In 1972, when I was 12 years old, my mother took me to the Salzburg Festival.
“In over nine years you’ve never posted an opera by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari,” no one has ever said.
“Trove Thursday” presents Purcell’s remarkably concise Dido and Aeneas in a pair of fascinatingly different interpretations.
We close 2018 with Le Comte Ory with an enviable nearly all-Italian cast of prime-time Rossini specialists: Mariella Devia, Cecila Bartoli, Ewa Podles, William Matteuzzi, Claudio Desderi and Pietro Spagnoli.
At one point I spent a couple of months on the dole and dollar record shopping had a number of obvious virtues as a pastime.
On this day in 1996 mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli made her Metropolitan Opera stage debut as Despina.
In the midst of Tosca month “Trove Thursday” assembles from the 60s to the 80s an Il Trittico in which each opera features an important Italian star.
This week’s feature is a classic Salzburger Festspiele performance from 1959 with the all-star cast of Leopold Simoneau, Lisa Della Casa, Kurt Böhme, Erika Köth, Walter Berry, Hans Hotter, Graziella Sciutti and Karl Dönch conducted by George Szell.
Poor Paisiello. Out of the nearly 100 operas written by this industrious composer just one was generally regarded as a masterpiece.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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