strong>Christian Gerhaher does not appear at first to sing but rather to speak on pitches, telling stories, explaining words by lingering on them or biting them off short.
Falstaff, Verdi’s totally unexpected, final, great comedic roar.
On her 90th birthday “Trove Thursday” presents the late great Belgian mezzo Rita Gorr parenting Régine Crespin in Massenet’s Hérodiade.
With February 14th falling on a Sunday, there will be no Valentine’s Day Met performance this year.
God, I love that photo of Lisa della Casa. She can sing, too!
By some quirk of fate, I tend to hear about the deaths of many operatic legends via radio news while out driving.
This afternoon at the Met, Grigolo sold his performance like the rent was due tomorrow and he was down to his last penny.
It’s hard to come up with any sensible reason to dislike Joyce DiDonato.
Giulio Cesare at the Met proved an evening that added up to much more than the sum of its uneven parts.
On Saturday I attended the premiere performance of a new production of Ariadne auf Naxos at the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden, Germany. It was Renée Fleming’s debut in the title role…
When sending out CDs to for me to review, our doyenne could not know that I have a fetish for 1950s vintage import LP jackets. I remember combing through the LP bins gazing admiringly at the import disks of a generation of middle-European singers who I was too young to have heard in person, who…
James Levine: Celebrating 40 Years at the Met includes not only unreleased video performances on DVD but also live radio broadcasts on CD. This performance is one of the latter, originally heard April 19, 2003. The Rake’s Progress has one of the greatest operatic pedigrees of all time. It was inspired by a series of…
[La Cieca is delighted to introduce a new reviewer, @scazzasofija.] I found Rosenkavalier (Met, Oct. 13) to be mostly sublime. My quibbles come from a preference for Kleiber’s tempos. I found that de Waart was waving his arms as fast as he could for the beginning, but I think the prelude and up until the…
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf died this morning at her home in Switzerland. She was 90. The first report of the soprano’s passing was on Deutchlandradio Kultur: “Elisabeth Schwarzkopf ist tot. Wie der Deutschlandfunk erfuhr, starb die Sopranistin im Alter von 90 Jahren in ihrem Wohnort Zumikon in der Schweiz. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf besaß eine der schönsten Sopranstimmen ihrer…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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