Nicola Lischi


La figlia dell’aria La figlia dell’aria

For her third solo recording, Olga Peretyatko summons the two men who launched her career less than a decade ago

on November 14, 2015 at 10:00 AM
The girl next door The girl next door

Andrea Andermann, the producer who brought you Tosca in the Settings and at the Times of Tosca, Traviata in Paris, and Rigoletto in Mantova, is preparing for a telecast of La Cenerentola.

on May 10, 2012 at 8:40 AM

It was while attending a performance of Fédora in Naples in 1885 that eighteen year-old Umberto Giordano fell in love with Sardou’s then immensely popular play; the protagonist was none other than Sarah Bernhardt, the creator of the title role. He immediately asked the French dramatist to sell him the rights, a request Sardou did…

on February 11, 2011 at 10:08 AM

Cubes and Macbeth seem to have been a successful pairing in the recent Regietheater. Graham Vick’s production of Macbeth at the Teatro alla Scala in the 1997/98 season had become famous, or infamous, for centering its spirit and energies on a big cube dominating both sets and singers. David Pountney exploited the same idea of…

on January 31, 2011 at 12:14 PM

If I had been handed Clari’s score without being told the name of the composer, I might have thought it was a lost Rossini opera, albeit a minor one.  I would have probably assigned it to the early period of Rossini’s career, because it shows more similarities with works like La pietra del paragone and…

on December 18, 2010 at 9:30 PM

“Le pene d’amore non uccisero la Callas” reads the rather sensational headline: “The pains of love did not kill Callas.” The actual story in La Stampa is more sober, telling of an investigative study into the causes of the diva’s vocal decline and eventual death.

on December 14, 2010 at 3:58 PM

Incredible, but true, I Puritani had not been performed in Great Britain since 1887 when Glyndebourne decided to stage it in 1960 with the main intention to showcase Joan Sutherland, who had been catapulted to international superstardom one year earlier in the legendary Lucia di Lammermoor at Covent Garden. Furthermore, Vittorio Gui, who had already…

on December 04, 2010 at 4:19 PM

Very few things intrigue me as much as analyzing belcanto operas, comparing their several versions and examining the composers’ second thoughts, modifications and revisions that, willingly or unwillingly, they made to their scores. I was already salivating when I heard that the Teatro Comunale di Bologna was going to perform Vincenzo Bellini’s I Puritani in…

on November 21, 2010 at 7:41 PM

Our Own Ercole Farnese discovered and translated this interview in La Stampa with Jonas Kaufmann, in which the tenor discusses his “his idolatrous success with ladies and gay men, four fifths of the opera-goers.”

on November 16, 2010 at 4:02 PM

In 1890 Cavalleria rusticana had taken the whole world by storm and in the next decade or so, hordes of composers, willing or unwillingly, jumped on the Verismo bandwagon.  La navarraise (1894) is generally considered Jules Massenet’s homage to the genre, and for a long time the two works were often performed together.   Emma Calvé,…

on October 27, 2010 at 10:11 AM

There is no peace for Verdi in Parma.  As a second production of its Verdi Festival the Teatro Regio presented I vespri siciliani on October 10,  starring Giacomo Prestia as Procida, Leo Nucci as Monforte, and the lovebirds Daniela Dessì and Fabio Armiliato as Elena and Arrigo. 

on October 18, 2010 at 11:31 AM

“So, how is this new Pavarotti?” or,  “This young tenor, what’s his name, I saw him on the morning show, is he any good?”   When people who have never set foot inside an opera house—and know Maria Callas chiefly as the woman Aristotle Onassis dumped for Jacqueline Kennedy—start asking me such questions, then I…

on October 17, 2010 at 7:56 PM

When Hans Von Bülow joked that Rienzi was Meyerbeer’s best opera, he was not very far off the mark.  In fact, Rienzi, der Letze der Tribunen, Wagner’s third opera, has all the traits of a typical “grand opéra”: it is divided in five acts, features a historical character or situation, makes large use of the…

on September 12, 2010 at 5:20 PM

During rehearsals for the upcoming Rigoletto from Mantova, Zubin Mehta attacks Sandro Bondi, Berlusconi’s Minister of Culture. Mehta is angry, and by his own admission, he becomes “cattivo”, nasty, when speaking about the financial cuts of the Berlusconi government in the opera houses.

on September 03, 2010 at 10:03 AM

A quintessential theater man as well as a brilliant conductor, James Levine rightfully chose not only the five-act version of Don Carlo for this 1980 performance but begins the opera as Verdi had originally conceived it. The Woodcutters chorus and the episode in which Elisabetta gives her necklace to a destitute woman are pages essential to…

on August 29, 2010 at 11:21 AM

To get straight to the point, the main attraction of this DVD is Renata Scotto. The Italian soprano, the first to perform all three heroines of Il trittico at the Met, is simply superb. She has élan in the moments of tension and a powerful, in-depth delivery. There is not a single word in the…

on August 22, 2010 at 8:57 PM

The three Brownies applying the final touches to a tapestry – the show curtain – depicting an idyllic landscape of Windsor before the music begins are the first indication that this productionof Falstaff does not take place in Elizabethan times. 

on August 06, 2010 at 11:10 PM

Halfway through the overture to L’italiana in Algeri a pin-up cartoon of our Isabella, Jennifer Larmore, slowly slides up and down a pole, setting the tone for the whole opera. Cartoonish is indeed the first adjective that springs to my mind when trying to describe this 1998 production of Rossini’s opera buffa from the Opéra…

on July 18, 2010 at 11:10 AM

Among the ten musical feasts that Paris staged to celebrate the coronation of the last Bourbon king, Charles X, in 1825, Il viaggio a Reims by Gioachino Rossini had undoubtedly the highest profile. Others, including La Route de Reims, a pastiche of Mozart music, are now long forgotten, and Rossini’s score once seriously risked suffering…

on April 29, 2010 at 4:09 PM

A dramatic symphony with incidental voices: that’s how Riccardo Muti’s Otello, which inaugurated the 2008 Salzburg Festival, could be aptly described. Beginning with the initial allegro agitato with its piercing lashes, it instantly appears obvious that Muti’s intention is to go for the jugular, nail the audience to their seats and never give them a…

on April 21, 2010 at 10:10 AM

1817 was a fertile and diverse time for 26 year old Gioachino Rossini. It opened with his last true opera buffa, La Cenerentola, continued with his most important semiseria, La gazza ladra, and ended with two operas, which, although both nominally belonging to the seria genre, could not be more different from each other.

on April 13, 2010 at 1:09 PM

Today, in 1848, one of the titans of Italian opera, Gaetano Donizetti, passed away in his native Bergamo at age 51. It would be perhaps more appropriate to say that his body died on this date, as his mind, ravaged by syphilis, had already abandoned him a few years earlier, so much that he had…

on April 08, 2010 at 11:23 AM

Although she has made headlines on this side of the Atlantic largely because of her recent dismissal by Franco Zeffirelli from a Roman production of La traviata on the grounds of “physical inadequacy,”  Daniela Dessì is a topflight star in Europe. In her native Italy she is arguably the most popular soprano currently active. Over…

on March 15, 2010 at 11:56 AM

Rome, June 16, 1800. Emilia sits in the lodge of Palazzo Farnese, of which she is the doorkeeper. She is a resilient, strong-willed and somewhat hardened woman. After all, she has long been in the employ of the Palazzo’s formidable occupant, Baron Scarpia, and witness to so much of his wickedness.

on February 18, 2010 at 7:18 PM
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