Gabriela Benacková, one of Trove Thursday’s favorite sopranos, turns 75 tomorrow, so we celebrate with two rare complete Verdi portrayals.
Trove Thursday welcomes the return to the Met of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin on March 25 with a collection of important moments from the opera.
Jaromir Weinberger’s Svanda dudák is rarely performed at all and more often than not in German rather than its original Czech, so Trove Thursday inevitably offers Schwanda der Dudelsackpfeifer from Dresden with Marjorie Owens, Tichina Vaughn, Christoph Pohl and Ladislav Elgr.
The Met’s new Don Carlos has prompted a lot of discussion lately about opera-in-translation, so Trove Thursday this week offers two works unexpectedly performed in French: Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snegourotchka and Weber’s Euryanthe.
Trove Thursday offers Shostakovich’s 1962 Katerina Izmailova with Australian soprano Marie Collier as its anti-heroine and Jon Vickers as her lover.
Next Wednesday is the composer’s 337th birthday, so Trove Thursday previews this spring’s most enticing Handel performance with two very different live versions of his delightful Serse,.
Trove Thursday offers a 1994 “pirate” of Ariadne auf Naxos featuring Gabriela Benacková and Natalie Dessay, along with another Viennese diva pairing: Benacková and Sena Jurinac in the second act of Janacek’s Jenufa.
Don Carlos is my favorite Verdi opera, and I’m always in favor of including the most music. But it can be a dizzying task to keep track of all the options.
Today is Mozart’s 266th birthday and I had already planned a Trove Thursday celebration when I learned that Maria Ewing had died on January 9.
Teresa Zylis-Gara died in late August at 91 and Trove Thursday offers the Polish soprano in a wide-ranging collection of live material showcasing her great versatility.
Trove Thursday offers a nearly forgotten 19th century opera with a most marvelous name: Le Roi d’Ys by Éduoard Lalo featuring a superb French cast led by Alain Vanzo, Andrea Guiot, Jane Rhodes and Robert Massard.
Trove Thursday begins 2022 with a favorite magical opera tinkered with by another great composer: Weber’s Der Freischütz in Berlioz’s French version conducted by Christoph Eschenbach with the great José van Dam as Gaspard!
Un ballo in maschera—but instead of a tragedy, an opera buffa—and in Danish?
For Christmas 2021 Trove Thursday welcomes The Three Wise Cis-Men each bearing a broadcast of my favorite sacred work by Mozart, the “Great” Mass in C minor, featuring a sterling American soprano: Kathleen Battle, Arleen Augér and Lisette Oropesa.
Trove Thursday sneaks in one more OONY offering before 2021 ends: Verdi’s rare La Battaglia di Legnano from 1987 with Aprile Millo, Mario Malagnini, and Matteo Manuguerra.
My sister Julie celebrates an important birthday later this month which reminded me—as I also recalled I visiting her while she was living in Prague—that I should unearth Bohuslav Martin?’s Julietta with Lucia Popp and Dénes Gulyás for this week’s Trove Thursday.
As one can see from the chronology published earlier this year, the American Opera Society, in addition to reviving a number of now familiar operas, introduced many singers who became important local figures; however, there were shooting-star exceptions like today’s Trove Thursday offering of d’Albert’s Tiefland featuring Angeles Gulin and Ion Buzea.
Trove Thursday adds two short works—Goyescas and L’enfant et les sortilèges—to Christian’s expansive recent survey of Bernard Haitink’s opera legacy.
Symphony orchestras crave Wagner so much they occasionally program single acts of one of the master’s demanding operas, especially Die Walküre’s rapturous first, so Trove Thursday offers six (!) incestuous concert renditions spanning half a century.
November in New York hosts two premieres dedicated to mythology’s greatest musician, which prompts Trove Thursday to present a vintage Monteverdi L’Orfeo with Judith Raskin and Gérard Souzay conducted by Leopold Stokowski (!) and a recent HIP London broadcast of Luigi Rossi’s L’Orfeo.
Trove Thursday remembers Edita Gruberová with live recordings of two of the three operas I heard her perform at the Met: a 1985 Munich La Traviata with Neil Shicoff and Wolfgang Brendel conducted by Carlos Kleiber and an I Puritani from Vienna 1994 featuring two other artists who recently left us too soon: Marcello Giordani and Dmitri Hvorostovsky.
A performance of Rossini’s Otello ossia Il Moro di Venezia from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, featuring Mariella Devia, Bruce Ford and Juan Diego Florez.
Turandot finally arrives on Trove Thursday, but it’s the setting by Ferruccio Busoni which predates by a decade the one by that other Italian guy, and it’s paired today with Arlecchino, the composer’s other commedia dell’arte-influenced short opera.
Trove Thursday offers two very different live recordings of Halévy’s grand opera La Juive.
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.
