Patrick Mack
I was just moderately excited when LA Opera announced that French tenor Benjamin Bernheim would be coming to concertize at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, 90210.
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It surprises even me how some operas have eluded me in live performance even after lo, these many years. One of them is Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette.
Happy was I to attend the Celebrity Opera Series presentation Saturday night at BroadStage, mere blocks from my humble abode in Santa Monica as Anglela Gheorghiu was making an eagerly awaited return for the first time since her debut here in 2013.
Patrick Mack on the iconic Ethan Mordden‘s career and his first book on opera in 30 years – and it appears that time has mostly stopped in the Mordden manse.
My vision may have been slightly blurry at the end.
Don’t cry for me, Birgit Nilsson
When my editor suggested to me a round-up of my favorite recordings of Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann I was très, très, intrigued.
Some operas carry around the shadow of their most famous interpreters more than others.
She can’t put her foot on the gas the way she used to but there’s still plenty of fuel in that tank.
As an opera fanatic who was baptized by the blood of Leontyne Price, the Messa da Requiem by Giuseppe Verdi appeared on my radar fairly soon after I started delving into the operatic canon.
You can imagine my surprise at encountering an almost wholly traditional staging with one teensy difference.
In 1982 I saw Turandot at the San Francisco Opera, the year after I became an opera fan, and it was my first live opera.
In the lead up to LA Opera’s mounting of Turandot on May 18th (hooray!) I thought I’d touch on some of my favorite recordings and new re-masters I’ve discovered. I have them all.
I have a confession and you may need to sit down for it: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita was one of the gateway drugs to my eventual opera fandom.
When my press invite came for the Book of Mountains and Seas, the collaboration between Chinese born contemporary composer Huang Ruo, the vocal ensemble Ars Nova Copenhagen, and master puppeteer and production designer Basil Twist, I was in.
Oh, La traviata, how do I love thee? Let me count the recordings.
One of the first things James Conlon did when he took over the reins as Music Director of LA Opera was create the “Recovered Voices” project, producing operas that had been suppressed by the Nazis.
We may all be armchair Handelians, but some of us are more used to it than others.
Perhaps the greatest souvenir of her art there is.
I can still vividly remember the first time the music of George Frideric Handel made an impression on me.
Despite this being the first full-length opera for Gabriela Lena Frank, there’s no lack of experience across the creative team which, along with favorable reviews for the production, contributed to high levels of anticipation.
I hate to say I nearly cringe at the thought of Gioachino Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia.
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pb—with our friends at Carnegie Hall—is giving away two tickets to PB’s December concert. Enter now!
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