This week, Chris’s Cache offers a performance of Follies from 2007 featuring Lucine Amara as a rarely richly sung Heidi alongside Donna Murphy and Victoria Clark.
Needing a Mozart palate-cleanser after the recent misbegotten Marriage of Figaro, I went back more than two decades for a Houston Così fan Tutte featuring then-rising Americans Christine Goerke, Joyce Di Donato, Richard Croft, and Nathan Gunn as the confused lovers.
Opera house versions of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd featuring Bryn Terfel / Judith Christin and Thomas Allen / Felicity Palmer.
Du Yun is the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer of Angel’s Bone. Her new opera, In Our Daughter’s Eyes, a one-act monodrama for bass-baritone and an orchestra of six, opened the current tenth Prototype Festival, in a performance at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, starring erstwhile Met regular Nathan Gunn.
Ultimately, the unrelenting grimness of the subject matter allied to the sameness of the vocal writing made for a wearying evening.
Heretofore I’d avoided the Met’s abridged, English-language holiday presentations.
This week we get closer to completing the operas of Benjamin Britten with The Rape of Lucretia.
Jarrett Ott is a star. That is the only surprise takeaway from the well-intended snore, Cold Mountain.
Theater an der Wien did justice to Bizet earlier this season with a cast starring Diana Damrau, Dmitry Korchak, and Nathan Gunn.
For decades thousands and thousands have attended Handel’s Messiah (usually around Christmas or more appropriately near Easter) making it easily one of the most widely known works of classical music.
Nathan Gunn (not really pictured) made his debut as Eugene Onegin in Cincinnati Opera’s production of Tchaikovsky’s opera last night. He certainly has the physicality for the part and the vocal potential. In this performance he sang well and expressively but without the heft to fully project over the orchestra.
“Time and tide wait for no one” pontificates Myrtle the barmaid, setting the tone for André Previn’s opera about fleeting romance but enduring love: Brief Encounter. Loosely based on the play Still Life by Noël Coward and the screenplay for the film Brief Encounter by Coward and David Lean, this opera (now on CD) tells…
This is a performance I never thought I’d see. This 2003 Met performance of Ariadne auf Naxos was filmed, but got tied up in some kind of (legal?) dispute and never televised, and I had long written it off as being tucked away in a vault, doomed to be “the lost telecast.” So it is…
Vocal glamour in abundance highlighted the opening performance of LA Opera’s Il barbiere di Siviglia on November 29 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion, with much buzz attendant on the company debuts of Rossini experts Juan Diego Flórez and Joyce DiDonato. Adding excitement was the Figaro of Nathan Gunn, who played with Errol Flynn panache, and…
Yet another rehash of the great voice vs. waistline debate, this time in the Chicago Daily Herald. Nicole Cabell laments the scarcity of European gyms, while “hunken-tenor” Joseph Kaiser plants his feet firmly on both sides of the fence by declaring, “Essentially if you can be healthy about being healthy, that’s the balance to find…
Cher public, those of you who have written to La Cieca wondering at the frequency Anthony Tommasini uses the word “strapping” to describe opera singers of the male persuasion — well, wonder no more. According to the New York Times archives, Tony has flogged his favorite modifer no fewer than 44 times in the past…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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