“Puccini’s Tosca is what is known in the trade as a ‘bread and butter’ opera.”
A Baroque Valentine’s with Opera Lafayette | Feb | DC & NYC
Celebrate love in all its guises with tender ballads, amorous duets, cheeky verses, and bawdy drinking songs plus food, cocktails and wine.
After nearly three years and over 20 performances Michael Mayer’s “Las Vegas” production of Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera still outrages many.
“Everyone complains about how there is no great singing in opera anymore, but last week’s performances suggest that’s not so. The singing today is mostly fine; it’s everything else that’s the problem.”
Although the season is less than three weeks old, Metropolitan Opera audiences may hear nothing else this season as beautiful as Peter Mattei’s “Song to the Evening Star.”
Lianna Haroutounian will sing the role of Amelia Grimaldi in all performances of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra at the Met this season: April 1, 5, 9 matinee, 13, and 16.”
This weekend Il Trovatore outgrossed the The Walk, a new IMAX film directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ben Kingsley.
“Met Music Director James Levine has decided to lighten his workload by removing the new production of Berg’s Lulu from his schedule so that he may focus his energies completely on Wagner’s epic drama Tannhäuser.”
“Roberto Aronica will sing Cavaradossi in the first five performances of Puccini’s Tosca at the Met this season—October 16, 21, 24 matinee, 29, and November 2—replacing Massimo Giordano, who is ill.”
“Taylor Stayton will sing the role of Percy in this evening’s performance of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, replacing Stephen Costello, who is ill,” says the Met press office.
“This throwback to the golden age of opera—superhuman singing greeted with frenzied ovations—was a function of a perfect storm of excitement.”
The Metropolitan Opera’s much vaunted so-called “Tudor Ring” of three royal operas by Donizetti got off to a bumpy start Saturday afternoon with a revival of Anna Bolena that stubbornly refused to cohere either musically or dramatically.
A clearly moved Hvorostovsky basked in the moment and momentarily broke character to acknowledge the love.
Mezzo-of-the-moment Jamie Barton’s future Met assignments include . . .
Would exciting American dramatic soprano Christine Goerke be the next great ice-princess we have been waiting for?
While the celebrity-studded, expensively-dressed audience gathered for the gala opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2015-2016 season seemed genuinely enthralled by Monday evening’s performance of Otello, it was more likely swept away by the power of Verdi’s genius than by Bartlett Sher’s puzzling, inert new production.
Anna, Bart and Peter talk about the Met’s new season with the always engaging Michael Cooper of the New York Times.
Naming rights, Sunday performances, an extension of the Met’s lobby forward into Lincoln Center Plaza . . . Peter Gelb puts all that and more on the table.
The winter 2014 final run of the Met’s first/only Rusalka production (a new one is scheduled in a few seasons) seemed both a nod to the theater’s past and a hint of its future.
Dmitri Hvorostovsky has withdrawn from three performances of Verdi’s Il Trovatore at the Met this season, on October 7, 10, and 17.
The Metropolitan Opera just announced that Mary Jo Heath, who has worked as a producer and guest host for the company over the past nine seasons, will become the fourth full-time radio host in the company’s history this September.
It’s official: in the Met’s new production of Otello, Aleksandrs Antonenko “will not use blackface makeup… breaking with a performance tradition of more than a century.”
George Gagnidze and Zeljko Lucic will share the title role of Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Met this fall, replacing Simon Keenlyside…
Your doyenne peers into the future, or, to be more accurate, into the Future Met Wiki, to reveal the latest rumors on casting and repertoire.
They were there, opera insiders said, because Chelsea Clinton is a friend of the tenor Vittorio Grigolo, who was playing the Chevalier, Manon’s true love.”
STEMdiva status
Ahead of a special boozy, bawdy Valentine’s Day concert, artistic director of Opera Lafayette Patrick Quigley speaks with soprano Maya Kherani about her journey from MIT to rising American Baroque star.
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.