Alban Berg’s compact yet potent oeuvre has long played an outsized role in shaping my understanding of music’s aesthetic evolution.
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.
It had something for everyone who loves loud chesty singing and smoky soft-singing: from Tchaikovsky to Rachmaninoff to Strauss…
Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov must be Russian’s most iconic opera and “Trove Thursday” presents it with Claudio Abbado leading an impressive team.
Riccardo Chailly’s appointment as La Scala’s new music director was news that I greeted with enthusiasm when first announced in 2013.
“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.
I clearly remember the day I first heard the voice of Cesare Siepi.
“Trove Thursday” presents a live Tristan 2 concert featuring one of my favorite dramatic sopranos. Gertrude Grob-Prandl.
Semiramide produced at Carnegie Hall by Matthew Epstein in 1983 with June Anderson, Marilyn Horne, Samuel Ramey and Douglas Ahlstedt with Henry Lewis conducting.
“Trove Thursday” presents an all-star five-act Don Carlo from forty years ago tonight.
“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.
“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.”
The wonderful Spanish mezzo Teresa Berganza celebrates her 81st birthday next week and “Trove Thursday” gets the party started.
The Canadian Robert Carsen would appear to love the theater to the point of fixation.
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.
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.
“Conduct Salome and Elektra as if they were by Mendelssohn: Fairy music.” Seriously, how often has that happened?
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.
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.
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.
My mother asked me once, whilst staring aghast at my CD collection, why I needed so many copies of Don Giovanni.
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.
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…
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…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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