Brute force
Alban Berg’s compact yet potent oeuvre has long played an outsized role in shaping my understanding of music’s aesthetic evolution.
Claudio Abbado
51 pieces since 2009 — at 8 companies, most often at La Scala.
51
pieces
8
companies
18
years
Down for the Comte
We close 2018 with Le Comte Ory with an enviable nearly all-Italian cast of prime-time Rossini specialists: Mariella Devia, Cecila Bartoli, Ewa Podles, William Matteuzzi, Claudio Desderi and Pietro Spagnoli.
My sister, my queen
It had something for everyone who loves loud chesty singing and smoky soft-singing: from Tchaikovsky to Rachmaninoff to Strauss…
Super tsar
Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov must be Russian’s most iconic opera and “Trove Thursday” presents it with Claudio Abbado leading an impressive team.
Overview: Riccardo Chailly
Riccardo Chailly’s appointment as La Scala’s new music director was news that I greeted with enthusiasm when first announced in 2013.
A touch of the stone
“Trove Thursday” turns its Rossini-150 series to one of the composer’s least known but tastiest comic gems La Pietra del Paragone with Julia Hamari, Justino Diaz, Alessandro Corbelli, Claudio Desderi and Paolo Barbacini conducted by Roberto Abbado.
Burnished bass
I clearly remember the day I first heard the voice of Cesare Siepi.
Frau Minne
“Trove Thursday” presents a live Tristan 2 concert featuring one of my favorite dramatic sopranos. Gertrude Grob-Prandl.
Horne in the morning and June at night
Semiramide produced at Carnegie Hall by Matthew Epstein in 1983 with June Anderson, Marilyn Horne, Samuel Ramey and Douglas Ahlstedt with Henry Lewis conducting.
Don Carlos: more or less
“Trove Thursday” presents an all-star five-act Don Carlo from forty years ago tonight.
La bontà in trionfo
“Trove Thursday” offers a sparkling performance of Rossini’s La Cenerentola from our nation’s capital featuring the scintillating conducting of Claudio Abbado and Lucia Valentini-Terrani in the title role.
Not only with words, but with lively gestures
“I will never sing the role again. It was frightful. We were a set of madwomen…There is nothing beyond Elektra. We have lived and reached the furthest boundaries in dramatic writing for the voice with Wagner. But Richard Strauss goes beyond him. His singing voices are lost. We have come to a full stop.”
Castaway
The wonderful Spanish mezzo Teresa Berganza celebrates her 81st birthday next week and “Trove Thursday” gets the party started.
After dark
The Canadian Robert Carsen would appear to love the theater to the point of fixation.
To the rescue!
Those who enjoyed (at least aurally) the Met’s recent La Donna del Lago may be craving more of the master from Pesaro, so 2015’s final “Trove Thursday” presents Torvaldo e Dorliska.
A passel of pirates
Many live treasures (and some duds) began to take up more and more space—first in my dorm room, then in my first little studio apartment thanks to a group of quite special men, none of whom I ever met face to face.
Fairy tale
“Conduct Salome and Elektra as if they were by Mendelssohn: Fairy music.” Seriously, how often has that happened?
Goodness had everything to do with it
The Met stage was filled with considerable magic Monday night when its dizzily effervescent revival of La Cenerentola starring Joyce DiDonato and Javier Camarena stirred a bewitched audience to some of the most ecstatic ovations heard this season.
Mike Richter meets Claudio Abbado
La Cieca assumes, or at least hopes, such an encounter is currently taking place on some other plane. In slightly more mundane terms, though, Mike Richter did “meet” Claudio Abbado, though not in the context of his celebrated CD-ROM series.
Appearing nightly
I suspect most New York City opera-lovers had long since given up hope that the fascinating soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci would ever return to their city.
One thousand four
My mother asked me once, whilst staring aghast at my CD collection, why I needed so many copies of Don Giovanni.
Thirds and music
Richard Wagner told Cosima he first got the idea of composing an opera about Tristan and Isolde while he was conducting Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi starring his muse, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, in the trouser role of Romeo.
Summer knights
Richard Wagner believed the key to any legend was contrasting the supernatural with human nature, and showing how the combination had no chance of enduring. In Lohengrin, the title’s character’s insistence on unconditional love and trust collide with the conditional expectations of the real world. The challenge is capturing the tale’s somber majesty without losing […]
Deutsche treat
Boy, this review practically writes itself. I’ve heard Jonas Kaufmann’s Alfredo live and was duly impressed, so I was thrilled to have the opportunity to review this recording. All I can say about Jonas Kaufmann: Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven & Wagner (Decca 4781463), to be released April 6, 2010, is that it went straight to both […]
Win a Free Ticket to Opening Night at the Met!
Quinn Kelsey and Lise Davidsen star in the Met's new Macbeth. We're giving away one ticket, so screw your courage to the sticking place and enter now!
I’ll take the fall
The days are getting shorter, but you can keep the prattle going this fall’s Talk of the Town! You will, you can, you must join in the discussion about: Great mezzo soprano performances (October),
Gained in translation (November), Teleport me back to… (December).
