In recital for the Los Angeles Opera, tenor Ben Bliss makes the case for the next stage of his career.
The women were the highlights of Washington National Opera’s militaristic Aïda
It’s such a joyous score, full of Italian warmth and humanity. Verdi’s late-stage, evergreen score is a constant source of joy.
Brendan Latimer sits down with Francesca Zambello and members of the cast of Washington National Opera’s production of Aïda to discuss the complicated legacy of one of Verdi’s most beloved works and the tricky business of “inventing the truth.”
Macbeth at the Festival Verdi in Parma aims big — on a small scale
Kevin Ng sits down with PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novelist and critic Garth Greenwell to talk about sex, queerness, and the “promise of opera.”
My recollections of Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in Louisiana twenty years ago today, come with a pair of odd bookends: it starts with Verdi’s Don Carlo and ends with Puccini’s Il trittico.
Rigoletto at The Santa Fe Opera is a near miss.
A revival of the furious I masnadieri at the Bayerische Staatsoper falls short of perfection – and there’s nothing wrong with that.
A new production of Dialogues des Carmélites featuring Anna Caterina Antonacci proves that it’s hard to be an iconoclast in Venice.
Nothing helped me understand Verdi better than Alessandro Manzoni‘s I promessi sposi.
According to the memoirs of Alma Mahler, her third husband, Franz Werfel used to wander around the cafés of Paris with one of his chums, singing arias from obscure Verdi operas at the top of their lungs until the management would ask them to move on.
Although presented as an overview of the performance of Italian opera from the first half of the 19th century, Divas and Scholars is really an impassioned defense of musicology as a discipline and of Italian opera as a subject worthy of scholarly attention.
Francesco Filidei’s new opera The Name of the Rose struggles to bridge the past and the present in Milan
Perhaps the conversation about Rigoletto and disability isn’t limited to physical appearance. What if we broaden the scope of what disability in this opera might look like?
West Bay Opera’s Otello punches well above its weight
John Yohalem wraps up Donizetti Month at parterre box with a look back at nearly six decades of Donizetti operagoing.
Prompted by Washington Concert Opera’s upcoming Luisa Miller, Chris Cache’s misbehaves five times by offering just the opera’s final act with sopranos from the 1970s, some of whom might be considered “under-appreciated”: Gabriella Tucci, Adriana Maliponte, Renata Scotto, Gilda Cruz-Romo, and Katia Ricciarelli.
It used to be proverbial on the Met Opera Quiz, usually quoted by quiz master Edward Downes: “If you can’t remember where a certain plot event occurs … it happens in La Gioconda.”
Revivals of Falstaff in Milan and Don Carlo in Naples have Larry Wolff thinking across the six decades of Verdi‘s career
Not even howling winds and thunderous rain could dampen the excitement of Bay Area audiences to experience Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen for the first time in the Bay Area at Zellerbach Hall Berkeley last Tuesday, 4 February.
I had been hopeful that 2024 would end, if not on a high note, then one that was at least in tune.
The court of Mantua has run away to join the circus; Washington, DC and Baltimore’s experimental opera company, IN Series, transformed Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto in a new production set under the big top this winter.
Michael Steinberg on Riccardo Muti, fascism, and who speaks through the collective voice of the Verdi Requiem.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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