It used to be proverbial on the Met Opera Quiz, usually quoted by quiz master Edward Downes: “If you can’t remember where a certain plot event occurs … it happens in La Gioconda.”
Even if our monolingual American tourists can be the source of vexation for many a Parisian, our singers gave much for the city’s operagoers to admire this month in stylish productions of Semele at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and I Puritani at the Opéra Bastille.
The Metropolitan Opera has revealed its upcoming season.
The Met was built for Saint-François d’Assise. It is a huge work, and it needs a huge space. And Ingo Metzmacher.
Only disordered and volcanic intellects need apply for this beautifully deranged production of Salome from Heartbeat Opera
Not even howling winds and thunderous rain could dampen the excitement of Bay Area audiences to experience Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen for the first time in the Bay Area at Zellerbach Hall Berkeley last Tuesday, 4 February.
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.
The American bass, a fixture of the Metropolitan Opera between 1967 and 2018, was 83.
When the birthdays start to pile up in the double digits in big round numbers, you start to examine your past and review what you have done with your life.
This is an astonishing recording by one of the greatest singers of the 19th century.
Are Beethoven’s symphonies overplayed? Yes, but for a reason. While this justification may sound cliché, Beethoven’s humanist universalism is a sentiment that feels urgent in an era of widespread polarization and pessimism.
Following last week’s multiple versions of three prime concert arias, Chris’s Cache concludes its Mozart month by offering more of those special vocal works, this time twenty-five arias for mezzo, tenor or bass, as well as more for soprano.
William Christie curates an evening of French Baroque music in a live broadcast from Carnegie Hall.
John Yohalem reports from the New York Dramatic Voices performance of Act III of Die Walküre
Target Margin Theater proudly boasts that Show/Boat: A River, its small-scale and bare-bones staging of Show Boat (at the Skirball Center on Washington Square through the 26th), is a “bold reimagining” of the classic Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein show, a “new adaptation that explores America’s transformation from the Jim Crow 1880s to the Chicago of the Great Migration to the challenges of today,” but I don’t see it.
Christopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleischmann‘s opera at the Prototype Festival re-sets Rashomon in the Pacific Northwest and binds its characters into a hellish cycle of violence with a dark, hypnotic score
In 2011, Sondra Radvanovsky‘s Tosca proved promising; fourteen years later, it was absolutely magnificent, a completely satisfying musical and dramatic embodiment of a challenging role by an artist at the peak of her powers.
In the “tormented writers’” room, two actors in goth makeup and bride-of-Frankenstein wigs are clacking on typewriters and throwing crumpled papers on the floor.
Given the keen interest in recent posts of Met pirates of Montserrat Caballé in Verdi, Chris’s Cache concludes its trio with the Spanish soprano’s Met Violetta, along with additional Met in-house recordings of Virginia Zeani, Pilar Lorengar, Jeanette Pilou, and Joan Sutherland as Verdi’s doomed courtesan.
At the time of the recording’s release, Kathleen Battle was getting established.
Eat the Document, which premiered at the Prototype Festival last week, compresses a decades-long, nonlinear story into a swift 90 minutes while still finding time to pause for reflection.
Apologies in advance to Key’mon Murrah, whose rather extraordinary Marian Anderson award recital with pianist Brian Zeger at the Kennedy Center on December 17 demands some general musing.
The celebrated Austrian director, known for his picturesque and conservative stagings, was 94.
For many opera lovers of the Baby Boomer generation, German bass Kurt Moll (1938-2017) was Sarastro, exuding wisdom and kindness through his unaffected bearing and incomparably rich, homogeneous sound.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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