Halfway through the overture to L’italiana in Algeri a pin-up cartoon of our Isabella, Jennifer Larmore, slowly slides up and down a pole, setting the tone for the whole opera. Cartoonish is indeed the first adjective that springs to my mind when trying to describe this 1998 production of Rossini’s opera buffa from the Opéra…
Your feelings about the new Opus Arte DVD of Handel’s Acis and Galatea will have a lot to do with your tolerance for gentle whimsy. As a cultural consumer who tends to gravitate toward the more high-octane, Italianate drama of a Verdi overture or a Real Housewives of New Jersey hair-pull, I do my best…
On the occasion of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s 85th Birthday, TDK has re-released performances of Schubert’s “Die schöne Müllerin” and “Winterreise” as a two-DVD boxed set. “Winterreise” was recorded without an audience at Siemensvilla, Berlin in January 1979, and is the earlier and more robust of the two performances. “Die schöne Müllerin” was taped over a decade…
I’d never actually seen a production of Lohengrin before I agreed to review a new Decca DVD of Richard Jones‘s staging for the Bayerische Staastoper, starring Jonas Kaufmann, so I hope I’ve got this right: It’s about this architect named Elsa, who lives in an Orwellian steampunk Germany that has videocamera technology but still dresses like…
An ambitious and Wagner-smitten Ruggero Leoncavallo wrote his rarely heard opera I Medici (Historical Action in Four Acts) as the beginning of what he planned as “an epic poem in the form of a historical trilogy.” Taking his lead from the Ring, Leoncavallo called his planned trilogy Crepesculum, an homage to the Italian translation of…
Juan Diego Flórez is without question a superstar of bel canto repertory, but the recent release of the recording of his role debut as Orphée in Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice at the Teatro Real in Madrid raises some interesting questions. Among these questions, first and foremost is the nature of Orpheus, and whether Flórez has…
Take a Wild Ride with a Valkyrie!! Yes, that’s what all the signs say around Old Baghdad-by-the-Bay…. So, fasten your seatbelts, y’all, it’s going to be a bumpy night! As it turned out, Die Walküre was an unexpectedly wonderful ride, marking the debut of someone who could be a very important new Brünnhilde, Nina Stemme.…
The wealthy suburban community of Greenwich, CT is a place where diamonds are in no short supply. Yet there are still some diamonds of artistic excellence hidden in this seaside town, including the shockingly well-done production of Hans Werner Henze’s The Runaway Slave (El Cimarrón) by the Greenwich Music Festival. This most likely will be…
[La Cieca welcomes the newest and most lissome member of the parterre espionage force, Mlle. La Taupe, who just last night invaded the first performance of San Francisco Opera’s La fanciulla del West.] UPDATE: The last act!
A long-awaited DVD from the Met documents one of the great “42nd Street” episodes in operatic history: on December 20, 1980, a largely unknown Julia Migenes (or Migenes-Johnson, as she was called in those days) stepped in on a few hours’ notice for an ailing Teresa Stratas as the anti-heroine of Berg’s Lulu. A prodigiously…
Maybe it’s just me, but every time I listen to well done French baroque music, my imagination flies to the opulent halls of Versailles. I fantasize about being amongst Louis XIV and his cohorts drunk on wine, good food, and better music, enjoying the life of a bon vivant. Few recordings have created this vivid…
I have to confess to a certain bias: I adore Rossini’s music. Barber was the first album I ever bought, and fittingly, the first opera I ever sang. Rossini was an astonishingly prolific composer, writing more than thirty-five operas, as well as numerous secular and sacred choral works, songs, and chamber music.
Look, this is a very special piece of music for me. You were twenty once, right? You were self-righteous. You had your musical heroes, and your mind was being remolded every fifteen minutes or so by a rapid succession of new experiences that challenged your notions of what music could do.
There is no cry heard more often these days than, “Where are all the Verdi sopranos?!?” Yes, there was a day when we had the likes of Aprile Millo, Eva Marton, Leontyne Price, Renata Tebaldi, Maria Callas, Leonie Rysanek, Zinka Milanov and Antonietta Stella all singing in the same, say 25 or 30 years. While…
Some things, like hearing an evening of chamber music on a barge in the East River, sound better on paper than they actually are. And some things work exactly the opposite way: for example, the composer David del Tredici. Bargemusic presented soprano Courtenay Budd in a program of two song cycles from the 1990s by…
“The end of the world was on the program Thursday night — but for the New York Philharmonic, performing the apocalyptic opera Le Grand Macabre was a promising new beginning.” [NYP]
Chandos has issued an excellent new CD of Serge Rachmaninoff‘s one-act opera Aleko, written when the composer was only nineteen as a graduation exercise for the Moscow Conservatory.
When attending a production by one of the myriad small, independent opera Companies in New York, it’s always a bit of a crapshoot. When I go to one of these things, I try and play by an old Irish saying: “If you’re expecting a kick in the balls, a slap in the face is a…
The subtitle for Il crociato in Egitto, the last of Meyerbeer’s great Italian operas, is “Historic Melodrama in Two Acts,” and boy is it! A melodrama, I mean. I’m not sure about the historic part.
Andrea Bocelli is a pop singer, and a wildly successful one at that. So why does he feel compelled to pretend to be a dramatic tenor?
To be, or not to be? This is the question. But for the producers of opera on DVD, the question is really, to be an opera or to be a film. The producers of the 1991 DVD of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito as produced by Glyndebourne that same year seemed to have been sitting…
Carl Orff’s 1949 opera (or quasi-opera, as some critics have called it) Antigonae has been issued on 2 CDs on the Profil label, in a Munich radio recording from 1958. This recording, conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch and featuring the German soprano Martha Mödl in the title role, is a most welcome addition to this work’s…
Reviewing a CD of someone you have never heard live is always a dicey proposition. As we all know, a voice sounds very different in a big hall than it does up-close and personal. So if Marc Hervieux is your favorite new tenor, please don’t put me in the “crosshairs” just yet. I freely admit…
Adapting a novel, especially a well known novel like Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron, can be a herculean task. The two conflicting, almost mutually exclusive, forces at work are the desire to create a great work for the stage, while at the same time remaining true to all the nuanced characterizations and storylines present in…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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