Parterre Box answers the question, “how can a singer do both Tristan and Nemorino within a few month of each other?” with a clip of a recent role debut from Michael Spyres.
Ahead of their opening in Don Carlo in Dallas tonight, Christopher Corwin chats with Nicole Car and Étienne Dupuis — and offers a special edition of Chris’s Cache!
It may be blasphemy to admit—particularly this month—but usually I can either take or leave Donizetti’s serious operas. However, I love the composer in comic mode, so Chris’s Cache runs with that sentiment in offering three recordings of Don Pasquale.
Revivals of Falstaff in Milan and Don Carlo in Naples have Larry Wolff thinking across the six decades of Verdi‘s career
On paper, the Met’s revival of L’elisir d’amore looked like a lovely evening. And at times it was—a few scenes hinted at what it could be and what it might yet become.
La Traviata offered a cast of fresh debutantes and an uncommonly strong musical performance that could hardly be bettered.
I’d like to create a pasta dish in honor of Ambrogio Maestri’s art.
Since 1985, from the Chicago Symphony at Carnegie Hall to the Welsh National Opera visiting BAM and from Chicago Lyric to New York City Opera to the Met, I’ve never encountered a bad Falstaff—or one that didn’t astound and delight me.
Use bodily force and get your friends to one of the next five performances of the Met’s new production of Adriana Lecouvreur. It is everything!
Though orchestrally lavish, this “semi-staging” delivers less theater than no staging at all.
I have a confession to make. I have been taking Rigoletto for granted.
Not a few eyebrows arched on social media when L.A. Opera appropriated the hashtag “Fight like a girl” on street level poster adverts all over town for the revival of their 2013 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca.
As portrayed by Vittorio Grigolo, Nemorino was a manic self-absorbed, probably bipolar, stalker who—against all odds and good sense—gets the poor girl.
These days a cadre of voluble opera-goers regularly issues dire warnings that anyone about to attend this or that production at the Met should close her eyes and just listen rather than witness yet another Peter Gelb regie “atrocity.”
A “lone voice in the wilderness” booed Barbara Frittoli’s calamitous Nedda.
This is the tenth season of the Met’s HD broadcasts, not that I would know it.
Coming as Peter Gelb did from the music industry, opera lovers hoped that he would display a more distinctive knack for casting and an improved talent pipeline than Joe Volpe offered during the waning years of his tenure.
f you like opera to look like a museum, the Arena di Verona’s latest video of Aida should jump to the top of your wish list.
Falstaff, Verdi’s final opera, is exuberantly inventive, bubbling and roiling with ideas the 79-year-old composer was too impatient to develop.
It may have taken most of Verdi’s canon to do it, but the “Tutto Verdi” collection finally manages to do justice to Verdi in his last two operas.
UPDATE: A video preview of the new Elisir follows the jump.
Verdi’s only successful comic opera, Falstaff, is notably hard to produce.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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