Below the belt
Three of the Met’s most cunning vocalists, Juan Diego Flórez, Joyce DiDonato and Diana Damrau, wrap their tongues around the trio from Le Comte Ory.
Diana Damrau
69 pieces since 2008 — in 18 roles, at 8 companies, most often at Metropolitan Opera.
69
pieces
18
roles
8
companies
19
years
By role
Role Adele
Role Adina
Teenager in love
L’elisir d’amore, Donizetti’s evergreen comedy about young love, returned to the Met last night with a strong cast, a high energy level from all the performers, and last but not least, a very full house.
Role Aithra
Shrieking violet
Diana Damrau‘s performance as Violetta was the work of a very ordinary artist, one susceptible to vocal flubs, poor intonation, and an all too banal approach operatic performance.
Role Amina
The year in Corwin
New York City isn’t a bad place to live, operatically-speaking.
The year in Yohalem
My memory is fading but the events I recall most vividly of the last season seem largely to have been concert performances.
A dream walking
The hostile reaction to the Mary Zimmerman production of La sonnambula was well documented after the premiere in 2009.
Role Antonia
Tales that witness madness
Jacques Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann has had a bumpy ride to its pride of position in the current French repertoire.
Role Donna Anna
One thousand four
My mother asked me once, whilst staring aghast at my CD collection, why I needed so many copies of Don Giovanni.
Role Elvira
Pretty in Puritani
Pretty Yende was still hanging around after her last Barbiere and she knows the role of Elvira, having sung it in Zurich last June.
Purists
Someone—a deranged purist no doubt—heckled Javier Camarena from the balcony of the opera house for withholding the infamous high F during “Credeasi, misera.”
Role Gilda
drammy per musica
New Kid on the Plaza Drammy writes: April 9, 2009. A traditional Otto Schenk production featuring Diana Damrau as Gilda and who cares but.. Frizza conducting, Viktoria Vizin as Maddalena, Calleja as the Duke, Frontali as Rigoletto, Aceto as Sparafucile. Stellar performances from the entire cast, excepting poor Mr Frontali. The set was phenomenal – […]
Role Juliette
A fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes
It’s not hard not to feel jaded about Romeo and Juliet.
Foolish love
The Met ushers out this wretched year and rings in the new with an elegant and effective new production of Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette.
Role Konstanze
Captive audience
Die Entführung aus dem Serail has been a bit of an unruly child recently, with productions by Neuenfels and Bieito dividing audiences and inspiring critics like Heather MacDonald to lengthy manifestos.
Role Leïla
‘Perles’ hearing
Alexander Birch Elliott‘ s dynamic if gauche Zurga added some pizzazz to an otherwise bland evening.
A fire upon the deep
Returning after 99 years for the Met’s annual New Year’s Eve gala, Bizet’s youthful exercise in Orientalia Les Pêcheurs de Perles proved a real crowd-pleaser.
Pli Ceylon pli
Theater an der Wien did justice to Bizet earlier this season with a cast starring Diana Damrau, Dmitry Korchak, and Nathan Gunn.
Role Lucia
What women want
Psychology is encoded in the composer’s vocal lines more than his librettist’s words.
Gentleman prefers brunettes
It’s no easy easy task to “re-review” one of the most discussed and scrutinized opera productions of the last few years. Mary Zimmerman’s mise-en-scène of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor has been extensively examined since it was chosen to inaugurate the 2007/08 season of the Metropolitan Opera, provoking very mixed reactions both from the professional critics […]
Role Marguerite de Valois
Paris was burning
Logistically, a large-scale revival of the operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer is an unreasonable request, much less an expectation.
Role Rosina
Shrieking violet
Diana Damrau‘s performance as Violetta was the work of a very ordinary artist, one susceptible to vocal flubs, poor intonation, and an all too banal approach operatic performance.
Role Sophie
‘Ja, ja’ land
We leave behind the Vienna of the 1740s, the time of breeches, fans and white wigs.
Role Susanna
Old-fashioned wedding
If the Arthaus Musik release of Le nozze di Figaro from La Scala feels like a slouchy revival pulled haphazardly from the video vault, the singers are certainly not at fault. Ildebrando D’Arcangelo and Diana Damrau, starring as Figaro and Susanna, are bankable stars who live up to the hype. At the podium, Gérard Korsten […]
Role Violetta
Three faces of Violetta
Christopher Corwin surveys the three Traviata casts — led by Lisette Oropesa, Rosa Feola, and Ermonela Jaho — at the Met this spring.
The damned don’t cry
Michael Mayer‘s production of La traviata at the Met is so timid, so devoid of insight, so cynically pandering and gaudy that I hardly feel like it even matters what I think of the performances of the current cast.
Shrieking violet
Diana Damrau‘s performance as Violetta was the work of a very ordinary artist, one susceptible to vocal flubs, poor intonation, and an all too banal approach operatic performance.
Money on the dresser
“Hailed ‘the Meryl Streep of opera’…” begins one sentence of a promotional piece for a Diana Damrau recording of another opera, reproduced on the soprano’s website.
Three nights in Paris
“Oh to be young and going to Paris for the first time,” exclaimed an elderly gentleman who donned his best sweatervest for a concert at the Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival this past August.
Role Zerbinetta
Shrieking violet
Diana Damrau‘s performance as Violetta was the work of a very ordinary artist, one susceptible to vocal flubs, poor intonation, and an all too banal approach operatic performance.
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).
Win a Free Ticket to Opening Night at the Met!
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