Star and garters
No amount of scholarly diligence has kept Les contes d’Hoffmann from being the messiest of all standard-repertory messes.
East Coast
Divine intervention
The second half of Warner Classics’ Maria Callas Live Remastered set represents the years 1954 to 1964 in the career of La Divina.
Stage struck
“Trove Thursday” presents a performance from 40 years ago: an inspired Renata Scotto as Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur.
Carmen denominator
When you attend a performance of Georges Bizet’s Carmen you can never be quite certain which one you’re in for.
Seriously? Right in front of Mycenae?
You’ve got your “Night in the Museum,”and your “It’s All In Her Head” and your “Pantomimes of Childhood Trauma” and that’s all before halftime.
Not much gold, but plenty of rush
Is this not Puccini’s greatest opera, his most human, least manipulative?
Z to A
Today’s offering is an electric performance of Verdi’s early potboiler Attila conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli.
Abendstern
“Trove Thursday” celebrates the thrilling Finnish soprano Karita Matilla in the ultimate diva role.
Simultaneous transformation
For those who thought opera to be a rare enough commodity that there shouldn’t be duels, Saturday night in the Berkshires offered the odd rebuttal.
For me and my Gaul
I first went bonkers for Bellini’s masterpiece during the previous century when the Met remounted it for Joan Sutherland.
And the villain still pursued her
Bard College presented a semi-staged concert of Halka on Saturday evening as part of its impressively wide-ranging two-week “Chopin and his World” festival.
My new philosophy
A rollicking performance of his delightful comic opera Der geduldige Sokrates featuring a fine cast and the magnificent Akademie für Alte Musik conducted by René Jacobs.
The green hills of home
The principal cast members for the week’s Aida are all Wagnerians: Birgit Nilsson, Sándor Kónya, Rita Gorr and Cornell MacNeil.
A midnight girl in a nine o’clock town
Samantha Hankey, so impressive as Diana and Giove-in-Diana in Juilliard’s recent run of Cavalli’s La Calisto, was the perfect Cenerentola.
Three sisters who are not sisters
Due to bandwidth limits “Trove Thursday” must post some more modest offerings in months with five Thursdays.
Catch a falling tsar
You’d think by now I’d know better than to make snap judgments about an opera or a singer—but apparently not.
Goodbye, gorgeous!
Can a surfeit of pleasure become—in the end—unsatisfying?
Woman on the Vergy
“Trove Thursday” offers Gemma di Vergy with the lovely, largely now forgotten Adriana Maliponte in the title role.
Mostly Mozart in the Jungle
Tack on a little symphonic Beethoven and some particularly zany hosting patter from Bernadette Peters, and you start to lose focus, or at least some sense of, um, what matters mostly.
Wine coolers are the first thing, morals follow on
Skirting the leafy, patrician Berkshires of Western Mass, and flush with wine coolers and white people, pastoral Tanglewood doesn’t much resemble the dark Nibelung settings of Norse myth.
Tree for the show
The late-mid 1730s were transitional years for Handel, to put it nicely.
Deine Divadienste will die Frau
I wish to introduce our younger Parterrians to the magical Martha Mödl to commemorate the opening of the Bayreuther Festspiele which opens tomorrow afternoon.
Drunk in both head and heart
This week’s “Trove Thursday” offers Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice featuring Anthony Rolfe Johnson.
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).