Jessica Pratt’s last-minute Norma in Milan might well be the stuff of legend
A starry cast is hampered by Christof Loy‘s dour production of Rusalka in Barcelona
Jacquelyn Stucker talks to Kevin Ng about repertoire, tearing down the Fach system, and what it takes to make music from baroque to George Benjamin her own.
It’s like making love with someone whose rap never ceases—and includes “helpful suggestions” about how you can be improving your game.
Chris’s Cache would argue that Prokofiev’s Betrothal in a Monastery is a much more enjoyable alternative to the pandemic-canceled Barrie Kosky The Fiery Angel
When such a canonically ossified work like Verdi’s Aïda is directed at all (let alone as ambitiously as Damiano Michieletto at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino), it does feel like a completely different opera
I so don’t get why any company in the Anglophone world ever bothers to perform Continental operetta in English.
The Comet/Poppea at this summer’s Running AMOC* festival at Lincoln Center is a thrilling, startling, deeply moving experience
A brilliant L’italiana in Algeri in Rome has Larry Wolff once again thinking about “singing Turks”
Claudio Abbado made his Met debut on 7 October 1968 conducting Verdi’s Don Carlo, led five more performances through 14 November, and then never returned. Chris’s Cache offers the only complete recording I’ve run across from that run.
The Met Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin surges into summer with a mixed program at Carnegie Hall
Kent Nagano‘s and the Richard-Wagner-Akademie‘s historically informed Ring Cycle takes on Siegfried in Dresden
A new recording by the London Symphony Orchestra is the latest landmark in a spring full of Janácek‘s Jenufa
A muted production challenges a talented cast in San Francisco Opera’s Idomeneo
A starry concert Aïda in Baltimore proves unusually polished
Opera Director and Detroit Opera Artistic Director Yuval Sharon begins his recent book A New Philosophy of Opera by imagining a future – some forty to fifty years from now – in which opera ceases to exist as an art form.
Contrasting approaches to Regie duke it out in Cavalleria rusticana & Pagliacci and Rusalka in Munich
Although presented as an overview of the performance of Italian opera from the first half of the 19th century, Divas and Scholars is really an impassioned defense of musicology as a discipline and of Italian opera as a subject worthy of scholarly attention.
In a satanic panic, this week Chris’s Cache presents trio of performances of Mefistofele
The final Saturday Matinee Broadcast of the 2024-25 season, live from New York
Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads the Philadelphia Orchestra, Stuart Skelton, and Nina Stemme in a Tristan und Isolde for the ages
The final live weeknight broadcast of the 2024-25 season from New York
A live broadcast from New York
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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