A new DVD recording of La Juive boasts considerable musical strengths in spite of a frustrating production.
Pacific Opera Project’s high-spirited revival of Fra Diavolo is both therapy and an escape.
A new production of La sonnambula at the Metropolitan Opera is musically charming if dramatically confounding.
Overall, this was a superb achievement and a thrilling season opener for the San Francisco Opera.
Folks who have never attended a full-length, uncut Giacomo Meyerbeer grand opera have been known to pout and ponder: Why did the most popular opera composer of the mid-nineteenth century all but vanish from the stages of the world after a hundred years?
As revivals of the composer’s sprawling works represent a daunting expense for many opera houses, exceptionally cast recordings of such concert performances serve as valuable documents that foster appreciation for his achievements.
Amilcare Ponchielli’s La Gioconda might not be a perfect opera (though I don’t see why not) but it is one of my favorites…
A perfect escape for a city laden with recent layoffs and job cuts coming into Holiday season
As far as I know, Juan Diego Flórez last appeared in New York City (not totally to his advantage) as Alfredo in the Met’s garish new production of La Traviata back in December 2018, nearly five years ago.
On paper, the Met’s revival of L’elisir d’amore looked like a lovely evening. And at times it was—a few scenes hinted at what it could be and what it might yet become.
The elusive La dame blanche returned for one evening to New York City on May 28 thanks to the New Amsterdam Opera led by maestro Keith Chambers.
In an era when the Metropolitan Opera cannot cast an Aida, Trovatore or Forza consistently, New Amsterdam Opera managed to cast large, attractive and fully technically capable voices in all the cruelly demanding principal roles in I Vespri Siciliani!
That question hung in the air when Teatro de la Zarzuela Madrid revived Tomás Bretón’s opera Farinelli for first time since its premiere in 1902.
Amore Opera, an old-fashioned, adventurous little company that performs ambitious and sometimes delectably obscure but worthy repertory at the Riverside Theatre, is now (through Sunday) presenting Un ballo in maschera.
Logistically, a large-scale revival of the operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer is an unreasonable request, much less an expectation.
At Palermo’s Teatro Massimo, Zerline, the heroine of Auber’s once beloved Fra Diavolo , undresses down to frilly French skivvies.
Ali Baba ou Les Quarantes Voleurs continues straight-tone September with Teresa Stich-Randall as its heroine while Alfredo Kraus scales the heights with another Nadir.
“Trove Thursday” presents a performance from 40 years ago: an inspired Renata Scotto as Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur.
Diana Damrau has chosen for her new Erato recital disc Grand Opera 11 high-flying showpieces from ten operas by Giacomo Meyerbeer.
A brilliant production of La Juive like that of Peter Konwitschny generalizes the message that mindless hate does not pay and the mindless mob is always the enemy of civilization.
Saturday evening conductor Will Crutchfield revived Donizetti’s La Favorite—unheard in New York for fifteen years.
Harry Lawrence Freeman’s Voodoo, begun sometime before 1914, was completed and first heard on radio in May, 1928, then staged on Broadway later that year—seven years before Porgy and Bess, please note.
Perhaps there are not that many people in the world who would look at a CD cover and think “Oh, goody, goody! A libretto by Eugène Scribe I’ve never come across before!”
What we have here is the grandest opera never heard.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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