This is the classic Onegin and there’s much to love, especially from Khaikin‘s sensitive conducting and Lemeshev‘s ideal Lensky.
Vishnevskaya writes rather as she sings.
Anticipating the first new local Aïda in thirty-six years, Chris’s Cache revisits Verdi’s popular opera in four unusually interesting in-house recordings from the Met 1961-1976.
In the lead up to LA Opera’s mounting of Turandot on May 18th (hooray!) I thought I’d touch on some of my favorite recordings and new re-masters I’ve discovered. I have them all.
Trove Thursday offers Shostakovich’s 1962 Katerina Izmailova with Australian soprano Marie Collier as its anti-heroine and Jon Vickers as her lover.
Tonight at the Met should have welcomed Barrie Kosky’s production of Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel; in its absence Trove Thursday steps in with a recent broadcast featuring this summer’s breakout star Ausrine Stundyte as the enigmatic Renata.
Trove Thursday began on September 10, 2015, so today we celebrate the podcast’s fifth birthday with a diva-starry Aïda double-bill: Galina Vishnevskaya vies for her soldier-hero with Irina Arkhipova, then Jessye Norman wins the guy (but loses her life) in spite of Mignon Dunn.
Trove Thursday turns to another epic opera in which the personal and the political intertwine: Prokofiev’s War and Peace.
With Liber scriptus came the biggest discovery for me, the vocal talent of Elena Stikhina.
Celebrating its third anniversary and next week’s Met opening, “Trove Thursday” offers a sumptuous banquet of the third and final chapter of divas in the “wrong language.”
Orfeo’s latest edition is a 1978 performance of Lucia di Lammermoor with a very estimable cast that on its surface may seem a tad mundane but the extensive liner notes (with performance photos) tell the story of why it held such magic.
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.
A live Un Ballo in Maschera featuring Jon Vickers, Amy Shuard, Lucia Popp, Shirley Verrett and Peter Glossop.
Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem with Anna Netrebko, Ian Bostrdge, and Thomas Hampson in an incredibly moving performance from the 2013 Salzburger Festspiele.
If you were in New York on July 7, 1975 chances are you were at the Met reveling in the visiting Bolshoi Opera’s Eugene Onegin.
Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is his masterwork and its themes of social convention and unrequited longing surely struck a deep chord in a composer who, in late 19th century Russia, was gay and had to conduct himself carefully.
The soprano and political dissident of the postwar Soviet Union died yesterday in Moscow. She was 86.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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