A 1985 broadcast of Don Giovanni featuring Cheryl Studer, Gundula Janowitz (as Elvira!), Krisztina Laki, Gösta Winbergh, Hermann Prey (in a rare outing as the Don) and Malcolm King conducted by Jeffrey Tate.
On this day in 1967 Herbert von Karajan first appeared at the Metropolitan Opera conducting and directing Die Walküre.
This week’s star-spangled “Trove Thursday” offers the second crazy-quilt installment of divas in the wrong language.
Arabella with Wolfgang Sawallisch conducting a prime-time 1980s Munich cast.
A rollicking performance of his delightful comic opera Der geduldige Sokrates featuring a fine cast and the magnificent Akademie für Alte Musik conducted by René Jacobs.
LoftOpera’s accurately but unpromisingly named Pergolesi & Vivaldi stumbled rather than soared.
Met audiences might have to wait a very long time for Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
Live recordings of Hans Knappertsbusch conducting Parsifal seem to proliferate like stairways in M.C. Escher prints.
Fidelio but with an unhappy ending, Bedrich Smetana’s stirring Dalibor opens 2016’s “Trove Thursday” in a 1968 German-language broadcast from Bavarian Radio.
Several prima donnas have ought to resurrect La Vestale, including Renata Scotto, whose priestess highlights this week’s “Trove Thursday.”
When LaCieca asked me to choose my favorite live recording, I had to think… and think.
It never occurred to me that each tape had to be individually dubbed or that others, maybe many, many others, might also be ordering tapes at the same time.
Herbert von Karajan once said listening to some of his old recordings made him envy painters who could simply burn the pictures they disliked.
“Conduct Salome and Elektra as if they were by Mendelssohn: Fairy music.” Seriously, how often has that happened?
The behavioral phenomenon of limerence has been described as “an involuntary potentially inspiring state of adoration and attachment to a limerent object involving intrusive and obsessive thoughts, feelings and behaviors from euphoria to despair, contingent on perceived emotional reciprocation.”
Richard Strauss’s “last romantic opera,” as he called Die Frau Ohne Schatten, is and has always been a problem child.
For all his historical importance Christoph Willibald Gluck remains one of the least known and performed of the great opera composers.
On Saturday I attended the premiere performance of a new production of Ariadne auf Naxos at the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden, Germany. It was Renée Fleming’s debut in the title role…
Almost exactly one hundred years ago on March 18, 1912, the Metropolitan Opera gave its final performance to date of Armide.
Idomeneo is one of those operas I always meant to get around to, but never did. Composed in 1780, it’s considered Mozart’s first “mature” opera. If you collect live recordings of significant debuts, this 1964 Glyndebourne Festival live recording might be of interest. So far as I can tell, this may be the first full…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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