A “lone voice in the wilderness” booed Barbara Frittoli’s calamitous Nedda.
Is Manon Lescaut a cold, clinical tale of the splendors and pitfalls of transactional sex, or is it a romantic Italian opera at its most lush and melodic?
Maria Agresta‘s delicately-acted, sumptuously-sung seamstress transformed what might have been just an average Wednesday night revival into something finer.
Two years before she brought the role to Wiener Staatsoper in a production somewhat dominated by Jonas Kaufmann, soprano Nina Stemme sang her first-ever Minnie in La fanciulla del West at Stockholm’s Royal Opera.
Angela Gheorghiu‘ s idiosyncratically alluring, sometimes maddening, always fascinating Floria Tosca inevitably became the evening’s unmissable raison d’être.
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.
Along with Don Giovanni, Carmen is an odd bird on the list of the most beloved and frequently performed works.
There is a simple elegance to the single-composer recital album format. For the listener in the mood for, say, Puccini, it’s a chance to delve into his music without any pesky interruptions by those other guys like Verdi or Massenet. And if one is also in the mood for a particular singer’s art, then the…
The studio opera recording is a rare beast these days and its arrival always a cause for celebration.
Piotr Beczala, Soile Isokoski and Kwangchul Youn star in this 2009 performance of Faust from the Wiener Staatsoper, idiomatically conducted by Bertrand de Billy.
Bohuslav Martinu’s The Greek Passion has had a rough life.
Töt erst sein Weib!” shrieks Anja Kampe as Leonore during the very first moments of Andreas Homoki’s ingenious production of Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio, at Opernhaus Zürich.
Jonas Kaufmann in a wifebeater is but one of the attractions of the Salzburg Festival production of Cavalleria rusticana, a telecast of which you can peruse after the jump.
“Michael Volle is not into bling,” begins an article in ACT-O, the glossy magazine of the Grand Théâtre de Genève.
Imagine two tenors releasing French opera aria collections at the same time without duplicating a single track!
New York City isn’t a bad place to live, operatically-speaking.
My memory is fading but the events I recall most vividly of the last season seem largely to have been concert performances.
2014 was a year of lemons into lemonade.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith… I am nothing.”
“This is obviously a difficult situation. But who knows Hans New Rock, knows his cool and objective aesthetic decision.”
Readers of this site are typically up to speed on emerging vocal talents, so clearly there is no need for me to write a review of Chilean-German soprano Carolina Ullrich’s riveting recital at the Paris Opera?
One of the things that made François Girard’s 2013 production of Parsifal at the Met so compelling was the way he tried to make the tale of suffering and temptation relevant to a contemporary audience.
Despite the continued popularity of Der Freischütz in German-speaking countries, are the magical mature operas of Carl Maria von Weber otherwise really so problematic, their libretti so unwieldy to explain their continued absence from the world’s stages?
The Salzburg Festival has long had the image of this place where for a little over a month, the very best singers are brought together with the very best conductors and the very best directors to create the very best productions the opera world has to offer.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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