The Vargas Blog

Singer Rufus Wainwrigh t was a hit during the first intermission of today's MET's broadcast of Saint-Saëns' Samson et Dalila . ...

By all accounts, Anthony Minghella's Madama Butterfly at the English National Opera, and soon to open the 2006-2007 Metropolitan Opera ...

The English National Opera has been advertising their current season at the London Colisseum with plenty of captivatingly sexy images these ...

The recent Peter Gelb news conferences have brought on many conversations about imminent winds of change that promise to swirl about the Met...

From the tone of today's article by Daniel J. Wakin in the New York Times, the upcoming tenure of Peter Gelb as General Manager at the ...

American Song, the Thomas Hampson recital at Carnegie Hall last Thursday was a critical and popular success. It happened on the nineteenth...

This weekend I discovered one of the masterpieces of the Japanese cinema: Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatari . I had never seen this f...

The skeletal remains of Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street are on view eight times a week at the Eugene O'Neill theater. S...

The following letter was posted on the Internet newsgroup rec.music.opera. It is a personal note from soprano Astrid Varnay rememembering h...

The New York Times January 12, 2006 Birgit Nilsson, Soprano Legend Who Tamed Wagner, Dies at 87 By BERNARD HOLLAND Birgit Nilsson, the Swedi...

The great Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson died on Christmas Day in her native Sweden. It was only today that her death was reported in Ameri...

Here is the New York Times Review of Robert Wilson's new Ring in Paris. November 2, 2005 Audiences Love a Minimalist 'Ring' ...

The Pillowman , Martin McDonagh's macabre play, is closing in a few weeks after a successful, but short run on Broadway's Booth thea...

It has been a fun summer of listening, recording and designing CD covers for the Internet webcasts of the European summer festivals that sta...

It has been quite an exciting Salzburg Festival this summer. As I reported earlier, Mozart's Die Zauberflöte with Riccardo Muti at the...

While the magic continues at Bayreuth through the month of August, over in Austria, the Salzburg Festival has begun. As the classical music ...

The following article appeared in the New York Times . It gives a brief impression of opening night of the 2005 Bayreuth Festival. Boos at...

The annual Bayreuth Festival opened today with a performance of Tristan und Isolde . The unusual new production (see pictures below) was con...

It's now been a little over 24 hours since the publication of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince , J.K. Rowling's latest trip to...

Wagner's concept of "total art work" was not something that he liked to share. Mozart and Verdi were fortunate to have had Lor...