On this day in 1970 the Metropolitan Opera presented new productions of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci.
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.
The mixture of romance and realism in Sondheim songs, the revelation that while love could be grand and passionate it could also be mundane or inconvenient or mistimed or just plain embarrassing, was such a relief.
Quarantining during COVID dramatically increased my compulsion to collect and compare interpretations.
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.
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.
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.
A live broadcast of the prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos featuring Julia Varady, a favorite sopranos in a role she sang only rarely.
Jonny spielt auf, the second opera by 26-year-old composer Ernest K?enek, was such a huge success after its 1927 Leipzig premiere that in the following season it was performed 491 times in Germany alone.
The Hänsel und Gretel discussions over the holidays plunged me down a YouTube rabbit hole.
American soprano Evelyn Lear died quietly earlier this evening at at Brooke Grove nursing center in Sandy Spring, Maryland. She was 86.
A long-awaited DVD from the Met documents one of the great “42nd Street” episodes in operatic history: on December 20, 1980, a largely unknown Julia Migenes (or Migenes-Johnson, as she was called in those days) stepped in on a few hours’ notice for an ailing Teresa Stratas as the anti-heroine of Berg’s Lulu. A prodigiously…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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