Assai più vale il soglio che un genitor perduto
Parterre Box highlights a busy few months of Verdi performances for Marina Rebeka and Ludovic Tézier with an exciting sample of their debuts in Nabucco.
Riccardo Frizza
19 pieces since 2010 — at 6 companies, most often at Metropolitan Opera.
19
pieces
6
companies
17
years
Ain’t no mountain high enough
A new production of La sonnambula at the Metropolitan Opera is musically charming if dramatically confounding.
Crowning achievement
Sondra Radvanovsky is very special here!
Stained class
With no disrespect to Nadine Sierra, who as Lucia acquits herself honorably if not magically in vocal terms, the undisputed cause célèbre here is director Simon Stone.
Leyla and the pirates
Next month in Bergamo Plácido Domingo takes on his zillionth—and possibly final—new role, so Trove Thursday previews it by returning to the same venue 50 years earlier for Donizetti’s Belisario with Leyla Gencer and Renato Bruson, a real baritone as its titular hero.
The three faces of Sondra
It was a gloomy, chilly, rainy day in Chicago on Sunday afternoon, a perfect reflection of the sad and gloomy fates of the title characters in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s presentation of The Three Queens.
Drama, Queen
Lightning struck again here when, after a wait of 39 years, San Francisco Opera unveiled a new production of Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux.
Senza nube e senza vel
I attended the Sunday, May 13, performance with bittersweet anticipation.
Occult following
Radvanovsky delivered a vocal and histrionic performance that should be the gold standard Norma for years.
Site unseen
Giuseppe Verdi was so unhappy with the first production of his Giovanna d’Arco at La Scala in 1845 that he swore an oath to himself that he would never entrust that theatre with a prima again.
Queen for a D
Friday’s season premiere at the Met of Donizetti’s opera about the doomed Scottish queen proved surprisingly satisfying and a genuine success for Sondra Radvanovsky.
Star, crossed
The key to enjoying Bellini’s I Capuleti e Montechi is to do a hard factory reset and reformat your brain to forget all other works based on Romeo and Juliet.
Moon and stars
One of the major complaints about the five year casting system (as well as the shared productions by different companies) is that operatic events are rarely surprises anymore.
Snow business
Every year I say I’m not going to another La Bohème because I’ve seen this too many times.
Vissi d’artist
The San Francisco Opera is batting a thousand where young singers are concerned this season.
Juan and two
I always think of Don Giovanni as half of the greatest opera ever written. Or, actually, about 2/3 of the greatest opera ever written.
Pick your poison
I think we’re all aware by now of the wicked libel that the French dramatist Victor Hugo concocted about the fair Lucrezia Borgia with his depiction of her as a murderous virago.
The Bland Witch Project
The premiere of Mary Zimmerman’s production of Giacomo Gioachino Rossini’s Armida was arguably the most controversial event of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2009-2010 season. The performances represented Armida’s first run at the Metropolitan Opera and had been commissioned at the behest of mega-diva Renée Fleming. The soprano had scored a triumph in concert presentations of the […]
German, te togli al campy…
1817 was a fertile and diverse time for 26 year old Gioachino Rossini. It opened with his last true opera buffa, La Cenerentola, continued with his most important semiseria, La gazza ladra, and ended with two operas, which, although both nominally belonging to the seria genre, could not be more different from each other.
Once on that island
Our Own Gualtier Maldè (right) escaped today’s Armida dress rehearsal at the Met with his wits intact. He reports: