It would be enough to compare his official studio recording of this work with the recent performances in Turin to confirm that today Riccardo Muti is no longer totally ‘Mutian’
On October 14, 1979 I spent my birthday attending my first all-star opera gala, thrilled at the chance to hear some of the great singers I’d only experienced on LPs, broadcasts or via my pirate reel-to-reel tapes.
In anticipation of the Met’s reopening performance on September 11, another serving of pandemic-hoarding arrives on Trove Thursday with 10 rare live performances of the Verdi Requiem’s concluding “Libera me.”
Live opera returns to Lincoln Center when Teatro Nuovo presents Il Barbiere di Siviglia on July 27 and 28.
Michael Fabiano is a boss. This is a fact.
This Sony Classical set of live performances covers a golden quarter century in the singing and staging of Wagner. Birgit Nilsson shared it with many other legends, and many of them appear on these discs.
This year’s Salzburg Festival opens Saturday with a new production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, an opera often performed elsewhere in translation, so “Trove Thursday” offers two for the price (!) of one.
This week’s star-spangled “Trove Thursday” offers the second crazy-quilt installment of divas in the wrong language.
I first went bonkers for Bellini’s masterpiece during the previous century when the Met remounted it for Joan Sutherland.
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.
Sunday afternoon’s intermittently involving concert performance of Handel’s Alcina at Carnegie Hall starred an unusually intense Joyce DiDonato as a powerful sorceress blinded by her romantic delusions.
For those who like their Handel loud, with no forfeit of baroque finesse, one promising solution is to make the hall smaller.
As someone who thinks Verdi is the greatest composer who ever lived and who feels pretty meh about Mozart, I expected to love the Verdi and be bored by the Mozart. I wasn’t far wrong.
Almost exactly one hundred years ago on March 18, 1912, the Metropolitan Opera gave its final performance to date of Armide.
1817 was a fertile and diverse time for 26 year old Gioachino Rossini. It opened with his last true opera buffa, La Cenerentola, continued with his most important semiseria, La gazza ladra, and ended with two operas, which, although both nominally belonging to the seria genre, could not be more different from each other.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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