Critiques de productions passés
19Compact in size but by no means slight.
Opportunity Makes the Thief proved a nice example of the kind of lively and enlightening contribution an “off-off-Broadway” company can make to New York's operatic life.
Carlisle Floyd One-Acts as Opera Magnets
The Little Opera double-bill is given in a small theater by young and able singers, the type whose voices flower in the space.
More complex than your usual opera comique.
The grace of [Saint-Georges'] work (this is his only surviving opera!) and the passion with with The Little Opera Theatre of NY brings it to the stage, should send audiences home floating on a blissful cloud.
Shows off singers at their best...Delightful, impressive, affecting.
Lovely, sophisticated, and fun...Carlisle Floyd deploys his expansive talents with wicked surety and infectious joy...an accomplished, committed cast and crew led by Philip Shneidman present his latest creation with colorful vision and glowing talent.
Beautifully satisfying...a superbly smart and affecting production.
Kristin Gornstein’s portrayal of Piramo was masterful. She sang the difficult role with a truly flawless lyric mezzo, finding opportunities to show both the character’s humor and heartbreak with a melismatic turn or with a glance.
Witnessing the LOTNY production makes one wonder why Owen Wingrave is not performed more often: it has a small cast of eight with juicy roles for all of the characters, evenly divided between men and women’s roles, not true of either of the composer’s operas, Peter Grimes or Billy Budd.
The part of Mrs. Coyle, Owen’s lone steady supporter, was vividly filled by the versatile Canadian-American-Irish soprano Amelia Watkins, whose vibrant (but never unruly) tones didn’t preclude near-perfect diction; she did handsome credit to the memory of its creator, the shamefully never-damed Heather Harper, who’d died just three weeks earlier. There was even a supernumerary bonus in the strong presence of Broadway legend Penny Fuller as the Wingrave housekeeper. Deftly holding the show together from a challenging stage-right, stage-level “pit,” conductor Richard Cordova (using Britten protégé David Matthews’s chamber orchestration of 2007) led his fifteen expert players in a nuanced, balanced reading that seemed, too, to relish this often angular score’s every jagged edge. If my admiration never turned to love, well, I’m not blaming anyone but Britten.
