On this day in 1968 mezzo-soprano Shirley Verrett made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Carmen.
Anita Rachvelishvili and Quinn Kelsey towered over an otherwise pedestrian if still exciting Il Trovatore.
We leave behind the Vienna of the 1740s, the time of breeches, fans and white wigs.
Let’s call this meeting to order. My name is Patrick and I’m a boxset-aholic.
Andrea Andermann is the veteran film producer who had the notion to assemble top-flight talent from the worlds of music and cinema for a generously funded film of Tosca.
Sony Classical has now released “Leontyne Price Prima Donna Assoluta” containing nearly her entire operatic oeuvre in a box set.
There was a general feeling of homecoming in the hall on Friday evening in anticipation of what promised to be a special return visit on many levels.
The most recent Egyptian voluptuary of 2006 by our friend Franco has now been replaced by the most singularly spartan production of Verdi’s masterpiece I think I’ve ever seen.
Anja Silja staked a claim as a leading Senta of her era with a series of searing performances of Der Fliegende Holländer while in her early twenties.
Manon Lescaut was Giacomo Puccini’s first big international success. His publisher, Giulio Ricordi, tried to put him off the project by citing Jules Massenet’s very successful adaptation just nine years previously. Puccini was intent on making the story his own, insisting, “A woman like Manon can have more than one lover… I shall feel it…
Giacomo Puccini’s horse-opera version of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” La Fanciulla del West, based on David Belasco’s play, The Girl of the Golden West, enjoyed the status of a curate’s egg for quite a while.
With much laying-on of fanfares and gift boxes our friends at Decca Classics have unleashed Luciano Pavarotti Edition 1: The First Decade on a weary and satiated public.
You may remember, gentle readers, that last year about this time Peter Gelb decided to enter into an unholy alliance with Target to benefit their mountainous number of opera loving customers by pre-releasing two Met performances exclusively in their fine emporiums.
Sometimes it seems as though DVDs are released just for the sake of filling a hole in the catalogue. Considering the lack of anything truly distinctive in this 2007 production of Verdi’s La forza del destino from the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, that would certainly seem to be the case here. (If anyone is wondering, the…
Ioan Holender was General Manager of the Wiener Staatsoper for nineteen years, the longest anyone has held this post, and the august institution honored him with the gala to end all galas in the final days of his administration. With the goal of commemorating each of the 40 new productions premiered at the Staatsoper during…
Reviewing a CD of someone you have never heard live is always a dicey proposition. As we all know, a voice sounds very different in a big hall than it does up-close and personal. So if Marc Hervieux is your favorite new tenor, please don’t put me in the “crosshairs” just yet. I freely admit…
UPDATE: Tonight’s performance of Simon Boccanegra at La Scala (featuring Placido Domingo) has been canceled because of a strike called by unions protesting the “decreto Bondi,” a measure to privatize all of Italy’s major opera houses and reduce salaries at these theaters across the board. Our Own Ercole Farnese reviewed yesterday’s news reports about this…
With the production of Siegfried, the “Ring for the 21st Century” staged by La Fura dels Baus finally hits its stride.
The Catalan theatre company La Fura dels Baus, under the baton of Zubin Mehta, brought forth a new production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in 2007 in Valencia. The brochure for the DVD release calls this “A Ring for the 21st Century” and tells us that stage director Carlus Padrissa has employed “…imagery for…
I’m sure I do not need to tell the mostly New-York based readers of parterre this, but Turandot is an opera that can really be turned into a pageant. Not that that’s a bad thing. It is, after all a fairy tale, and so when directors attempt to delve deep into the psychology of Puccini’s…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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