I trust, fellow Parterre readers, that we can all agree that Riccardo Muti is a great opera conductor.
The purely musical performance preserved here is thrilling, ratcheted to a higher intensity than the Deutsche Grammophon studio recording
Diana Soviero chats with Roger Pines about six decades of performing, four decades of teaching, and how she’s handing the tradition off to the next generation.
I’m convinced that someone else will claim this Donizetti opera before I do, but Maria Stuarda is definitely my very favorite Donizetti opera.
As this is “Donizetti Month” here on parterre box, Chris’s Cache offers the recently deceased Paul Plishka and Opera Orchestra of New York with Carol Vaness in Anna Bolena and with Mariella Devia in the rarely heard Adelia.
Anticipating the first new local Aïda in thirty-six years, Chris’s Cache revisits Verdi’s popular opera in four unusually interesting in-house recordings from the Met 1961-1976.
Patrick Mack on the iconic Ethan Mordden‘s career and his first book on opera in 30 years – and it appears that time has mostly stopped in the Mordden manse.
Lyric Opera of Chicago has opened its new season with a revival of its tried and true 2006 production of Verdi’s sixteenth opera, Rigoletto, one of his most tuneful and dramatic works (I attended the Sunday matinée performance).
Maria Callas’s official debut in opera was as La Gioconda in 1947 at the arena in Verona.
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’
As said at the beginning, I implied I’d rather see Don Carlo(s) and listen to Forza.
This week Chris’s Cache features Maria Chiara, Elena Mauti-Nunziata, Rita Orlandi-Malaspina and Orianna Santunione in L’Amico Fritz, Mefistofele, Simon Boccanegra and La Fanciulla del West, respectively.
Today’s Chris’s Cache features live recordings of Otello most noteworthy for their Desdemonas: (in chronological order) Teresa Stratas, Julia Varady, Eva Marton and Karita Mattila.
Anticipating Leontyne Price’s 96th birthday on February 10, Chris’s Cache presents the American diva in an epic collection of live performances.
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.
This week’s Trove Thursday—Kodály’s Háry János in a 1955 RAI broadcast in Italian led by famed Hungarian conductor Ferenc Fricsay—may be a bit brief as C-19 finally arrived last week chez CC.
In an era when the Metropolitan Opera cannot cast an Aida, Trovatore or Forza consistently, New Amsterdam Opera managed to cast large, attractive and fully technically capable voices in all the cruelly demanding principal roles in I Vespri Siciliani!
For this, the 250th edition of Trove Thursday, [hold for applause] a broadcast of a memorable evening at Carnegie Hall—and I was there: Smetana’s stirring Libuse, the Czech national opera, with a transcendent Gabriela Benackova as its titular prophetess.
Today’s offering is an electric performance of Verdi’s early potboiler Attila conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli with Nicolai Ghiaurov, Piero Cappuccilli and the weirdly exciting (or is it the other way around?) Mara Zampieri.
Trove Thursday uncovered two broadcasts of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia that share a fascinating nexus: in each an enduring superstar tenor—José Carreras/Alfredo Kraus—is poisoned by a soon-to-vanish rising-star soprano—Vasso Papantoniou/Margarita Castro-Alberty.
Trove Thursday offers a problematic yet fascinating work that would almost certainly not be staged today: Il Guarany by Carlos Gomes featuring João Gibin, Gianna d’Angelo, Piero Cappuccilli and Nicola Zaccaria.
Many now have scads more time for listening so Trove Thursday will offer several epic operas during May beginning with Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (this week aka Guglielmo Tell) in a concert performance featuring Giuseppe Taddei in the title role and Teresa Zylis-Gara and Franco Bonisolli as the war-crossed lovers.
“Trove Thursday” drafts a 1960s All-Star team for Verdi’s Il Trovatore broadcast from the Teatro Colón.
Claudio Abbado passed away on the 20th of January five years ago, just months before I began my Ph.D.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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