Our selected Rosenkavalier video overview closes out the 20th-century selections, crosses the millennial mark, and includes the first of our performances to depart from the opera’s prescribed 18th-century setting.
“Has anyone ever seen a truly great production of this opera?”
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.
A woman reads from the Bible. There is a dance scene in a tavern. The discovery of blood gives away the protagonist.
Gather around while I play Ghost of New Year’s Eve past!
Fidelio but with an unhappy ending, Bedrich Smetana’s stirring Dalibor opens 2016’s “Trove Thursday” in a 1968 German-language broadcast from Bavarian Radio.
Simply put, Christine Goerke is a stupendous Elektra.
Fifteen years after his first parterre box interview, that criterion of countertenors David Daniels speaks of Oscar Wilde, Marilyn Horne, marriage and political art.
Once upon a time, a man and a woman met. He could sing, she could sing. They fell in love, got married, and became a power couple to rival Billary.
The 1965 season was a time of big changes at the Vienna State Opera.
Cecilia Bartoli and Joyce DiDonato are not the only ladies who have recorded recitals this year featuring music from the 17th and 18th centuries.
We approach, beloveds, as unto a shrine, for these are no ordinary performances.
Richard Wagner believed the key to any legend was contrasting the supernatural with human nature, and showing how the combination had no chance of enduring. In Lohengrin, the title’s character’s insistence on unconditional love and trust collide with the conditional expectations of the real world. The challenge is capturing the tale’s somber majesty without losing…
Richard Strauss’s “last romantic opera,” as he called Die Frau Ohne Schatten, is and has always been a problem child.
Legendary soprano Sena Jurinac, one of the most beloved artists at the Vienna State Opera, died yesterday. She was 90. [via AP]
In 2006, Aribert Reimann was offered a commission to create a new work for Vienna State Opera. After initial hesitation—”The creative process can sometimes be rather a struggle and isn’t necessarily a pleasant experience”—he went to work. After a flirtation with a Camus drama, he settled on Franz Grillparzer’s version of Medea as his subject…
Take a Wild Ride with a Valkyrie!! Yes, that’s what all the signs say around Old Baghdad-by-the-Bay…. So, fasten your seatbelts, y’all, it’s going to be a bumpy night! As it turned out, Die Walküre was an unexpectedly wonderful ride, marking the debut of someone who could be a very important new Brünnhilde, Nina Stemme.…
There are several reasons to purchase the new DVD of Die Meistersinger from Vienna (EuroArts EUA 2072488), but the main one is Christian Thielemann. This production will most likely come to be known as “Thielemann’s Meistersinger,” because his sense of the overall architecture of the work is, pardon the pun, masterful.
Among the “auditions” that have come flooding in from the cher public are reviews of three very different productions of Don Giovanni. Your doyenne has taken the liberty of combining the three critiques into a single posting, but she urges you to remember, remember well the names of the authors of this troika of treatises.
Undaunted by Hurricane Hannah, La Cieca continues her presentation of Lohengrin at Unnatural Acts of Opera. Lohengrin: Jess Thomas Elsa: Claire Watson Telramund: Walter Berry Ortrud: Christa Ludwig Koenig Heinrich: Martti Talvela Heerrufer: Eberhard Waechter Vienna State Opera, Karl Boehm, 1965. Lohengrin Act 2
[Our Own Gualtier Maldè reports from this afternoon’s dress rehearsal of La Fille du Régiment] The Met has another hit on its hands — though not a totally new one, this production and cast already having triumphed at Covent Garden and the Vienna Staatsoper. Laurent Pelly (who vies with Davide Alagna and Mark Streshinsky as…
Was seht ihr in den Lust- und Trauerspielen?!Haustiere, die so wohlgesittet fühlen,An blasser Pflanzenkost ihr Mütchen kühlenUnd schwelgen in behaglichem Geplärr,Wie jene andern – unten im Parterre… La Cieca salutes the successful launch of Alex Ross‘s The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century with a podcast of one of her very favorite operas…
UPDATED January 12: The legendary Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson died on December 25, it was announced yesterday. She was 87. La Cieca will present a special episode of “Unnatural Acts of Opera” tonight in salute to Mme. Nilsson. Birgit Nilsson as Isolde, Metropolitan Opera, 1971 Once Birgit Nilsson was negotiating a contract with Herbert von…
The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn’t reverse things. It doesn’t argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art (and life) a different — a supplementary —…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
×
Sign up for Parterre’s free newsletter.
Exclusive opera reviews, commentary, and top reads
delivered to your email weekly…ish.