Opera conductors … my favorite subject!
No Leos Janácek operas have turned up this month among the works we’d like to see at the Met, so Chris’s Cache corrects that omission with live recordings of two of the composer’s most compelling operas (performed in English).
Leos Janácek’s rise to international prominence as a Titan of music was dovetailed by a cluster of profoundly original operas that were written during his extraordinary autumnal years.
On this day in 1973 the Metropolitan Opera presented the company premiere of Les Troyens.
Trove Thursday celebrates Christa Ludwig with live excerpts from 1955 through 1982.
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.
A second Trove Thursday marking the recent passing of Jessye Norman focuses on the soprano’s catholic repertoire with three 20th century works: Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex; Berg’s Altenberg Lieder; and Franck’s Les Béatitudes.
“Trove Thursday” leaps to the end of the cycle with a slightly abridged Götterdämmerung featuring Amy Shuard as Brünnhilde.
Ali Baba ou Les Quarantes Voleurs continues straight-tone September with Teresa Stich-Randall as its heroine while Alfredo Kraus scales the heights with another Nadir.
Fidelio but with an unhappy ending, Bedrich Smetana’s stirring Dalibor opens 2016’s “Trove Thursday” in a 1968 German-language broadcast from Bavarian Radio.
A great man has passed and our consolation is that so much of his art has been preserved for us on recordings.
It’s kind of shocking, when you really think about it, that the kind of international operatic model that the Royal Opera now operates on barely existed only 50 years ago. Until around 1960 most of the performances at the Covent Garden were given in English and the casting choices were enough to make the Vicar…
Joseph Volpe‘s memoir The Toughest Show on Earth (see, La Cieca can get the title right when she wants too) is a book about a working-class kid from Queens who wanted to be Rudolf Bing when he grew up. Or, rather, it’s about a stage carpenter who was bright enough and ambitious enough to do…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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