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.
On the 21st of this month Romanian soprano Virginia Zeani will celebrate her 95th birthday and Trove Thursday salutes her versatility with two markedly different 20th century works: Menotti’s The Consul and Mascagni’s Il Piccolo Marat, one of many collaborations with her husband Nicola Rossi-Lemeni.
Trove Thursday presents Alzira—derided by some as Verdi’s worst opera—in a 1968 Carnegie Hall concert with Gianfranco Cecchele, Louis Quilico (star of last night’s Met Rigoletto stream) and Elinor Ross, who died in March at age 93.
I still remember, and some of it quite vividly, what it was like to experience Achim Freyer‘s intense and groundbreaking Ring production all these years later.
What does the opera singer of the future look like?
Trove Thursday offers a problematic yet fascinating work that would almost certainly not be staged today: Il Guarany by Carlos Gomes featuring João Gibin, Gianna d’Angelo, Piero Cappuccilli and Nicola Zaccaria.
Robert Wilson is many things: a visionary (certainly); an iconoclast, artist, director, and designer of sets, lighting, costumes, movement (and furniture). Yet his work is never boring (well, at least not intentionally).
Trove Thursday finally welcomes Wagner’s Lohengrin arriving in a concert performance conducted by Georg Solti with Siegfried Jerusalem, Julia Varady, Eva Randová, Hermann Becht, Hans Sotin and Wolfgang Schöne.
As the late Arlene Saunders had a very limited commercial discography and performed mostly in Europe, I thought some readers might be curious to hear more of her.
Trove Thursday goes mini-epic with Gustave Charpentier’s naturalistic slice-of-life of fin-de-siêcle Paris in a rare 1999 Renée Fleming performance of Louise co-starring Jerry Hadley, Samuel Ramey and Felicity Palmer.
It was love at first hearing. The music was glorious, the conducting bouncy and pointed, and the singers sure sounded terrific to me.
For those of you keeping track at home that’s four substitutions for three roles and the curtain hasn’t even gone up yet.
Sunday is Handel’s 335th birthday, an event Trove Thursday celebrates with Rodelinda, Regina de’Longobardi, one of the composer’s most popular works.
A special program note for Saturday night’s performance of Matthew Aucoin’s new opera Eurydice pointed to a rare convergence of three MacArthur Grant fellows in its creation and staging.
We’ve had a mini-fest of director Barrie Kosky’s work this year at LA Opera.
Bring your family: This show is special! Such perfect opera is hard to find!
The San Francisco Opera, perhaps incidentally, continued their exploration of operas based on literary works by mounting the revival of Giacomo Puccini’s first success, Manon Lescaut.
Friday evening’s Met premiere of Akhnaten was a resounding triumph and an outstanding testament to Philip Glass’s enduring operatic vision.
Trove Thursday acknowledges the late Raymond Leppard‘s important influence with a live broadcast of his seminal “realisation” of Cavalli’s L’Ormindo plus some Cavalli and Monteverdi tidbits with Janet Baker.
How does one make a performance of standard opera repertoire like Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro feel “fresh?”
The days are getting shorter, but you can keep the prattle going this fall’s Talk of the Town! You will, you can, you must join in the discussion about: Great mezzo soprano performances (October),
Gained in translation (November), Teleport me back to… (December).
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