Midway through his traversal of Wagner’s 10 mature operas for PentaTone, we’ve learned this about Marek Janowski:
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
My mother asked me once, whilst staring aghast at my CD collection, why I needed so many copies of Don Giovanni.
Can it be nearly a quarter-century ago that an Italian mezzo-soprano in her early twenties recorded her first recital?
Press quotes on the back of this new release from EMI of Georges Bizet’s masterpiece promise ”a stylish and cliché-free Carmen” and on most fronts I think it’s a fair assessment.
To imagine that I have anything new to say about Maria Callas’ 1957 performance of Anna Bolena at La Scala is sheer pomposity.
Rule Britannia? Often during the Olympics that famous number from Thomas Arne’s 1740 Alfred echoed in my ears.
Beethoven expressed it best when he reportedly threw Rossini shade: “Any other other style than opera buffa would do violence to your nature.”
We approach, beloveds, as unto a shrine, for these are no ordinary performances.
The chicken or the egg?
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…
The cover picture on the Opera Australia’s DVD
of a 2011 production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni is rather startling.
As we lurch into the month of July, La Cieca (not pictured, one hopes) wants quietly but firmly to draw the attention of her cher public to some of the more interesting releases on audio and video newly available on Amazon.com.
The story is enough of a cipher to make any regie-bent director salivate.
One of my adolescent pastimes was trolling the classical cut-out bins in record stores searching for overlooked gems or unfamiliar singers.
Of all the Olympics-related products created to honor the upcoming summer games in London, surely one of the oddest must be a brand new pasticcio just released on a two-CD set
by Naïve—L’Olimpiade.
For all his historical importance Christoph Willibald Gluck remains one of the least known and performed of the great opera composers.
Jules Massenet wrote Werther at the midpoint of his very successful career.
I have been a devotee of Berlioz’s Les Troyens since I first discovered the Covent Garden recording conducted by Colin Davis.
The symbolism and themes of suffering and redemption in Parsifal have provided catnip for more than a few oddball stagings filled with Regie excesses.
Let’s start with some refreshing news: Poèmes is the finest thing Renée Fleming has recorded in many a season.
It is hard to know just who is the intended audience for this release of Pelléas and Mélisande.
Yes, the plot of Luisa Miller is a novella, and a pleasantly juicy one at that.
I could feel my face (to say nothing of my spirits) sink as I opened an envelope from La Cieca containing a new Decca CD
to review.
It’s kind of shocking, when you really think about it, that the kind of international operatic model that the Royal Opera now operates on barely existed only 50 years ago. Until around 1960 most of the performances at the Covent Garden were given in English and the casting choices were enough to make the Vicar…
