Rigoletto's librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, replaced the king with the Duke of Mantua, who is just as morally bankrupt as the original. The opera premiered in 1851 in Venice and has been a popular production to roll out with both name recognition and one of those golden tunes that almost everybody has heard: La donna e mobile, which becomes haunting in the context of the actual plot.
By installing my sculpture Vertical Highways V03 in front of Rockefeller Center, I want to initiate a dialogue of art and architecture that resonates with the urban history of New York City.
Bomsori Kim is a 36-year-old, South Korean, classical violinist who plays from the soul. In Bomsori's hands, she takes people on a journey to the music of another century.
The piece is steeped in Schopenhauer's meditations on the futility of worldly striving and the necessity of accepting oblivion. It is also infused with Wagner's paganistic worship of desire and his matchless ability to translate longing into perpetually unresolved musical phrases.
The thing is an almost-four-hour-long continuous explosion - actors dancing, grappling, and hurling furniture; the director present onstage ripping pieces out of the set; paint and blood and flowers and feathers everywhere.
Claude Chabrol, the celebrated co-founder of the French New Wave, stated, 'Because men are living, and women are surviving. Cinema is about surviving.' This profound insight influenced Petzold's approach to storytelling.
All this to say that Alexander Whitley can harness the technology that so fascinates him, and equally importantly, that he fully understands, to enhance his primary vocation as a dance maker and produce bewitching work. Unfortunately, Mirror, and its companion piece The Rite of Spring, in the brand new double bill currently at Sadler's Wells East, proved major disappointments.
When wonderful scores of music have been rediscovered after being forgotten for 350 years, it's akin to finding doubloons that were lost at the bottom of the ocean in a shipwreck. Yet the result of musical rediscovery is much better than finding long-lost gold, because musical treasures can be shared with a world of listeners.
In Siegfried, the third part of Der Ring des Nibelungen, Richard Wagner shifts the focus away from the troubled world of the gods towards the energy of youth on earth. This is storytelling through opera, where the theatre is crucial and the music sublime.
People all saw that there is something new is being attempted here that you've just got to see. I think that is its own reward. In an era where New York's storied Met Opera has faced layoffs, pay cuts, postponed productions, and a controversial financial agreement with Saudi Arabia, forward-thinking artistic direction becomes essential for survival.
Maira Kalman painted a vase exploding with flowers, capturing the anticipatory air the season brings. She cited Gustav Mahler's 'Das Lied von der Erde' ('The Song of the Earth') as her inspiration: 'Dark is life. Spring is here. The birds are singing.' What more do we need to know?
My dad bought his first blues album in Sweden, 1964. It was a John Lee Hooker album, and even though it was on the other side of the world in a place my dad had never been, and a place he could not relate to, the music was so powerful that it changed my dad's life and he devoted his whole life to music. When I was about seven years old, a little boy, he put a guitar in my arms and I loved the guitar.
I don't want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it's like, Hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this any more. Chalamet said in a recorded conversation for Variety, expressing his reluctance to participate in art forms he perceives as lacking contemporary audience engagement and cultural relevance.
Pornceptual challenges mainstream perceptions of pornography, reframing it as inclusive, artistic, intimate, and respectful rather than exploitative or taboo. Its events, from Berlin to international stages, bring a sex-positive, body-inclusive ethos to nightlife. Strict consent practices, no-photo policies, and spaces designed for authentic self-expression create a rare kind of freedom - one that allows visitors to explore identity, desire, and intimacy without judgment.
The Austrian pianist's expressive, emotional playing may grab the headlines, but it's the unerring sense of underlying architecture that's the thread through her long career. We heard that here, not just within each of the works, but in the shared foundations, and sometimes secret connecting passages, she revealed between them.
Volti and Left Coast meet in a bold and dramatic new work by Chris Castro for storyteller and musicians, which delves into the ancient and universal human explanations for our beginnings. The human relationship to our environment forms a through-line from romantic to experimental musical sensibilities.
Charles-Valentin Alkan was undoubtedly one of the great composers of his day. Chopin, his friend and one-time nextdoor neighbour, was an enthusiastic admirer, while Liszt cited Alkan as the only person in whose presence he felt nervous performing. Many of his keyboard works are notoriously difficult to play, yet all are immaculately crafted.
Radulovic plunges in, his audacious attack and intonational high-wire act almost upsetting the applecart in the oompah-pah finale. The same fearless commitment pays dividends elsewhere: in the jaunty Heifetz arrangement of the Gavotte from the Classical Symphony, for example, or in the spiky march from The Love for Three Oranges.
From unassuming hunks of Carrara marble and limestone, Matthew Simmonds carves realistic, miniature gothic cathedral arches, stairwells, and colonnades. Often based on architectural details of real places, such as cities around Tuscany and Germany's Bamberg Cathedral, the sculptures portray intimate details of corners, vaulted ceilings, arcades, and stairwells that can sometimes be peeked through additional apertures.
I don't want to be working in ballet or opera things where it's like 'Hey, keep this thing alive,' even though it's like no one cares about this anymore. All respect to the ballet and opera people out there.
Our eyes—which we usually think of as purely visual organs—spontaneously dance to the rhythm of what we hear, says study co-author Du Yi, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Using a high-speed eye-tracking system, Du and her team were stunned to discover nonmusicians instinctively blinking in sync with the beat structure of Bach chorales.
I took it upon myself yesterday to 'give it to the man' because there is a culture based around outrage. What I was doing yesterday was virtue signaling because... I knew Timothée's goof-up was something that I could leverage in order for people to connect with me and f*ck with me. And it's easy. It's a modern way to garner clicks, likes, approval, all kinds of things.
The youngest person to win the prestigious Marilyn Horne Foundation Vocal Competition, Sierra made her operatic debut at age 16 as the Sandman in Hansel and Gretel. Today Sierra is best known for her roles in Verdi's Rigoletto (as Gilda) and as the lead in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor.
With a rich background in both Chinese ink painting from the illustrious Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and Western painting at Kunsthochschule Kassel, Xia brings a unique duality to his creations. His latest body of work blends these contrasting techniques, showcasing paintings stretched across unconventional canvases, think flattened cardboard boxes and vintage record sleeves.
When attending the ballet used to mean lining up at the box office or will-call window for a chance to score seats, you can now buy ballet tickets easily online, through the respective company websites or through third-party sites like Stubhub, Vivid Seats and SeatGeek.
Black Coffee is one of electronic music's most influential figures. The Grammy Award-winning artist is celebrated for blending Afro-house, deep house and soulful electronic sounds in both his sets and productions, and has been hypnotising crowds at major festivals and iconic venues worldwide for more than a decade.
