Falstaff, Verdi’s final opera, is exuberantly inventive, bubbling and roiling with ideas the 79-year-old composer was too impatient to develop.
Whenever I encounter Eric Owens, he’s plotting to conquer the universe.
Serious opera fan and internet pioneer Mike Richter died earlier this week.
the strip on my first and, so far at least, only visit to Las Vegas a few years ago, I noticed what to me was a most unexpected sight and startled my companions by pointing out the window and shouting “Auber!”
The part of Lady Macbeth is different from any other role Verdi wrote because the composer insisted that the interpreter must have a harsh, ugly voice.
It may have taken most of Verdi’s canon to do it, but the “Tutto Verdi” collection finally manages to do justice to Verdi in his last two operas.
Giuseppe and I have always had a complicated relationship.
Of all of Verdi’s operas. Aida is the one I find least interesting dramatically.
The Tutto Verdi series from the Teatro Regio Parma may be said to relate to the great Giuseppe Verdi’s oeuvre as the burning of the library at Alexandria did to classical literature.
Name a Verdi opera, based on a play by Voltaire, described in the immortal words of the composer as “Questo e proprio brutto.”
Director Daniel Moshel (not pictured) who created the YouTube sensation MeTube, sat down recently—and virtually—to chat with La Cieca (also not pictured.)
There’s that old joke; What’s the difference between opera and sex? Punchline; you can have good sex.
All of the operas of Giuseppe Verdi contain music that is worth hearing and can be rewarding in good performances.
Verdi’s first operatic masterpiece is well served by this DVD
of a performance from the Teatro Regio di Parma.
There’s something charming and almost irresistible about early Verdi opera. I always equate it to seeing a grade school test from Albert Einstein.
Once again, we’re back with the Parmigiani at the Teatro Regio and their Tutto Verdi project marking the upcoming bicentennial of the great maestro’s birth.
The realization of the opera Un ballo in maschera by Verdi and the librettist Antonio Somma is almost as famous as the opera itself.
Recently your doyenne engaged in an email-based interview with David Alden, director of the Met’s new production of Un ballo in maschera, opening on Thursday.
Camille Saint-Saëns was such a brilliant, facile musician that pals like Wagner and Liszt felt a distinct schadenfreude when he suffered composer’s block.
Beethoven expressed it best when he reportedly threw Rossini shade: “Any other other style than opera buffa would do violence to your nature.”
On this Gay Pride weekend, I remember my late friend Robert Chesley, activist and playwright (Stray Dog Story), who had also been an elementary schoolteacher.
It was dear Oscar Wilde, wasn’t it, who devised that early mot du jour “Good writers borrow; great writers steal”…
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…
Classical music writer and opera critic Robert Levine has written a very pleasant new book, Weep, Shudder, Die, A Guide to Loving Opera, published by HarperCollins Books. Levine sets up the book’s premise early in his introduction: “Could singing… make one, as the composer Vincenzo Bellini said, ‘weep, shudder, die’ and at the same time…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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