Questo e Quello
Dame Gwyneth Jones is fighting an attempt to oust her as president of the Wagner Society, a position she has held for 23 years.
Our weekly canard concerns that greatest of all operas, Don Giovanni—or is it?
Here’s Jonas Kaufmann last night in Munich, singing Manrico’s scena from Trovatore
Soprano Elizabeth Blancke-Biggs sings the final scene from Salome in the Stefan Herheim production for Den Norske Opera.
So finally we can see what the Robert Lepage Ring would have looked like if only the Machine hadn’t been totally fucked.
American mezzo Jamie Barton, who has steadily been winning fans in the US over the past few years for her rich and nuanced singing, took the international opera world by storm last weekend by winning both the Song Prize as well as the overall prize in the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition.
Could Marek Janowski do for Wagner what the early music movement did for the Baroque and Classical repertory?
Name a Verdi opera, based on a play by Voltaire, described in the immortal words of the composer as “Questo e proprio brutto.”
Ailyn Pèrez is a soprano on the rise.
Miss Garden smiled. “You probably have never seen a thin Violetta,” she exclaimed. “You’ll find that that will make a difference.”
Maesto Lorin Maazel (pictured) responds to La Cieca.
As day breaks over the murder house, La Cieca, famed doyenne of yesteryear, invites the cher public to discuss off-topic and general interest subjects.
Christian Thielemann has proved himself to be the preeminent Strauss interpreter of the current generation of conductors and he’s in striking form here.
When I acquire DVDs of opera performances, I look for performances which truly merit a video recording; performances in which the totality of the musical and dramatic elements are worth preserving for repeated viewing.
“Let’s go up to Westchester!”
For our weekly meander through mendacity, we turn to no less than Gotham Chamber Opera’s own Neal Goren, who writes, “People repeat as fact that women ruin their voices, or at least sacrifice their high notes, by singing in chest voice. So untrue!”
June Anderson will make the transition into the “Anne Revere” segment of her career next summer when she sings the role of Elvira Griffiths in Tobias Picker‘s An American Tragedy at the Glimmerglass Festival.
Aidan Lang has been named Seattle Opera’s third General Director effective September 1, 2014.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, the repentant Puritan—that is, he repented that his family had once been Puritans—describes the voice of Rappaccini’s Daughter, Beatrice, as “rich as a tropical sunset, … which made Giovanni, though he knew not why, think of deep hues of purple or crimson and of perfumes heavily delectable.”
Handel’s first surviving musical composition is Almira, the opera he wrote in a hurry when shake-ups at the Hamburg opera house, where the 19-year-old had been playing in the violin section, left a planned production unfinished.
La Cieca supposes she shouldn’t complain: the more time Lorin Maazel spends on Facebook, the less time he spends conducting Don Carlo.
Longtime Friend of the Box Zachary Woolfe (pictured) sits down with Marc Scorca of Opera America for a “Conversation about Opera in America,” implausibly enough.
Tuesday at 7:00 PM, WQXR’s Operavore and Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts offer a sneak peek at “Verdi in Paris,” the theme of this year’s Bel Canto at Caramoor.
“Adamo [not pictured] spent a year researching the story, and poured his learning into his libretto. It has 116 footnotes.”
Tell us: What’s your favorite Verdi performance?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
