Like probably all of us, there are so many different things I could have submitted for a favorite Verdi performance.
Chris’s Cache follows up its Gounod R&J installment with a widely varied quintet of additional Romeos and Juliets
Yes, there were other Giocondas if not of quite the same distinction. Chronologically…
A convocation of mezzos–and a pride of tenors–produce hundreds of sixteenth notes in a bewitching Rossini showpiece
Wrapping up Diva November, Chris’s Cache offers two sacred works that couldn’t be more unalike.
On this day in 1992 the Metropolitan Opera presented a new production of Lucia di Lammermoor directed by Francesca Zambello (not pictured.)
We have two reasons for celebrating Jessye Norman and the first is a release on the BBC / London Philharmonic Orchestra label of a Richard Strauss concert.
Last Wednesday the 92nd Street Y presented the friendliest-ever episode of American Gladiators when Lawrence Brownlee and Michael Spyres continued their bel canto bromance with a delirious (almost) all-Rossini recital accompanied by Myra Huang.
Trove Thursday remembers Edita Gruberová with live recordings of two of the three operas I heard her perform at the Met: a 1985 Munich La Traviata with Neil Shicoff and Wolfgang Brendel conducted by Carlos Kleiber and an I Puritani from Vienna 1994 featuring two other artists who recently left us too soon: Marcello Giordani and Dmitri Hvorostovsky.
American soprano Gianna Rolandi died Sunday morning, according to a number of her friends and colleagues. She was 68.
A recent discussion here about Gianna Rolandi prompts Trove Thursday to present the American soprano in a rare trouser role in an even rarer opera, Cimarosa’s Gli Orazi e I Curiazi paired with Anna Caterina Antonacci.
Two of the leading postwar Czech sopranos appear together in Janacek’s Kát’a Kabanová when Trove Thursday presents Gabriela Benacková‘s gleaming heroine in her US debut relentlessly persecuted by Nadjezhda Kniplová’s implacable mother-in-law.
I need to get something off my chest. I love bel canto.
Edita Gruberova essentially revived and propagated the bel canto repertoire in central Europe, specifically in the German-speaking countries.
Semiramide produced at Carnegie Hall by Matthew Epstein in 1983 with June Anderson, Marilyn Horne, Samuel Ramey and Douglas Ahlstedt with Henry Lewis conducting.
Three decades before Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Flórez dazzled the world with their La donna del lago roadshow, another deluxe team headed by Frederica von Stade and Marilyn Horne shone in Rossini’s neglected masterpiece.
This live CD of Wagner orchestral excerpts and the Wesendonck Lieder is noteworthy for the conducting of Franz Welser-Most and the truly remarkable playing of The Cleveland Orchestra. I have seldom heard an ensemble sound so beautiful on CD. The strings shimmer like satin, the reeds are clean and clear, the brass warm and burnished with…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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