Leos Janácek’s rise to international prominence as a Titan of music was dovetailed by a cluster of profoundly original operas that were written during his extraordinary autumnal years.
As New Yorkers swelter in the Fahrenheit 90s. Trove Thursday escapes to wintry Vienna 1920s for Richard Strauss’s Intermezzo (in English) sumptuously conducted by Julius Rudel and starring the incomparable Elisabeth Söderström as the delicious, exasperating wife of Alan Titus.
“Trove Thursday” offfers Joseph Martin Kraus’s superb Aeneas i Cartago, eller Dido och Aeneas—in Swedish!—starring a luminous Elisabeth Söderström as the doomed Queen.
The old adage “the third time’s the charm” proved to be the case with me and Daphne, Richard Strauss’s ravishing bukolische Tragödie, when I recently heard it performed by Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra.
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.
“Trove Thursday” offers a belated 55th birthday nod to Dmitri Hvorostovsky with a blazing live performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride.
A live broadcast of the prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos featuring Julia Varady, a favorite sopranos in a role she sang only rarely.
The glorious and beloved Elisabeth Söderström tackles the fiendishly difficult role of Christine in a 1974 performance from Glyndebourne.
“Trove Thursday” pays tribute to the great German bass Kurt Moll
A week from tonight the Met premieres an eagerly anticipated new Der Rosenkavalier, its first in nearly 50 years—probably to the dismay of many grown used to the venerable Nathaniel Merrill–Robert O’Hearn production. As a preview “Trove Thursday” offers a live broadcast of Richard Strauss’s most popular opera with a delicious cast headed by Régine…
This may be Karita Mattila’s greatest role.
“Trove Thursday” presents Sena Jurinac‘s radiant portrayal of Janacek’s Jenufa opposite the implacable Kostelnicka of Martha Mödl.
Three decades before Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Flórez dazzled the world with their La donna del lago roadshow, another deluxe team headed by Frederica von Stade and Marilyn Horne shone in Rossini’s neglected masterpiece.
If works like Salome and Erwartung defined modernism in the first decades of the 20th century, Die Tote Stadt and Palestrina represented the regressive avant garde.
It is hard to know just who is the intended audience for this release of Pelléas and Mélisande.
The great Swedish soprano died earlier today. She was 82. [AP]
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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