Making out like a bandit
“Trove Thursday” turns for the third of Verdi’s four Schiller adaptations to a recent I Masnadieri with risen stars Lisette Oropesa and Russell Thomas.
Bayerische Staatsoper
Songs of disappointment
b>Lawrence Brownlee, star tenor of stage and NFL games is a real “pillar of the community.”
The best of everything
Munich’s Bayerische Staatsoper’s victory lap at Carnegie Hall concluded Thursday night with a sumptuous Der Rosenkavalier spectacularly conducted by Kirill Petrenko
Testament of youth
“Trove Thursday” offers a vernal take on Massenet’s magical Cendrillon (in English) featuring two sopranos: Margaret Price—not yet 30—and Anne Pashley, then just 35.
Less than hero
Iestyn Davies’s theatrical blandness combined with his vocal unsuitability for the role left a hole at the center of Rinaldo.
Fire Walk with Me
This week brings another opera about which we’ve heard a lot but have had few opportunities to see onstage: The Fiery Angel by Sergei Prokofiev.
Search for Tamara
The 2016 Richard Tucker Award recipient is Tamara Wilson.
Old school
This week, I offer you a classic rendition of Richard Strauss’ tale of the House of Atreus starring Ursula Schröder-Feinen, Astrid Varnay, Leonie Rysanek, Theo Adam, and Hans Hopf under Karl Böhm’s direction.
Cross purposes
“Has anyone ever seen a truly great production of this opera?”
A tsar is torn
In Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, all the Russian people starve and suffer, but none has suffering like the mental agonies of Tsar Boris.
This woman is dangerous
Our weekly peek into the Mike Richter treasure trove yields a live recording from his “Operas of Richard Strauss” CD-ROM, Die Frau ohne Schatten from the Bayerische Staatsoper on July 16, 1988.
Under water
Rusalka and her sisters are huddled in the flooded basement.
Second chance?
Okay, so here’s that Luc Bondy production of Tosca again, this time as seen at the Bayerische Staatsoper earlier this summer, with the “original cast” of Karita Mattila and the singer who did all the rehearsals in New York until the last week, Juha Uusitalo. They rehearsed again for the co-production in Munich for festival performances and […]
Mostly armorless
I’d never actually seen a production of Lohengrin before I agreed to review a new Decca DVD of Richard Jones‘s staging for the Bayerische Staastoper, starring Jonas Kaufmann, so I hope I’ve got this right: It’s about this architect named Elsa, who lives in an Orwellian steampunk Germany that has videocamera technology but still dresses like […]
“And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges”
Christof Loy’s dreamlike, pared-down production of Donizetti’s 1833 masterpiece Lucrezia Borgia, created for the Bayerischen Staatsoper, is brought to life on Medici DVD from performances in July 2009. The DVD of the performance is accompanied by another hour-long DVD, The Art of Bel Canto: Edita Gruberova, which includes some fascinating rehearsal and performance footage of […]
I’ll take the fall
The days are getting shorter, but you can keep the prattle going this fall’s Talk of the Town! You will, you can, you must join in the discussion about: Great mezzo soprano performances (October),
Gained in translation (November), Teleport me back to… (December).