The Vargas Blog

When I bought tickets to Richard Wagner 's Die Walküre months ago, urged on by the announcement that Lorin Maazel would be returning t...

Cloverfield aims to be a really scary movie and it succeeds rather affectively. Critics who have labeled it "Godzilla meets The Blair...

The most surprising aspect of the life and work of French composer Olivier Messiaen is how such groundbreaking music poured forth from an ...

Here is the Associated Press review of Opening Night of La Scala, Milan. Daniel Barenboim made a triumphant debut Friday night as principal...

Lightning has struck so many times repeatedly at The Metropolitan Opera since the arrival of Peter Gelb that when something goes awry you ...

Macbeth is a 500 dollar opera written by Giuseppe Verdi at the time when Italian composers were churning out 30 dollar jobs that are now a...

You are in for a treat when the film Persepolis opens in the United States at the end of December. I was fortunate to see it last weekend ...

One of the best experiences that a film lover can have at the New York Film Festival is discovering a new talent, a new voice in cinema. It...

The Metropolitan Opera opened its 2007-2008 with a new drop-dead gorgeous staging of Gaetano Donizetti 's Lucia di Lammermoor . The pr...

The New York Daily News reported recently that Daniel Radcliffe , better known to movie goers as Harry Potter, will be coming to Broadway i...

It's been a few days since his death, and it is still difficult to think of a world without Luciano Pavarotti . He was the first real s...

In an interview given to PlaybillArts in May of 2006, German bass René Pape disclosed that he is preparing the role of Hans Sachs in Wagner...

Opera houses mounting productions of Richard Wagne r 's last work, Parsifal , are careful to remind audiences that according to the wish...

Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni died this week, both on the same date: July 30, and both in their native countries of Sweden and...

No doubt as a response to Katharina Wagner 's new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at Bayreuth , this article called "...