Trove Thursday celebrates Pride with a Bible-based homoerotic sort-of opera not by the guy who wrote “Depuis le jour”: Charpentier’s David et Jonathas with Mark Padmore, Laurent Naouri and Jaël Azzaretti led by Emmanuelle Haïm.
The Met recently submitted another eye-roll inducing entry for the Woke Olympics with their Women’s History Month slate.
Soprano Erin Wall died in early October, a month shy of her 45th birthday; Trove Thursday remembers her with a 2012 broadcast of Kaija Saariaho’s shimmering L’Amour de Loin.
Trove Thursday celebrates early St. Cecilia’s Day—November 22—with a 1976 performance of Licino Refice’s Cecilia starring Renata Scotto as the patron saint of music and musicians.
As Phaedra’s tragic, all-consuming passion for her stepson Hippolytus has fascinated artists for centuries, Trove Thursday offers two of its lesser-known musical settings: Pizzetti’s opera Fedra with Régine Crespin and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson performing the cantata Phaedra, Britten’s final vocal work.
Lise Davidsen turned in a fine performance Saturday, cementing her up-and-coming star status in an eclectic program given from the Oscarshall Palace in Oslo.
A broadcast of Weill and Brecht’s pungent Die Dreigroschenoper
While last year’s finals were dominated by early nineteenth-century bel canto arias, this year’s finalists took on a remarkably broad range of music from a variety of repertoires.
It is rare to be moved to tears by a lieder recital. It is rarer still to be moved to tears by the third song on a recital program.
Come ye addicts of melody! After long eclipse, Bel Canto shines again!
From the technical standpoint San Francisco Opera’s Billy Budd was pretty much flawless.
Britten’s penultimate opera, the anti-war ghost story Owen Wingrave, was composed for television performance in 1971.
All about the life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, but depicted as an opera performed as a dress rehearsal for an opera.
Odyssey Opera’s Ägyptische Helena was a beautifully executed production of a flawed opera.
Give the creators credit for producing an emotional response.
An image of the old, ruined Coventry Cathedral goes into closer and closer focus until the stage is dominated by a grassy stone.
This was not a performance as gimmick.
With Liber scriptus came the biggest discovery for me, the vocal talent of Elena Stikhina.
Last weekend marked the opening night for West Edge Opera: Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.
Antonacci’s singing is remarkably beautiful for one who clearly doesn’t make that a top priority.
My mother leaned in and quietly whispered,”Is that Leontyne Price?” to which I replied,”Shhhh!”
In recent years, Opera Paralléle has established a reputation for creative programming of contemporary opera in San Francisco. Persuaded both by the promise of an unusual Bernstein-Heggie double bill, and the unusual venue of SF Jazz’s Miner Auditorium, I had the pleasure of attending an excellent production this past week.
J.S. Bach doesn’t get a lot of attention on this site although he wrote tons of vocal music.
Norman Dello Joio, who was knocking about winning prizes for film and TV scores, composed The Trial at Rouen, his second opera on the subject, for NBC.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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