Christopher Corwin surveys the three Traviata casts — led by Lisette Oropesa, Rosa Feola, and Ermonela Jaho — at the Met this spring.
For Niel Rishoi, a new CD of Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi by Eleonora Burrato for Pentatone can’t help but invite unflattering comparisons
This week, Chris’s Cache features five singers in Orchesterlieder by Richard Strauss
Donizetti’s never been a desert island composer of mine, but he comes close when I hear Edita Gruberova in her prime.
Donizetti wrote so much great music, it’s hard to single out a favorite opera, or even a preferred aria!
At the time of the recording’s release, Kathleen Battle was getting established.
A perfect meeting of voice with composer occurred when Arleen Auger took part in the rediscovery of early works by Mozart.
When my editor suggested to me a round-up of my favorite recordings of Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann I was très, très, intrigued.
Perhaps the greatest souvenir of her art there is.
Edita Gruberova considered her greatest pride and loves not her career but her daughters Klaudia and Barbara and grandchildren Cris, Denis, and Alyssa.
Despite the diminishing returns of her vocal means, Edita Gruberova‘s last years of her career were if anything more successful than ever.
These are my findings and opinions (and I welcome rebuttals)!
The worst criticism perhaps was the gleeful Schadenfreude noting Edita’s voice wasn’t as under her command as it used to be.
Sondra Radvanovsky is very special here!
Artistic temperament she had, but not including self-centered megalomania. She was one of the most fully human individuals I have ever known.
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.
I had no idea whatsoever of the reality of the life of this strong, vibrant woman I had gotten to know, the traumas she suffered; the extent and the horror of her experiences was all very surreal to me.
The entire dinner was spent discussing conductors.
You know in some of those old Jeanette MacDonald movies where she plays a prima donna and receives applause in a public setting? That’s just what happened when the three of us walked into that restaurant, one patron calling out “Brava!”
I proposed to Edita that we turn my 20-page paper into a book, a musical biography.
I never fathomed I’d be writing words as these this soon.
Trove Thursday remembers Edita Gruberová with live recordings of two of the three operas I heard her perform at the Met: a 1985 Munich La Traviata with Neil Shicoff and Wolfgang Brendel conducted by Carlos Kleiber and an I Puritani from Vienna 1994 featuring two other artists who recently left us too soon: Marcello Giordani and Dmitri Hvorostovsky.
The Slovak soprano, whose career spanned more than 50 years, died yesterday in Zurich. She was 74.
Teresa Stratas turned 83 yesterday and Trove Thursday features one of the recent past’s most interesting yet frustrating artists in two rare broadcasts.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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