Klaus Mäkelä unexpectedly joins the foray for The Cleveland Orchestra‘s performances of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem.
George Frideric Handel (born 341 years ago on Monday) composed over 40 operas including many masterpieces, but his Giulio Cesare is the one that everyone knows best.
Across three evenings at the 92nd Street Y, Konstantin Krimmel and Ammiel Bushakevitz traversed all of Schubert‘s major song cycles with stark intensity.
I was first exposed to Hänsel und Gretel as a child, likely via The Metropolitan Opera’s 1982 PBS telecast.
Júlia Várady‘s smoldering, almost feral Sieglinde from the Sawallisch/Lehnhoff Ring, remains my favorite.
Peter Sellars‘s triple bill of Viennese modernism featuring Erwartung and a concert performance of The Raft of the Medusa stare down death at the Salzburg Festival
The revival of Don Carlo(s) which opened on November 3 restored the translated Italian text and the cut 1882 four-act revision not seen at the Met since Rudolf Bing’s last season in 1972.
This week’s Trove Thursday—Kodály’s Háry János in a 1955 RAI broadcast in Italian led by famed Hungarian conductor Ferenc Fricsay—may be a bit brief as C-19 finally arrived last week chez CC.
Gabriela Benacková, one of Trove Thursday’s favorite sopranos, turns 75 tomorrow, so we celebrate with two rare complete Verdi portrayals.
My sister Julie celebrates an important birthday later this month which reminded me—as I also recalled I visiting her while she was living in Prague—that I should unearth Bohuslav Martin?’s Julietta with Lucia Popp and Dénes Gulyás for this week’s Trove Thursday.
In the month and a half leading to Bernard Haitink’s passing on October 21, my AirPods constantly channeled a musical festival of sorts centered on the Dutch giant’s expansive discography.
The program was set around themes of loss, of unfulfilled wishes, the endurance of loss, triumphant or depressed.
Off-and-on since last fall my PPP (Personal Pandemic Project) has been assembling a chronology of the American Opera Society. For 19 years beginning in 1951 it presented a remarkable series of concert performances of works unperformed by either the Met or New York City Opera.
Ninety-five years ago, Evelyn Lear was born on January 8 in Brooklyn, and Trove Thursday remembers the soprano with one of her earliest successes: Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten co-starring her husband Thomas Stewart, Helmut Krebs and Franz Crass.
Who will prevail in Trove Thursday’s Fidelio Drag Race finals: Gwyneth Jones/Leonard Bernstein 1970 or Julia Varady/Nikolaus Harnoncourt 1986?
Trove Thursday finally welcomes Wagner’s Lohengrin arriving in a concert performance conducted by Georg Solti with Siegfried Jerusalem, Julia Varady, Eva Randová, Hermann Becht, Hans Sotin and Wolfgang Schöne.
With most of us dug in for the duration, there’s no better time to tuck into a CD box set of neglected treasures. Not that I needed an excuse, mind you.
Joyce DiDonato’s take on Winterreise is a conceptual misstep that, song after song, frustratingly dilutes and distracts from an often rewarding musical performance.
A second Trove Thursday marking the recent passing of Jessye Norman focuses on the soprano’s catholic repertoire with three 20th century works: Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex; Berg’s Altenberg Lieder; and Franck’s Les Béatitudes.
Orfeo’s 150 Years box chronologically documents some of the finest nights of live opera from the Wiener Staatsoper in the years following its restoration in 1955.
Brigitte Fassbaender‘s sound is piquant and, I’d hazard to guess, instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with her work.
Wagner’s Ring is an artistic masterpiece that is peerless in its ability to continually reveal layers of musical, theatrical, and philosophical insight
An image of the old, ruined Coventry Cathedral goes into closer and closer focus until the stage is dominated by a grassy stone.
With Liber scriptus came the biggest discovery for me, the vocal talent of Elena Stikhina.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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