between...

Q. What's the difference between a conductor and God? ... A. God doesn't think he's a conductor. Yannick Nézet-Séguin was named the...

Dealing with pandemic shutdown requires a particular sort of humour. Try a Finnish sense of humour. The Finnish National Opera, forced...

It’s a cultural virtual tour - if it’s Tuesday it must be Tchaikovsky? The Met has dealt with its unremitting task of livestreaming an...

Lock up your local young operatic talent with no work and time to invent - and what do you get? Quarantine così is the answer from a...

(By Tom) What is? Politics of course! If you didn’t know that, you haven’t been living on this planet for the last four years. And as its...

The Met, with fine attention to current affairs, is giving us a week (in our dates, Oct 20-27) of Operatic Comedies – and the two gems...

Romantic musical melodrama can be comic or tragic - and both blossom with bel canto. Donizetti proved it, and his gems are screening at...

"Wagner has beautiful moments, but awful quarters of an hour," Rossini remarked. Many of both sorts are coming up this week. In the world...

It's a Mozart Week at the Met - on the 29th week of their free live streamings. Note: with daylight saving in Melbourne, times for Met...