Happy 86th birthday composer John Corigliano
On October 14, 1979 I spent my birthday attending my first all-star opera gala, thrilled at the chance to hear some of the great singers I’d only experienced on LPs, broadcasts or via my pirate reel-to-reel tapes.
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.
It was love at first hearing. The music was glorious, the conducting bouncy and pointed, and the singers sure sounded terrific to me.
Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco in a rare NYC concert performance with Margaret Price, Carlo Bergonzi and Sherrill Milnes.
“Trove Thursday” goes modest with Donizetti’s domestic comedy Don Pasquale featuring Ileana Cotrubas, Alfredo Kraus, Vicente Sardinero and Wladimiro Ganzarolli.
A poster outside Carnegie Hall proclaimed “Mahler Well Met” and to some degree it proved to be true.
Anticipation of events like the Metropolitan Opera’s 50th Anniversary bash turns me back into the newly opera-soused kid who begged his parents to let him watch the highlights of the Bing Gala on the family color television.
Falstaff, Verdi’s totally unexpected, final, great comedic roar.
Between them, Maria Guleghina, Marcello Giordani, James Morris and John Del Carlo have nearly 150 combined years of service on stage.
It took me years to appreciate the serious Donizetti, but I’ve always loved the composer’s comic operas, particularly Don Pasquale and Elisir.
It’s kind of shocking, when you really think about it, that the kind of international operatic model that the Royal Opera now operates on barely existed only 50 years ago. Until around 1960 most of the performances at the Covent Garden were given in English and the casting choices were enough to make the Vicar…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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