No, we don’t really need another “Orpheus” opera. Or, rather, we don’t need this one.
In San Francisco Opera’s new Così fan tutte, the elements that most visibly read as “American” were a penchant for slapstick humor, overcooked blocking, and an abundance of cartoonish period costumes that hobbled the opera’s first act.
In their realization of Alcina, Harry Bicket and his ensemble recreated a dramatically vivid and musically nuanced character study out of the opera’s central figures.
You’d think after nearly 40 years of opera going I’d have seen almost everything.. .twice. Yet I found myself at LA Opera Tuesday night for a special presentation of George Frideric Handel’s Alcina which was my first live experience with one of his operas.
Remember that time you went to the opera and the whole evening was like magic? Saturday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion probably ranks among my greatest nights in the theater and I’m finding the superlatives in my thesaurus inadequate to the task.
Ludwig van Beethoven’s “rescue opera” Fidelio was presented by San Francisco Opera as their first new production of the season last Thursday in reinterpreted fashion.
Trove Thursday offers two very different live recordings of Halévy’s grand opera La Juive.
Let’s all cast our minds back to March of 2020. Or, better, let’s not.
After the break the ladies stepped up their game so much that it elevated the night into legendary status: definitely one for the books!
The San Francisco Opera became the first US opera company to present a full-blown production indoors on its home turf this season when they ushered the US opera audience into 2021-22 Season on Saturday September 21 with a stellar performance of Giacomo Puccini’s perennial favorite Tosca.
Live opera returns to Lincoln Center when Teatro Nuovo presents Il Barbiere di Siviglia on July 27 and 28.
Lately I’ve been loving listening to Régine Crespin, prompting Trove Thursday to celebrate the great French soprano with private in-house recordings of two of her important non-Met North American appearances.
When LA Opera finally decided to put a toe in the water and mount its first production since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was Igor Stravinsky‘s opera/oratorio Oedipus Rex.
American soprano Gianna Rolandi died Sunday morning, according to a number of her friends and colleagues. She was 68.
Were Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Horne 20th century opera’s ultimate same-sex pairing?
Teresa Stratas turned 83 yesterday and Trove Thursday features one of the recent past’s most interesting yet frustrating artists in two rare broadcasts.
Pauline Tinsley, who died May 11, made few commercial recordings; Trove Thursday offers the thrilling English soprano in excerpts over nearly two decades from nine works ranging from Handel to Richard Strauss.
This solid if not stellar performance finds our diva in particularly passionate form. Maybe they should have re-titled it Maddalena?
Trove Thursday celebrates Christa Ludwig with live excerpts from 1955 through 1982.
Last month in the New York Times Joshua Barone surveyed recent European streams of German works by Kurt Weill and pondered their relationship to his later Broadway successes; his piece prompted Trove Thursday to feature two versions of One Touch of Venus.
Franco Corelli was born on April 8, 1921 in Ancona and Trove Thursday celebrates the matinee-idol tenor’s centenary with a pair of his rare non-Met US appearances; seducing Marie Collier in La Fanciulla del West and vacillating between Ilva Ligabue and Grace Bumbry in Il Trovatore.
Following last week’s Golden Cockerel, Trove Thursday offers another classic Russian opera not in Russian: Borodin’s Fürst Igor with Nelly Miricioiu, Marjana Lipovsek, Bodo Brinkmann, Evgeny Nesterenko, Robert Schunk and Sergei Koptchak conducted by Mark Ermler.
Despite the ongoing pandemic and the political upheaval, the Prototype Festival is back, and it is bigger and more accessible than ever before.
Next month in Bergamo Plácido Domingo takes on his zillionth—and possibly final—new role, so Trove Thursday previews it by returning to the same venue 50 years earlier for Donizetti’s Belisario with Leyla Gencer and Renato Bruson, a real baritone as its titular hero.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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