For the birds
A “lone voice in the wilderness” booed Barbara Frittoli’s calamitous Nedda.
Ambrogio Maestri
22 pieces since 2012 — in 10 roles, at 8 companies, most often at Metropolitan Opera.
22
pieces
10
roles
8
companies
15
years
By role
Role Alfio
Role Amonasro
Glyph you hadn’t, but you did
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.
Role Baron Scarpia
Crate expectations
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.
Role Don Pasquale
Bachelor party
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.
Role Dottore Dulcamara
‘Elisir’ not quite ‘rara qualita’
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.
Role Dulcamara
His cup runneth over
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.
First sip
UPDATE: A video preview of the new Elisir follows the jump.
Role Falstaff
Of paunches and princes
Revivals of Falstaff in Milan and Don Carlo in Naples have Larry Wolff thinking across the six decades of Verdi‘s career
Kitchen confidential
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.
Out here in the dark
This is the tenth season of the Met’s HD broadcasts, not that I would know it.
He is big
Falstaff, Verdi’s final opera, is exuberantly inventive, bubbling and roiling with ideas the 79-year-old composer was too impatient to develop.
Autumn leaves
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.
Questions and antlers
Verdi’s only successful comic opera, Falstaff, is notably hard to produce.
Role Michonnet
A talent to a Muse
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!
Role Pasquale
About a boy
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.”
Role Scarpia
“Tosca,” starring the Philadelphia Orchestra
Though orchestrally lavish, this “semi-staging” delivers less theater than no staging at all.
I’ll take the fall
The days are getting shorter, but you can keep the prattle going this fall’s Talk of the Town! You will, you can, you must join in the discussion about: Great mezzo soprano performances (October),
Gained in translation (November), Teleport me back to… (December).