Christopher Corwin
Trove Thursday presents Alzira—derided by some as Verdi’s worst opera—in a 1968 Carnegie Hall concert with Gianfranco Cecchele, Louis Quilico (star of last night’s Met Rigoletto stream) and Elinor Ross, who died in March at age 93.
Trove Thursday uncovered two broadcasts of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia that share a fascinating nexus: in each an enduring superstar tenor—José Carreras/Alfredo Kraus—is poisoned by a soon-to-vanish rising-star soprano—Vasso Papantoniou/Margarita Castro-Alberty.
Ordinarily we’d be listening to Bayreuth Festival broadcasts this week but instead Trove Thursday steps up with a true Wagner rarity: Die Feen from the Wiener Staatsoper starring as Ada, the fairy in love with a mortal, Gundula Janowitz, who turns 83 on Sunday.
Sonya Yoncheva’s first-ever Princess Romazov was one of this summer’s casualties but Trove Thursday steps up with a rare 1960 in-house pirate of Giordano’s Fedora starring Renata Tebaldi, Giuseppe di Stefano and Tito Gobbi along with a pair of Tebaldi-di Stefano Puccini highlights from the early 1950s.
Trove Thursday relishes neglected works, operas in translation and irreplaceable divas, and this week it presents a pair that embody all three affections: Cherubini’s Les Abencérages and Weber’s Oberon in Italian with the glorious Anita Cerquetti, conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini and Vittorio Gui respectively.
A broadcast of Weill and Brecht’s pungent Die Dreigroschenoper
With the Fourth of July approaching, Trove Thursday turns to a quintessentially American opera with the broadcast of the world premiere—some 60 years after its composition—of Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha with Alpha Floyd, Seth McCoy and Simon Estes conducted by Robert Shaw.
An acclaimed revival earlier this season of Sebastián Durón’s Coronis (that name, yikes!) reminded me that Trove Thursday has been ignoring baroque zarzuelas.
Trove Thursday offers a problematic yet fascinating work that would almost certainly not be staged today: Il Guarany by Carlos Gomes featuring João Gibin, Gianna d’Angelo, Piero Cappuccilli and Nicola Zaccaria.
Starry galas are popping up everywhere lately so it’s time for Trove Thursday’s, a challenging panoply trodding mostly off the beaten path—with an S-twist!
Trove Thursday finally welcomes Wagner’s Lohengrin arriving in a concert performance conducted by Georg Solti with Siegfried Jerusalem, Julia Varady, Eva Randová, Hermann Becht, Hans Sotin and Wolfgang Schöne.
Cavalleria Rusticana began Pietro Mascagni’s career with a bang, and despite a number of fine subsequent works the composer never again achieved the same lasting success that he had with his first.
As the late Arlene Saunders had a very limited commercial discography and performed mostly in Europe, I thought some readers might be curious to hear more of her.
Trove Thursday goes mini-epic with Gustave Charpentier’s naturalistic slice-of-life of fin-de-siêcle Paris in a rare 1999 Renée Fleming performance of Louise co-starring Jerry Hadley, Samuel Ramey and Felicity Palmer.
Trove Thursday turns to another epic opera in which the personal and the political intertwine: Prokofiev’s War and Peace.
Congratulations to kankedort who correctly identified 17 of 24 selections!
The competition to guess the identities of 24 sopranos singing “O hehrstes Wunder!” ends tonight, Monday May 11 at midnight EDT.
The final third of this week’s vocal-identification quiz brings together perhaps the most difficult-to-name sopranos offering Sieglinde’s “O hehrstes Wunder!” from Die Walküre.
Many now have scads more time for listening so Trove Thursday will offer several epic operas during May beginning with Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (this week aka Guglielmo Tell) in a concert performance featuring Giuseppe Taddei in the title role and Teresa Zylis-Gara and Franco Bonisolli as the war-crossed lovers.
Today’s installment of parterre box’s latest vocal-identification quiz brings eight more Sieglindes proclaiming “O hehrstes Wunder!”
For an ecstatic outburst lasting less than a minute I swiftly gathered up an exaltation of Sieglindes from live performances spanning nearly 80 years. In fact, there were so many I decided to split up the quiz into three parts.
Two of the leading postwar Czech sopranos appear together in Janacek’s Kát’a Kabanová when Trove Thursday presents Gabriela Benacková‘s gleaming heroine in her US debut relentlessly persecuted by Nadjezhda Kniplová’s implacable mother-in-law.
Trove Thursday completes its Prévost–trifecta with Puccini’s Manon Lescaut starring Sondra Radvanovsky and (pre-Met) Aleksandrs Antonenko conducted by Riccardo Chailly plus an added Radvanovsky-Puccini bonus: Suor Angelica.
Last night should have seen my favorite of this season’s revivals but instead Trove Thursday must step up with Jean-Marie Leclair’s irresistibly captivating Scylla et Glaucus conducted by Christophe Rousset.