The bonkers, bewildering Die ägyptische Helena begets a suitably lush musical and creative treatment at Bard SummerScape.
Bluebeard’s Castle and Erwartung at Canadian Opera Company deliver on fine performances even if Robert Lepage‘s production skimps on horror.
This Bard production, led by Leon Botstein, makes the strongest possible case musically, dramatically and visually for Smetana’s opera Dalibor.
Later this month the Met at last revives its striking Herbert Wernicke production of Die Frau ohne Schatten, prompting a Chris’s Cache preview of three live recordings of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s fanciful if knotty masterpiece.
At all of these vocal contests, including this one, I find myself fascinated and perplexed by the same question: What exactly are the judges looking for?
On this day in 1992 the Metropolitan Opera presented a [disastrous] new production of Elektra.
Trove Thursday previews next week’s BBC Proms presentation of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius with a 2008 broadcast conducted by Colin Davis with Sarah Connolly, Ben Heppner and Gerald Finley.
Trove Thursday’s belated contribution to last weekend’s Platinum Jubilee is a broadcast from Aldeburgh of Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana with Christine Brewer and Tom Randle as Elizabeth and Essex, an opera which premiered 69 years ago yesterday.
Nina Stemme’s Elektra always seemed the sanest individual onstage never quite giving over to obsession or hysteria with a good line in mordant sarcasm and contempt.
Minutes into “An die Nacht,” the first song Friday night, I realized how much I’d missed being enveloped in that seductive Straussian combination of a soprano (or two or three) rising higher and higher over a surging orchestra.
Don Carlos is my favorite Verdi opera, and I’m always in favor of including the most music. But it can be a dizzying task to keep track of all the options.
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.”
Christine Goerke‘s distracted, tentative Isolde turned out to be the least potent feature of what was an otherwise exciting and effective second act of Tristan.
A sense of celebration was definitely in the air last Thursday at the Vienna State Opera.
Christian Thielemann is widely regarded as our time’s preeminent master of the Austro-German symphonic ensemble.
“Trove Thursday” presents a live Tristan 2 concert featuring one of my favorite dramatic sopranos. Gertrude Grob-Prandl.
The tendency to rank—to create subjective lists of best or greatest, or to organize things in ascending or descending order—is a human compulsion.
You’ve got your “Night in the Museum,”and your “It’s All In Her Head” and your “Pantomimes of Childhood Trauma” and that’s all before halftime.
In March 1973, OONY’s second season featured Francesca da Rimini starring Raina Kabaivanska, Plácido Domingo and Matteo Manuguerra.
The 2016 Richard Tucker Award recipient is Tamara Wilson.
A semi-staging of Dido and Aeneas starring Broadway divas and frequent collaborators Kelli O’Hara and Victoria Clark seemed a screwy idea at best.
“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.”
Without fail, all nine finalists had nice clear ringing voices. Whether they develop into great artists is another question.
A “lone voice in the wilderness” booed Barbara Frittoli’s calamitous Nedda.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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