The queen’s throat
“Trove Thursday ” presents Heinrich Marschner’s Hans Heiling in a 2001 performance from Berlin featuring Alessandra Marc as the title character’s mom, the Queen of the Elves.
Leon Botstein
38 pieces since 2010 — at 7 companies, most often at American Symphony Orchestra.
38
pieces
7
companies
17
years
No retreat, Nono surrender
Intolleranza was presented by Leon Botstein and his American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on Thursday night, holding the audience rapt and intrigued for 65 minutes.
And the villain still pursued her
Bard College presented a semi-staged concert of Halka on Saturday evening as part of its impressively wide-ranging two-week “Chopin and his World” festival.
Catch a falling tsar
You’d think by now I’d know better than to make snap judgments about an opera or a singer—but apparently not.
When the sun comes out
This year as part of Bard’s “Puccini and His World” festival audiences may witness the resurrection of Mascagni’s distinctly odd Iris.
The other Valkyrie
While D.C. Wagnerians wait for Nina Stemme’s Brünnhilde to arrive next week, “Trove Thursday” presents the erstwhile Valkyrie of another compelling diva: Anna Caterina Antonacci as Brunehild, the heroine of Ernest Reyer’s Sigurd, a French grand opera also based on the Nibelungenlied.
All about my mother
On her 90th birthday “Trove Thursday” presents the late great Belgian mezzo Rita Gorr parenting Régine Crespin in Massenet’s Hérodiade.
Lips together, teeth apart
Mr. Peabody, that Leonardo among canines, claimed she was suffering from toothache.
Tomb raider
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?
Light my foyer
Each year, Leon Botstein leads the American Symphony Orchestra in a concert opera or two.
It’s not easy being Greek
Sergey Taneyev, pupil of Tchaikovsky and teacher of Scriabin and Rachmaninov, composed just one opera, Oresteia, premiered in 1895 when he was 39.
One from the vault
There has never been a successful vampire musical—so they say. But that’s just not true.
L’infelice Aragonese
Camille Saint-Saëns was such a brilliant, facile musician that pals like Wagner and Liszt felt a distinct schadenfreude when he suffered composer’s block.
Gold digger of 2011
It seems a thing incredible but fifty years ago Richard Strauss was regarded as the wunderkind composer of a few tone poems, three notable operas (all produced before the First World War) and then nothing notable during forty years of repetitious senility. Even Ariadne auf Naxos, today one of the most popular works in the […]
From a distance
Asking New Yorkers to travel two hours to the remote but beautiful campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson River Valley to see an opera can be like asking them to cross the Sahara. Yet if there is any opera I would put my life at risk to see again, it just might be […]
I’ll take the fall
The days are getting shorter, but you can keep the prattle going this fall’s Talk of the Town! You will, you can, you must join in the discussion about: Great mezzo soprano performances (October),
Gained in translation (November), Teleport me back to… (December).
Win a Free Ticket to Opening Night at the Met!
Quinn Kelsey and Lise Davidsen star in the Met's new Macbeth. We're giving away one ticket, so screw your courage to the sticking place and enter now!
