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 »
The best joke in Offenbach’s delicious Orphée aux Enfers is the opening premise: Orphée and Eurydice are miserably married, due to her utter boredom with his old-fashioned music. That’s a thumb in the eye of classical myths adored by highfalutin Frenchies (and especially the deification of Gluck’s Orfeo, which is quoted in Act II). In Dona D. Vaughn’s production for the Manhattan School of Music’s Senior Opera Theater Workshop, mariage à la mode is wittily sent up by dressing the unhappy couple as the bride and groom on a wedding cake. Read more »
“The spring season at the Met is as changeable as March weather in New York: crisp and brilliant for a day or two, and then suddenly as dismal as Thursday night’s Faust.” [New York Post]
Short as Roman emperor Eliogabalo’s reign was, the world sighed in relief when it was over.
On first hearing, Paul Dukas’ 1907 opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue (Ariane and Bluebeard) sounds like the love child of a three-way between Wagner, Strauss, and Debussy.
There has never been a successful vampire musical—so they say. But that’s just not true.
Thursday’s Met performance of the Verdi tearjerker featured a major find: Diana Damrau, who, in her first outing as Violetta, mesmerized with her gleaming soprano and ferocious acting.
Christoph Willibald Gluck wrote some fifty operatic works, not counting revisions and translations, and in every form extant in the two cities, Paris and Vienna, in which he made his career.
Cher Public