A real vibrancy
Your favorite box set-aholic here completely missed the release last August of Giuseppe Di Stefano – Complete Decca Recordings in honor of the great tenor’s centenary.
Metropolitan Opera
Consistently enthralling
To conclude its triumphant season, last week the Met Orchestra performed its annual Carnegie Hall concerts under music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin and once again performed superbly.
Romeo and Gilda
The winners of the evening were the composer Riccardo Zandonai and Teatro Grattacielo which pulled off a near-impossible feat with success.
Queen’s evidence
Trove Thursday’s belated contribution to last weekend’s Platinum Jubilee is a broadcast from Aldeburgh of Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana with Christine Brewer and Tom Randle as Elizabeth and Essex, an opera which premiered 69 years ago yesterday.
Those monsters look like us
“This used to be a funhouse… but now it’s full of evil clowns / It’s time to start the countdown…. I’m gonna burn it down”
Ghost of honor
The elusive La dame blanche returned for one evening to New York City on May 28 thanks to the New Amsterdam Opera led by maestro Keith Chambers.
Varying the song
The opera The Rake’s Progress, as many people know already, was inspired by a series of engravings and paintings of the same name by William Hogarth, showing the decline of a young man into depravity and insanity.
Give Paris one more chance
Pavarotti and Freni are gone but the Franco Zeffirelli Bohème remains.
Reminiscences of Mozart
The great Spanish mezzo soprano Teresa Berganza died on May 13 at the age of 89, so Trove Thursday salutes one of its favorites with a pair of dazzling rare live Mozart performances.
Reviving a pharaoh
The Met brought back 2019 smash Akhnaten last night, with nearly the exact same cast and creative team, and with nearly the same knockout effect of three years ago.
The Multiverse of Morley
A Trove Thursday Mega-Post © featuring the wonderful American soprano Erin Morley in Orff’s Carmina Burana and Richard Strauss’s Brentano Lieder, plus extended live excerpts from Handel’s Orlando, Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots.
Resisting the recognizable
It was Matthew Jocelyn’s libretto, with its disorientingly deconstructive approach to its source text, that gave Brett Dean’s Hamlet its identity.
Rachel, Rachel
It’s nice to see Sony Classical backing a serious operatic soprano and not some crossover refugee from Britain’s Got Talent or another syrupy Christmas album from the world’s reigning Heldentenor.
Mainly in the plain
I wonder why many New Yorkers have been led to believe that the only Handel conductor in the world is Harry Bicket.
Crowning achievement
Sondra Radvanovsky is very special here!
Thrust into the political spotlight
The Met’s revival of Turandot on Saturday night was surprisingly contentious.
Everyone’s gone to the moon
The Met’s recent Ariadne auf Naxos and Elektra combo left me wanting more and more Richard Strauss, so Trove Thursday offers a complete Capriccio with Jonas Kaufmann (his one-and-only Flamand) and Christopher Maltman vying for Soile Isokoski.
Stained class
With no disrespect to Nadine Sierra, who as Lucia acquits herself honorably if not magically in vocal terms, the undisputed cause célèbre here is director Simon Stone.
A crazier day
Saturday’s performance of Le nozze di Figaro at the Met mined the humor from Mozart’s divine setting of Beaumarchais’s play about a crazy day in the Almaviva household.
Now, baby, or never
Born on this day in 1915 singer and songwriter Billie Holiday.
Twisted sisters
Nina Stemme’s Elektra always seemed the sanest individual onstage never quite giving over to obsession or hysteria with a good line in mordant sarcasm and contempt.
Through different eyes
I was reminded at the Met’s season premiere of Eugene Onegin Friday night always to expect the unexpected.
The favorite
Gabriela Benacková, one of Trove Thursday’s favorite sopranos, turns 75 tomorrow, so we celebrate with two rare complete Verdi portrayals.
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).