Parterre Box
Lovely Christmas carol by Pietro Yon, “Gesù bambino” as sung by The Greatest Thing Ever at a Christmas concert in Ravello in 2021. Beautiful!
Grand Tier Grab Bag anticipates Elina Garanca‘s upcoming Zwischenfach pivot by sharing her in some other not-quite-mezzo repertoire opposite Brian Jagde.
Leontyne Price in her early prime is soaring and radiant in traditional Christmas songs.
Bernie Williams and Jonathan Tetelman take over Carnegie Hall for one night. You’ll be fine.
An Australian Christmas where the paddocks are brown, the gullies are green, and the singing is, frankly, better behaved than most of us will be by lunchtime.
Though there are a number of fine recording of holiday music by opera singers (Eileen Farrell!), this great performance of Jessye Norman was captured on video as well.
A beautiful Christmas album is Pavarotti‘s ‘Oh, Holy Night” conducted by Kurt Herbert Adler.
This has been my favorite Christmas song since I first heard this performance, the opening track of Malena Ernman‘s first Christmas album.
There’s plenty of full-on Christmas music to love in Anne Sophie von Otter‘s “Home for Christmas.”
I bought this album because I found the photo on the cover to be Camp.
Parterre Box anticipates Ailyn Peréz‘s upcoming New York performances of Madama Butterfly with the Puccini role most closely associated with her
When I first listened years ago as a baby opera queen to Tebaldi‘s 1971 “Christmas Festival,” I could not get over just how enfeebled she sounded.
“Vesselina’s Chest Voice” is my new drag name.
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.
Tell us: What’s your favorite Verdi performance?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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