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.
The CD explosion coincided with an enormous increase in interest in HIP (historically informed performance) so now there were lots of commercial recordings of the sort of operas I had turned to pirates to find.
By some quirk of fate, I tend to hear about the deaths of many operatic legends via radio news while out driving.
I was once accused—by my own mother, mind you!—of having too many recordings of Verdi’s Aida. The blistering audacity of that recrimination did get me to thinking: How many recordings of Aida is too many? I mean, you’ve got the old classic you cut your teeth on. Then there’s he one where the tenor and…
Just discovered: a Swedish documentary about Birgit Nilsson.
None of my previous Elektra experiences prepared me for this stunning, overwhelming performance from the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence.
“Conduct Salome and Elektra as if they were by Mendelssohn: Fairy music.” Seriously, how often has that happened?
Legendary Birgit Nilsson heads a spectacular cast in the second act of Götterdämmerung, our latest treasure from Mike Richter‘s trove of CD-ROMs.
The curious things about accepted wisdom is that sometimes it’s correct.
One of my adolescent pastimes was trolling the classical cut-out bins in record stores searching for overlooked gems or unfamiliar singers.
The Met has finally released the contents of the James Levine 40th Anniversary box sets separately for those of us who didn’t have $500 lying around.
Here goes with the End of the Gods and the End of these Ring reviews: Götterdämmerung was more of a mixed bag than the other operas, but still left a powerful impression. This was where Zambello’s choice to steer clear of heavy spectacle was most evident to me. The cost in grandeur was offset by…
When a new production of Fidelio premiered at the Met in 1960, the opera had been absent from the repertoire since 1951, the post-war return of Kirsten Flagstad as a still effective Leonore and led by Bruno Walter. In the period between the two productions a new generation of singers had begun to make their…
Five decades before the Met turned to computer-assisted planks to help tell the story of Wagner’s Ring cycle, the company stirred controversy and comment with another staging of the tetralogy. General Manager Rudolf Bing imported a stark, abstract production from the Salzburg Festival in order to secure the services of Herbert von Karajan, who not…
This live CD of Wagner orchestral excerpts and the Wesendonck Lieder is noteworthy for the conducting of Franz Welser-Most and the truly remarkable playing of The Cleveland Orchestra. I have seldom heard an ensemble sound so beautiful on CD. The strings shimmer like satin, the reeds are clean and clear, the brass warm and burnished with…
La Cieca preens proudly to present a peerless pair of protégés (left to right) Squirrel and Maury D’Annato. The bromancers attended (or one should say “took in”) last night’s Ariadne auf Naxos at the Met, and as of early this afternoon they were still deconstructing.
Those of you cher public who ordered and enjoyed Decca’s bargain Wagner box may now be interested in a bargain Puccini edition offered by EMI. The set, Puccini: The Operas, retails for $59.98 (less than four bucks a disc) and includes complete performances of:Â
Those muckraking scamps over at Opera News are at it again, quoting a in their June issue a particularly inflammatory passage from the mad gay diaries of mad gay Cecil Beaton. Dear Cecil, you will recall, designed the Met’s celebrated 1961 production of Turandot that starred Birgit Nilsson. It seems that mere critical and popular…
UPDATED January 12: The legendary Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson died on December 25, it was announced yesterday. She was 87. La Cieca will present a special episode of “Unnatural Acts of Opera” tonight in salute to Mme. Nilsson. Birgit Nilsson as Isolde, Metropolitan Opera, 1971 Once Birgit Nilsson was negotiating a contract with Herbert von…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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