Nothing to sneeze at
This week’s Trove Thursday—Kodály’s Háry János in a 1955 RAI broadcast in Italian led by famed Hungarian conductor Ferenc Fricsay—may be a bit brief as C-19 finally arrived last week chez CC.
East Coast
Vertigo more than tuberculosis
This Traviata remained firmly Beltway-bound and by the time I had gotten home, the 45-minute traffic jam to leave the parking lot was eminently fresher in my mind than the evening’s performance.
‘Big D’ energy
Only three years separate the creation of The Most Happy Fella (1956) and The Sound of Music (1959), but there’s a proverbial ocean between these two Golden Age musicals are being performed at prestigious festivals this summer.
Summertime lies
A trip to Mediterranean climes came through musically, as the Boston Symphony Orchestra presented a largely satisfying concert performance of Don Giovanni on July 16.
Behold the happy pair
Beverly Sills and Renée Fleming perform 30 years apart the same work with the same orchestra in the same venue!
Back to baroque
The always elegant Véronique Gens has recently returned often to her earliest roots in the French baroque.
Angry young men
Since April four wildly varied incarnations of Hamlet have been haunting New York City theaters; the most recent to arrive was Robert Icke’s chicly contemporary take on Shakespeare’s play which opened last week at the Park Avenue Armory.
The Verdi thing
On Thursday June 30th, San Francisco Opera closed their summer season with a one-night-only special concert celebrating Eun Sun Kim’s first season as the Caroline H. Hume Music Director, in an aptly named concert “Eun Sun Kim Conducts Verdi.”
A real vibrancy
Your favorite box set-aholic here completely missed the release last August of Giuseppe Di Stefano – Complete Decca Recordings in honor of the great tenor’s centenary.
Consistently enthralling
To conclude its triumphant season, last week the Met Orchestra performed its annual Carnegie Hall concerts under music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin and once again performed superbly.
Romeo and Gilda
The winners of the evening were the composer Riccardo Zandonai and Teatro Grattacielo which pulled off a near-impossible feat with success.
Queen’s evidence
Trove Thursday’s belated contribution to last weekend’s Platinum Jubilee is a broadcast from Aldeburgh of Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana with Christine Brewer and Tom Randle as Elizabeth and Essex, an opera which premiered 69 years ago yesterday.
Those monsters look like us
“This used to be a funhouse… but now it’s full of evil clowns / It’s time to start the countdown…. I’m gonna burn it down”
Ghost of honor
The elusive La dame blanche returned for one evening to New York City on May 28 thanks to the New Amsterdam Opera led by maestro Keith Chambers.
French kiss
To celebrate Valerie Masterson‘s turning 85 tomorrow, Trove Thursday offers a second annual birthday salute to the English soprano.
Varying the song
The opera The Rake’s Progress, as many people know already, was inspired by a series of engravings and paintings of the same name by William Hogarth, showing the decline of a young man into depravity and insanity.
Give Paris one more chance
Pavarotti and Freni are gone but the Franco Zeffirelli Bohème remains.
Reminiscences of Mozart
The great Spanish mezzo soprano Teresa Berganza died on May 13 at the age of 89, so Trove Thursday salutes one of its favorites with a pair of dazzling rare live Mozart performances.
Ring my bell
The monsoon outside was no match for the torrents of gorgeous, dramatic singing and playing that was unleashed inside George Washington University’s Lisner Hall Sunday afternoon when Washington Concert Opera, in a glorious deluge of Léo Delibes, presented Lakmé to round out its return season.
Spaced out
Before Wednesday I don’t remember gasping when I entered a concert venue.
Reviving a pharaoh
The Met brought back 2019 smash Akhnaten last night, with nearly the exact same cast and creative team, and with nearly the same knockout effect of three years ago.
The Multiverse of Morley
A Trove Thursday Mega-Post © featuring the wonderful American soprano Erin Morley in Orff’s Carmina Burana and Richard Strauss’s Brentano Lieder, plus extended live excerpts from Handel’s Orlando, Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots.
Resisting the recognizable
It was Matthew Jocelyn’s libretto, with its disorientingly deconstructive approach to its source text, that gave Brett Dean’s Hamlet its identity.
Room temperature
It’s maybe not a surprise that Carmen is neither a good vocal nor temperamental fit for Isabel Leonard.
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).