“I will never sing the role again. It was frightful. We were a set of madwomen…There is nothing beyond Elektra. We have lived and reached the furthest boundaries in dramatic writing for the voice with Wagner. But Richard Strauss goes beyond him. His singing voices are lost. We have come to a full stop.”
In a striking program at Carnegie Hall last night, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s), with guest vocalist Susan Graham, brought together a wide array of musical proclivities—good and good bad taste alike.
That Placido Domingo and James Levine, the Met’s inexorable septuagenarians, would team up yet again—on April Fools’ Day, no less—for a revival of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra occasioned an uncomfortable degree of doubt and dread.
Javier Camarena offered a performance carefully calibrated to a more intimate venue that nonetheless offered emotionally potent results.
Los Angeles first saw Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly presented at the Mason Opera House downtown in 1908 by the English Grand Opera Company. Rumors that LA Opera Artistic Director Placido Domingo portrayed Cio-Cio San’s little boy in that production remain unsubstantiated.
During its first-ever Roberto Devereux Thursday evening one felt transported back to the Volpe years: four of the Met’s biggest stars shining in an opulent (if occasionally perverse) but reassuringly non-challenging production paid for by Sybil B. Harrington.
What is an Orphic moment? A song so sweet that even Hades must release the dead back to the living?
Just when you thought it was safe to return to Rossini and Verdi—blam!
There are two kinds of opera lovers: Those who despise or tolerate La Gioconda as a preposterous rip-off of Aida that lingered a century in the repertory in spite of its galumphing story, largely because of the popularity of its tuneful ballet—and true opera lovers. We love every silly note of the thing, and every […]
Sunday afternoon at Carnegie Hall two remarkable slices of soprano-heaven were served up, first by Carolyn Sampson and then by Erin Morley, during the second act of Handel’s Orlando.
An astute double-feature exposes all the complexities of female suffering embedded within two canonical works.
Without fail, all nine finalists had nice clear ringing voices. Whether they develop into great artists is another question.
After two previous productions of Tosca in New York City this season (the Met’s revival of the controversial Luc Bondy version and NYCO Renaissance’s depressingly retrograde take), New Yorkers finally got a pleasing, if rough-edged, performance of the Puccini classic from LoftOpera.
As portrayed by Vittorio Grigolo, Nemorino was a manic self-absorbed, probably bipolar, stalker who—against all odds and good sense—gets the poor girl.
If I were Renée Fleming, I, too, would indulge myself.
The wonderful Spanish mezzo Teresa Berganza celebrates her 81st birthday next week and “Trove Thursday” gets the party started.
Capriccio was a great pleasure on Friday night, March 4. This was a co-production of Opera Philadelphia and The Curtis Institute, presented in the intimate Pearlman Theater at the Kimmel Center.
These days a cadre of voluble opera-goers regularly issues dire warnings that anyone about to attend this or that production at the Met should close her eyes and just listen rather than witness yet another Peter Gelb regie “atrocity.”
It took the better part of a decade—including two high-profile cancelations—or New York to finally hear Anna Netrebko in recital.
A 1984 performance of Handel’s Orlando with Marilyn Horne, Valerie Masterson, Marvis Martin, Jeffery Gall and Robert Lloyd, conducted by Charles Mackerras.
An opera revolving around chastity vows, adultery, slut-shaming, lesbianism, transvestism and much more!
Ana Maria Martinez’s tremendously impressive Cio-Cio-San dominated the season premiere of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly at the Met.
I grew up with the Anna Moffo recording of Luisa Miller, so it was fortuitous that the Met gave the premiere of a new production in 1968, around the time RCA released the album.
On her 90th birthday “Trove Thursday” presents the late great Belgian mezzo Rita Gorr parenting Régine Crespin in Massenet’s Hérodiade.
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).
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