Anticipating the first new local Aïda in thirty-six years, Chris’s Cache revisits Verdi’s popular opera in four unusually interesting in-house recordings from the Met 1961-1976.
The court of Mantua has run away to join the circus; Washington, DC and Baltimore’s experimental opera company, IN Series, transformed Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto in a new production set under the big top this winter.
While everyone tries to figure out what on earth Strauss and Hofmannsthal are up to in Die Frau ohne Schatten, now playing at the Met, Chris’s Cache offers a later, simpler, shorter Strauss with three live broadcasts of his “bucolic tragedy” Daphne.
Here’s the bottom line: at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall stage on December 3, Iestyn Davies and viol consort Fretwork made the sweetest sounds I’ve heard from human beings all year.
Patrick Mack reviews yet another Puccini album from Jonas Kaufmann
On Tuesday night, in the commodious concert hall of the Morgan Library, the Boston Early Music Festival forces brought Georg Philipp Telemann’s Don Quichotte auf der Hochzeit des Comacho to New York.
A recent conversation with a friend who has loved Die Frau ohne Schatten for twice as long as I have been alive revealed that we both had some unresolved questions about the plot.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s program of works by Mozart and Kevin Puts, a composer championed by star Renée Fleming, was one of musical and artistic contrasts.
Christopher Corwin reviews Pablo Larraín‘s Maria
Montagu James reviews the US tour of the Kirill Petrenko-led Berlin Philharmonic
Judith Malafronte on firebrand pedagogues, the old-school singing manual revival, and what many voice teachers are getting wrong.
The plight of two women, each from different backgrounds, was on full display in San Francisco opera houses last week.
Il trovatore may be famous for its melodramatic plot and unlikely mistaken identities, but surely even Verdi and Cammarano couldn’t have imagined the chaos of a performance featuring two Manricos and two Leonoras.
Washington National Opera’s second full-run offering of the season, a new production of Verdi’s perennially appealing Macbeth, premiered last Wednesday at the Kennedy Center.
This archly traditional production of La bohème was a little shaky on opening night. It nevertheless had a full complement of sterling individual performances to take us on home.
After an uneven gala performance of Tosca on Tuesday, I’m not sure what the Met means by “celebrating Puccini.”
Later this month the Met at last revives its striking Herbert Wernicke production of Die Frau ohne Schatten, prompting a Chris’s Cache preview of three live recordings of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s fanciful if knotty masterpiece.
With Boston Lyric Opera’s largest opera production of the season already well behind us, the one-off semi-staged gala performance of Aïda held on Sunday at Emerson College’s Colonial Theatre to support the company’s vast education and community engagement apparatus, was a particularly enticing entry on the Boston cultural calendar.
The New York Philharmonic podium has been occupied the past two weeks by Finnish conductors once thought to be top contenders for the ensemble’s music directorship.
Washington National Opera rounded out its season opening weekend with a one-night-only performance entitled “Gods & Mortals: A Celebration of Wagner” the evening after the premiere of its new production of Fidelio.
Ainadamar functions on two levels: as a defiant dance against fascist totalitarianism and as an exaltation of the diva.
Strike Up the Band! cried the brothers Gershwin (and book-writers George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind) in the first of their three satirical, vaguely political operettas—sort of jazz Gilbert & Sullivan—that they dreamed up in the late 1920s.
The Richard Tucker Foundation Gala has always been a big annual celebration of the voice with an emphasis on big-voiced singers in big repertoire (not much Wagner usually, though…). Like so many reliable operatic institutions it has struggled for survival after the pandemic.
Aside from a tour with the LSO this spring, this was, I believe, the only time Antonio Pappano would be conducting in the US this season. This made the concert at Symphony Hall a real treat.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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