Following the announcement that she’ll make her Met debut next season, Grand Tier Grab Bag brings Italian soprano Erika Grimaldi to your attention with a duet from Manon Lescaut.
Carmen Giannatasio sings her first Minnie, under Riccardo Frizza, in a live broadcast from Bologna.
The rule that governs Dante’s Inferno is called the “contrapasso” – that every sinner is given a punishment in poetic proportion to their crime.
The only correct version of Don Carlos must be in French. That is the language that Verdi composed it in and he made all his revisions in that language.
Riccardo Chailly’s appointment as La Scala’s new music director was news that I greeted with enthusiasm when first announced in 2013.
Whenever opera-lovers are canvassed about what neglected operas they hunger to see revived, the resulting lists inevitably feature a goodly number of grand operas, those once wildly popular monstrosities–particularly by Meyerbeer–written primarily for Paris in the mid-19th century.
Strange as it is to encounter two such disparate works presented with the identical production concept, it’s odder still that the opera you’d think would be the slam dunk is anything but.
Somewhere around the early 80’s, stage directors realized that the odious theatre practice of “audience involvement” was over.
Very few things intrigue me as much as analyzing belcanto operas, comparing their several versions and examining the composers’ second thoughts, modifications and revisions that, willingly or unwillingly, they made to their scores. I was already salivating when I heard that the Teatro Comunale di Bologna was going to perform Vincenzo Bellini’s I Puritani in…
UPDATE: Tonight’s performance of Simon Boccanegra at La Scala (featuring Placido Domingo) has been canceled because of a strike called by unions protesting the “decreto Bondi,” a measure to privatize all of Italy’s major opera houses and reduce salaries at these theaters across the board. Our Own Ercole Farnese reviewed yesterday’s news reports about this…
Vocal glamour in abundance highlighted the opening performance of LA Opera’s Il barbiere di Siviglia on November 29 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion, with much buzz attendant on the company debuts of Rossini experts Juan Diego Flórez and Joyce DiDonato. Adding excitement was the Figaro of Nathan Gunn, who played with Errol Flynn panache, and…
Over the years we have heard many different versions of Gluck’s Orphée. One can choose the Vienna version for castrato, which is shorter and simpler (or better: equally difficult, but in a less spectacular way), the Paris rewrite for tenor or the Berlioz reworking for the distinguished mezzo Pauline Viardot (Anne Sophie von Otter sang…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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