The New Yorker

Malcolm X and Hamlet Seize the Opera Stage

In 1986, the novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany interviewed the composer Anthony Davis, whose opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” had just received a triumphant première at New York City ...
The Guardian

To be or not to be: the question is, where are the operatic Hamlets?

Brett Dean’s Hamlet premieres at Glyndebourne this week. Will he succeed where hundreds of other composers have failed and give Shakespeare’s masterpiece the opera it deserves? There have been 40 ...
Observer

Review: The Met Opera’s ‘Hamlet’ Takes Big Swings but Mostly Misses

The Met imported Neil Armfield’s unsparing production from England’s Glyndebourne Festival where the Australian composer’s second opera premiered in 2017. Throughout their adaptation, Dean and Jocelyn ...
The Daily Telegraph

Hamlet: how opera remade Shakespeare's Dane

Rupert Christiansen was the opera critic and arts features writer for The Telegraph between 1995 and 2020. He is the author of several books of cultural history including Romantic Affinities, Paris ...