Welcome, beloveds, to the Jessye Norman Memorial Museum. I’ll be the docent for your tour today.
Chris’s Cache ends March with Berlioz’s exquisite Shakespeare adaptation Béatrice et Bénédict because it’s just the best thing to listen to on a spring day.
This was a wonderful concert because MIchael Tilson Thomas approached every moment of it with an air of expansiveness and gratitude.
Anticipating Leontyne Price’s 96th birthday on February 10, Chris’s Cache presents the American diva in an epic collection of live performances.
Du Yun is the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer of Angel’s Bone. Her new opera, In Our Daughter’s Eyes, a one-act monodrama for bass-baritone and an orchestra of six, opened the current tenth Prototype Festival, in a performance at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, starring erstwhile Met regular Nathan Gunn.
Trove Thursday previews next week’s BBC Proms presentation of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius with a 2008 broadcast conducted by Colin Davis with Sarah Connolly, Ben Heppner and Gerald Finley.
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.
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.
Minutes into “An die Nacht,” the first song Friday night, I realized how much I’d missed being enveloped in that seductive Straussian combination of a soprano (or two or three) rising higher and higher over a surging orchestra.
Despite having lost its announced Cherubino, conductor and Count (the latter in the midst of rehearsals), the season premiere of Le Nozze di Figaro Saturday afternoon proved to be one of the most enjoyable Met Mozart performances I’ve attended in ages.
Un ballo in maschera—but instead of a tragedy, an opera buffa—and in Danish?
In anticipation of the Met’s reopening performance on September 11, another serving of pandemic-hoarding arrives on Trove Thursday with 10 rare live performances of the Verdi Requiem’s concluding “Libera me.”
Pauline Tinsley, who died May 11, made few commercial recordings; Trove Thursday offers the thrilling English soprano in excerpts over nearly two decades from nine works ranging from Handel to Richard Strauss.
Trove Thursday celebrates Christa Ludwig with live excerpts from 1955 through 1982.
As Phaedra’s tragic, all-consuming passion for her stepson Hippolytus has fascinated artists for centuries, Trove Thursday offers two of its lesser-known musical settings: Pizzetti’s opera Fedra with Régine Crespin and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson performing the cantata Phaedra, Britten’s final vocal work.
Trove Thursday couldn’t wait until Passover to offer Mendelssohn’s Elijah featuring two of my favorite singers, Gabriela Benacková and José van Dam, joined by Florence Quivar, Francisco Araiza and Thomas Moser.
On this day in 1959 Alban Berg‘s Wozzeck had its Metropolitan Opera premiere.
If only she’d been able to sing more than 10 minutes of Bjork’s music!
Do we do what we have to do? Or do we have to do what we do?
Wednesday night’s New York Philharmonic concert was a high-stakes performance for a number of reasons.
They say you never forget your first.
Erwartung and Bluebeard’s Castle returned to Lincoln Center Thursday night in a musically scintillating if theatrically mild double-bill by the New York Philharmonic.
Opera’s latest superstar, Angel Blue, in a compleat and enthralling portrayal, gloriously sung and rivetingly acted.
Broadway star Kelli O’Hara stepped out of her comfort zone.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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