A heady audience paid top price to pack Carnegie Hall Thursday for just 80 minutes of unstaged Wagner.
“Trove Thursday” presents a live Tristan 2 concert featuring one of my favorite dramatic sopranos. Gertrude Grob-Prandl.
Christine Goerke‘s puzzling high register has become an increasingly troubling aspect of her singing. One just never knew what was going to come out from one moment to the next.
The Met got exactly what it asked for: a safely opulent, resolutely unchallenging Tosca that was far from shabby or little but couldn’t have been less shocking
Skirting the leafy, patrician Berkshires of Western Mass, and flush with wine coolers and white people, pastoral Tanglewood doesn’t much resemble the dark Nibelung settings of Norse myth.
Endlessly extricating her from existing contracts then negotiating new ones must make being Sonya Yoncheva’s manager the hardest job in the music business.
I can scarcely remember a performance where so many conflicting thoughts raced through my mind as happened Thursday night during the Met Orchestra’s “bleeding chunks” of Wagner’s Ring at Carnegie Hall.
Simply put, Christine Goerke is a stupendous Elektra.
One Saturday afternoon during my freshman year in college, Richard Strauss’s Elektra made me fall in love with Ursula Schröder-Feinen—or maybe vice versa.
James Levine turns 72 this year. Even though his health has improved considerably in the past year and he may continue to conduct for a decade or more, it seems inevitable that he will step down as the Met’s Music Director sometime in the next few years to assume the role of Conductor Laureate.
Andris Nelsons led the Vienna Philharmonic in a performance of Salome that provided just the sort of thing one hopes for in a concert performance of an overflowingly rich operatic score.
I’ve always had a fondness for Giacomo Puccini’s Suor Angelica and apparently so did he since he often referred to it as, “among the finest of my children.”
This Hans Neuenfels staging for the Bayreuth Festival caused quite a stir at its 2010 premiere, but now, with time and distance, how radical is the production?
Hans Neuenfels‘ new staging of Lohengrin for Bayreuth is the grimmest version of this work I’ve seen. Not that this opera is all bright lights and lollipops, but he gave us a particularly dark take on the work, motivated, in part, by Wagner’s writings at the time of the opera’s composition.
In what may qualify as the most unholy alliance of Peter Gelb‘s tenure at the Met so far, since February the “Live in HD” performances from 2009 of both Turandot and Aida issued by Decca have been available from… Target. Only Target. They are scheduled for international release this July. Up until recently there has…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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