Zubin Mehta was a major part of musical life when I moved to Southern California in 1969, having started his tenure as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
The air held a real charge that night in SF’s War Memorial Opera House.
The Solti recording of Bohème is completely miscast.
Juan Diego Flórez‘s charm and artistic sensibility remain as vibrant as ever, as seen at a recent Carnegie Hall recital.
A beautiful Christmas album is Pavarotti‘s ‘Oh, Holy Night” conducted by Kurt Herbert Adler.
Like Type 2 Diabetes, symptoms of YAS (Yuletide Aversion Syndrome) commonly creep up on gay men after manopause.
Are today’s stars enough to sustain Andrea Chénier?
Brendan Latimer sits down with Francesca Zambello and members of the cast of Washington National Opera’s production of Aïda to discuss the complicated legacy of one of Verdi’s most beloved works and the tricky business of “inventing the truth.”
Sherrill Milnes sits down with Brendan Latimer to talk about his life, career, and what he hopes to pass along to the next generation
It’s like making love with someone whose rap never ceases—and includes “helpful suggestions” about how you can be improving your game.
The thing that inspires me about Pavarotti’s performance here is that this is the piece within the opera that everyone in the audience is waiting to hear.
As a beginning freshman in college at CSU Long Beach, I was cast in my first opera – the chorus for L’Elisir d’amore ( performed in English as “The Elixir of Love”).
Matthew Travisano takes on Mimì’s Act III aria from La bohème — not that one, the other one — in the latest installment of the “Perspectives on an Aria” series
Chris’s Cache highlights the erstwhile Chicago Symphony Orchestra @ Carnegie series with not one but two starry operas conducted by Georg Solti: Salome with Birgit Nilsson and a performance of Moses und Aron
Assuming someone else will pick Leyla Gencer‘s legendary “Vil bastarda”, I’ll go with another clip featuring robust audience participation.
Some people were introduced to the art form listening to the Met’s NBC broadcasts on a glowing tube radio or watching acid-trip animated adaptations on the BBC or seeing Elmer Fudd sing, “Kill the Wabbit.” I came to opera through simulated drive-by shootings soundtracked by The Marriage of Figaro.
The American bass, a fixture of the Metropolitan Opera between 1967 and 2018, was 83.
Given the keen interest in recent posts of Met pirates of Montserrat Caballé in Verdi, Chris’s Cache concludes its trio with the Spanish soprano’s Met Violetta, along with additional Met in-house recordings of Virginia Zeani, Pilar Lorengar, Jeanette Pilou, and Joan Sutherland as Verdi’s doomed courtesan.
As for complete recordings of Il trovatore, which was discussed at some length last week, there are at least 200 of them, both studio and live.
Patrick Mack on the iconic Ethan Mordden‘s career and his first book on opera in 30 years – and it appears that time has mostly stopped in the Mordden manse.
When asked to express some “thoughts” here about Verdi’s Il trovatore, my immediate thought was “hmm… not a lot to think about there.”
As an opera fanatic who was baptized by the blood of Leontyne Price, the Messa da Requiem by Giuseppe Verdi appeared on my radar fairly soon after I started delving into the operatic canon.
There were, of course, other Chénier recordings beyond the truly great ones…
Quite simply, the singers are not around today who are steeped in the tradition of verismo, or for that matter the later part of the 19th century.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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