Sony Classical, in association with The Metropolitan Opera, has begun issuing on CD a number of historic Met broadcasts, newly remastered. The first I received for review was the December 10, 1955 broadcast of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, perhaps most notable for the Ulrica of Marian Anderson, who earlier that year made her debut…
“Gioia!” is the title of Aleksandra Kurzak‘s debut aria recital, her first international release under a new exclusive contract with Decca Music Group, and—not surprisingly—this writer’s response to the soprano’s sparkling vocalism. In the liner notes, the Polish soprano explains that the title of this recording was her agent’s suggestion: “He said that he can…
Stefan Herheim’s production of Parsifal for Bayreuth is the regie Holy Grail—a production that completely fulfills the promise and purpose of Regietheater.
Noticing how often she turns up lately, one might guess that the operatic “heroine” for the global economic crunch is Medea, the mythological Greek sorceress and filicide.
Robert Schumann said he devoted more love and energy to Manfred than any of his other compositions. It took him only about a month in 1848 to adapt a translation of Byron’s semi-autobiographical poem about a guilt-ridden noble into a program consisting of an overture and 15 pieces for chorus, orchestra and spoken voice. Schumann was…
Hans Neuenfels‘ new staging of Lohengrin for Bayreuth is the grimmest version of this work I’ve seen. Not that this opera is all bright lights and lollipops, but he gave us a particularly dark take on the work, motivated, in part, by Wagner’s writings at the time of the opera’s composition.
In the fall of 2010, director Andrei Konchalovsky and conductor Gianandrea Noseda struck up a collaboration for a new production of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, to be performed at Teatro Regio Torino, co-produced with Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia of Valencia and Fondazione Lirico Sinfonica Petruzzelli e Teatri di Bari.
Fertilization; birth; growth; decay. Eating; digestion; defecation; fermentation; biogas recovery; food production. Wagner’s Tannhäuser is a meditation on the relentless, repetition of cycles that define our existence and man’s insistence on the possibility salvation despite all the biochemical evidence to the contrary.
La Lodoiska is a jewel composed by Giovanni (Johannes) Simone Mayr (1763-1845), a contemporary of Mozart and Beethoven. Although he did receive instruction in music at early age, Mayr did not have the chance to systematically study composition until he was in his mid-twenties when he came a pupil of Ferdinando Bertoni, the maestro di…
An aged Giacomo Casanova, forgotten and bored with life’s prospects, has decided to kill himself. This man, who has always lived according to the liberties of his chemical attractions, allowed himself to be ruled by Nature, now at the end attempts to assert control. But Nature, too crafty to be denied, holds him back from…
Since it’s put on in lavish productions at the biggest houses, sung by the biggest stars, since it wrings such a rich sound out of such a small band, and since the musical, formal and literary ambitions of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s great meta-opera are so very grand, it might be easy to…
Our Doyenne demonstrated her omniscience once again by sending me a DVD of Rimsky Korsakov’s Le Coq d’Or (Zolotoy Petushok) to review. I’m with musicologist Richard Taruskin who stated that Rimsky Korsakov was “perhaps the most underrated composer of all time” (and I’m sure his editor insisted on including the “perhaps”).
Since an early appearance as Schaunard in Baz Luhrmann’s Broadway La bohème, barihunk Daniel Okulitch has been steadily building a substantial career. Along with noteworthy performances as Don Giovanni in New York and Figaro in Le nozze di Figaro in Los Angeles, much of his career has been centered on contemporary work. He has leading…
Joyce DiDonato enjoys the rare cachet of having three studio-recorded operas released in the past three years while other famous divas must be content with “just” DVDs. Although two of Renée Fleming’s Violettas have found their way onto video in less than five years (why??), “the people’s diva” has only recorded one studio opera in…
Classical music writer and opera critic Robert Levine has written a very pleasant new book, Weep, Shudder, Die, A Guide to Loving Opera, published by HarperCollins Books. Levine sets up the book’s premise early in his introduction: “Could singing… make one, as the composer Vincenzo Bellini said, ‘weep, shudder, die’ and at the same time…
Handel’s Orlando is one of three operas Handel based on episodes from Ariosto’s best-selling sixteenth-century epic, Orlando Furioso. The story was, in 1733, well known throughout the Mediterranean world, and everyone set it to music—Vivaldi’s and Haydn’s settings have enjoyed recent revivals, and the libretto Handel set had originally been devised for Domenico Scarlatti. Intricate…
When sending out CDs to for me to review, our doyenne could not know that I have a fetish for 1950s vintage import LP jackets. I remember combing through the LP bins gazing admiringly at the import disks of a generation of middle-European singers who I was too young to have heard in person, who…
Santa Fe has done a brave and laudable thing is presenting the first major revival of The Last Savage in decades, and if the libretto were, perhaps, translated into Hindu, the production values, excellence of cast, and directorial choices could conceivably work their magic of, if not pulling a rabbit out of a hat, then…
Scanning this summer’s Mostly Mozart schedule one wondered if New York really needed another Don Giovanni right now? And one with a non-starry cast where the best-known name was the Commendatore, Kristinn Sigmundsson?
Necrophiliac pedophilia? Or a slow descent into madness? What really happened at Bly? After listening to Glyndebourne’s 2007 Production of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, released in a live recording under the festival’s own label, one is still left in the dark as to what really transpired at that English estate. Perhaps this…
It seems a thing incredible but fifty years ago Richard Strauss was regarded as the wunderkind composer of a few tone poems, three notable operas (all produced before the First World War) and then nothing notable during forty years of repetitious senility. Even Ariadne auf Naxos, today one of the most popular works in the…
After the Georges Antheil opera that was my first assignment from La Cieca, I have to confess feeling slightly relieved when I opened the parterre package to find: Billy Budd! And not only a Billy Budd, but one starring John Mark Ainsley! The rest of the cast looked similarly starry (pardon the pun), so I…
Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades straddles two genres. With a macabre plot that explores the boundaries of human obsession, it’s an early psychological thriller that makes the audience engage in a kind of voyeurism Alfred Hitchcock loved. Yet the plot drawn from Pushkin and the striking Romantic score with its references to Mozart, Bizet and Grétry firmly…
They’ve been celebrating the centennial of Gian-Carlo Menotti lately, spouting wild claims for the immortality of his music. He did have an impressive run of successes in the 1940s, but he lived till 2007 with many more premieres and nary another hit.
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.
