To celebrate the birthday of Renata Tebaldi, our friends at Opera Depot are offering a free download of live performances by this great diva.
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“A charming musical performance welded to a dramatic production so old and stale that, like fish left out too long, it’s starting to smell.”
Tenors Bryan Hymel (pictured) and Joseph Calleja redeem otherwise routine Puccini revivals at the Met, says Our Own JJ in the New York Observer.
“…a perfect marriage of text and music, creating a series of tableau-like scenes, as if Paul’s story is being related through a series of exquisitely posed still photographs…”
Saturday afternoon at 12:30 on WQXR’s magazine show Operavore, our own JJ talks about Mathilde Marchesi and Antony Roth Costanzo discusses his Orlofsky role in the Met’s Fledermaus.
“…the Met’s brand new production of Die Fledermaus, which premiered on New Year’s Eve, is overproduced, undersung and interminable, less a holiday entertainment than a checklist of opera-making skills the company can’t seem to master.”
Our Own JJ (not pictured) counts down his 10 favorite New York opera performances of 2013 in the New York Observer.
How, then, to explain the perplexing performance last Friday night of Falstaff, Mr. Levine’s first new production since his return?
Our dear friends at Operavore (to whence Our Own JJ will be returning for another season early in 2014) have called for nominations for favorite operatic “party records.”
Our Own JJ takes on an old frame (Der Rosenkavalier) and a new (Eugene Onegin) in his latest review for the New York Observer.
“Opera isn’t all about the music: On the most basic level, it’s a grotesquely expensive form of entertainment.”
“Two Boys demonstrates that Mr. Muhly is capable of very great things indeed, offering extended glimpses of the kind of masterpiece he just missed writing here, and, more happily, of the kind of masterpiece I feel confident he will write in the future.”
Who knows what to expect from an opera about the Internet?
Our Own JJ surveys the first week of the Met’s season (Eugene Onegin, Cosi fan tutte, The Nose, Norma) for the New York Observer.
“The queen of tabloid TV arrived at BAM Tuesday night in Anna Nicole, an opera brimming with wit and good taste. In other words, they got Anna Nicole all wrong.”
Our Own JJ has been thinking about Bayreuth some more, this time in the pages of Musical America.
All right, I admit it; I finally broke down and read the program notes for the Ring in the Bayreuth program book.
I’m told that the public were, if hardly enthusiastic, at least ambivalent toward the Frank Castorf Ring up until the first performance of Siegfried, at which point things got really ugly and the booing started in earnest.
First things first: working from the limited evidence of half or less than half of Frank Castorf’s production of the Ring, I don’t see any evidence of contempt for the audience or whatever you want to call it.
Our Own JJ (right) reports he is ready and relatively un-jetlagged for Das Rheingold tonight at Bayreuth. He'll have comments afterward.
If you’re a hard-core opera buff who finds the Met’s flashy sets and costumes distracting, have I got a show for you!
Opening last night, the most buzzed-about show at the Lincoln Center Festival was inspired by a 16th-century Chinese folk tale of a sassy Monkey, who uses his magic powers and awesome kung fu skills to retrieve holy scriptures from India.
The question on everyone’s lips at Carnegie Hall was, “Is Jimmy back in form?”
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Win tickets to Piotr Beczala at Carnegie Hall!
pb—with our friends at Carnegie Hall—is giving away two tickets to PB’s December concert. Enter now!
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