Well, when the New York Times goes into a tizzy, you know times are hard, cher public, but your doyenne is ready to ride to the rescue, hakeo don’t panic.
A biopic entitled Florence Foster Jenkins, marvelously directed by Stephen Frears of Philomena and The Queen fame, stars the actress that never ceases to amaze us all, Meryl Streep, as Mme. Jenkins.
A semi-staging of Dido and Aeneas starring Broadway divas and frequent collaborators Kelli O’Hara and Victoria Clark seemed a screwy idea at best.
This season’s Met Donizetti Tudor Trilogy concluded with Roberto Devereux, given its penultimate performance by HD transmission Saturday, April 16. It is good to see these works finally given here; they are too important, too crucial a part of the operatic repertory to have been ignored for as long as they have.
The no-star, slapstick revival of John Dexter’s 37-year-old production of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail that opened Friday night proved James Levine’s tenure as Music Director of the Met will end in two weeks with neither a whimper nor a bang.
Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and a slew of their members of court are hanging out in the afterlife…
The haunted Mycenae of Patrice Chéreau’s enthralling production of Richard Strauss’s Elektra had seized its viewers in an unrelenting vise that never relaxed even at its quietly shattering conclusion.
“I will never sing the role again. It was frightful. We were a set of madwomen…There is nothing beyond Elektra. We have lived and reached the furthest boundaries in dramatic writing for the voice with Wagner. But Richard Strauss goes beyond him. His singing voices are lost. We have come to a full stop.”
That Placido Domingo and James Levine, the Met’s inexorable septuagenarians, would team up yet again—on April Fools’ Day, no less—for a revival of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra occasioned an uncomfortable degree of doubt and dread.
Javier Camarena offered a performance carefully calibrated to a more intimate venue that nonetheless offered emotionally potent results.
Los Angeles first saw Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly presented at the Mason Opera House downtown in 1908 by the English Grand Opera Company. Rumors that LA Opera Artistic Director Placido Domingo portrayed Cio-Cio San’s little boy in that production remain unsubstantiated.
During its first-ever Roberto Devereux Thursday evening one felt transported back to the Volpe years: four of the Met’s biggest stars shining in an opulent (if occasionally perverse) but reassuringly non-challenging production paid for by Sybil B. Harrington.
There are two kinds of opera lovers: Those who despise or tolerate La Gioconda as a preposterous rip-off of Aida that lingered a century in the repertory in spite of its galumphing story, largely because of the popularity of its tuneful ballet—and true opera lovers. We love every silly note of the thing, and every…
Without fail, all nine finalists had nice clear ringing voices. Whether they develop into great artists is another question.
After two previous productions of Tosca in New York City this season (the Met’s revival of the controversial Luc Bondy version and NYCO Renaissance’s depressingly retrograde take), New Yorkers finally got a pleasing, if rough-edged, performance of the Puccini classic from LoftOpera.
As portrayed by Vittorio Grigolo, Nemorino was a manic self-absorbed, probably bipolar, stalker who—against all odds and good sense—gets the poor girl.
The wonderful Spanish mezzo Teresa Berganza celebrates her 81st birthday next week and “Trove Thursday” gets the party started.
These days a cadre of voluble opera-goers regularly issues dire warnings that anyone about to attend this or that production at the Met should close her eyes and just listen rather than witness yet another Peter Gelb regie “atrocity.”
It took the better part of a decade—including two high-profile cancelations—or New York to finally hear Anna Netrebko in recital.
A 1984 performance of Handel’s Orlando with Marilyn Horne, Valerie Masterson, Marvis Martin, Jeffery Gall and Robert Lloyd, conducted by Charles Mackerras.
Ana Maria Martinez’s tremendously impressive Cio-Cio-San dominated the season premiere of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly at the Met.
I grew up with the Anna Moffo recording of Luisa Miller, so it was fortuitous that the Met gave the premiere of a new production in 1968, around the time RCA released the album.
On her 90th birthday “Trove Thursday” presents the late great Belgian mezzo Rita Gorr parenting Régine Crespin in Massenet’s Hérodiade.
Nixon in China is one of several titles that when I tell people that it’s on my Top Ten Favorite list of operas, I get strange looks.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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