One moral is that Eugene O’Neill may just not be opera fodder.
To get right to the point, the performance did not come together despite some good elements and was a major missed opportunity.
The winners of the evening were the composer Riccardo Zandonai and Teatro Grattacielo which pulled off a near-impossible feat with success.
The elusive La dame blanche returned for one evening to New York City on May 28 thanks to the New Amsterdam Opera led by maestro Keith Chambers.
Teatro Grattacielo presented two visions of love’s magic on November 13 and 14—one via Spain and Argentina (in collaboration with Opera Hispánica) and the other via Alsace by way of Italy.
If you have not been following the exploits of Teatro Grattacielo during lockdown, it’s not because they haven’t been exploitatory all over the place.
Without furnishings to distract them, the cast prowled the stage with sinister energy, exchanging significant looks and deadly secrets as though fearing Nihilists behind every drapery.
As the Netrebko-crowned Macbeth took to the stage at the Met, just a few blocks away, Teatro Grattacielo presented its 25th Anniversary Gala Concert.
Zelmira, a work of 1822, was the last of the eight operas Rossini composed for the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, then the largest opera house in Italy—perhaps in Europe.
L’Arlesiana in a vibrant live performance from a dozen years ago with Giuseppe Filianoti, Latonia Moore and Marianne Cornetti.
“Are we Team Guelf or Team Ghibelline?”
“Trove Thursday” ushers in February with Catalani’s La Wally with a mountain-top cast of Renata Tebaldi, Renata Scotto, Mario del Monaco, Giangiacomo Guelfi and Giorgio Tozzi conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini.
Riccardo Zandoni’s Il Grillo del Focolare is an opera after all.
This year’s treat was Vittorio Gnecchi’s Cassandra, completed around 1905
Teatro Grattacielo is New York’s homegrown organization to rescue Verismo operas from oblivion, one per annum, allowing for the occasional double bill.
What we go to Grattacielo for is fresh young voices singing their guts out.
Italo Montemezzi’s La Nave, premiered in 1918 and not performed anywhere since 1938, concerns itself with nautical power, male and female archetypes, love and hate conjoined, sex and death, the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire — and the visionary future of Old Venice.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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