Antonio Literes, a boy soprano from Majorca, had, we may presume, friends in high places.
I don’t usually attend a performance of an opera I’ve known well most of my life expecting a revelation.
“Trove Maundy Thursday” offers a recent un-HIP version of Handel’s Messiah.
Today is Handel’s 332nd birthday and “Trove Thursday” celebrates with a rare live broadcast of his best-known opera Giulio Cesare in Egitto.
An unstaged performance of Juditha Triumphans by five soloists and the Venice Baroque Orchestra under Andrea Marcon.
Joyce DiDonato’s atest album, In War & Peace: Harmony through music, is more specific than it sounds.
The seventeenth-century works of Francisco Cavalli may be easier for modern audiences to accept.
A 1984 performance of Handel’s Orlando with Marilyn Horne, Valerie Masterson, Marvis Martin, Jeffery Gall and Robert Lloyd, conducted by Charles Mackerras.
Might Max Emanuel Cencic be the countertenor for people who hate countertenors?
William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants made a much-anticipated appearance at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival Saturday performing Theodora.
My memory is fading but the events I recall most vividly of the last season seem largely to have been concert performances.
Mark Morris’ staging of Acis and Galatea at Lincoln Center is everything good about summer condensed into two hours.
We must be doubly grateful that The English Concert’s recent Theodora was so quickly followed by the American Classical Orchestra’s fine Samson on Tuesday evening at Alice Tully Hall.
For decades thousands and thousands have attended Handel’s Messiah (usually around Christmas or more appropriately near Easter) making it easily one of the most widely known works of classical music.
Giulio Cesare at the Met proved an evening that added up to much more than the sum of its uneven parts.
That’s what it must have been like in 1726 London when Handel composed Alessandro for perhaps the three most famous (and expensive) singers of the day.
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s best known opera is La Serva Padrona, but the Neapolitan composer also composed several other works, which are now lovingly presented on video by the Fondazione Pergolesi Spontini at Jesi.
Cecilia Bartoli and Joyce DiDonato are not the only ladies who have recorded recitals this year featuring music from the 17th and 18th centuries.
Can it be nearly a quarter-century ago that an Italian mezzo-soprano in her early twenties recorded her first recital?
Rule Britannia? Often during the Olympics that famous number from Thomas Arne’s 1740 Alfred echoed in my ears.
The chicken or the egg?
Of all the Olympics-related products created to honor the upcoming summer games in London, surely one of the oddest must be a brand new pasticcio just released on a two-CD set
by Naïve—L’Olimpiade.
Nicholas Hytner’s much-travelled and well received 1985 production of George Frideric Handel’s 1738 opera Xerxes has been released on DVD
from Arthaus Musik, in a performance recorded live from the English National Opera in 1988.
“Hey the line forms, on the right dear / Now that Macheath’s back in town / You’d better lock your doors, and call the law / Because Macheath’s back in town.” So concludes Marc Blitzstein’s famous English translation of the song that opens Die Dreigroschenoper.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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