In an imaginative line-up of old and new Americana, the concert opened with the Suite by Matthew Aucoin crafted from his 2020 opera, Eurydice. At the Met, where the opera – a retelling of the Orpheus myth from Eurydice’s point of view – played last fall, Aucoin’s richly orchestrated score impressed, but in this abstract the music’s wide-ranging …
This uplifting and altogether sensational program illustrated a critical juncture in Beethoven’s ever-expanding view of possibility, when, between his Second and Third Symphonies, he became more acutely aware of his increasing deafness and at the same time made a huge leap in his compositional style. Jessica Hunt’s piece was influenced by his personal struggles which …
In this, the Metropolitan Opera’s second revival of David McVicar’s 2017 realistic, retro-style staging of Puccin’s Tosca, Sondra Radvanovsky returns to her signature role of Floria Tosca, opera’s quintessential prima donna, caught in the middle of a violent and passionate Roman love-triangle between her lover, the painter and republican sympathizer Mario Cavaradossi, and Baron Scarpia, the sadistic Roman chief of police …
This Metropolitan Opera performance marked the New York premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice, a co-commission and co-production with LA Opera where it received its world premiere in February of 2020. With a libretto by Sarah Ruhl, adapted from her acclaimed 2003 play of the same title, it is an absorbing, often witty take on the Orpheus myth, …
