Our selected Rosenkavalier video overview closes out the 20th-century selections, crosses the millennial mark, and includes the first of our performances to depart from the opera’s prescribed 18th-century setting.
Thanks to the generosity of a parterre reader, “Trove Thursday” presents a rare recording from the famed Carnegie Hall series curated by Matthew Epstein to commemorate Handel’s tercentenary.
What is surreal, symbolic, and generally mysterious in the dramatic arts can get a bad rap.
Joined by the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, The English Concert concluded the US leg of its current tour at Carnegie Hall Sunday with a complete performance of the darkly moving Theodora, Handel’s penultimate oratorio.
For decades thousands and thousands have attended Handel’s Messiah (usually around Christmas or more appropriately near Easter) making it easily one of the most widely known works of classical music.
De Nederlandse Opera’s remarkable 2011 feat of premiering productions of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide and Iphigénie en Tauride on the same day and virtually the same set has been issued on a 2-DVD set by Opus Arte
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As if last week’s survey wasn’t enough, a few more recent diva-recital disks remain worthy of attention particularly since they arrive from five front-rank singers.
Noticing how often she turns up lately, one might guess that the operatic “heroine” for the global economic crunch is Medea, the mythological Greek sorceress and filicide.
Joyce DiDonato enjoys the rare cachet of having three studio-recorded operas released in the past three years while other famous divas must be content with “just” DVDs. Although two of Renée Fleming’s Violettas have found their way onto video in less than five years (why??), “the people’s diva” has only recorded one studio opera in…
Maybe it’s just me, but every time I listen to well done French baroque music, my imagination flies to the opulent halls of Versailles. I fantasize about being amongst Louis XIV and his cohorts drunk on wine, good food, and better music, enjoying the life of a bon vivant. Few recordings have created this vivid…
Over the years we have heard many different versions of Gluck’s Orphée. One can choose the Vienna version for castrato, which is shorter and simpler (or better: equally difficult, but in a less spectacular way), the Paris rewrite for tenor or the Berlioz reworking for the distinguished mezzo Pauline Viardot (Anne Sophie von Otter sang…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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