What better sentiment can we embrace as the year ends then to hope, often against against hope, for peace and love in a world of chaos?
I am sure many of us will post the Fledermaus gala, but it doesn’t get better than this, even in a Fledermaus gala
If you’ve ever been to Juan Diego Flórez‘s recitals, you’ll know the part most of the audience is waiting for is when he takes out his guitar.
Eileen Farrell could sing in all genres. I call her the queen of crossover, especially in her bluesy albums. Eileen Farrell, like Miami, you’ve got style!
Lovely Christmas carol by Pietro Yon, “Gesù bambino” as sung by The Greatest Thing Ever at a Christmas concert in Ravello in 2021. Beautiful!
Leontyne Price in her early prime is soaring and radiant in traditional Christmas songs.
An Australian Christmas where the paddocks are brown, the gullies are green, and the singing is, frankly, better behaved than most of us will be by lunchtime.
Though there are a number of fine recording of holiday music by opera singers (Eileen Farrell!), this great performance of Jessye Norman was captured on video as well.
A beautiful Christmas album is Pavarotti‘s ‘Oh, Holy Night” conducted by Kurt Herbert Adler.
This has been my favorite Christmas song since I first heard this performance, the opening track of Malena Ernman‘s first Christmas album.
There’s plenty of full-on Christmas music to love in Anne Sophie von Otter‘s “Home for Christmas.”
I bought this album because I found the photo on the cover to be Camp.
When I first listened years ago as a baby opera queen to Tebaldi‘s 1971 “Christmas Festival,” I could not get over just how enfeebled she sounded.
“Vesselina’s Chest Voice” is my new drag name.
Dear Joan with her trills and ornaments brings “Joy to the World” every holiday season. Wishing a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.
Christmas kitsch is great fun, of course, but Christmas can be just as wonderful without it, as this great singer proves.
Christmas should be over the top, opulent, a little sad, utterly sincere, and ever so vulgar.
Auntie Joan goes the whole nine yards on this one and invigorates it to make it work in a way as no one else can.
Like Type 2 Diabetes, symptoms of YAS (Yuletide Aversion Syndrome) commonly creep up on gay men after manopause.
This month’s theme – “Opera singers celebrate the holidays” – conjured up a vast lexicon of memories of growing up in the 1960s and early 1970s.
“It duz… not… SCHVING!!!!”
One of my favorite Christmas recordings is Kathleen Battle‘s A Christmas Celebration.
Gabriela Beňačková is featured in a wonderful Christmas album called Carolling, released by Supraphon in the early 1990s.
“O Divine Redeemer” is, I suppose, more properly an Advent or Lenten piece. But when Renata Tebaldi asks us to hear her “croy”, who can resist?
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.
