My first experience with John Corigliano’s music was in high school with the ear and mind blowing score he wrote for Ken Russell’s film Altered States.
My memory is fading but the events I recall most vividly of the last season seem largely to have been concert performances.
Throw in a trio of murders and a healthy splash of vodka and you have, more or less, the plot of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
The legendary Italian soprano Magda Olivero has died.
I never thought I’d see the day when Giuseppe Verdi and Benjamin Britten would battle it out for musical superiority but that’s exactly what happened in Los Angeles this year.
I’ve long been a fan of Kenneth Branagh, even though this fandom feels a bit like being a camel in the desert.
Being an opera lover in Los Angeles is a lot like being a Red Sox fan. As hard as they try we never make it to the World Series, let alone the playoffs.
Although Walter Braunfels was among those German composers whose music was banned in their home country after 1933, and whose political rehabilitiation in 1945 was not accompanied by a commensurate revival of his music, his 1920 opera Die Vögel should need no special pleading on musical or dramatic grounds. Though Braunfels is traditionally described as…
In the process of unearthing forgotten musical works, sometimes we stumble across a gem. World War II saw an entire generation of European composers forced into internment or diaspora, and their works are only slowly being rescued from obscurity. In a recent DVD release from the LA Opera, a part their Recovered Voices series, we…
This review was not going to be primarily about Shirley Verrett. She is not a singer I am all that familiar with and when I was sent this DVD of Tosca to review a week ago, I focused more on the director of the production, baritone-turned-producer Tito Gobbi, than on the singers. But sometimes life…
The life of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is almost as melodramatic as that of its heroine. Composed in the early 1930’s, the opera was well received at its 1934 Leningrad premiere, and was also a success in Moscow a couple of years later. Then one evening Stalin came to see it and…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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