Christopher Corwin on three stylish sopranos delighting audiences live in New York and on recording in a trio of new releases.
With its sumptuous wood paneling, frescoed ceilings, and various Gilded Age trappings, the Park Avenue Armory’sBoard of Officers Room certainly is not a bad place to spend Valentine’s Day—even better when it plays host to equally sumptuous music-making.
There is a strong case to be made that George Fridrich Handel is the composer most suited to the present moment.
I can still vividly remember the first time the music of George Frideric Handel made an impression on me.
I wonder why many New Yorkers have been led to believe that the only Handel conductor in the world is Harry Bicket.
Saturday’s performance of Le nozze di Figaro at the Met mined the humor from Mozart’s divine setting of Beaumarchais’s play about a crazy day in the Almaviva household.
Next Wednesday is the composer’s 337th birthday, so Trove Thursday previews this spring’s most enticing Handel performance with two very different live versions of his delightful Serse,.
Despite having lost its announced Cherubino, conductor and Count (the latter in the midst of rehearsals), the season premiere of Le Nozze di Figaro Saturday afternoon proved to be one of the most enjoyable Met Mozart performances I’ve attended in ages.
In their realization of Alcina, Harry Bicket and his ensemble recreated a dramatically vivid and musically nuanced character study out of the opera’s central figures.
You’d think after nearly 40 years of opera going I’d have seen almost everything.. .twice. Yet I found myself at LA Opera Tuesday night for a special presentation of George Frideric Handel’s Alcina which was my first live experience with one of his operas.
We are in the midst of a titanic Beethoven onslaught prompted by the unstoppable need to commemorate the composer’s upcoming 250th birthday.
Sunday is Handel’s 335th birthday, an event Trove Thursday celebrates with Rodelinda, Regina de’Longobardi, one of the composer’s most popular works.
Director Barrie Kosky’s Glyndebourne 2015 production of Handel’s 1739 oratorio Saul (released on Opus Arte DVD) shows imagination as well as a strong cast and design team.
One can only pray that “three strikes, you’re out” applies at the Met. If so, we can rest easy that Jeremy Sams won’t be getting any new assignments.
Rule Britannia? Often during the Olympics that famous number from Thomas Arne’s 1740 Alfred echoed in my ears.
Scanning this summer’s Mostly Mozart schedule one wondered if New York really needed another Don Giovanni right now? And one with a non-starry cast where the best-known name was the Commendatore, Kristinn Sigmundsson?
Among symbolic classical tropes, one of my favorites (perhaps because only another classicist will understand it) is Nessus’ Shirt, an emblem of glory (a promotion, say, or an expensive luxury) that destroys you.
I have heard Gerald Finley live and enjoyed his singing immensely. He possesses a strong, resonant, lyric baritone, even of scale and beautiful of timbre. His biggest successes to date have been creating the roles of Oppenheimer in John Adams‘ Dr. Atomic and Harry in Mark-Anthony Turnage‘s The Silver Tassie. He includes selections from both…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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