Notable purveyor of mayhem and infanticide Medea has lately been missing from the local operatic scene, but Sunday afternoon sections of the recently renovated Alice Tully Hall were singed by Canadian soprano Dominique Labelle’s blazing incarnation of the Greek sorceress.
Joyce DiDonato is taking her Mary Stuart on the road, so to speak.
The legions of New York opera buffs who now can’t talk about anything but Javier Camarena will be happy to know that there’s now a DVD release
of their new favorite tenor in Rossini’s Le Comte Ory available.
Joyce, Javier and now Julia—this week these three remarkable Js brought New York City memorable “Cinderella stories.”
The Met stage was filled with considerable magic Monday night when its dizzily effervescent revival of La Cenerentola starring Joyce DiDonato and Javier Camarena stirred a bewitched audience to some of the most ecstatic ovations heard this season.
Short answer: yes. But let’s begin by dismissing the a blatant canard. One thing that the Metropolitan Opera does not need to do is to scale back the number of performances in a season.
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.
It’s hard to come up with any sensible reason to dislike Joyce DiDonato.
Ailyn Pèrez is a soprano on the rise.
“I’ve lived with mendacity!—Why can’t you live with it? Hell, you got to live with it, there’s nothing else to live with except mendacity, is there?”
Nearly 30 years after a Handel opera last played there, Carnegie Hall presented The English Concert opening a three-year opera-oratorio project on Sunday afternoon with Radamisto.
I completely missed The Enchanted Island during the Met’s 2011-12 season, both in the house and in the HD presentation. Even on Sirius, I had only heard snippets of the performance.
It’s easiest to write reviews when there are soaring triumphs and miserable failures.
Cecilia Bartoli and Joyce DiDonato are not the only ladies who have recorded recitals this year featuring music from the 17th and 18th centuries.
If you’re the sort who prefers his diva to be an unapproachable sphinx prone to infuriating cancellations while radiating ennui, I suspect that the sunny, hard-working, grateful persona of American mezzo soprano Joyce DiDonato will not appeal to you at all.
My mother asked me once, whilst staring aghast at my CD collection, why I needed so many copies of Don Giovanni.
The chicken or the egg?
Here’s the thing about puns, Betsy: summer going to enjoy them and summer not.
As a child I had but a few criteria that were necessary to ensure a happy entertainment. These included mostly ball-gowns, fairy godmothers and Julie Andrews, though Sally Ann Howes was acceptable in a pinch.
The New Year’s Eve gala at the Met ushering out 2011 was the world premiere of the much-anticipated mash-up The Enchanted Island AKA “baroque opera for those who hate (or at least don’t know) baroque opera.
After today’s Met dress rehearsal of The Enchanted Island, La Cieca’s spy (pictured) reports: “You would think that if they had the entire Baroque canon to mine, they would’ve chosen music that wasn’t slow, dull, and long. In Peter Gelb‘s opening remarks, he called it ‘the Met’s Baroque Coming Out party,’ which makes me think this entire endeavor was…
Many American opera-lovers take the “Grand Tour”—a pilgrimage to Europe to attend opera at its great houses—Peter Grimes at the Royal Opera in London or Otello at La Scala in Milan, or perhaps for the more well-heeled a visit to the summer festivals of Glyndebourne, Salzburg or Aix-en-Provence.
It is, as Noel Coward remarked, astonishing how potent cheap music is. According to Brockway and Weinstock’s World of Opera, Gounod’s Faust was performed, after a rather lackluster debut in 1859, a thousand times inParis at the Opera between 1869 and 1894—a gobsmacking average of once every nine days.
Only because I am a member of the You Can Never Have Too Much Callas School of Opera Listening can I recommend EMI’s new release The Callas Effect. The beautifully packaged production is the size of a small paperback book and consists of two CDs with 29 arias sung by Callas plus a new 70-minute…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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