102 pieces since 2006 — at 10 companies, most often at La Scala.
When sending out CDs to for me to review, our doyenne could not know that I have a fetish for 1950s vintage import LP jackets. I remember combing through the LP bins gazing admiringly at the import disks of a generation of middle-European singers who I was too young to have heard in person, who […]
Five decades before the Met turned to computer-assisted planks to help tell the story of Wagner’s Ring cycle, the company stirred controversy and comment with another staging of the tetralogy. General Manager Rudolf Bing imported a stark, abstract production from the Salzburg Festival in order to secure the services of Herbert von Karajan, who not […]
Reviewing a CD of someone you have never heard live is always a dicey proposition. As we all know, a voice sounds very different in a big hall than it does up-close and personal. So if Marc Hervieux is your favorite new tenor, please don’t put me in the “crosshairs” just yet. I freely admit […]
Had I been living at the time Walter Felsenstein’s film of Verdi’s Otello was released in 1969, such then-innovative elements as the use of color on television and a vernacular translation might have given me new insights into this great opera. Maybe.
UPDATED January 12: The legendary Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson died on December 25, it was announced yesterday. She was 87. La Cieca will present a special episode of “Unnatural Acts of Opera” tonight in salute to Mme. Nilsson. Birgit Nilsson as Isolde, Metropolitan Opera, 1971 Once Birgit Nilsson was negotiating a contract with Herbert von […]
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