While everyone tries to figure out what on earth Strauss and Hofmannsthal are up to in Die Frau ohne Schatten, now playing at the Met, Chris’s Cache offers a later, simpler, shorter Strauss with three live broadcasts of his “bucolic tragedy” Daphne.
Richard Strauss’ “Bucolic Tragedy in One Act” Daphne is one of his most beautiful and most frustrating works.
This sterling revival shows the Metropolitan to be surviving well and in good shape.
Trove Thursday offers Mozart’s Requiem with Lucia Popp, Christa Ludwig, Peter Schreier and Walter Berry conducted by James Levine from the 1981 Salzburg Festival.
A sense of celebration was definitely in the air last Thursday at the Vienna State Opera.
Following classic recordings documenting the work of Karl Böhm and Herbert von Karajan. Orfeo’s 150 Years Wiener Staatsoper box moves on to new releases that are seeing their first incarnation on an officially available disc.
Christian Thielemann is widely regarded as our time’s preeminent master of the Austro-German symphonic ensemble.
The old adage “the third time’s the charm” proved to be the case with me and Daphne, Richard Strauss’s ravishing bukolische Tragödie, when I recently heard it performed by Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra.
“Trove Thursday” celebrates the thrilling Finnish soprano Karita Matilla in the ultimate diva role.
Seville bills itself as the “City of 150 operas,” and celebrated this fact at the Exposition of 1992 by erecting a magnificent new opera house, the Teatro de la Maestranza, right beside the Plaza de Toros.
Now we have considered the three “winners” in the Tristan competition, let’s turn to the also-rans, or, to be more optimistic, the runners up.
Just 85 years ago, four of Italy’s greatest opera stars gathered at Teatro all Scala for an historic event: the first-ever recording of Arrigo Boito’s sole complete opera, Mefistofele.
The dramatic tenor died this morning in Vienna.
This Sunday marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson from breast cancer.
I can scarcely remember a performance where so many conflicting thoughts raced through my mind as happened Thursday night during the Met Orchestra’s “bleeding chunks” of Wagner’s Ring at Carnegie Hall.
Sunday afternoon’s all-Richard Strauss concert served as a de facto commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the debut of Renée Fleming, long one of the house’s biggest stars.
Although the season is less than three weeks old, Metropolitan Opera audiences may hear nothing else this season as beautiful as Peter Mattei’s “Song to the Evening Star.”
Richard Strauss’s many one-act operas make excellent concert programs, both for their length (usually under two hours) and the primary place each gives the orchestration, a specialty where Strauss’s brilliance seldom deserted him.
My memory is fading but the events I recall most vividly of the last season seem largely to have been concert performances.
In what may qualify as the most unholy alliance of Peter Gelb‘s tenure at the Met so far, since February the “Live in HD” performances from 2009 of both Turandot and Aida issued by Decca have been available from… Target. Only Target. They are scheduled for international release this July. Up until recently there has…
The moral of Lohengrin is clearly set out: Don’t talk on your wedding night. Even more important, don’t sing. Happily, at Lyric Opera of Chicago, Johan Botha in the title role and Amber Wagner as Elsa of Brabant ignored this advice.
Ioan Holender was General Manager of the Wiener Staatsoper for nineteen years, the longest anyone has held this post, and the august institution honored him with the gala to end all galas in the final days of his administration. With the goal of commemorating each of the 40 new productions premiered at the Staatsoper during…
There are several reasons to purchase the new DVD of Die Meistersinger from Vienna (EuroArts EUA 2072488), but the main one is Christian Thielemann. This production will most likely come to be known as “Thielemann’s Meistersinger,” because his sense of the overall architecture of the work is, pardon the pun, masterful.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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