Opera Review: Journey's End In Lovers' Meeting

L'Amour de Loin at the Metropolitan Opera.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Susanna Philips (top) Tamara Mumford (left) and Eric Owens in L'Amour de Loin.
Photo by Ken Howard © 2016 The Metropolitan Opera.

Last night, the Metropolitan Opera played its last 2016 performance of Kaija Saariaho's opera L'Amour de Loin. This the first opera by a female composer mounted at the Met since 1903, and it served as a kind of manifesto for this company's mission in this uncertain new century.L'Amour de Loin (the title means "Love From Afar") is Ms. Saariaho's first opera, and it premiered at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris in 2000. This production featured Susanna Philips and Eric Owens, American stars who have risen to prominence in the last decade, as well as the stage direction of Robert Lepage, an artist whose successes at the Met are still overshadowed by the colossal failure of his staging of Wagner's Ring.

Metropolitan Opera Preview: L'Amour de Loin

Long distance love is the subject of Kaija Saariaho's 21st century opera.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Keep 'em separated: Susanna Philips and Eric Owens in L'Amour de Loin. 
Image © 2016 The Metropolitan Opera.

Sixteen years after its Salzburg premiere and fourteen years after the first North American performances, the Metropolitan Opera finally stages L'Amour de Loin ("Love From Afar") by contemporary Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, in a new production by Robert Lepage.

Concert Review: The Genesis Effect

The Oratorio Society of New York plays Haydn's Creation.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Conductor Kent Tritle leading the Oratorio Society of New York at Carnegie Hall.
Photo by Tim Dwight © 2014 The Oratorio Society of New York. 

Franz Joseph Haydn is a pivotal figure in music. The father of the symphony and the string quartet, Haydn is too often pigeon-holed as a doddering relic, a composer who churned out similar works to keep a rich patron happy and whose music remains irrelevant today. With their season-opening performance of The Creation ("Die Schöpfung") on Monday night at Carnegie Hall, Kent Tritle and the Oratorio Society of New York showed that the truth about Haydn is something very different.

Metropolitan Opera Preview: Così fan tutte

James Levine returns to conducting opera with Mozart's comedy.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The Three Sopranos: Isabel Leonard (left) Danielle De Niese (center) and Susanna Philips
in a scene from the Metropolitan Opera's revival of Così fan tutte. 
Photo by Marty Sohl © 2013 The Metropolitan Opera.

Are women really "like that?"(Maybe.)

Are men really pigs? (Probably.)

Is James Levine really back? (Definitely!)