Pirate lives
The New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players are celebrating their 50th Anniversary Season presenting Ruddigore (last month), The Pirates of Penzance (first two weekends in January), and Iolanthe (on its way in April).
In limbo
In the “tormented writers’” room, two actors in goth makeup and bride-of-Frankenstein wigs are clacking on typewriters and throwing crumpled papers on the floor.
Consumptive professionals
Given the keen interest in recent posts of Met pirates of Montserrat Caballé in Verdi, Chris’s Cache concludes its trio with the Spanish soprano’s Met Violetta, along with additional Met in-house recordings of Virginia Zeani, Pilar Lorengar, Jeanette Pilou, and Joan Sutherland as Verdi’s doomed courtesan.
Talk of the Town
A favorite Mozart performance from MisterSnow
Sing High, Sing Low – My favorite Fiordiligi
Broadcast / Live Chat
Giulio Cesare
Baroque specialist Ottavio Dantone leads a live video broadcast from the Teatro Alighieri in Ravenna
La bohème
A live performance from New York
The Latest
In Munich, performances by 97-year-old Herbert Blomstedt and 32-year-old Thomas Guggeis show the city’s orchestral ensembles at their best
11 comments
I’ve shared this before but this is one of the most perfect pieces of Mozart singing and acting I’ve ever come across.
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At the time of the recording’s release, Kathleen Battle was getting established.
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Instead of giving laurels to a performance already praised since a long time, my choice will be Don Giovanni, Metropolitan Opera, May 2023.
Eat the Document, which premiered at the Prototype Festival last week, compresses a decades-long, nonlinear story into a swift 90 minutes while still finding time to pause for reflection.
Musically speaking, Così fan tutte is my favorite opera by Mozart, but not necessarily in terms of its dramaturgy
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Eleanor Steber shows us how it’s done.
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David Fox and Cameron Kelsall take on a new revival of Gypsy: Is there any gayer or more impassioned theater topic?
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sings Mozart’s great K 523, ‘Abendempfindung an Laura’ live at Ravinia with Peter Serkin, August 2004
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Apologies in advance to Key’mon Murrah, whose rather extraordinary Marian Anderson award recital with pianist Brian Zeger at the Kennedy Center on December 17 demands some general musing.
The celebrated Austrian director, known for his picturesque and conservative stagings, was 94.
For many opera lovers of the Baby Boomer generation, German bass Kurt Moll (1938-2017) was Sarastro, exuding wisdom and kindness through his unaffected bearing and incomparably rich, homogeneous sound.
Despite not being very happy with the state of the world (and the union) and not looking forward to the New Year, this past December I took in many festive holiday offerings including a pair of oratorios.
Così is an almost post-modern opera, in that it mocks the bourgeois construction of ‘love’ as a socially-sanctioned precursor to matrimony.
