Joyce DiDonato’s atest album, In War & Peace: Harmony through music, is more specific than it sounds.
>What does a great opera production do, and what does a bad production fail to do?
“The music’s fun, but doesn’t Rossini repeat himself?”
“Trove Thursday” presentsFerdinando Paër’s 1804 Leonora ossia L’Amore coniugale.
In how many operas does the heroine drink poison and then go lengthily mad?
Giuseppe Verdi was so unhappy with the first production of his Giovanna d’Arco at La Scala in 1845 that he swore an oath to himself that he would never entrust that theatre with a prima again.
Maria Agresta‘s delicately-acted, sumptuously-sung seamstress transformed what might have been just an average Wednesday night revival into something finer.
Those who enjoyed (at least aurally) the Met’s recent La Donna del Lago may be craving more of the master from Pesaro, so 2015’s final “Trove Thursday” presents Torvaldo e Dorliska.
There might be nothing in the world as joyous as a Rossini overture.
For her third solo recording, Olga Peretyatko summons the two men who launched her career less than a decade ago
“Operatic” generally refers to sung drama, but there is another meaning of that term: grandiose, outsize, hysterical.
Homer, inspired by many a muse, sang not of sequels to his Iliad.
It’s fun to wonder what might have happened if Rossini had never composed Il Barbiere di Siviglia. Would Giovanni Paisiello’s earlier adaptation of the work be a repertory favorite? Or would it have faded into obscurity with an occasional revival here and there?
Poor Paisiello. Out of the nearly 100 operas written by this industrious composer just one was generally regarded as a masterpiece.
The creation of Kurt Weill’s The Eternal Road and its lately remodeled avatar, The Road of Promise, boiled down and premiered at Carnegie Hall Wednesday night by the Collegiate Chorale and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, was an intricate process, far more interesting than the work itself.
James Conlon, Music Director for the LA Opera, often does the pre-game lecture in the huge open space on the second floor lobby of the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion and it’s almost always a standing room only crowd.
What would you do if I asked you to take a old, faded version of Puccini’s score for La Bohème and fill in the unreadable parts with a mélange of disco, kabarett, and Alban Berg?
Heaven temporarily relocated to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées Sunday evening for a concert performance of Rossini’s revered but rarely heard Semiramide.
Every year I say I’m not going to another La Bohème because I’ve seen this too many times.
A production as delectable as the current one (through Sunday) at the Juilliard Opera will make you wonder why Il Turco is not as well known as L’Italiana, Il Barbiere, La Cenerentola, even the odd and occasional Il Viaggio a Rheims.
Kitsch is alive and well in Rossini’s La Cenerentola at the War Memorial.
I just arrived back from Stella di Napoli’s.
Two operas both alike in dignity, set in dimly lit Renaissance towns ruled by seething, conspiratorial courts.
Before there was Verdi’s Otello, Rossini’s Otello was considered the master operatic adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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