Who doesn’t love a slightly murky archival recording?
While it may not be top-tier Rossini, Teatro Nuovo’s mounting of Il turco in Italia is still good summer fun.
Washington National Opera offered a searing production of Robert Ward’s opera The Crucible, directed by WNO Artistic Director Francesca Zambello, as the second installment in the company’s next chapter.
As we reach the end of “Bass Month” I’d like to call attention to the superb American Gregory Reinhart who particularly shone in music by Jean-Philippe Rameau.
This performance features Samuel Ramey in what I consider one of the most powerful deliveries of this aria on record.
George Frideric Handel (born 341 years ago on Monday) composed over 40 operas including many masterpieces, but his Giulio Cesare is the one that everyone knows best.
The vivacious MANON! at Heartbeat Opera makes a strong case for the return of opera in translation.
The opera is life affirming, but also recognizes that life comes to an end.
The miracle workers at Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Odyssey Opera have published another premiere recording of a work that I’ve long heard of but never heard: Dominick Argento’s The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe.
Richard Lynn bravely asks what we’re hoping to get out of the continued Peter Gelb-bashing — and whether our expectations of him have ever been fair
Mexican soprano Gilda Cruz-Romo died on 28 June at the age of 85 and Chris’s Cache remembers her with live recordings of a frequent role and a rather rare one: a last-minute Met Tosca plus perhaps her only stab at the Cherubini Medea.
Contrasting approaches to Regie duke it out in Cavalleria rusticana & Pagliacci and Rusalka in Munich
In a satanic panic, this week Chris’s Cache presents trio of performances of Mefistofele
John Yohalem wraps up Donizetti Month at parterre box with a look back at nearly six decades of Donizetti operagoing.
The nail-biting adventures of Voltaire’s titular hero Candide are hardly more circuitous than those faced by Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 Broadway musical adaptation.
Joyce Guyer’s silvery soprano, impeccable musicianship and beguiling stage presence made her an invaluable member of the Met roster in the late 1990s and early 2000s, appearing most frequently in harmony with others in such assignments as Najade in Ariadne auf Naxos, Woglinde in Wagner’s Ring Cycle and as a Parsifal Flower Maiden.
Patrick Mack looks back on “a great, nay, historic evening,” Renata Scotto‘s 1981 performance of Il trittico, now newly available on Met Opera on Demand.
I’ve been waiting (nearly) 20 years for another encounter with Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti’s Vanessa.
Needing a Mozart palate-cleanser after the recent misbegotten Marriage of Figaro, I went back more than two decades for a Houston Così fan Tutte featuring then-rising Americans Christine Goerke, Joyce Di Donato, Richard Croft, and Nathan Gunn as the confused lovers.
They used to say of the island of Crete that it produces more history than can be consumed locally.
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.
Too young to be in love. But not too young to go to war or to die.
During the 1970s, Stephen Sondheim composed Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures and Sweeney Todd–five richly varied masterpieces of musical theater in a nearly miraculous burst of creativity.
Chris’s Cache follows up its Gounod R&J installment with a widely varied quintet of additional Romeos and Juliets
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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