First sip
UPDATE: A video preview of the new Elisir follows the jump.
East Coast
A boozy short leave
After 23 years, the Queen of Carthage has finally made it to Manhattan.
L’infelice Aragonese
Camille Saint-Saëns was such a brilliant, facile musician that pals like Wagner and Liszt felt a distinct schadenfreude when he suffered composer’s block.
Brit star! would I were steadfast as thou art!
Rule Britannia? Often during the Olympics that famous number from Thomas Arne’s 1740 Alfred echoed in my ears.
The desert song
You Parterrestrials know all about Santa Fe Opera’s amazing mountain setting and open-sided theater affording breathtaking sunsets, weather-related drama and–when the back stage wall is opened–starry backdrops, but it was my first visit, so indulge me a little.
Tales of an evil queen
Beethoven expressed it best when he reportedly threw Rossini shade: “Any other other style than opera buffa would do violence to your nature.”
Endgame
Based on reliable reports about reshuffling of the Met’s repertoire for the 2013-14 season, the only reasonable conclusion is that James Levine will never return to conduct with the company.
Stairway to paradise
We approach, beloveds, as unto a shrine, for these are no ordinary performances.
Questions and antlers
Verdi’s only successful comic opera, Falstaff, is notably hard to produce.
Puccini three ways
Puccini’s evening of one-act operas Il Trittico seems to be riding a wave of popularity over the last few years, with a new production at the Met and several high-profile productions in America and Europe.
Joy cometh in the mourning
Is the threnody, the lament over a beloved corpse, the oldest form of song? Surely it is among the oldest; one of the most widespread and stylistically various, millennia before opera was devised.
Breaking dawn
When Giuseppe Filianoti isn’t busy being one of the world’s more versatile tenors, he plays detective.
Conquering Ciro
By the time Rossini was 20, he had produced six operas, most of them brief, comic and slight. He admitted to admiring Mozart (not then well known south of the Alps), but the melodies of his early works show more of the influence of Paisiello.
Renaissance: fair
On this Gay Pride weekend, I remember my late friend Robert Chesley, activist and playwright (Stray Dog Story), who had also been an elementary schoolteacher.
Blonde item
This year, I attended one of Natalie Dessay‘s only fully-sung Traviatas at the Met.
Citius, Altius, Fortius
Of all the Olympics-related products created to honor the upcoming summer games in London, surely one of the oddest must be a brand new pasticcio just released on a two-CD set
by Naïve—L’Olimpiade.
The windmills of his mind
Jules Massenet’s Don Quichotte was one of a number of commissions from the Monte Carlo Opera that occupied the composer at the end of his life.
Grand, hotel
Sneaking in under the wire during the final week of May were two highpoints of New York’s opera season: the Cleveland Orchestra’s Salome with a stunning Nina Stemme and operamission’s revelatory US stage premiere of a complete edition of Handel’s first opera Almira.
Expect opera, pay less
You may remember, gentle readers, that last year about this time Peter Gelb decided to enter into an unholy alliance with Target to benefit their mountainous number of opera loving customers by pre-releasing two Met performances exclusively in their fine emporiums.
The Way We Were
“Opera News, 76 years old and one of the leading classical music magazines in the country, said on Monday that it would stop reviewing the Metropolitan Opera, a policy prompted by the Met’s dissatisfaction over negative critiques.”
The end of glasnost?
When Mikhail Gorbachev assumed the mantle of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, a palpable change was felt in the air, from Novosibirsk to East Berlin. Words like glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) began to replace the gradually outmoded Leninist philosophies that had become warped under Stalin and Andropov.
Just my Gluck
For all his historical importance Christoph Willibald Gluck remains one of the least known and performed of the great opera composers.
Lyre’s poker
The Underworld as corporate boardroom, Pluto a “suit,” the damned a bunch of clerks tapping away at laptops.
Wholly Grail
Certain opera productions become the stuff of legend as much for the circumstances surrounding the performance as for the musical results.
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).