Parterre Box
I think Babette’s Feast is a more or less perfect film and has been my favorite since the first time I saw it.
A Baroque Valentine’s with Opera Lafayette | Feb | DC & NYC
Celebrate love in all its guises with tender ballads, amorous duets, cheeky verses, and bawdy drinking songs plus food, cocktails and wine.
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
Max Ophuls, one of the greatest film directors, made masterpieces in French, German, English and Italian, as well as an amusing comedy in Dutch; he also clearly loved opera.
Brian Jadge will be replaced by Brandon Jovanovich in the upcoming revival of The Queen of Spades, announces the Met press office
The terzettino from Così fan tutte makes an unexpected and unforgettable appearance in John Schlesinger‘s 1971 Sunday Bloody Sunday.
As opera and operetta “had a moment” in major Hollywood motion pictures starring the likes of Lawrence Tibbett, Jeannette MacDonald, and Nelson Eddy during the Great Depression, it made perfect sense that a canny showman like Mae West would want a piece of the action.
Visconti’s masterpiece and one of the great filmed sequences of opera.
STEMdiva status
Ahead of a special boozy, bawdy Valentine’s Day concert, artistic director of Opera Lafayette Patrick Quigley speaks with soprano Maya Kherani about her journey from MIT to rising American Baroque star.
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.