Video Artists International brings us back to a time when opera was carried over the airwaves by great voices—and a tire company.
Well, I had a favorite—Sabine Kalter. But 15 years later, I changed my mind. It was Sabine Kalter.
In an era when the Metropolitan Opera cannot cast an Aida, Trovatore or Forza consistently, New Amsterdam Opera managed to cast large, attractive and fully technically capable voices in all the cruelly demanding principal roles in I Vespri Siciliani!
Let’s call this meeting to order. My name is Patrick and I’m a boxset-aholic.
Mariusz Trelinski unveiled a rather gloomy, though musically satisfying, Tristan und Isolde.
With February 14th falling on a Sunday, there will be no Valentine’s Day Met performance this year.
If you had told me 20 years ago that at some point in the future I would have over 550 of the Metropolitan Opera’s performances, audio and video, at my command with the touch of a button I would say my eulogy had just been read and I’d been taken to my reward.
When LaCieca asked me to choose my favorite live recording, I had to think… and think.
A new CD
features the ten most gorgeous minutes recorded by a tenor in Wagner since World War II.
Five decades before the Met turned to computer-assisted planks to help tell the story of Wagner’s Ring cycle, the company stirred controversy and comment with another staging of the tetralogy. General Manager Rudolf Bing imported a stark, abstract production from the Salzburg Festival in order to secure the services of Herbert von Karajan, who not…
A documentary about the heldentenor Max Lorenz would seem to be an ideal prism through which to examine the moral ambiguities and trade-offs of artistic life in the Third Reich. The preeminent Siegfried, Tristan and Tannhauser of the Nazi era was considered so essential to the success of Bayreuth that Winifred Wagner told Hitler that…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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