Goodbye, Nostalgia!
The program was set around themes of loss, of unfulfilled wishes, the endurance of loss, triumphant or depressed.
East Coast
“A valiant if not completely successful attempt”
On this day in 1986, the Metropolitan Opera opened its season with a new production of Wagner’s Die Walküre.
Calling cards
On this day in 1968 mezzo-soprano Shirley Verrett made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Carmen.
Uncloistered
Let’s all cast our minds back to March of 2020. Or, better, let’s not.
Letting their hair down
After the break the ladies stepped up their game so much that it elevated the night into legendary status: definitely one for the books!
Tauride zone
This week Trove Thursday presents Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride in three stirring broadcasts starring Rita Gorr, Gré Brouwenstijn and Sena Jurinac
Great and happy, but not quite live
This was a great and happy event, but it wasn’t so much a musical one.
Love for sail
Last weekend, On Site Opera presented What Lies Beneath, a program of maritime-themed operatic excerpts staged aboard the 19th century schooner Wavertree (now a part of the South Street Seaport Museum).
Tenors al fresco
Lawrence Brownlee and Michael Spyres are two singers at the top of their game, as this concert showed, virtually peerless in music as punishing as it is pretty.
Get ready for the judgment day
In anticipation of the Met’s reopening performance on September 11, another serving of pandemic-hoarding arrives on Trove Thursday with 10 rare live performances of the Verdi Requiem’s concluding “Libera me.”
Uninvited ghost
Trove Thursday sends best wishes to Michael Tilson Thomas, currently recovering from a recent surgery to remove a brain tumor, and presents him in a broadcast leading the UK premiere of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mlada with Makvala Kasrashvili, Felicity Palmer, Jon Frederic West and Sergei Leiferkus.
Reorientation
Concerts at Wolf Trap, mixed bags in more ways than one, provided fleeting glimpses of the old normal as moments of frisson mingled with more familiar monotony.
Round Table discussion
Like many composers of his generation, Ernest Chausson was enthralled by Wagner and he too turned to legend for his only opera, one that would consume him for final decade of his brief life.
The 50-Year-Old Virgin
Joan of Arc inspired many splendid works of art including Tchaikovsky’s Orleanskaya Deva which Trove Thursday presents today in a 1975 broadcast featuring the great Russian mezzo Irina Arkhipova and her husband tenor Vladislav Piavko.
Rossini al fresco
Last night, for the first time in nearly a year and a half, opera returned to Lincoln Center.
Sisters are doing it for themselves
Pauline Viardot‘s Cendrillon hews closer to the Perrault original than either Rossini or Massenet’s more familiar retellings and is dainty in conception as a salon opera for her students.
Color Me Barbiere
Live opera returns to Lincoln Center when Teatro Nuovo presents Il Barbiere di Siviglia on July 27 and 28.
Damask and depth
For the weeks between the announcement that the return of Wolf Trap Opera would, in part, take the form of a concert performance of Sweeney Todd and its opening at the Filene Center on Friday evening, I racked my brain: why Sweeney now?
Headless “Girl” in a topless bar
Today’s listener has heard the scores of the classic Westerns that borrowed from Puccini (and Wagner!) to create the sound of the myth of the West.
“Jonathan loved him as his own soul”
Trove Thursday celebrates Pride with a Bible-based homoerotic sort-of opera not by the guy who wrote “Depuis le jour”: Charpentier’s David et Jonathas with Mark Padmore, Laurent Naouri and Jaël Azzaretti led by Emmanuelle Haïm.
Love letters
March 2, 2020 – June 18, 2021: Those 15 months were the longest I’ve gone without attending a live opera performance since high school.
Gianna Rolandi 1952-2021
American soprano Gianna Rolandi died Sunday morning, according to a number of her friends and colleagues. She was 68.
Two by two
Were Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Horne 20th century opera’s ultimate same-sex pairing?
Desperate housewife
As New Yorkers swelter in the Fahrenheit 90s. Trove Thursday escapes to wintry Vienna 1920s for Richard Strauss’s Intermezzo (in English) sumptuously conducted by Julius Rudel and starring the incomparable Elisabeth Söderström as the delicious, exasperating wife of Alan Titus.
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).