Michael Shae

Living Dangerously with Donizetti

The challenges of ‘Roberto Devereux’

Don Carlos Rediscovered

With Don Carlos Verdi intended, as the English critic and musicologist Andrew Porter wrote, “to give a new nobility and purpose to grand opera.”

A New Callas

A Definitive New Callas

Callas’s voice is riveting: instantly recognizable, intensely focused, it is theater; it is why, nearly forty years after her death, her recordings have never gone out of print but constantly find new admirers.

Houdon’s Sensuous Sculpture

In “The Best Faces of the Enlightenment,” from the April 8 issue of The New York Review, Willibald Sauerländer writes about a new exhibition of the work of Jean-Antoine Houdon, whom he calls “the last and probably greatest French sculptor of the eighteenth century.” In his works—a selection of which can be seen in this slide show—the “panegyric rhetoric of the baroque” and the “flounces and wigs of the rococo” give way to “an unadorned naturalism.”

Pynchon: The Sun Also Rises