A DVD of a 2001 Met performance of Berg’s Wozzeck is included in James Levine: Celebrating 40 Years at the Met – DVD Box Set, and it’s easy to see why this performance was chosen. Levine and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra he has done so much to build and improve are the real stars of…
To get straight to the point, the main attraction of this DVD is Renata Scotto. The Italian soprano, the first to perform all three heroines of Il trittico at the Met, is simply superb. She has élan in the moments of tension and a powerful, in-depth delivery. There is not a single word in the…
Richard Strauss’s brilliantly disturbing Elektra was first performed at the Dresden State Opera in 1909, and arrived in America in 1910 at the Manhattan Opera House. A second American premiere, this time in the original German, was in Philadelphia in 1931 with – and this will kill you – Nelson Eddy as Orestes. Along with…
As part of the massive CD/DVD release celebrating the 40th Anniversary of James Levine at the Met, “In Concert at the Met, 1982-83” offers generous excerpts from three memorable Gala Concerts: from February 1982, Troyanos-Domingo-Levine; from March 1982, Price-Horne-Levine; and from January 1983, Domingo-Milnes-Levine. I had the pleasure of being in the house for each…
On the subject of the FringeNYC’s production of The Pig, the Farmer and the Artist, Our Own JJ writes: “Gay stereotypes and penis jokes, with enough sodomy references for an entire season of Oz!” [NY Post]
This live CD of Wagner orchestral excerpts and the Wesendonck Lieder is noteworthy for the conducting of Franz Welser-Most and the truly remarkable playing of The Cleveland Orchestra. I have seldom heard an ensemble sound so beautiful on CD. The strings shimmer like satin, the reeds are clean and clear, the brass warm and burnished with…
It’s just a little over a month until “The Season” starts here in New York — though La Cieca hears that there is opera done elsewhere and she hopes someone will keep her up to date on this trend — but, anyway, what with the Season starting and the glittering crowds and shimmering clouds in…
Blazing Jupiter, the Jovial Star, my personal magical azimuth, plus Perseid meteors wafting about, burning out as do our souls, as we arrived home from Seattle Opera’s new production of Tristan und Isolde.
Christof Loy’s highly controversial 2009 production of Berg’s Lulu for The Royal Opera House has been released on DVD (Opus Arte), with beautifully realized film direction by Robin Lough. Antonio Pappano and the Orchestra of The Royal Opera House lead an extraordinary cast of singing actors in plumbing the musical and psychological depths of this…
My grandfather warned me once: “Beware redheaded women. They’re both good and evil, depending on the second.” On Patricia Petibon’s new album Rosso the soprano combines arrestingly beautiful singing and aggressively amorous characterizations with wildly dramatic artistic choices so easily and effectively, that she in a way lends an air of truth to the old…
Our own JJ (not pictured) revisits A Little Night Music, and who should be inhabiting that chateau extravagantly overstaffed but Elaine Stritch? [Capital New York]
The three Brownies applying the final touches to a tapestry – the show curtain – depicting an idyllic landscape of Windsor before the music begins are the first indication that this productionof Falstaff does not take place in Elizabethan times.
Asking New Yorkers to travel two hours to the remote but beautiful campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson River Valley to see an opera can be like asking them to cross the Sahara. Yet if there is any opera I would put my life at risk to see again, it just might be…
The Post decided to pass on a review of the Caramoor Maria di Rohan (July 24), but the presentation is definitely worth a mention and some discussion, so let’s take it to parterre.
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…
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.
