Patrick Mack
Patrick Mack starting listening to opera as a teenager to the total bewilderment of his rock and roll mother. He sang leading roles in the opera departments of Santa Monica College and UCLA and for two years in the Baltimore Symphony Chorus. In 2003 he joined the tenor section of The Verdi Chorus which has been giving young singers paid performance opportunities for over 30 years. He has served on their Board of
Directors since 2012 and handles their publicity, marketing, and Facebook page. Patrick is a luxury cruise consultant with All-Travel in
Los Angeles and was honored as one of the Top 25 Travel Agents in the country in 2015 by Travel Agent Magazine. Having weaned himself from an
early age on the musical opinions of Andrew Porter in the New Yorker, he has been wielding the critics pen on Parterre.com since 2011.
His singing of the national anthem has never failed to impress those standing closest to him at any public event he attends.
Patrick Mack looks back on “a great, nay, historic evening,” Renata Scotto‘s 1981 performance of Il trittico, now newly available on Met Opera on Demand.
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Parterre Box welcomes pitches from all interested writers—even those not endowed quite as pictured.
Patrick Mack reviews yet another Puccini album from Jonas Kaufmann
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.
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.
The melodrama was fabulous.
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.
Call for submissions: parterre box‘s new Talk of the Town
parterre box is launching a new themed regular feature curated by our readers and opera fans across the world! We are asking for your favorite clips, recordings, and anecdotes to get people chatting, listening, and thinking.
parterre box is launching a new themed regular feature curated by our readers and opera fans across the world! We are asking for your favorite clips, recordings, and anecdotes to get people chatting, listening, and thinking.
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