Chris’s Cache offers an early 80th birthday salute to Jessye Norman with broadcasts of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, and Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder plus a pair of opera arias by Verdi and Mascagni from a 1979 Atlanta Symphony concert with Robert Shaw.
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.
Born on this day in 1945 soprano Jessye Norman
Welcome, beloveds, to the Jessye Norman Memorial Museum. I’ll be the docent for your tour today.
On this day in 1993, the Metropolitan Opera presented a new production of Ariadne auf Naxos.
We have two reasons for celebrating Jessye Norman and the first is a release on the BBC / London Philharmonic Orchestra label of a Richard Strauss concert.
A near-full house attended the Jessye Norman Memorial Celebration at the Met on Sunday afternoon, the auditorium packed with family, friends, colleagues, and fans of the late soprano, who passed away on September 30 of this year.
A second Trove Thursday marking the recent passing of Jessye Norman focuses on the soprano’s catholic repertoire with three 20th century works: Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex; Berg’s Altenberg Lieder; and Franck’s Les Béatitudes.
With all the greatest respect for Jessye Norman as an artist, I do wish people would stop quoting her vain and defensive statements about critics as if she were some kind of oracle.
They say you never forget your first.
The Grammy winning opera and concert singer is dead. She was 74.
“This guy stood up and asked the diva what it felt like getting trapped inside the stage pyramid during the Met’s premiere of Antony and Cleopatra.”
La Cieca wishes to be among the first to congratulate Jessye Norman, who has emerged from semi-retirement to leap upon the musical theater bandwagon.
“Trove Thursday”’s latest folie de grandeur is an overflowing three-part explosion of post-war divas in live performances of unexpected arias always in the “wrong language.”
Tristan has been the season-launching opera three times before now, but good luck finding someone to provide a firsthand account of the last time.
It took the better part of a decade—including two high-profile cancelations—or New York to finally hear Anna Netrebko in recital.
“Dress size is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.”
La Cieca wishes the divine Jessye Norman the very best of luck with her newly-released autobiography
Stand Up Straight and Sing, because—not to put too fine a point on it—it doesn’t look like the diva is going to make much of a go of her second career as a saloon singer.
Leave it to that savviest of all divas, Jessye Norman, to work a subtle product placement into the very first chapter of her newly-released autobiography, Stand Up Straight and Sing.
