The opera proved somewhat puzzling—the score representing more a collage of fragmented and incidental musical ideas, and the libretto a turgid, slow-moving mass of purple prose.
Today the good guy finally gets his chance with San Giovanni Battista by Alessandro Stradella featuring Christophe Dumaux as John the Baptist.
Claus Guth, in a staging of Handel’s Orlando for Theater an der Wien, decided to revisit a PTSD theme.
Christian Thielemann is widely regarded as our time’s preeminent master of the Austro-German symphonic ensemble.
“Trove Thursday” offers Die Frau ohne Schatten conducted by Georg Solti and also featuring Regina Resnik, Donald McIntyre and the inevitable James King.
“Trove Thursday” drafts a 1960s All-Star team for Verdi’s Il Trovatore broadcast from the Teatro Colón.
Russell Thomas’s opening aria, “Del piu sublime soglio” displayed an intense attention to the text and some surprisingly beautiful piano phrasing that I’ve never heard risked before and it brought wonder and gooseflesh.
Although Gustav Mahler never wrote an opera, his colossal Eighth Symphony “The Symphony of a Thousand” may give us some glimpses of what a Mahler opera might have sounded like
Considering the size and the logistics for staging Les Troyens, every new production of Berlioz’s epic masterpiece is a special event.
Claudio Abbado passed away on the 20th of January five years ago, just months before I began my Ph.D.
Alban Berg’s compact yet potent oeuvre has long played an outsized role in shaping my understanding of music’s aesthetic evolution.
Tuesday the Met unveils its sixth new production of La Traviata since moving to Lincoln Center.
Lohengrin descended upon the Wiener Staatsoper this month like American college students to Oktoberfest: loudly, spastically, not especially coherent, and in full lederhosen and dirndls.
The whole performance reminded me of what Butterfly as I have never known it, but often herad about it, can be.
How do we celebrate a long career in opera, particularly one as illustrious as Plácido Domingo‘s?
Anna Netrebko is the greatest performing artist singing opera today. Nobody else comes close; she makes me love her in a way that verges on the erotic.
August on “Trove Thursday” begins with Midsummer Mezzo Madness featuring a sterling quartet of lower-voiced ladies
This year’s Salzburg Festival opens Saturday with a new production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, an opera often performed elsewhere in translation, so “Trove Thursday” offers two for the price (!) of one.
Well here we are, beloveds, still swathed in the warm glow of the Leonard Bernstein centennial. Box sets abound like bunnies in a hutch.
The old adage “the third time’s the charm” proved to be the case with me and Daphne, Richard Strauss’s ravishing bukolische Tragödie, when I recently heard it performed by Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra.
Munich’s Bayerische Staatsoper’s victory lap at Carnegie Hall concluded Thursday night with a sumptuous Der Rosenkavalier spectacularly conducted by Kirill Petrenko
“Trove Thursday” presents a live Tristan 2 concert featuring one of my favorite dramatic sopranos. Gertrude Grob-Prandl.
The third installment of my 50th anniversary tribute to Edita Gruberova was impossible to narrow down to one selection.
“Trove Valentine’s Day” further stokes Semiramis-fever with another of the celebrated works about the infamous queen: La Semiramide riconosciuta, a superb 1729 opera by Nicola Porpora.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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