Kiss me beneath the milky twilight
Only disordered and volcanic intellects need apply for this beautifully deranged production of Salome from Heartbeat Opera
East Coast
Look to the western sky
Not even howling winds and thunderous rain could dampen the excitement of Bay Area audiences to experience Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen for the first time in the Bay Area at Zellerbach Hall Berkeley last Tuesday, 4 February.
Goddess in three persons
Patrick Mack looks back on “a great, nay, historic evening,” Renata Scotto‘s 1981 performance of Il trittico, now newly available on Met Opera on Demand.
Not a Marietta
We are a nostalgic sort, we opera lovers. Fortunately, Korngold’s Die tote Stadt, which arrived in concert form to Boston’s Symphony Hall last weekend, is all about nostalgia.
And her mother too
After a flurry of coverage over the past weeks, Opera Lafayette, in partnership with New Orleans’s OperaCréole, finally premiered Edmond Dédé’s Morgiane, ou Le Sultan d’Ispahan in DC last night.
Paul Plishka 1941-2025
The American bass, a fixture of the Metropolitan Opera between 1967 and 2018, was 83.
She has come, she has come
I’ve been waiting (nearly) 20 years for another encounter with Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti’s Vanessa.
Aged in oak
When the birthdays start to pile up in the double digits in big round numbers, you start to examine your past and review what you have done with your life.
Die tote Stadt
Korngold‘s opera in a live broadcast from Boston
A favorite Mozart performance from Last Castrato
This is an astonishing recording by one of the greatest singers of the 19th century.
By Last Castrato
141 comments
What’s old is new again
An 1887 French grand opera by a Black American composer receives its world premiere with Opera Lafayette and OperaCréole next week and is raising questions about the potential of “restorative justice” in the operatic canon.
Ode to Ode to Joy
Are Beethoven’s symphonies overplayed? Yes, but for a reason. While this justification may sound cliché, Beethoven’s humanist universalism is a sentiment that feels urgent in an era of widespread polarization and pessimism.
Life is like a box of Mozartkugeln
Following last week’s multiple versions of three prime concert arias, Chris’s Cache concludes its Mozart month by offering more of those special vocal works, this time twenty-five arias for mezzo, tenor or bass, as well as more for soprano.
Les Arts Florissants
William Christie curates an evening of French Baroque music in a live broadcast from Carnegie Hall.
Meninas and meninos
Despite the practically unmitigated fiasco of the last Verdi concert opera performance seen in Boston, I approached Sunday’s Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras performance of Don Carlo at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre with much more optimism.
Act III at last
John Yohalem reports from the New York Dramatic Voices performance of Act III of Die Walküre
I was on your side, Bill, when you were losin’
Target Margin Theater proudly boasts that Show/Boat: A River, its small-scale and bare-bones staging of Show Boat (at the Skirball Center on Washington Square through the 26th), is a “bold reimagining” of the classic Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein show, a “new adaptation that explores America’s transformation from the Jim Crow 1880s to the Chicago of the Great Migration to the challenges of today,” but I don’t see it.
Perspectives, reflections, obscurity, and illusion
Christopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleischmann‘s opera at the Prototype Festival re-sets Rashomon in the Pacific Northwest and binds its characters into a hellish cycle of violence with a dark, hypnotic score
Shocker and awe
In 2011, Sondra Radvanovsky‘s Tosca proved promising; fourteen years later, it was absolutely magnificent, a completely satisfying musical and dramatic embodiment of a challenging role by an artist at the peak of her powers.
In limbo
In the “tormented writers’” room, two actors in goth makeup and bride-of-Frankenstein wigs are clacking on typewriters and throwing crumpled papers on the floor.
Consumptive professionals
Given the keen interest in recent posts of Met pirates of Montserrat Caballé in Verdi, Chris’s Cache concludes its trio with the Spanish soprano’s Met Violetta, along with additional Met in-house recordings of Virginia Zeani, Pilar Lorengar, Jeanette Pilou, and Joan Sutherland as Verdi’s doomed courtesan.
A favorite Mozart performance from RudigerVT
At the time of the recording’s release, Kathleen Battle was getting established.
By RudigerVT
93 comments
Tick, tick… boomers!
Eat the Document, which premiered at the Prototype Festival last week, compresses a decades-long, nonlinear story into a swift 90 minutes while still finding time to pause for reflection.
Countering expectations
Apologies in advance to Key’mon Murrah, whose rather extraordinary Marian Anderson award recital with pianist Brian Zeger at the Kennedy Center on December 17 demands some general musing.
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).