Chris’s Cache celebrates the 91st birthday today of Janet Baker, one of my favorite singers.
When my editor suggested to me a round-up of my favorite recordings of Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann I was très, très, intrigued.
Folks who have never attended a full-length, uncut Giacomo Meyerbeer grand opera have been known to pout and ponder: Why did the most popular opera composer of the mid-nineteenth century all but vanish from the stages of the world after a hundred years?
As a burgeoning opera fan, I relied on YouTube to connect me with the art form.
Too young to be in love. But not too young to go to war or to die.
Pelléas and Mélisande are not transparent to themselves. Which means: they each have an unconscious.
“In over nine years you’ve never posted an opera by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari,” no one has ever said.
Chris’s Cache follows up its Gounod R&J installment with a widely varied quintet of additional Romeos and Juliets
The outdoor recitals that the Metropolitan Opera presents in New York City Parks every summer are a wonderful way to showcase rising young stars and promising beginners from the Met’s Lindemann Program.
Final opera of the season. Little-known opera. A revival. So, you can probably skip it, right?
I’m old enough to remember when Yannick Nézet-Séguin could do no wrong.
There were, of course, other Chénier recordings beyond the truly great ones…
Opera took center stage on the final weekend of the Philadelphia Orchestra season.
Quite simply, the singers are not around today who are steeped in the tradition of verismo, or for that matter the later part of the 19th century.
The score for Innocence was menacing yet comforting, and, essentially, violent and peaceful at the same time
You can imagine my surprise at encountering an almost wholly traditional staging with one teensy difference.
Doing my research for these “thoughts” ahead of a starry revival in London that opened yesterday, I came across the following review for the Opening Night of the 1962-63 Season.
Matthew Polenzani strode into the Park Avenue Armory’s Board of Officers Room last Monday evening and was received like a beloved friend–and indeed that is what he is to many of New York’s opera-goers.
Washington National Opera’s final production of the season, seen May 22, is also its high point: a new Turandot directed by Francesca Zambello, updated to the 20th century and featuring the world premiere of a completion of Puccini’s score by composer Christopher Tin and playwright and screenwriter Susan Soon He Stanton.
It has been a great season for prolific Bay Area composer Jake Heggie.
Opera has always been Orpheus-obsessed.
Erin Morley closed Vocal Arts DC’s season on May 13th with a recital in the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater, partnered by pianist Gerald Martin Moore.
In 1982 I saw Turandot at the San Francisco Opera, the year after I became an opera fan, and it was my first live opera.
To bring a well-known story to the stage, many methods are available.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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