This was a Rosenkavalier that aspired to excellence and almost achieved it.
The revival of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Music Center downtown, last seen at LA Opera in 2013, is reason for jubilation for everyone except perhaps the singers engaged.
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
As I mentioned in a previous post, one of my two favorite operas is Les Troyens,
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.
Remember that time you went to the opera and the entire evening was perfection?
Emilio Sagi’s production of The Barber of Seville is ungepotchket in the flesh.
Die Meistersinger is a bold stroke of programming, in a not particularly exciting way.
Hopefully the assignment of Herman Melville’s endless whaling opus Moby-Dick as compulsory reading for High School students is a thing of the past.
With a primary color, projection-heavy English-language Magic Flute that’s going to feel like a matinee whenever you see it, the SFO season has lived up to its initial promise.
Well that’s a terrible place to start a review, and it’s not quite fair to SFO’s Lucia di Lammermoor, but…
If I’d gotten an hour less sleep you’d now find me mixing everything up and writing about Mrs. Lovett making her entrance on a bronze horse like Peter the Great.
Gala this; gala that; who knew rich people wore clothes so badly?
While Bernard Herrmann is remembered primarily for the seven films on which he collaborated with Hitchcock, he also composed one opera: Wuthering Heights, written between 1943 and 1951.
In attempting to get a little bit of everything onto my Mixcloud page, I realized that I inadvertently neglected some essentials: 1) Leyla Gencer 2) La Gioconda.
You might be surprised, though, when that title turns out to be Show Boat.
Three blocks from the opera house is a terrible time to realize there was homework.
I have an idea (soon to be angrily debunked in the comments section) that Le nozze di Figaro is rarely a source of unalloyed bliss to the chronic operagoer.
It is easy to become overly identified with opera—as a cleverer friend of mine once noted: being a sports fan is an interest, but if you like opera, everyone thinks of it as a crippling obsession.
As I leaned forward the woman in front of me turned to her seatmate and very quietly, in a voice thick with emotion and not a few tears, said, “it’s so beautiful.”
Certain operas are better in theory than practice.
It seems almost comical to think now but the designer-director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, who died in 1988, was at one time considered the height of regie-theatre scandal.
I would love to contribute a top ten list but I didn’t even go to ten things this year.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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