Parterre Box
“Vesselina’s Chest Voice” is my new drag name.
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.
Dear Joan with her trills and ornaments brings “Joy to the World” every holiday season. Wishing a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.
This spring’s Talk of the Town is craving your operatic dominance and your submissions by January 15.
Christmas kitsch is great fun, of course, but Christmas can be just as wonderful without it, as this great singer proves.
Christmas should be over the top, opulent, a little sad, utterly sincere, and ever so vulgar.
Grand Tier Grab Bag highlights La Scala’s opening night prima donna Sara Jakubiak with an excerpt of her Chrysothemis recorded last year.
Auntie Joan goes the whole nine yards on this one and invigorates it to make it work in a way as no one else can.
Like Type 2 Diabetes, symptoms of YAS (Yuletide Aversion Syndrome) commonly creep up on gay men after manopause.
This month’s theme – “Opera singers celebrate the holidays” – conjured up a vast lexicon of memories of growing up in the 1960s and early 1970s.
“It duz… not… SCHVING!!!!”
One of my favorite Christmas recordings is Kathleen Battle‘s A Christmas Celebration.
New York audiences got a taste of Ben Bliss in Mozart this fall, but this week Grand Tier Grab Bag offers snippets of the tenor trying his hand at Handel earlier this year.
Gabriela Beňačková is featured in a wonderful Christmas album called Carolling, released by Supraphon in the early 1990s.
“O Divine Redeemer” is, I suppose, more properly an Advent or Lenten piece. But when Renata Tebaldi asks us to hear her “croy”, who can resist?
Anna Moffo, in glorious voice and looking gorgeous as usual, sings “O Holy Night,” one of my favorite Christmas tunes.
I love Tabori—his staging of Bluebeard’s Castle and Erwartung are among my five favorite opera performances of all time.
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.
Ha ha ha, so gorgeous!
Grand Tier Grab Bag features a complete performance of Ernest Chausson‘s Poème de l’amour et de la mer ahead of a particular year for both its soloist and conductor.
The production is based on the Elisabeth Fritzl story, and it really made me reconsider this opera’s fairy tale storyline.
I never thought an opera production could be this well done.
Les Camilles both agree on this one. And WHY? You ask??!
Barbara Hannigan‘s Lulu is the greatest live performance I’ve seen.
Grand Tier Grab Bag looks forward to a big week for Umberto Giordano by sharing Sondra Radvanovsky and Gregory Kunde performing the final duet from Andrea Chénier.
