Experience Handel’s black comedy of intrigue and impropriety in this production from David McVicar set in the present. Joyce DiDonato stars as the cunning title character with Harry Bicket at the ...

Julia Agrippina or Agrippina the Younger was born November 6th in the year 15 C.E. Among classists, she was considered the most powerful and ruthless women of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, and yet many ...

Handel and his librettist, Vincent Grimani, knew that certain stories are timeless--like corruption in government--and this one has plenty of twists and turns...and even some belly laughs. It was the ...

A funny thing happened on the way to Emperor Claudius' death scene: He didn't die. At least, that's what happens in Handel's opera AGRIPPINA, setting the convoluted plot in motion and giving the young ...

It is a popular saying in theater that "dying is easy, comedy is hard." In Boston Lyric Opera's (BLO) "Agrippina," the actors have to do both. Fortunately for audiences, they do it well. The opera is ...

Ivan Hewett is The Telegraph’s Classical Music Critic and an author whose works include Music: Healing The Rift, a personal history of modern music. He has been involved in music as a composer, ...

Agrippina, where have you been all my life? And Ars Lyrica? I think I love you. Ars Lyrica, Houston’s preeminent early music ensemble, under the sparkling direction of Matthew Dirst, has staged an ...

NEW YORK – When talk turns to whether the Metropolitan Opera should put on old works – like 1709 old – habits die hard. The story has been told for decades that intimate Baroque operas will vanish in ...

Not that there isn't much splendid singing and playing to enjoy. Maybe it's even appropriate that excess is the keynote of Joyce DiDonato's Agrippina, fierce to the point of insanity in getting her ...

Joyce DiDonato gives one of her finest performances in Barrie Kosky’s witty and unnerving staging of Handel’s opera of political manipulation in ancient Rome ‘The ambitious are bound by no laws,” we ...