parterre box

“I’ve lived with mendacity!—Why can’t you live with it? Hell, you got to live with it, there’s nothing else to live with except mendacity, is there?” Big Daddy explodes with this cynical world view during Act 2 of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and that speech crossed my mind as I pondered the two recent releases of “Vivaldi” operas on my desk.

The “inverted commas” stem from the knowledge that both CDs include scads of music that either cannot be definitively ascribed to Il Prete Rosso or that is explicitly attributed to other composers, yet only his name is sprayed all over the packaging and publicity. Read more »

One can only imagine the frenzy that would have occurred in the late 1950s had one of the leading opera composers of the day (Britten? Poulenc? Menotti?) written an opera for Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi—with Franco Corelli as their leading man. That’s what it must have been like in 1726 London when Handel composed Alessandro for perhaps the three most famous (and expensive) singers of the day. Despite its initial runaway success, today it remains one of Handel’s least performed works; however, that may be changing with the release of not one, but two new recordings. Read more »

Wagner is becoming an important calling card for Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theatre. After releasing a well-received Parsifal on its recording label in 2010, the St. Petersburg troupe is marking the bicentennial of the composer’s birth with a buzzworthy new Ring cycle culled from a series of performances and recording sessions featuring the likes of Jonas Kaufmann, Rene Pape, Nina Stemme and Anja Kampe.

With that kind of international star power, the set is probably destined for commercial success. For some, it will also add kindling to the debate about Gergiev’s strengths in this repertory.   Read more »