Christopher Corwin picks the flowers of a baroque May in New York City with reviews of concerts starring Lauren Snouffer, Key’mon Murrah, and the Oratorio Society of New York.
“Let’s start at the very beginning” of Kent Nagano’s pioneering complete Ring project which was recently discussed here in depth in Montagu James’s review of Die Walküre.
Bergamo hosts an annual Donizetti festival, Salzburg presents a Mozart-woche every January, and of course there is Bayreuth for Wagner. But Handel gets two festivals every spring, and this year I was finally able to attend one of them.
Two short theatrical works and one sacred piece from the beguiling oeuvre of the guy who didn’t write Louise
No one who followed Trove Thursday will be surprised that Diva November on Chris’s Cache today features Ann Hallenberg and Sandrine Piau.
This month, both the Paris Opéra and the Opéra-Comique are mounting seminal works about unhinged anti-heroines who meet their downfall after falling head-over-heels for an unavailable, deeply unattainable man – Salome, in the case of the Opéra; and Armide, in the case of the Opéra-Comique.
The always elegant Véronique Gens has recently returned often to her earliest roots in the French baroque.
Last night should have seen my favorite of this season’s revivals but instead Trove Thursday must step up with Jean-Marie Leclair’s irresistibly captivating Scylla et Glaucus conducted by Christophe Rousset.
Although I usually pretend that I don’t have the diva-worship gene, sharp-eyed readers of parterre box will know that since I joined the site in 2011 as “DeCaffarrelli” I have often swooned as an Ann Hallenberg-fanboi.
A brace of Handel operas at the George Enescu International Festival.
“Trove Thursday” offers Offenbach’s irreverent La Belle Hélène featuring the beauteous Véronique Gens.
Legrenzi married the quirky libretto to a score of transcendental beauty.
A performance of Gluck’s Alceste from Wiener Staatsoper in June 2016.
My impossible wish would be to hear one of the great castrati who dominated opera for most of the 18th century.
The behavioral phenomenon of limerence has been described as “an involuntary potentially inspiring state of adoration and attachment to a limerent object involving intrusive and obsessive thoughts, feelings and behaviors from euphoria to despair, contingent on perceived emotional reciprocation.”
That’s what it must have been like in 1726 London when Handel composed Alessandro for perhaps the three most famous (and expensive) singers of the day.
As if last week’s survey wasn’t enough, a few more recent diva-recital disks remain worthy of attention particularly since they arrive from five front-rank singers.
Cecilia Bartoli and Joyce DiDonato are not the only ladies who have recorded recitals this year featuring music from the 17th and 18th centuries.
Many American opera-lovers take the “Grand Tour”—a pilgrimage to Europe to attend opera at its great houses—Peter Grimes at the Royal Opera in London or Otello at La Scala in Milan, or perhaps for the more well-heeled a visit to the summer festivals of Glyndebourne, Salzburg or Aix-en-Provence.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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