Parterre Box
Antony and Cleopatra is perhaps not the showcase Elizabeth DeShong deserves, so Grand Tier Grab Bag highlights the superlative mezzo in two clips
Jeanette MacDonald singing in her movies got the ball rolling for my lifelong interest in opera.
Greta Garbo as diva Rita Cavallini with an Italo-Swedish accent.
I love the use of the Liebestod at the end of Romeo + Juliet. It’s such a lush, romantic way to end the movie. The most Baz Lurhmann thing ever.
Impossible to pick any one film clip, but it’s hard to imagine a more evocative use of operatic music than Lars von Trier‘s Melancholia.
I think Babette’s Feast is a more or less perfect film and has been my favorite since the first time I saw it.
The thing that inspires me about Pavarotti’s performance here is that this is the piece within the opera that everyone in the audience is waiting to hear.
Philippe Jaroussky conducts a performance recorded last month in Montpellier featuring Levy Sekgapane
Anna Paquin cries at the opera to the Barcarolle from Tales of Hoffmann (Renée Fleming and Susan Graham)
It’s mad! It’s gay! It’s Michael Fabiano singing “Come un bel dì di maggio” from Andrea Chénier!
One of the most striking uses of opera in television appears in HBO’s The Leftovers.
The Peruvian tenor Luigi Alva has died at 98.
I’m cheating by choosing TV over a movie, but I can’t not pick the Hamlet episode of Gilligan’s Island.
It’s a total fraud, but I have always loved Maytime‘s “Csaritza” a fake “MGM” opera based on themes from Tchaikovsky‘s 5th symphony.
A live broadcast from New York
A brutal, chilling, gory final scene leading to a triumphant and goose bumps inducing final moments.
“Ebben, ne andro lontana” sung by Wihelmenia Wiggins Fernandez in Diva is a gorgeous woman in a beautiful dress singing a wonderful area in a legitimate concert venue. Great singing in my favorite French film.
parterre box presents for your comparing pleasure excerpts of three Italian sopranos trying their (poker) hands at Puccini’s Minnie: Carmen Giannatasio, Chiara Isotton, and Anna Pirozzi
Watching Fitzcarraldo at a very young age obviously turned me into a baby opera queen.
Bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee is the winner of the $50,000 2025 Richard Tucker Award
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
