Giannina Arangi-Lombardi never sang at the Met.
Leyla Gencer had a long European career but never sang at the Met.
Ivy Lin searches for a slam dunk version of Elvira’s Mad Scene from I puritani in the latest “Perspectives on an Aria.”
A new production of Dialogues des Carmélites featuring Anna Caterina Antonacci proves that it’s hard to be an iconoclast in Venice.
John Yohalem wraps up Donizetti Month at parterre box with a look back at nearly six decades of Donizetti operagoing.
For me, Donizetti’s operas are all about the mad scenes.
I’m convinced that someone else will claim this Donizetti opera before I do, but Maria Stuarda is definitely my very favorite Donizetti opera.
Donizetti wrote so much great music, it’s hard to single out a favorite opera, or even a preferred aria!
In a splashy new recording of Norma, Marina Rebeka “is doing something very untoward, and it appears destructive to her voice.” It has Niel Rishoi worried.
To the extent that singers should be considered stewards of their repertoire, equating bad singing to whatever “verismo” is will only be to the detriment of verismo.
Yes, there were other Giocondas if not of quite the same distinction. Chronologically…
It’s time to discuss Zinka Milanov.
Zachary Woolfe reflects on the legacy of parterre box founder James Jorden and three decades of “remembering when opera was queer and dangerous and exciting and making it that way again”
To get right to the point, the performance did not come together despite some good elements and was a major missed opportunity.
Despite the diminishing returns of her vocal means, Edita Gruberova‘s last years of her career were if anything more successful than ever.
The worst criticism perhaps was the gleeful Schadenfreude noting Edita’s voice wasn’t as under her command as it used to be.
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!
Trove Thursday offers two very different live recordings of Halévy’s grand opera La Juive.
Live opera returns to Lincoln Center when Teatro Nuovo presents Il Barbiere di Siviglia on July 27 and 28.
Pauline Tinsley, who died May 11, made few commercial recordings; Trove Thursday offers the thrilling English soprano in excerpts over nearly two decades from nine works ranging from Handel to Richard Strauss.
Tonight at the Met should have welcomed Barrie Kosky’s production of Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel; in its absence Trove Thursday steps in with a recent broadcast featuring this summer’s breakout star Ausrine Stundyte as the enigmatic Renata.
Next month in Bergamo Plácido Domingo takes on his zillionth—and possibly final—new role, so Trove Thursday previews it by returning to the same venue 50 years earlier for Donizetti’s Belisario with Leyla Gencer and Renato Bruson, a real baritone as its titular hero.
On the 21st of this month Romanian soprano Virginia Zeani will celebrate her 95th birthday and Trove Thursday salutes her versatility with two markedly different 20th century works: Menotti’s The Consul and Mascagni’s Il Piccolo Marat, one of many collaborations with her husband Nicola Rossi-Lemeni.
Trove Thursday began on September 10, 2015, so today we celebrate the podcast’s fifth birthday with a diva-starry Aïda double-bill: Galina Vishnevskaya vies for her soldier-hero with Irina Arkhipova, then Jessye Norman wins the guy (but loses her life) in spite of Mignon Dunn.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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