Sunday afternoon at Carnegie Hall two remarkable slices of soprano-heaven were served up, first by Carolyn Sampson and then by Erin Morley, during the second act of Handel’s Orlando.
If I were Renée Fleming, I, too, would indulge myself.
The wonderful Spanish mezzo Teresa Berganza celebrates her 81st birthday next week and “Trove Thursday” gets the party started.
A 1984 performance of Handel’s Orlando with Marilyn Horne, Valerie Masterson, Marvis Martin, Jeffery Gall and Robert Lloyd, conducted by Charles Mackerras.
On her 90th birthday “Trove Thursday” presents the late great Belgian mezzo Rita Gorr parenting Régine Crespin in Massenet’s Hérodiade.
Diana Damrau is a great flirt.
Polish singers are chameleons. They have to be.
William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants made a much-anticipated appearance at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival Saturday performing Theodora.
Angela Gheorghiu‘ s idiosyncratically alluring, sometimes maddening, always fascinating Floria Tosca inevitably became the evening’s unmissable raison d’être.
Simply put, Christine Goerke is a stupendous Elektra.
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.
Besides the heavens and a sweater in The Devil Wears Prada, it is the hue of Hibla Gerzmava’s soprano, in contrast to the red or rose or red-orange voices of most sopranos.
Three decades before Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Flórez dazzled the world with their La donna del lago roadshow, another deluxe team headed by Frederica von Stade and Marilyn Horne shone in Rossini’s neglected masterpiece.
Which operatic character could be best described as a spider?
Richard Strauss’s many one-act operas make excellent concert programs, both for their length (usually under two hours) and the primary place each gives the orchestration, a specialty where Strauss’s brilliance seldom deserted him.
Harry Lawrence Freeman’s Voodoo, begun sometime before 1914, was completed and first heard on radio in May, 1928, then staged on Broadway later that year—seven years before Porgy and Bess, please note.
The creation of Kurt Weill’s The Eternal Road and its lately remodeled avatar, The Road of Promise, boiled down and premiered at Carnegie Hall Wednesday night by the Collegiate Chorale and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, was an intricate process, far more interesting than the work itself.
Although she began her career nearly 25 years ago recording and performing lots of baroque music, I was surprised to see German soprano Dorothea Röschmann promoted as the star attraction of an all-Purcell concert Sunday at Carnegie Hall.
Who needs sets and costumes anyway?
Mr. Peabody, that Leonardo among canines, claimed she was suffering from toothache.
My memory is fading but the events I recall most vividly of the last season seem largely to have been concert performances.
His shaved head in striking contrast to his dark beard and glinting eyes, the implacable Tartar conqueror glowers at us from the CD cover, while the uncropped photo of countertenor Xavier Sabata (above) is even more disturbing, featuring his raised fist and forearm tightly wrapped in a leather belt.
A Birnam Wood of Macbeths and Ladys has come traipsing through New York this year.
Whenever opera-lovers are canvassed about what neglected operas they hunger to see revived, the resulting lists inevitably feature a goodly number of grand operas, those once wildly popular monstrosities–particularly by Meyerbeer–written primarily for Paris in the mid-19th century.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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