The Vargas Blog

Here is Anthony Tommasini's review from The New York Times: WASHINGTON, March 26 — If you put on a production of Wagner's monumental...

Here is the Washington Post review of the new production of Das Rheingold at the Washington National Opera. "A Rheingold that Stands o...

Tonight the Washington Opera premieres its much awaited production of Das Rheingold , the work which kicks off the company's first stagi...

The performance of La Forza del Destino that I attended on March 18 was as good as anything I have seen at the MET in quite a while. It was...

Washington Opera to give Wagner's "Ring" a New, American Setting By Tim Page -- The Washington Post One test of a masterpiece ...

Next Saturday, the Washington Opera will unveil its eagerly awaited new production of The Ring of the Nibelung. Das Rheingold , the first ...

Conductor Peter Schneider has been named James Levine's replacement for the three performance of Wagner's Parsifal which will play...

Regretfully, it is now official: his rotator cuff is torn and James Levine requires surgery. This unfortunate event will lead the Maestro...

I never got to hear Anna Moffo live. When I started going to the opera in the late 1970's, she had already retired from singing at the...

I saw James Levine on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, in the spring of 2004, walking outside the MET. He was walking very gingerly, lagging b...

The Juilliard Choral Union, to which I belong, will be performing at BAM with the Mark Morris Dance Group. The ballet is called Gloria , a...

These days, mention Bryn Terfel 's name and it is Wagner, not Mozart or Verdi, that first comes to mind. Last year it was Die Walküre ...

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...