Audacious star performances elevate safe direction in Richard II and The Seagull on London’s West End
A live broadcast from Venice’s Teatro la Fenice
Donizetti wrote so much great music, it’s hard to single out a favorite opera, or even a preferred aria!
Florian Leopold Gassmann‘s rare comedy live from Milan
Back to Rameau again this week with Samson at the Opéra Comique, my third Rameau production in as little as three months, after Les Fêtes d’Hébé in the same house, and Castor et Pollux at the Palais Garnier.
Karina Canellakis conducts Janácek‘s final opera live from Amsterdam.
Recent rapturous musings about Huw Montague Rendall and curiosity about Aigul Akhmetshina‘s return to the Met as Rosina in May have prompted the box to share a recent sample of the pair in “Dunque io son.”
This performance of Mahler’s Symphony N°8 at the Bozar in Brussels will probably be my last ever Mahler concert.
Christina Nilsson‘s debut enlivens the Met’s new Aïda.
Corinne Winters sings the title role in Janácek‘s opera live from Munich.
A stylish and funny Così fan tutte at LA Opera is a pretty glam affair, according to Patrick Mack.
Prompted by Washington Concert Opera’s upcoming Luisa Miller, Chris Cache’s misbehaves five times by offering just the opera’s final act with sopranos from the 1970s, some of whom might be considered “under-appreciated”: Gabriella Tucci, Adriana Maliponte, Renata Scotto, Gilda Cruz-Romo, and Katia Ricciarelli.
Some of my blog‘s habitués (they do exist) will know that I sometimes quote the people around me at the opera.
A performance recorded earlier this year at the Teatro Regio di Parma.
parterre box is titillated (in the most prudishly puritanical way possible) to share a clip from the Paris Opera’s recent production of I Puritani starring Lisette Oropesa and Lawrence Brownlee
As I mentioned in my last article (on the subject of Calixto Bieito’s production of Das Rheingold at the Paris Opera), in what the French might call une histoire belge, La Monnaie’s Ring cycle started with Romeo Castellucci as its director, and is now ending with Pierre Audi.
Eli Jacobson inaugurates parterre box’s new “Perspectives on the Aria” feature with a deep dive into Leonore’s “Abscheulicher!” from Beethoven’s Fidelio which returns to the Metropolitan Opera tomorrow with the Met’s current dramatic soprano star Lise Davidsen as Leonore.
Opera San José (OSJ) is continuing the second half of its 41st season with a company premiere of Béla Bartók’s Symbolist opera Bluebeard’s Castle (A kékszakállú herceg vára), with a libretto by his friend and poet Béla Balázs, and OSJ truly spared no effort to make the occasion a memorable one.
Even if our monolingual American tourists can be the source of vexation for many a Parisian, our singers gave much for the city’s operagoers to admire this month in stylish productions of Semele at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and I Puritani at the Opéra Bastille.
The conclusion of Romeo Castellucci‘s Pierre Audi‘s Ring cycle live from Brussels
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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