A new production of La sonnambula at the Metropolitan Opera is musically charming if dramatically confounding.
In a splashy new recording of Norma, Marina Rebeka “is doing something very untoward, and it appears destructive to her voice.” It has Niel Rishoi worried.
On this day in 2011, the Metropolitan Opera opened its season with a new production of Anna Bolena.
A recent discussion here about Gianna Rolandi prompts Trove Thursday to present the American soprano in a rare trouser role in an even rarer opera, Cimarosa’s Gli Orazi e I Curiazi paired with Anna Caterina Antonacci.
Now we find Mariella Devia, a diva held in near mythic regard due to her vocal longevity, with competing videos of two of her performances that were released, literally, on the same day.
For her third solo recording, Olga Peretyatko summons the two men who launched her career less than a decade ago
The key to enjoying Bellini’s I Capuleti e Montechi is to do a hard factory reset and reformat your brain to forget all other works based on Romeo and Juliet.
For better or worse, Decca’s new Norma recording
will ultimately be embraced—or dismissed—by those reacting directly to Cecilia Bartoli’s controversial portrayal.
Everyone who revives Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda, as the Collegiate Chorale did at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday night, calls the piece an “overlooked masterpiece.”
Giovanni Simone Mayr was one of the most important musical figures of his day, a man Rossini referred to as the “father of Italian opera” whom Napoleon personally lobbied to come work in Paris. Though he wrote nearly 70 operas and taught Donizetti and Bellini, the Bavarian-born composer had the misfortune of hitting his peak…
The subtitle for Il crociato in Egitto, the last of Meyerbeer’s great Italian operas, is “Historic Melodrama in Two Acts,” and boy is it! A melodrama, I mean. I’m not sure about the historic part.
Among the ten musical feasts that Paris staged to celebrate the coronation of the last Bourbon king, Charles X, in 1825, Il viaggio a Reims by Gioachino Rossini had undoubtedly the highest profile. Others, including La Route de Reims, a pastiche of Mozart music, are now long forgotten, and Rossini’s score once seriously risked suffering…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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