Few operas scream “summertime easy listening” like Pfitzner’s Palestrina—all 225 minutes of it—so Trove Thursday presents a performance from the Royal Opera’s 1997 New York visit conducted by Christian Thielemann.
“Trove Thursday” turns to a quintet of baritone/bass voices: Matthias Goerne, Simon Keenlyside, Georg Nigl, Thomas Quasthoff and René Pape performing works by Pfitzner, Sibelius, Adams, Martin and Schubert.
There was a moment during Natalie Dessay’s performance of Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade” when the singer summoned the ghost of her former self.
If works like Salome and Erwartung defined modernism in the first decades of the 20th century, Die Tote Stadt and Palestrina represented the regressive avant garde.
There has never been a successful vampire musical—so they say. But that’s just not true.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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