On June 16, San Francisco Opera concluded their excellent Centennial Season with a heartfelt 100th Anniversary Concert, featuring a starry cast, three conductors (including current and former Music Directors) and the SF Opera Orchestra and Chorus.
On October 14, 1979 I spent my birthday attending my first all-star opera gala, thrilled at the chance to hear some of the great singers I’d only experienced on LPs, broadcasts or via my pirate reel-to-reel tapes.
On Thursday June 30th, San Francisco Opera closed their summer season with a one-night-only special concert celebrating Eun Sun Kim’s first season as the Caroline H. Hume Music Director, in an aptly named concert “Eun Sun Kim Conducts Verdi.”
Emanuel Ax, Anderson Cooper, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Katie Couric, Renée Fleming, David Foster, Josh Groban, John Lithgow, Kelli O’Hara, Stephen Sondheim, Emma Thompson and John Williams are among the special guests.
The discussion of the Metropolitan Opera’s “At-Home Gala” set a new record for parterre box articles, with 11,590 pageviews and 1,877 comments!
Although the gold glitter cannons detonated at the end of the act were an ostentatious reminder that this was a celebration of the new year, it seemed that the only words on anyone’s lips as the audience filed out of the theater were “Viva Netrebko!”
How do we celebrate a long career in opera, particularly one as illustrious as Plácido Domingo‘s?
Recorded on 7 May 2017, 50 Years at Lincoln Center: A Gala Celebration features three dozen Met singers of the present decade, from A(ngela) to Z(eljko).
The Met got exactly what it asked for: a safely opulent, resolutely unchallenging Tosca that was far from shabby or little but couldn’t have been less shocking
This year’s Richard Tucker Music Foundation’s annual gala concert at Carnegie Hall is marginally less starry than last year’s.
Anticipation of events like the Metropolitan Opera’s 50th Anniversary bash turns me back into the newly opera-soused kid who begged his parents to let him watch the highlights of the Bing Gala on the family color television.
Here’s where the parterriani will surely gather to hear and to comment upon this evening’s monster gala celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Met’s incumbency at Lincoln Center.
For your Wednesday listening enjoyment, here’s a BBC broadcast of the Gala Farewell to Sir David Webster (pictured, left) at the Royal Opera House on July 9, 1970.
As if listening live to tonight’s gala Met premiere of Die Fledermaus were not frivolity sufficient unto the end of the calendar year, La Cieca and Jungfer Marianne Leitmetzerin (pictured above, in no particular order) offer an alternative version of Strauss’s operetta for your amusement.
… is Anna Netrebko, performing “Vieni, t’affretta” from Verdi’s Macbeth at tonight’s opening gala at the Mariinsky.
“Upon my word,” exclaims La Cieca (pictured at right, in the background), “I could almost swear I see a few empty seats on the other side of theater for the Met’s opening night performance of L’elisir d’amore!”
A friend of the box just reminded La Cieca that tonight, April 22, 2012 is the 40th anniversary of the farewell gala honoring Sir Rudolf Bing.