What happens when you attend a performance and it doesn’t engage you?
My sister Julie celebrates an important birthday later this month which reminded me—as I also recalled I visiting her while she was living in Prague—that I should unearth Bohuslav Martin?’s Julietta with Lucia Popp and Dénes Gulyás for this week’s Trove Thursday.
Quarantining during COVID dramatically increased my compulsion to collect and compare interpretations.
Trove Thursday celebrates Christa Ludwig with live excerpts from 1955 through 1982.
For those pining for Puccini with the Met out of commission. Trove Thursday steps up with the composer’s brief first opera Le Villi with Krassimira Stoyanova, José Cura and Franz Grundheber, led by Simone Young.
During the 70s, Kiri Te Kanawa, particularly singing Mozart, became one of my favorite singers.
Sunday is Handel’s 335th birthday, an event Trove Thursday celebrates with Rodelinda, Regina de’Longobardi, one of the composer’s most popular works.
Rosa Feola immediately established with her first group that she’s a serious artist who brought to the concert format both a warmly appealing coppery soprano as well as detailed and savvy dramatic instincts.
When I first heard of this broadcast my thought was to save it to celebrate Jessye Norman‘s 75th birthday in 2020.
“Trove Thursday” remembers the company’s very first Lady Macbeth via Leonie Rysanek’s NYC debut in a concert performance of Verdi’s Shakespeare masterpiece less than a year before her first Met appearance.
Following classic recordings documenting the work of Karl Böhm and Herbert von Karajan. Orfeo’s 150 Years Wiener Staatsoper box moves on to new releases that are seeing their first incarnation on an officially available disc.
“Trove Thursday” turns to a quintet of baritone/bass voices: Matthias Goerne, Simon Keenlyside, Georg Nigl, Thomas Quasthoff and René Pape performing works by Pfitzner, Sibelius, Adams, Martin and Schubert.
Riccardo Muti’s vision of Aida’s score largely emerged as one of subtlety, musicality, and restraint.
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
Nina Stemme’s Elektra is familiar to me in three different incarnations.
Claudio Abbado passed away on the 20th of January five years ago, just months before I began my Ph.D.
Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov must be Russian’s most iconic opera and “Trove Thursday” presents it with Claudio Abbado leading an impressive team.
Tuesday the Met unveils its sixth new production of La Traviata since moving to Lincoln Center.
“The heavens are telling” begins the famous chorus that ends the first section of The Creation.
To heck with Bayreuth and Salzburg, Glimmerglass and Santa Fe as Rosa Feola sang Mozart at Lincoln Center Friday night and I wouldn’t have been anywhere else!
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.
It was already nearly two o’clock in the morning, late for a work night, and Nixon Ben Mahmoud was ashamed to find himself crying real tears.
One of the greats of classical music, Franz Joseph Haydn was a bit of an “also-ran” as an opera composer.
Awaiting the return of Parsifal to the Met, “Trove Thursday” hops to the other end of Wagner’s oeuvre with a recent Rienzi der letzte der Tribunen.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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