Parterre Box
Grand Tier Grab Bag highlights La Scala’s opening night prima donna Sara Jakubiak with an excerpt of her Chrysothemis recorded last year.
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.
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.
Who are the rats? Why are their tails getting longer? Is Lohengrin a rat trying to free himself from a maze?
At every turn, the preconceived notion of Trovatore was denied, right down to the boxing during the ballet.
With Cesare’s old-school rules of war set spinning by Cleopatra’s Bollywood-inspired manipulations, a Da Capo aria has never felt more dangerous
Grand Tier Grab Bag marks the Metropolitan Opera return of Daniele Rustioni with a zippy performance of the Royal Hunt and Storm from Les Troyens recorded in 2022 in Munich.
Barrie Kosky’s incredible production widened and universalized the ending.
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.
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.