Parterre Box

Jeanine De Bique, appearing in recitals in Fort Worth and New York this fall, casts a spell in this week’s Grand Tier Grab Bag.

Parterre Box pays tribute to late conductor Antonino Fogliani with a bit of Maria Stuarda ahead of the opera’s return to the Met next month.

Marina Rebeka and Jonas Kaufmann are heading to New York for Tosca, so Parterre Box offers a sample of the two of them in a different Puccini opera.

Köln’s current Rigoletto, the debonair Korean baritone Insik Choi, is this week’s Grand Tier Grab Bag featured artist.

The operatically elusive Marianne Crebassa is in Parterre Box‘s spotlight this week ahead of La clemenza di Tito in Barcelona.

Anita Rachvelishvili and Saioa Hernandez are headed back to New York and this week’s Grand Tier Grab Bag features them together in a performance from July.

I am interpreting “gained in translation” literally, and the wonderful The Bartered Bride with Vickers, Stratas, Gedda, and Talvela singing it in English was a great experience.

The music is so recitative-like and the text so important (like a play) that it needs the immediacy of a text that the audience can understand.

I’m not sure if Eleanor Steber‘s strongly founded marble tower is a lyrical improvement, but I just can’t imagine this being sung better. Can you?

Consider this 1959 Italian-language blowout from Palermo, with Franco Corelli’s infiammatissimo Don José

This 1961 performance from the Bolshoi is a treasure.

Don Carlo not in French, nor in Italian, but in German.