Likely Impossibilities

Warning, I have been struck by the blogging spirit again. I have a lot of notes and half-written reviews in my notebook, so I may be struck again later this week. Sorry for the relative lack of freshness, but think, on a scholarly writing scale this...

I wanted to see Stefan Herheim’s new Glyndebourne staging of Pelléas et Mélisande in part out of perverse curiosity. What would happen when opera’s most hyperactive extrovert directs opera’s least flamboyant, er, opera? I was on my way to the Nineteenth...

I wrote about opera and modern life in Saturday’s New York Times:
Beneath the artifice, the virtuosic singing and the foreign languages, opera’s stories are deeply familiar: tales of love, loss and duty that anyone could identify with. But lately, there’s another way that opera has been recognizable to many in its...

I went to Zürich and I talked to director Andreas Homoki about his production of Franz Lehár’s Das Land des Lächelns. My article is in this week’s issue of VAN.
In Franz Lehár’s 1929 operetta “Das Land des Lächelns,” a Viennese lady, Lisa, loves a Chinese diplomat, Sou-Chong. She follows him back to China and marries him, only for them to ultimately be forced apart by Chinese custom. In 1929, this was a plea...