An uneven new cast can’t dim the glow of Richard Eyre‘s incisive Le nozze di Figaro at the Met
When my editor suggested to me a round-up of my favorite recordings of Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann I was très, très, intrigued.
Chris’s Cache offers three striking interpretations of another Gluck masterpiece Alceste from Janet Baker, Anna Caterina Antonacci, and Véronique Gens
Bay Area audiences starved for vocal fare during its opera’s winter/spring hiatus recently experienced two exceptional concerts with distinguished singing at the Davies Symphony Hall.
I hate to say I nearly cringe at the thought of Gioachino Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia.
“This used to be a funhouse… but now it’s full of evil clowns / It’s time to start the countdown…. I’m gonna burn it down”
While the formulaic nature of some of Rossini’s other operas can undermine his ability to balance bravura singing and playing with legitimate drama, a concert Maometto II proves, with what it offers as much as what it lacks, that the formula still works.
A pair of Hasse works: the all-male oratorio I Pellegrini al Sepolcro di Nostro Signore, plus the popular serenata Marc’Antonio e Cleopatra.
Saturday’s performance of Così fan tutte demonstrated that even the cool, acerbic wit of Mozart’s most controversial comedy can warm our hearts in these icy winter months.
Handel’s biting Agrippina finally arrived at the Metropolitan Opera Thursday evening 310 years after its Venetian premiere.
Saturday afternoon’s performance of Le Nozze di Figaro at the Met was awash with contradictions.
All about the life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, but depicted as an opera performed as a dress rehearsal for an opera.
I was shocked to realize I hadn’t seen Don Giovanni at the Met since Michael Grandage’s stultifying production opened in 2011.
A 1985 broadcast of Don Giovanni featuring Cheryl Studer, Gundula Janowitz (as Elvira!), Krisztina Laki, Gösta Winbergh, Hermann Prey (in a rare outing as the Don) and Malcolm King conducted by Jeffrey Tate.
Winsome, tony, and studded with overbooked bistros, Tanglewood is not exactly crawling with bohemians these days.
Iestyn Davies’s theatrical blandness combined with his vocal unsuitability for the role left a hole at the center of Rinaldo.
It was odd, if not downright uncomfortable, to watch Le Nozze di Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera.
I don’t usually attend a performance of an opera I’ve known well most of my life expecting a revelation.
Pretty Yende was still hanging around after her last Barbiere and she knows the role of Elvira, having sung it in Zurich last June.
Someone—a deranged purist no doubt—heckled Javier Camarena from the balcony of the opera house for withholding the infamous high F during “Credeasi, misera.”
It took the better part of a decade—including two high-profile cancelations—or New York to finally hear Anna Netrebko in recital.
I have an idea (soon to be angrily debunked in the comments section) that Le nozze di Figaro is rarely a source of unalloyed bliss to the chronic operagoer.
The Met stage was filled with considerable magic Monday night when its dizzily effervescent revival of La Cenerentola starring Joyce DiDonato and Javier Camarena stirred a bewitched audience to some of the most ecstatic ovations heard this season.
Nearly 30 years after a Handel opera last played there, Carnegie Hall presented The English Concert opening a three-year opera-oratorio project on Sunday afternoon with Radamisto.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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