Roman eye
The newest Italian production of L’incoronazione di Poppea was a splendid example of how a 17th century opera can be performed in the best possible way today
Nikolaus Harnoncourt
24 pieces since 2011 — at 1 company, most often at Theater an der Wien.
24
pieces
1
company
16
years
By company
Trapped
What happens when you attend a performance and it doesn’t engage you?
“Pseudo-Greek”
On this day in 1960 soprano Eileen Farrell made her Metropolitan Opera debut in the title role of a new production of Gluck’s Alceste.
Out of the repast
The entire dinner was spent discussing conductors.
Suspended in time
You know in some of those old Jeanette MacDonald movies where she plays a prima donna and receives applause in a public setting? That’s just what happened when the three of us walked into that restaurant, one patron calling out “Brava!”
Quicksilver princess
Trove Thursday remembers Edita Gruberová with live recordings of two of the three operas I heard her perform at the Met: a 1985 Munich La Traviata with Neil Shicoff and Wolfgang Brendel conducted by Carlos Kleiber and an I Puritani from Vienna 1994 featuring two other artists who recently left us too soon: Marcello Giordani and Dmitri Hvorostovsky.
The boys from Syracuse
Trove Thursday begins February with two striking versions of Rossini’s Tancredi.
Boys don’t cry
Who will prevail in Trove Thursday’s Fidelio Drag Race finals: Gwyneth Jones/Leonard Bernstein 1970 or Julia Varady/Nikolaus Harnoncourt 1986?
Mithridates is dead
Trove Thursday marks Mozart’s 264th birthday on Sunday with the 14-year-old’s remarkable opera seria Mitridate, Re di Ponto .
Moods for moderns
Maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin, always with a gift for gab, is ever more loquacious in concerts, often talking directly to the audience.
Agrippina
“Trove Thursday” presents for the third annual installment of “Handel for my Birthday” a wickedly ideal Felicity Palmer dominating Agrippina.
Dido it again
“Trove Thursday” presents Purcell’s remarkably concise Dido and Aeneas in a pair of fascinatingly different interpretations.
Laughing song
It can be confidently asserted that Edita Gruberova is one opera’s most gifted comediennes.
Stage struck
“Trove Thursday” presents a performance from 40 years ago: an inspired Renata Scotto as Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur.
My new philosophy
A rollicking performance of his delightful comic opera Der geduldige Sokrates featuring a fine cast and the magnificent Akademie für Alte Musik conducted by René Jacobs.
Drunk in both head and heart
This week’s “Trove Thursday” offers Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice featuring Anthony Rolfe Johnson.
Let me live by my wits and Trost to my luck
I finally get to complete my personal operatic Top Ten this week with Igor Stravinsky’s only full-length opera, The Rake’s Progress.
The lady or the Tiber
On his 86th birthday last month, the great Austrian conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt announced his retirement.
Henry, sweet Henry
Although she began her career nearly 25 years ago recording and performing lots of baroque music, I was surprised to see German soprano Dorothea Röschmann promoted as the star attraction of an all-Purcell concert Sunday at Carnegie Hall.
Megalomania in mufti
Who needs sets and costumes anyway?
One charming afternoon
In recent years the enterprising Dell’Arte Opera Ensemble has brightened the usually arid weeks of August in New York City with some worthy operatic showcases for young singers.
Belief in a higher power
The behavioral phenomenon of limerence has been described as “an involuntary potentially inspiring state of adoration and attachment to a limerent object involving intrusive and obsessive thoughts, feelings and behaviors from euphoria to despair, contingent on perceived emotional reciprocation.”
Be careful what you ask for
When our coquine Doyenne invited those interested to review recordings I kindly requested Italian belcanto and early French works. Instead, I got a DVD of Schubert’s Alfonso und Estrella (ahem, in German!), thus the title of this review. It was one of those WTF? moments, and I thought La C. was in a PMS attack. […]
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