Summer of the mezzo
August on “Trove Thursday” begins with Midsummer Mezzo Madness featuring a sterling quartet of lower-voiced ladies
Boston Symphony Orchestra
63 pieces since 2010.
63
pieces
17
years
O sofa fanciulla
Winsome, tony, and studded with overbooked bistros, Tanglewood is not exactly crawling with bohemians these days.
They live by night
A heady audience paid top price to pack Carnegie Hall Thursday for just 80 minutes of unstaged Wagner.
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
Frau Minne
“Trove Thursday” presents a live Tristan 2 concert featuring one of my favorite dramatic sopranos. Gertrude Grob-Prandl.
The mania event
Christine Goerke‘s puzzling high register has become an increasingly troubling aspect of her singing. One just never knew what was going to come out from one moment to the next.
E avanti a lui russava tutta Roma
The Met got exactly what it asked for: a safely opulent, resolutely unchallenging Tosca that was far from shabby or little but couldn’t have been less shocking
Final curtain
“Trove Thursday” pays tribute to Dmitri Hrovostovsky with a broadcast of his final new role, Rubinstein’s The Demon.
Wine coolers are the first thing, morals follow on
Skirting the leafy, patrician Berkshires of Western Mass, and flush with wine coolers and white people, pastoral Tanglewood doesn’t much resemble the dark Nibelung settings of Norse myth.
Composer’s intentions
A live broadcast of the prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos featuring Julia Varady, a favorite sopranos in a role she sang only rarely.
Sunset, Sunrise
This Sunday marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson from breast cancer.
Trauermarsch
I can scarcely remember a performance where so many conflicting thoughts raced through my mind as happened Thursday night during the Met Orchestra’s “bleeding chunks” of Wagner’s Ring at Carnegie Hall.
Sweet bird
Anna Moffo made some of the most entrancing records ever. Their appeal is to “voice fanciers.” (I understand. We’re a despised group.) But Moffo’s best work renders us helpless.
As on through the seasons we sail
Trove Thursday looks forward to spring via Haydn’s beguiling oratorio Die Jahreszeiten (The Seasons) in a splendid rendition from the 1981 Salzburg Festival with Ileana Cotrubas, Francisco Araiza and José van Dam, James Levine conducting.
Aged in blood
Simply put, Christine Goerke is a stupendous Elektra.
Dancing in the dark
One Saturday afternoon during my freshman year in college, Richard Strauss’s Elektra made me fall in love with Ursula Schröder-Feinen—or maybe vice versa.
Be my guest!
James Levine turns 72 this year. Even though his health has improved considerably in the past year and he may continue to conduct for a decade or more, it seems inevitable that he will step down as the Met’s Music Director sometime in the next few years to assume the role of Conductor Laureate.
Retirement of a thousand cuts continues
This just in from the Met press office: “On the advice of his doctors, James Levine will reduce his conducting dates at the Met for the rest of the current season while he continues to recover from recent procedures to alleviate back pain. His planned performances of Das Rheingold on March 30 and April 2 will […]
You’re tearing me apart!
So, if you wondering when the spit is going to hit the fan (to quote another great ’50s teen angst opus), well, the date you’re looking for is October 9, 2010. Why is that date so special or unusual, you ask? Well, for the currently ailing James Levine, it’s the day he’s supposed to be in […]
Win a Free Ticket to Opening Night at the Met!
Quinn Kelsey and Lise Davidsen star in the Met's new Macbeth. We're giving away one ticket, so screw your courage to the sticking place and enter now!
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).
