Chris’s Cache highlights the erstwhile Chicago Symphony Orchestra @ Carnegie series with not one but two starry operas conducted by Georg Solti: Salome with Birgit Nilsson and a performance of Moses und Aron
Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder and Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot are, in their different ways, the final decadent flowering of a musical tradition at its twilight.
On this day in 1981 the Metropolitan Opera broadcast the full three-act version of Berg’s Lulu starring Teresa Stratas.
Teresa Stratas turned 83 yesterday and Trove Thursday features one of the recent past’s most interesting yet frustrating artists in two rare broadcasts.
“Trove Thursday” leaps to the end of the cycle with a slightly abridged Götterdämmerung featuring Amy Shuard as Brünnhilde.
“I will never sing the role again. It was frightful. We were a set of madwomen…There is nothing beyond Elektra. We have lived and reached the furthest boundaries in dramatic writing for the voice with Wagner. But Richard Strauss goes beyond him. His singing voices are lost. We have come to a full stop.”
None of my previous Elektra experiences prepared me for this stunning, overwhelming performance from the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence.
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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