A favorite Verdi performance from Tildy Diva
A well-known Met Aïda with a starry cast from 1967 is TildyDiva’s Favorite Verdi Performance
By Tildy Diva
36 comments
Grace Bumbry
47 pieces since 2008 — in 12 roles, at 9 companies, most often at Metropolitan Opera.
47
pieces
12
roles
9
companies
19
years
By role
Role Amneris
Teeny furniture
Sony Classical has now released “Leontyne Price Prima Donna Assoluta” containing nearly her entire operatic oeuvre in a box set.
Trick or trill
With help from the Met’s invaluable performance archive, here is a look back at just some of what you could have seen, and perhaps did see, on October 31st through the years at the Met.
Alpha and omega
On Wednesday, the still-active, still radiant Virginia Zeani turns 90.
The lion in stereo
A great man has passed and our consolation is that so much of his art has been preserved for us on recordings.
Role Azucena
I, Franco
Franco Corelli was born on April 8, 1921 in Ancona and Trove Thursday celebrates the matinee-idol tenor’s centenary with a pair of his rare non-Met US appearances; seducing Marie Collier in La Fanciulla del West and vacillating between Ilva Ligabue and Grace Bumbry in Il Trovatore.
Role Carmen
A life with a hero
By some quirk of fate, I tend to hear about the deaths of many operatic legends via radio news while out driving.
Role Eboli
Four saints in five acts
A quintessential theater man as well as a brilliant conductor, James Levine rightfully chose not only the five-act version of Don Carlo for this 1980 performance but begins the opera as Verdi had originally conceived it. The Woodcutters chorus and the episode in which Elisabetta gives her necklace to a destitute woman are pages essential to […]
Role Elisabeth
“The trouble is you think you have time”
“Trove Thursday” presents Falla’s La Vida Breve in a live concert version with Victoria de los Angeles, one of Spain’s greatest singers, as Salud.
Role Jenufa
Bye bye baby
Following last week’s performances in Cleveland, Ronnie Banerjee compares six different versions of the Kostelnicka’s monologue from Leos Janácek’s Jenufa for “Perspectives on an Aria”
Role Laura
Thoughts on La Gioconda: the others
Yes, there were other Giocondas if not of quite the same distinction. Chronologically…
Superglottal
In attempting to get a little bit of everything onto my Mixcloud page, I realized that I inadvertently neglected some essentials: 1) Leyla Gencer 2) La Gioconda.
Role Leonora
To love the language
With most of us dug in for the duration, there’s no better time to tuck into a CD box set of neglected treasures. Not that I needed an excuse, mind you.
Role Medea
Season of the Witch
Trove Thursday offers a pair of live broadcasts of Médée featuring two compelling mid-20th century divas—Inge Borkh in German and Eileen Farrell in Italian.
Role Santuzza
Village people
On this day in 1970 the Metropolitan Opera presented new productions of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci.
Role Turandot
This is a gala day for you
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.
Role Venus
Wagnerienne
Diva November meets Wagner December when Chris’s Cache this week offers Régine Crespin as both Elisabeth in Tannhäuser and Senta in Der Fliegende Holländer via a pair of American pirates from the 1960s.
It’s the Minnesinger not the song
Tannhäuser pales beside the other great Wagnerian operas in the degree to which it has innovated the Regisseur’s vocabulary for set design and dramaturgy.
The hill is greener
Live recordings of Hans Knappertsbusch conducting Parsifal seem to proliferate like stairways in M.C. Escher prints.
Win a Free Ticket to Opening Night at the Met!
Quinn Kelsey and Lise Davidsen star in the Met's new Macbeth. We're giving away one ticket, so screw your courage to the sticking place and enter now!
