I don’t usually attend a performance of an opera I’ve known well most of my life expecting a revelation.
Our selected Rosenkavalier video overview closes out the 20th-century selections, crosses the millennial mark, and includes the first of our performances to depart from the opera’s prescribed 18th-century setting.
“Trove Thursday” presents a recording of the rare L’Olimpiade featuring Joan Caplan and Rita Shane in the two leading castrato roles.
Today is Handel’s 332nd birthday and “Trove Thursday” celebrates with a rare live broadcast of his best-known opera Giulio Cesare in Egitto.
With Christmas Eve 2016 falling on a Saturday, the Met offers contrasting orchestral splendors at noon and 6 p.m.
Sony Classical has now released “Leontyne Price Prima Donna Assoluta” containing nearly her entire operatic oeuvre in a box set.
Thanks to the generosity of a parterre reader, “Trove Thursday” presents a rare recording from the famed Carnegie Hall series curated by Matthew Epstein to commemorate Handel’s tercentenary.
A 1984 performance of Handel’s Orlando with Marilyn Horne, Valerie Masterson, Marvis Martin, Jeffery Gall and Robert Lloyd, conducted by Charles Mackerras.
With February 14th falling on a Sunday, there will be no Valentine’s Day Met performance this year.
This week “Trove Thursday” brings a rare in-house recording of a visit to the Metropolitan Opera House by the Staatsoper Hamburg presenting Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress with a deluxe cast
If you had told me 20 years ago that at some point in the future I would have over 550 of the Metropolitan Opera’s performances, audio and video, at my command with the touch of a button I would say my eulogy had just been read and I’d been taken to my reward.
Since the 1916 version of Ariadne auf Naxos which we all know and love had its premiere at Wiener Staatsoper, it seems most appropriate to bring you this 1967 performance from the same venue, with a legendary cast at its zenith.
It never occurred to me that each tape had to be individually dubbed or that others, maybe many, many others, might also be ordering tapes at the same time.
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.
Sunday afternoon’s intermittently involving concert performance of Handel’s Alcina at Carnegie Hall starred an unusually intense Joyce DiDonato as a powerful sorceress blinded by her romantic delusions.
On this, the occasion of her 37th birthday [see below], La Cieca is happy to repeat the story of how she came to be born (as first told in the pages of parterre box, issue #28.
Giulio Cesare at the Met proved an evening that added up to much more than the sum of its uneven parts.
Nearly 30 years after a Handel opera last played there, Carnegie Hall presented The English Concert opening a three-year opera-oratorio project on Sunday afternoon with Radamisto.
Love grand opera but wary of a six o’clock curtain with five hours of music behind it? (And nothing is grander than Berlioz’s Les Troyens, eh?) Your dilemma has been solved. Show up at the Met at 7:30 or 8:00, whenever they have the first intermission.
Richard Wagner told Cosima he first got the idea of composing an opera about Tristan and Isolde while he was conducting Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi starring his muse, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, in the trouser role of Romeo.
I have been a devotee of Berlioz’s Les Troyens since I first discovered the Covent Garden recording conducted by Colin Davis.
Joyce DiDonato enjoys the rare cachet of having three studio-recorded operas released in the past three years while other famous divas must be content with “just” DVDs. Although two of Renée Fleming’s Violettas have found their way onto video in less than five years (why??), “the people’s diva” has only recorded one studio opera in…
Scanning this summer’s Mostly Mozart schedule one wondered if New York really needed another Don Giovanni right now? And one with a non-starry cast where the best-known name was the Commendatore, Kristinn Sigmundsson?
When handing out the goodies, the gods weren’t stingy with Shirley Verrett. Few opera singers were as prodigiously gifted as Verrett: the perfect amalgam of Kunst and Stimm housed in a frame of voluptuous allure. In addition to an instrument of stunning natural beauty and easy range, Verrett displayed superior musicianship, dramatic intelligence and searing…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
×
Sign up for Parterre’s free newsletter.
Exclusive opera reviews, commentary, and top reads
delivered to your email weekly…ish.