I think we’ve got her number
“Are we Team Guelf or Team Ghibelline?”
Arturo Toscanini
49 pieces since 2007 — at 2 companies, most often at Metropolitan Opera.
49
pieces
2
companies
20
years
By company
I put a spell on you
Armide with a superbly grand Francophone heroine in Karina Gauvin and conducted by the always excellent Ivor Bolton.
Burnished bass
I clearly remember the day I first heard the voice of Cesare Siepi.
Kingly sex
As far as prewar Italian verismo goes, L’amore dei tre re is a supernova.
BASTA: Bang bang, he shot me down
Evan clicked over to the his favorite music critic’s weekly column, “Slings and Arias.”
Peak performance
“Trove Thursday” ushers in February with Catalani’s La Wally with a mountain-top cast of Renata Tebaldi, Renata Scotto, Mario del Monaco, Giangiacomo Guelfi and Giorgio Tozzi conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini.
Start the revolution without me
In Andrea Chenier an unexpected Canadian star-tenor relishes beheading alongside a far less well-known Italian diva: Jon Vickers and Ilva Ligabue.
Not much gold, but plenty of rush
Is this not Puccini’s greatest opera, his most human, least manipulative?
Mountain high, valley low
Be wary of operas that are famous for just one aria or just one famous opinion.
Teeny furniture
Sony Classical has now released “Leontyne Price Prima Donna Assoluta” containing nearly her entire operatic oeuvre in a box set.
Devil’s advocate
Just 85 years ago, four of Italy’s greatest opera stars gathered at Teatro all Scala for an historic event: the first-ever recording of Arrigo Boito’s sole complete opera, Mefistofele.
Amateur hour
Florence Foster Jenkins, a new film directed by Stephen Frears, celebrates a true amateur.
Snow business
Los Angeles saw the first U.S. performance of Giacomo Puccini’s snow-dusted weeper in 1897 just a year after the young Toscanini led the prima in Turin.
Orchids, tiaras, minks, ermines and top hats
A biopic entitled Florence Foster Jenkins, marvelously directed by Stephen Frears of Philomena and The Queen fame, stars the actress that never ceases to amaze us all, Meryl Streep, as Mme. Jenkins.
Sweet bird
Anna Moffo made some of the most entrancing records ever. Their appeal is to “voice fanciers.” (I understand. We’re a despised group.) But Moffo’s best work renders us helpless.
Gli enigmi sono due
Giacomo Puccini’s final opus interruptus is and shall always remain my favorite opera. The reasons for this preference are so varied and numerous that if they were printed and bound the volume would most assuredly require its own stand.
Something extramarital
Saturday evening conductor Will Crutchfield revived Donizetti’s La Favorite—unheard in New York for fifteen years.
Panning for gold
Giacomo Puccini’s horse-opera version of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” La Fanciulla del West, based on David Belasco’s play, The Girl of the Golden West, enjoyed the status of a curate’s egg for quite a while.
Tomb raider
Despite the continued popularity of Der Freischütz in German-speaking countries, are the magical mature operas of Carl Maria von Weber otherwise really so problematic, their libretti so unwieldy to explain their continued absence from the world’s stages?
Enfin, elle est en notre présence
Almost exactly one hundred years ago on March 18, 1912, the Metropolitan Opera gave its final performance to date of Armide.
Future imperfect
The world has come to an end and we are at the end of the world, the collapsed ruins of a bridge that can no longer be crossed. There is no greenery; the few trees that are left are dead and being chopped down for fuel. Shell-shocked survivors wander through this hellscape, fighting over the […]
Words without song
Long ago, in a galaxy far away – I mean, the era before supertitles became common in opera houses around the world – you could always tell the text-mad opera fan. He was the one who arrived early to the theater and spent the remaining minutes to curtain hunched over his libretto booklet, trying to […]
Vivian Della Chiesa 1914-2009
Vivian Della Chiesa, “Toscanini’s favorite soprano,” died on Tuesday. She was 94. Della Chiesa is heard in the Trio from I Lombardi with Jan Peerce and Nicola Moscona, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, in a radio concert from January 31, 1943. “Qui posa il fianco… Qual volutta trascorrere”
Teresa Stich-Randall 1927-2007
The American soprano, whose voice Toscanini called “the find of the century,” died Tuesday in Vienna. She is heard here singing “Crudele… Non mi dir” from a 1960 performance of Don Giovanni. Teresa Stich-Randall