To celebrate the birthday of Renata Tebaldi, our friends at Opera Depot are offering a free download of live performances by this great diva.
By La Cieca
18 comments
“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.”
By La Cieca
Tenors Bryan Hymel (pictured) and Joseph Calleja redeem otherwise routine Puccini revivals at the Met, says Our Own JJ in the New York Observer.
By La Cieca
“…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…”
By La Cieca
“…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.”
By La Cieca
How, then, to explain the perplexing performance last Friday night of Falstaff, Mr. Levine’s first new production since his return?
By La Cieca
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.”
By La Cieca
“Opera isn’t all about the music: On the most basic level, it’s a grotesquely expensive form of entertainment.”
By La Cieca
“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.”
By La Cieca
Who knows what to expect from an opera about the Internet?
By La Cieca
“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.”
By La Cieca
Our Own JJ has been thinking about Bayreuth some more, this time in the pages of Musical America.
By La Cieca
Our Own JJ debuts in the pages of the New York Observer.
By La Cieca
All right, I admit it; I finally broke down and read the program notes for the Ring in the Bayreuth program book.
By James Jorden
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.
By James Jorden
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.
By James Jorden
Our Own JJ (right) reports he is ready and relatively un-jetlagged for Das Rheingold tonight at Bayreuth. He'll have comments afterward.
By La Cieca
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!
By La Cieca
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.
By La Cieca
The question on everyone’s lips at Carnegie Hall was, “Is Jimmy back in form?”
By La Cieca
