A favorite Donizetti performance from James Grant A favorite Donizetti performance from James Grant

In 1972, when I was 12 years old, my mother took me to the Salzburg Festival.

Down for the Comte Down for the Comte

We close 2018 with Le Comte Ory with an enviable nearly all-Italian cast of prime-time Rossini specialists: Mariella Devia, Cecila Bartoli, Ewa Podles, William Matteuzzi, Claudio Desderi and Pietro Spagnoli.

You shall know them by their ‘Flutes’ You shall know them by their ‘Flutes’

This year’s Salzburg Festival opens Saturday with a new production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, an opera often performed elsewhere in translation, so “Trove Thursday” offers two for the price (!) of one.

Castaway Castaway

The wonderful Spanish mezzo Teresa Berganza celebrates her 81st birthday next week and “Trove Thursday” gets the party started.

Bridging the Channel

It’s kind of shocking, when you really think about it, that the kind of international operatic model that the Royal Opera now operates on barely existed only 50 years ago. Until around 1960 most of the performances at the Covent Garden were given in English and the casting choices were enough to make the Vicar…