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On this day in 1993 Dvorak‘s Rusalka finally appears at the Met. Gabriela Benacková does the honors.
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Born on this day in 1759 poet and dramatist Friedrich von Schiller
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My first opera of the new season in Paris, after kicking off in Brussels with Kris Defoort’s thought-provoking The Day of our Singing, was another nearly-new work, totally new to me: Sir George Benjamin’s Picture a day like this.
In a splashy new recording of Norma, Marina Rebeka “is doing something very untoward, and it appears destructive to her voice.” It has Niel Rishoi worried.
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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.
Washington National Opera rounded out its season opening weekend with a one-night-only performance entitled “Gods & Mortals: A Celebration of Wagner” the evening after the premiere of its new production of Fidelio.
Miguel Harth-Bedoya leads Angel Blue, Elena Villalón, Daniela Mack, and Alfredo Tejada in Osvaldo Golijov and David Henry Hwang‘s opera
Andy Knapp recently wrote enthusiastically about a 1973 Met pirate recoding of Il Trovatore starring Montserrat Caballé, Viorica Cortez, Plácido Domingo, and Robert Merrill. Chris’s Cache today shares that recording, as well another Met in-house starring the same soprano, tenor and baritone in Un Ballo in Maschera from several years earlier.
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On this day in 1928 the American premiere of Richard Strauss‘s Die Ägyptische Helena at the Met. Maria Jeritza was the Helena.
Michael Steinberg on Riccardo Muti, fascism, and who speaks through the collective voice of the Verdi Requiem.
Ainadamar functions on two levels: as a defiant dance against fascist totalitarianism and as an exaltation of the diva.
On this day in 1883 the Metropolitan Opera presented its very first Traviata. Marcella Sembrich is Violetta
Strike Up the Band! cried the brothers Gershwin (and book-writers George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind) in the first of their three satirical, vaguely political operettas—sort of jazz Gilbert & Sullivan—that they dreamed up in the late 1920s.
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