The man who would be nymph
Sometimes the fates conspire, preventing an artist from recording the role for which he is his generation’s touchstone.
East Coast
Rigoletto on the fringe
Tanglewood may bring the classical music crowd to Lenox, but for opera, it’s all about neighboring Pittsfield, Mass.
I put a spell on you
Armide with a superbly grand Francophone heroine in Karina Gauvin and conducted by the always excellent Ivor Bolton.
Rosa’s turn
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!
Summer of the mezzo
August on “Trove Thursday” begins with Midsummer Mezzo Madness featuring a sterling quartet of lower-voiced ladies
I’m no angel
Bard cultish Summerscape series continues to test our esoteric limits with Demon, Anton Rubinstein’s little-known opera about a demon who hankers for a Georgian princess.
Social Medea
Simone Mayr’s Medea in Corinto, a curious work of 1813, has been revived by Will Crutchfield’s new enterprise, Teatro Nuovo.
You shall know them by their ‘Flutes’
This year’s Salzburg Festival opens Saturday with a new production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, an opera often performed elsewhere in translation, so “Trove Thursday” offers two for the price (!) of one.
Alexander was great
As the first of the 2018 opera productions last Saturday, the Merola Opera Program chose Mozart’s rarely-performed early serenata, Il re pastore.
The wedding singers
Caramoor imported the venerable West-Coast period orchestra Philharmonia Baroque to perform Atalanta, an obscure pastoral work by Handel.
Aggrieved is the glorious work
What could go wrong? As it turned out: just about everything!
O sofa fanciulla
Winsome, tony, and studded with overbooked bistros, Tanglewood is not exactly crawling with bohemians these days.
Who’s that girl?
“Trove Thursday” goes modest with Donizetti’s domestic comedy Don Pasquale featuring Ileana Cotrubas, Alfredo Kraus, Vicente Sardinero and Wladimiro Ganzarolli.
More than words
This week’s star-spangled “Trove Thursday” offers the second crazy-quilt installment of divas in the wrong language.
A touch of classic
“Trove Thursday” offfers Joseph Martin Kraus’s superb Aeneas i Cartago, eller Dido och Aeneas—in Swedish!—starring a luminous Elisabeth Söderström as the doomed Queen.
Making out like a bandit
“Trove Thursday” turns for the third of Verdi’s four Schiller adaptations to a recent I Masnadieri with risen stars Lisette Oropesa and Russell Thomas.
Too cloistered for comfort
New Amsterdam Opera’s concert version of Donizetti’s elaborate score La favorita, offered energy, panache and several top-notch young soloists.
Home run
The Barber of Seville turned out to be the most overall solid production of the year and even a bit of old-fashioned fun.
Fan mail to La Nilsson
On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of your birth, I am perplexed as to what to write about you that isn’t of the highest, most ecstatic praise and of deliriously effusive encomiums.
The constant nymph
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.
Senza nube e senza vel
I attended the Sunday, May 13, performance with bittersweet anticipation.
Give ’em Hellman
I mean, how often does one get to hear Bernstein’s gorgeous, rollicking, and varied score nursed by a full orchestra and the artistic resources of an opera company?
A touch of the stone
“Trove Thursday” turns its Rossini-150 series to one of the composer’s least known but tastiest comic gems La Pietra del Paragone with Julia Hamari, Justino Diaz, Alessandro Corbelli, Claudio Desderi and Paolo Barbacini conducted by Roberto Abbado.
Talking to John Raitt, part three
In the final installment of this interview, the star discusses the enduring appeal of Carousel.
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).