The great Spanish mezzo soprano Teresa Berganza died on May 13 at the age of 89, so Trove Thursday salutes one of its favorites with a pair of dazzling rare live Mozart performances.
Before Wednesday I don’t remember gasping when I entered a concert venue.
The Met brought back 2019 smash Akhnaten last night, with nearly the exact same cast and creative team, and with nearly the same knockout effect of three years ago.
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.
It was Matthew Jocelyn’s libretto, with its disorientingly deconstructive approach to its source text, that gave Brett Dean’s Hamlet its identity.
It’s nice to see Sony Classical backing a serious operatic soprano and not some crossover refugee from Britain’s Got Talent or another syrupy Christmas album from the world’s reigning Heldentenor.
I wonder why many New Yorkers have been led to believe that the only Handel conductor in the world is Harry Bicket.
Sondra Radvanovsky is very special here!
The Met’s revival of Turandot on Saturday night was surprisingly contentious.
Reunited and it feels so good!
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.
Joyce DiDonato admits that she is “a problem solver, a dreamer, and—yes I’m a belligerent optimist.”
With no disrespect to Nadine Sierra, who as Lucia acquits herself honorably if not magically in vocal terms, the undisputed cause célèbre here is director Simon Stone.
Saturday’s performance of Le nozze di Figaro at the Met mined the humor from Mozart’s divine setting of Beaumarchais’s play about a crazy day in the Almaviva household.
Born on this day in 1915 singer and songwriter Billie Holiday.
Nina Stemme’s Elektra always seemed the sanest individual onstage never quite giving over to obsession or hysteria with a good line in mordant sarcasm and contempt.
People these days often exclaim “…..is everything!” but often it feels like gross hyperbole. But surely anyone who has seen Mark Morris’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato since it premiered in 1989 would agree that it is indeed everything!
I was reminded at the Met’s season premiere of Eugene Onegin Friday night always to expect the unexpected.
Gabriela Benacková, one of Trove Thursday’s favorite sopranos, turns 75 tomorrow, so we celebrate with two rare complete Verdi portrayals.
Eleanora Buratto at this fully matured point of her career has a warm, creamy full lyric soprano that has the roundness and sweet warmth of a Freni but can also expand into the spinto power of a Tebaldi.
Dramaturgically, The Hours is a mixed bag: I wouldn’t discard it, but I would want to fix it. But simply as an evening of gorgeous music and singing, it’s cordon bleu.
Happy 58th birthday to actress and singer Vanessa Williams.
The Boston Symphony and Alban Berg’s “Wir arme Leut” spread musical riches at Carnegie Hall.
While it must be admitted that Elza van den Heever doesn’t have an ideally warm and agile Handel voice, she evidenced fierce control over her instrument and skillfully built a powerful portrait of the courageous Rodelida fighting for her survival.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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