Salieri’s La Cifra (“The Cipher”) played all over Europe for 20 years, in several translations (German, Spanish). Then, like many a worthy work, it was forgotten.
I was overjoyed by the coincidence that Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival would be presenting Façade.
Simone Mayr’s Medea in Corinto, a curious work of 1813, has been revived by Will Crutchfield’s new enterprise, Teatro Nuovo.
As the first of the 2018 opera productions last Saturday, the Merola Opera Program chose Mozart’s rarely-performed early serenata, Il re pastore.
Heartbeat is, after all, a company that loves to tinker.
The third installment of my 50th anniversary tribute to Edita Gruberova was impossible to narrow down to one selection.
In Schikaneder’s patriarchal cosmology, darkness is the province of emotional women—not just the erratic fury of the Queen of the Night, but the pathetic supplications of Pamina as well.
Bard College presented a semi-staged concert of Halka on Saturday evening as part of its impressively wide-ranging two-week “Chopin and his World” festival.
Due to bandwidth limits “Trove Thursday” must post some more modest offerings in months with five Thursdays.
Tack on a little symphonic Beethoven and some particularly zany hosting patter from Bernadette Peters, and you start to lose focus, or at least some sense of, um, what matters mostly.
“Trove Thursday” provides a live broadcast of Mozart’s rarely performed cantata Davide Penitente by Les Arts Florissants conducted by William Christie.
There was a moment during Natalie Dessay’s performance of Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade” when the singer summoned the ghost of her former self.
Sandrine Piau‘s lovely recital with pianist Susan Manoff at The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society on February 14 entered around the themes of sleep, dreams and waking.
An unstaged performance of Juditha Triumphans by five soloists and the Venice Baroque Orchestra under Andrea Marcon.
Revive is a manifesto of sorts, declaring Elina Garanca’s intentions for the new direction in her career.
To mark Mozart’s 260th birthday tomorrow, “Trove Thursday” offers his infrequently performed bucolic opera Il Re Pastore with the sublime Arleen Augér as its heroine and Edith Mathis as her shepherd-lover.
>What does a great opera production do, and what does a bad production fail to do?
Ezio was an inspired choice for Boston’s feisty Odyssey Opera to open its “When In Rome” festival.
The no-star, slapstick revival of John Dexter’s 37-year-old production of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail that opened Friday night proved James Levine’s tenure as Music Director of the Met will end in two weeks with neither a whimper nor a bang.
With recent events in politics, it is becoming ever clearer that humankind hasn’t evolved much since the Enlightenment.
Fans of divas who sing 19th and 20th century opera may find themselves searching in vain for CDs to buy with this season’s gift cards, since their idols so rarely put out solo recitals these days.
Homer, inspired by many a muse, sang not of sequels to his Iliad.
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.
I have an idea (soon to be angrily debunked in the comments section) that Le nozze di Figaro is rarely a source of unalloyed bliss to the chronic operagoer.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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