After two previous productions of Tosca in New York City this season (the Met’s revival of the controversial Luc Bondy version and NYCO Renaissance’s depressingly retrograde take), New Yorkers finally got a pleasing, if rough-edged, performance of the Puccini classic from LoftOpera.
As portrayed by Vittorio Grigolo, Nemorino was a manic self-absorbed, probably bipolar, stalker who—against all odds and good sense—gets the poor girl.
If I were Renée Fleming, I, too, would indulge myself.
The wonderful Spanish mezzo Teresa Berganza celebrates her 81st birthday next week and “Trove Thursday” gets the party started.
These days a cadre of voluble opera-goers regularly issues dire warnings that anyone about to attend this or that production at the Met should close her eyes and just listen rather than witness yet another Peter Gelb regie “atrocity.”
It took the better part of a decade—including two high-profile cancelations—or New York to finally hear Anna Netrebko in recital.
A 1984 performance of Handel’s Orlando with Marilyn Horne, Valerie Masterson, Marvis Martin, Jeffery Gall and Robert Lloyd, conducted by Charles Mackerras.
Ana Maria Martinez’s tremendously impressive Cio-Cio-San dominated the season premiere of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly at the Met.
I grew up with the Anna Moffo recording of Luisa Miller, so it was fortuitous that the Met gave the premiere of a new production in 1968, around the time RCA released the album.
On her 90th birthday “Trove Thursday” presents the late great Belgian mezzo Rita Gorr parenting Régine Crespin in Massenet’s Hérodiade.
Nixon in China is one of several titles that when I tell people that it’s on my Top Ten Favorite list of operas, I get strange looks.
Sir Richard Eyre’s new Manon Lescaut at the Met Friday night demonstrated no particular aptitude for opera.
With February 14th falling on a Sunday, there will be no Valentine’s Day Met performance this year.
Bellini blossomed over us like a love fest.
Jarrett Ott is a star. That is the only surprise takeaway from the well-intended snore, Cold Mountain.
This week “Trove Thursday” brings a rare in-house recording of a visit to the Metropolitan Opera House by the Staatsoper Hamburg presenting Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress with a deluxe cast
Washingtonians enjoyed a happy reunion this past Sunday with David Daniels.
La Cieca thinks she knows who the murderer is.
Friday’s season premiere at the Met of Donizetti’s opera about the doomed Scottish queen proved surprisingly satisfying and a genuine success for Sondra Radvanovsky.
A woman reads from the Bible. There is a dance scene in a tavern. The discovery of blood gives away the protagonist.
Anna Moffo made some of the most entrancing records ever. Their appeal is to “voice fanciers.” (I understand. We’re a despised group.) But Moffo’s best work renders us helpless.
God, I love that photo of Lisa della Casa. She can sing, too!
A “lone voice in the wilderness” booed Barbara Frittoli’s calamitous Nedda.
New York City Opera has officially launched its “renaissance” at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater last night with a production of Puccini’s Tosca that should please a lot of older, conservative audiences, if not the adventurous operagoers that City Opera courted in the past.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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