Who doesn’t love a slightly murky archival recording?
While it may not be top-tier Rossini, Teatro Nuovo’s mounting of Il turco in Italia is still good summer fun.
A grandly sung revival of The Ballad of Baby Doe at Central City Opera mines poignance from America’s past and present.
Video Artists International brings us back to a time when opera was carried over the airwaves by great voices—and a tire company.
Jessye Norman really embraces elements of the song falling somewhere between classical art song and popular ballad.
The greatest bass performance I ever experienced was actually four – four performances in four roles.
George Frideric Handel (born 341 years ago on Monday) composed over 40 operas including many masterpieces, but his Giulio Cesare is the one that everyone knows best.
Diana Soviero chats with Roger Pines about six decades of performing, four decades of teaching, and how she’s handing the tradition off to the next generation.
This month’s theme – “Opera singers celebrate the holidays” – conjured up a vast lexicon of memories of growing up in the 1960s and early 1970s.
It’s Norma, darling. We know.
John Yohalem wraps up Donizetti Month at parterre box with a look back at nearly six decades of Donizetti operagoing.
For me, Donizetti’s operas are all about the mad scenes.
I’m convinced that someone else will claim this Donizetti opera before I do, but Maria Stuarda is definitely my very favorite Donizetti opera.
In 1972, when I was 12 years old, my mother took me to the Salzburg Festival.
One of my favorite scenes from Donizetti is the Act I finale from Anna Bolena.
Donizetti wrote so much great music, it’s hard to single out a favorite opera, or even a preferred aria!
Patrick Mack looks back on “a great, nay, historic evening,” Renata Scotto‘s 1981 performance of Il trittico, now newly available on Met Opera on Demand.
Lisette Oropesa, a product of the Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artist Program, has not been seen much on the stage of the Met in recent seasons.
When my editor suggested to me a round-up of my favorite recordings of Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann I was très, très, intrigued.
Some operas carry around the shadow of their most famous interpreters more than others.
On this day in 1975 Rossini‘s Siege of Corinth had its American stage premiere at the Metropolitan Opera
Zachary Woolfe reflects on the legacy of parterre box founder James Jorden and three decades of “remembering when opera was queer and dangerous and exciting and making it that way again”
Lisette Oropesa has announced she will sing Norma “in the future.”
The wicked poisoner showed herself in fine form, full of purple passion and lusty music-making that would gladden the heart of any bel canto enthusiast or opera lover in general.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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