“Trove Thursday” presents a recording of the rare L’Olimpiade featuring Joan Caplan and Rita Shane in the two leading castrato roles.
Let’s call this meeting to order. My name is Patrick and I’m a boxset-aholic.
Leonie Rysanek, would have turned 90 today.
This is the hardest piece I’ve ever tried to write for parterre.
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.
Your alte Jungfer’s requisite Kuschelkatze (pictured) arrived on my doorstep in Mariahilf with the name of Tristan.
You don’t often hear the grand operas of Benjamin Britten on smaller stages.
The focus in this 1974 performance of Salome from Orange is (mostly) on the Herodes of Jon Vickers.
The wonderful Spanish mezzo Teresa Berganza celebrates her 81st birthday next week and “Trove Thursday” gets the party started.
Live recordings of Hans Knappertsbusch conducting Parsifal seem to proliferate like stairways in M.C. Escher prints.
Between them, Maria Guleghina, Marcello Giordani, James Morris and John Del Carlo have nearly 150 combined years of service on stage.
While the celebrity-studded, expensively-dressed audience gathered for the gala opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2015-2016 season seemed genuinely enthralled by Monday evening’s performance of Otello, it was more likely swept away by the power of Verdi’s genius than by Bartlett Sher’s puzzling, inert new production.
For those of you who can’t make it to the Met’s opening night, I am happy to provide you the opportunity to experience another Otello with a cast that was unmatchable for 1981.
The studio opera recording is a rare beast these days and its arrival always a cause for celebration.
I’m beginning this new series of “pirate-casts” with a great opera: Berlioz’s Les Troyens featuring the luminous pairing of Janet Baker and Jon Vickers as Didon and Énée.
The CD explosion coincided with an enormous increase in interest in HIP (historically informed performance) so now there were lots of commercial recordings of the sort of operas I had turned to pirates to find.
By some quirk of fate, I tend to hear about the deaths of many operatic legends via radio news while out driving.
The legendary Canadian heldentenor died on Friday. He was 88.
Who needs sets and costumes anyway?
Herbert von Karajan once said listening to some of his old recordings made him envy painters who could simply burn the pictures they disliked.
We must be doubly grateful that The English Concert’s recent Theodora was so quickly followed by the American Classical Orchestra’s fine Samson on Tuesday evening at Alice Tully Hall.
Joined by the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, The English Concert concluded the US leg of its current tour at Carnegie Hall Sunday with a complete performance of the darkly moving Theodora, Handel’s penultimate oratorio.
Ambiguity. That’s the theme of the operas of Benjamin Britten (ennobled as Baron Britten of Aldeburgh).
The curious things about accepted wisdom is that sometimes it’s correct.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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