This week we get closer to completing the operas of Benjamin Britten with The Rape of Lucretia.
I was hopeful that my next operatic engagement would offer greater rewards: Norma at the Edinburgh Festival.
Thanks to the generosity of a parterre reader, “Trove Thursday” presents a rare recording from the famed Carnegie Hall series curated by Matthew Epstein to commemorate Handel’s tercentenary.
If you were in New York on July 7, 1975 chances are you were at the Met reveling in the visiting Bolshoi Opera’s Eugene Onegin.
This Sunday marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson from breast cancer.
William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants made a much-anticipated appearance at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival Saturday performing Theodora.
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.
For decades thousands and thousands have attended Handel’s Messiah (usually around Christmas or more appropriately near Easter) making it easily one of the most widely known works of classical music.
Love grand opera but wary of a six o’clock curtain with five hours of music behind it? (And nothing is grander than Berlioz’s Les Troyens, eh?) Your dilemma has been solved. Show up at the Met at 7:30 or 8:00, whenever they have the first intermission.
I have been a devotee of Berlioz’s Les Troyens since I first discovered the Covent Garden recording conducted by Colin Davis.
In a post Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, and Jerry Falwell era and with politicians spouting that natural disasters are God’s way of telling us to reduce the national debt, Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry seems more prescient than even he probably intended. A satirical novel about the excesses of the evangelical movement in the early part…
Joyce DiDonato enjoys the rare cachet of having three studio-recorded operas released in the past three years while other famous divas must be content with “just” DVDs. Although two of Renée Fleming’s Violettas have found their way onto video in less than five years (why??), “the people’s diva” has only recorded one studio opera in…
Les Troyens is one of those things, or often two of those things, that should be a big event or it practically needn’t happen at all.* The keynote is grandiosity in the best way, from the subject to the musical demands (let’s include the implicit challenge of one singer performing both Cassandre and Didon—not because…
The first opera to be performed in the 21st century at the Metropolitan Opera, thankfully after the lack of total destruction from the Y2K bug, was the recently premiered The Great Gatsby by John Harbison. Commissioned to mark James Levine’s 25th anniversary with the company, the recording of this New Year’s Day broadcast is now…
The fascinating and unconventional artist Lorraine Hunt Lieberson died yesterday at her home in Santa Fe. We in New York heard her only infrequently in opera, most recently in Serse and La clemenza di Tito at the NYCO and Les Troyens at the Met. She was scheduled to sing Orfeo in a new production of…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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