My sole live encounter with Seiji Ozawa coincided with his final appearances at the Metropolitan Opera, where he conducted its 2008 revival of Tchaikovsky’s Pikovaya Dama.
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 lovely English soprano Valerie Masterson turns 84 today, prompting Trove Thursday to present her in a pair of her specialties.
Sunday is Handel’s 335th birthday, an event Trove Thursday celebrates with Rodelinda, Regina de’Longobardi, one of the composer’s most popular works.
Trove Thursday marks Mozart’s 264th birthday on Sunday with the 14-year-old’s remarkable opera seria Mitridate, Re di Ponto .
Trove Thursday acknowledges the late Raymond Leppard‘s important influence with a live broadcast of his seminal “realisation” of Cavalli’s L’Ormindo plus some Cavalli and Monteverdi tidbits with Janet Baker.
Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov must be Russian’s most iconic opera and “Trove Thursday” presents it with Claudio Abbado leading an impressive team.
Riccardo Chailly’s appointment as La Scala’s new music director was news that I greeted with enthusiasm when first announced in 2013.
Hansel and Gretel might just be the best thing the Met has done so far this season.
“Trove Thursday” presents a performance from 40 years ago: an inspired Renata Scotto as Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur.
With Christmas Eve 2016 falling on a Saturday, the Met offers contrasting orchestral splendors at noon and 6 p.m.
As promised, “Trove Thursday” offers Don Quichote chez la duchesse, a second nearly unknown opera based on Cervantes’ towering literary masterpiece.
On his 86th birthday last month, the great Austrian conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt announced his retirement.
Many live treasures (and some duds) began to take up more and more space—first in my dorm room, then in my first little studio apartment thanks to a group of quite special men, none of whom I ever met face to face.
Ambiguity. That’s the theme of the operas of Benjamin Britten (ennobled as Baron Britten of Aldeburgh).
Christof Loy’s highly controversial 2009 production of Berg’s Lulu for The Royal Opera House has been released on DVD (Opus Arte), with beautifully realized film direction by Robin Lough. Antonio Pappano and the Orchestra of The Royal Opera House lead an extraordinary cast of singing actors in plumbing the musical and psychological depths of this…
To be, or not to be? This is the question. But for the producers of opera on DVD, the question is really, to be an opera or to be a film. The producers of the 1991 DVD of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito as produced by Glyndebourne that same year seemed to have been sitting…
The English tenor, specialist in the works of Benjamin Britten, died yesterday after a brief illness.
Our JJ‘s review of the Met’s revival of Le nozze di Figaro didn’t make it into today’s New York Post for reasons that you should be able to figure out once you’ve read the piece. At the suggestion of his editor, La Cieca is publishing it here.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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