Sweet 1600s
Over the past week New York City was blessed by two appealing 17th century presentations: John Blow’s Venus and Adonis from Opera Lafayette and La Storia di Orfeo courtesy of the Boston Early Music Festival.
Claudio Monteverdi
44 pieces since 2008.
44
pieces
19
years
Gods and monsters
Legrenzi married the quirky libretto to a score of transcendental beauty.
Once more with feeling
We humans tend to dislike uncertainty, therefore there is something comforting going to opera revivals; you know exactly what you are going to get.
Something’s comin’
This program honored the singer, composer and theorist Giulio Caccini, “Giulio da Romano,” on the 400th anniversary of his death.
I love you to death
New York fans of 17th century Italian vocal music should be rejoicing this month.
Rome if you want to without anything but the love we feel
“Trove Thursday” marks Monteverdi’s 450th birthday with a rare broadcast of his towering final work L’Incoronazione di Poppea.
Debuts and farewells
Arabella with Wolfgang Sawallisch conducting a prime-time 1980s Munich cast.
Goodbye, gorgeous!
Can a surfeit of pleasure become—in the end—unsatisfying?
Elements of style
Antonio Literes, a boy soprano from Majorca, had, we may presume, friends in high places.
Harmony of contrasts
Joyce DiDonato’s atest album, In War & Peace: Harmony through music, is more specific than it sounds.
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.
Ulysses in Midtown
In the program for Opera Omnia’s production of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno di Ulisse, Crystal Manich, the company’s stage director, speaks of producing “baroque works in non-traditional ways.”
All the world loves a crown
Seventeenth century opera remains the true connoisseur’s delight partly because it’s so rarely done.
Brit star! would I were steadfast as thou art!
Rule Britannia? Often during the Olympics that famous number from Thomas Arne’s 1740 Alfred echoed in my ears.
Joy cometh in the mourning
Is the threnody, the lament over a beloved corpse, the oldest form of song? Surely it is among the oldest; one of the most widespread and stylistically various, millennia before opera was devised.
Stealing Rome
L’incoronazione di Poppea nearly disappeared from the stage completely after its 1642 Venice premiere and a Naples revival in 1651.
Del primer pianto
Classical music writer and opera critic Robert Levine has written a very pleasant new book, Weep, Shudder, Die, A Guide to Loving Opera, published by HarperCollins Books. Levine sets up the book’s premise early in his introduction: “Could singing… make one, as the composer Vincenzo Bellini said, ‘weep, shudder, die’ and at the same time […]
Sexual perversity in Gowanus
It is a thousand pities Francesco Cavalli never saw Some Like It Hot. A tale of convoluted romances, cross-dressing, immoral moralizing and a divine diva would have been right up his alley, or rather, Venetian canal. As staged by Vertical Players Repertory in a back alley around the corner from the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn’s […]
Playing at gods
“Playthings of the Gods: Essential Myths,” the Vertical Player Repertory’s evening of Monteverdi, Britten and Milhaud, heard October 8, was a satisfying treat. The soloists were excellent, although the venue, Christ Church Cobble Hill, had overwhelmingly boomy acoustics and robbed the audience of any nuance in the voices.
Queen of the Pirates
[This article originally appeared in the print zine precursor to this site, one of a series of surveys of live recordings by critic Leila de Lakmé.] Leyla Gencer. The very name is exotic. She was an artist of Turkish ancestry who, during the 1950s and 60s, held her own despite the presence of Maria Callas, […]