Matthew Gurewitsch
Chekhov In Flashes
From London, Andrew Scott’s Off Broadway-bound Vanya
Heart of Darkness
In Brussels, Fanny and Alexander gets an operatic makeover
A Fairly Mixed-Up Young Man
In 2015 (ages before Rivals!), Alex Hassell grabbed the brass ring as Shakespeare’s Henry V
A Champion for Clara
Alexandra Dariescu makes a specialty of the other Schumann piano concerto
All in the Family
Not much is as it seems in Ingmar Bergman’s late, great, very spooky Yuletide bonbon Fanny and Alexander
Rare Bird, Bass Division
Peixin Chen’s amazing journey from Inner Mongolia to the great lyric stages of the West
Hamlet in Lockdown
How Sir Ian McKellen spent (part of) his pandemic
Flameout
At the Paris Opera, a Handmaid’s Tale makeover for Spontini’s Napoleonic La Vestale
Like to a Lonely Dragon
A shattering Coriolanus from Tom Hiddleston, ten years on
The Ives Conundrum
Celebrating 150 years of Charles Ives, the masterful American composer we’re still quick to dismiss as a crank
This Little Light of Mine
How the secret “cabin songs” of the enslaved took over the world
This Way to the Time Machine
La Scala, which opened in 1778, looks back to the 1600s
Mad as a Hatter
Cecilia Bartoli pulls out all stops in a vintage revival of Nina, Paisiello’s runaway smash of 1789
The Queen’s Next Move
In Salzburg’s The Tales of Hoffmann, Kathryn Lewek shows four faces of the Eternal Feminine
’Til Death Do Us Part
From Ostrava with love, rarities by Smetana
The Best of Times, the Worst of Times
New to Beethoven’s only opera, Lise Davidsen transcends a director’s funny stuff
Stranger than Fiction
Teatro Nuovo gives Carolina Uccelli’s lone surviving opera, Anna di Resburgo, a long-overdue second shot
After Auschwitz
Revisiting the posthumous 2010 stage premiere of Mieczysław Weinberg’s fierce masterpiece The Passenger
Dream Time Alfresco
Way above 96th Street, Shakespeare’s midsummer madness in classical Harlem Renaissance style
A Great Deal More Night Music
Stephen Sondheim’s orchestrator, Jonathan Tunick, doubles his score in the world premiere of a re-arranged A Little Night Music at New York’s Lincoln Center
Miloš Karadaglić
The reigning superstar of the classical guitar on recalibrating his priorities
Infinity Times Four
From the Donmar Warehouse in London, Nick Payne’s Constellations
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
In Basel, Anne Sofie von Otter dismantles Schubert’s Winterreise, to transformative effect
The Gulag of Bernarda Alba
From London’s National Theatre, Lorca’s blistering tragedy of woman’s inhumanity to woman
