Vincenzo Bellini’s La Straniera was presented at George Washington University’s dreary Lisner Hall on Sunday.
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.
Endlessly extricating her from existing contracts then negotiating new ones must make being Sonya Yoncheva’s manager the hardest job in the music business.
Diana Damrau has chosen for her new Erato recital disc Grand Opera 11 high-flying showpieces from ten operas by Giacomo Meyerbeer.
Anticipation of events like the Metropolitan Opera’s 50th Anniversary bash turns me back into the newly opera-soused kid who begged his parents to let him watch the highlights of the Bing Gala on the family color television.
We leave behind the Vienna of the 1740s, the time of breeches, fans and white wigs.
Saturday night the Los Angeles Opera threw itself a party.
Jacques Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann has had a bumpy ride to its pride of position in the current French repertoire.
Pretty Yende was still hanging around after her last Barbiere and she knows the role of Elvira, having sung it in Zurich last June.
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.”
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.
Now we have considered the three “winners” in the Tristan competition, let’s turn to the also-rans, or, to be more optimistic, the runners up.
During its first-ever Roberto Devereux Thursday evening one felt transported back to the Volpe years: four of the Met’s biggest stars shining in an opulent (if occasionally perverse) but reassuringly non-challenging production paid for by Sybil B. Harrington.
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.
Diana Damrau is a great flirt.
“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.
Theater an der Wien did justice to Bizet earlier this season with a cast starring Diana Damrau, Dmitry Korchak, and Nathan Gunn.
Imagine two tenors releasing French opera aria collections at the same time without duplicating a single track!
New York City isn’t a bad place to live, operatically-speaking.
My memory is fading but the events I recall most vividly of the last season seem largely to have been concert performances.
Almost exactly twenty years after her auspicious Metropolitan Opera debut as the Fiakermilli in Arabella and a year following what she has claims was her final appearance on the operatic stage, Natalie Dessay returned Sunday afternoon to Lincoln Center—to sing opera.
“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.
The legions of New York opera buffs who now can’t talk about anything but Javier Camarena will be happy to know that there’s now a DVD release
of their new favorite tenor in Rossini’s Le Comte Ory available.
That’s the exact word I’d use to describe Olga Peretyatko’s debut in I Puritani last night at the Metropolitan Opera: “calm.”
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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