Video Artists International brings us back to a time when opera was carried over the airwaves by great voices—and a tire company.
The air held a real charge that night in SF’s War Memorial Opera House.
This month’s theme – “Opera singers celebrate the holidays” – conjured up a vast lexicon of memories of growing up in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Aga Mikolaj (born Agnieszka Beata Mikolajczyk) sang Strauss and Mozart with a gorgeous, shimmering tone.
There were, of course, other Chénier recordings beyond the truly great ones…
It would be enough to compare his official studio recording of this work with the recent performances in Turin to confirm that today Riccardo Muti is no longer totally ‘Mutian’
After putting a hiatus on their awards in 2020 and 2021 (for reasons that are all too well-known to all of us), the Richard Tucker Foundation Gala returned on Sunday evening November 13 honoring soprano Angel Blue the 2022 Award winner.
On October 14, 1979 I spent my birthday attending my first all-star opera gala, thrilled at the chance to hear some of the great singers I’d only experienced on LPs, broadcasts or via my pirate reel-to-reel tapes.
Trove Thursday offers two very different live recordings of Halévy’s grand opera La Juive.
While the Met reruns over-familiar HDs, Trove Thursday offers a Puccini rarity: Edgar, the composer’s second opera, starring Latonia Moore and Marcello Giordani.
The proceedings took the virtue of longevity too much to heart; the night stretched on interminably.
I was extraordinarily happy Monday evening to encounter Angel Blue and Russell Thomas as Mimi and Rodolfo.
Anticipation of events like the Metropolitan Opera’s 50th Anniversary bash turns me back into the newly opera-soused kid who begged his parents to let him watch the highlights of the Bing Gala on the family color television.
Let’s call this meeting to order. My name is Patrick and I’m a boxset-aholic.
With help from the Met’s invaluable performance archive, here is a look back at just some of what you could have seen, and perhaps did see, on October 31st through the years at the Met.
If you had told me 20 years ago that at some point in the future I would have over 550 of the Metropolitan Opera’s performances, audio and video, at my command with the touch of a button I would say my eulogy had just been read and I’d been taken to my reward.
There’s hands-on and then there’s hands-on, and the latter was definitely in play in the lobby of the Kaye Playhouse just before Thursday night’s performance of La traviata by the Martina Arroyo Foundation’s Prelude to Performance program.
On this, the occasion of her 37th birthday [see below], La Cieca is happy to repeat the story of how she came to be born (as first told in the pages of parterre box, issue #28.
It is a known fact that in summer, I only attend events in my habitual haunts of Nice, Antibes, St. Paul de Vence and Milan. However, when our coquine doyenne begged on her knees (à la Gencer in Alceste), I accepted the assignment to review Martina Arroyo Foundation’s production of Puccini’s La Rondine.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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