Christopher Corwin surveys the three Traviata casts — led by Lisette Oropesa, Rosa Feola, and Ermonela Jaho — at the Met this spring.
A strong revival of Eugene Onegin at the Metropolitan Opera and a recital by Benjamin Bernheim offered the chance to hear “Kuda, kuda” twice in two days.
Easily the Met’s new Sonnambula, where cast and production team delivered a gorgeously sung and well thought out concept for a libretto often derided for its simplicity.
A starry (and potentially annual) Christmas gala lights up Carnegie Hall.
Rolando Villazón opens up about his production of La sonnambula, how he develops characters, and what makes opera dance.
A new production of La sonnambula at the Metropolitan Opera is musically charming if dramatically confounding.
Chris’s Cache offers Nadine Sierra and Xabier Anduaga, the stars of the upcoming production of La sonnambula, in a performance of another favorite bel canto opera
What better a way to honor Independence Day than with a bit of French-American partnering?
It may be blasphemy to admit—particularly this month—but usually I can either take or leave Donizetti’s serious operas. However, I love the composer in comic mode, so Chris’s Cache runs with that sentiment in offering three recordings of Don Pasquale.
Prompted by Washington Concert Opera’s upcoming Luisa Miller, Chris Cache’s misbehaves five times by offering just the opera’s final act with sopranos from the 1970s, some of whom might be considered “under-appreciated”: Gabriella Tucci, Adriana Maliponte, Renata Scotto, Gilda Cruz-Romo, and Katia Ricciarelli.
Nadine Sierra, Javier Camarena, and Artur Rucinski lead a live broadcast from Barcelona.
Christopher Corwin reviews Pablo Larraín‘s Maria
The Richard Tucker Foundation Gala has always been a big annual celebration of the voice with an emphasis on big-voiced singers in big repertoire (not much Wagner usually, though…). Like so many reliable operatic institutions it has struggled for survival after the pandemic.
Lisette Oropesa, a product of the Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artist Program, has not been seen much on the stage of the Met in recent seasons.
Rigoletto is the perfect opera. The story is straightforward and powerful; none of the action occurs backstage or between scenes or twenty-seven years before curtain rise; and the ethical anvil lands not once but twice, on the title character singing, “La maledizione!” The curse!
Les Contes d’Hoffmann is something of a puzzle in which some of the pieces are missing and others been altered to fit since Offenbach died before he could complete and revise the work.
Chris’s Cache follows up its Gounod R&J installment with a widely varied quintet of additional Romeos and Juliets
The past seems to be in conversation with the present.
It’s not hard not to feel jaded about Romeo and Juliet.
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.
The pandemic had different effects on different people.
Come back, Big Clock! We need you more than ever!
The concert itself—starring Michael Fabiano, Nadine Sierra, Pene Pati and Lucas Meachem—seemed to be a beautiful affair that I would have loved to see it in a person.
To conclude its triumphant season, last week the Met Orchestra performed its annual Carnegie Hall concerts under music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin and once again performed superbly.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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