In Bayreuth, a confident Magnus Vigilius and luminous Jennifer Holloway attempt to elevate Wagner’s populist Rienzi.
What a shaded and elegant delivery William Mattteuzzi brings to this lilting setting of D’Annunzio‘s “O falce di luna calante”!
An air of discovery pervaded the first New York presentation of La ville morte much the way that it pervades the opera’s plot itself.
Puccini’s schmaltziest, most melodic, most dramatically limp, most cynical, most obscure mature work
On this day in 1987 the Met raised the curtain on Franco Zeffirelli‘s production of Turandot.
Over the course of 700 pages, Alex Ross exhaustively—and sometimes exhaustingly—examines an impact that began in the Wagner’s own lifetime and continues unbroken today, with references cropping up in contemporary works as different as The Matrix and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
As Phaedra’s tragic, all-consuming passion for her stepson Hippolytus has fascinated artists for centuries, Trove Thursday offers two of its lesser-known musical settings: Pizzetti’s opera Fedra with Régine Crespin and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson performing the cantata Phaedra, Britten’s final vocal work.
Javier Camarena offered a performance carefully calibrated to a more intimate venue that nonetheless offered emotionally potent results.
Tonight’s program at the New York Philharmonic, Arthur Honegger’s massive oratorio dramatique Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher, has been an occasional visitor to the orchestra’s repertoire starting with the performance conducted by Charles Munch in January of 1948.
“I didn’t think anything could be campier than Adriana. But this is nothing but camp. Adriana at least has tunes.”
Italo Montemezzi’s La Nave, premiered in 1918 and not performed anywhere since 1938, concerns itself with nautical power, male and female archetypes, love and hate conjoined, sex and death, the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire — and the visionary future of Old Venice.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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