Here’s a playlist of bel canto favorite suitable for motivating even the most couch potatoesque of parterrians to put in a hard session of weight training.
In anticipation of the Met’s revival this evening of I puritani, I thought it might be nice to take a look back at a few archival videos. In terms of commercial videos, there isn’t much out there, so once again I look to those great old pirated videos for inspiration.
With the Met season soon to finish, I am sure many will want to unwind with a little after party/masked ball.
What better way to say, “welcome, first day of spring” than with Elena Cernei singing “Printemps qui commence?”
That 60 Minutes piece everyone’s been talking about, with Peter Gelb describing opera as “blood sport,” after the jump.
Sleep soundly tonight, Kasper Holten: your Vêpres Siciliennes casting problem has just been solved!
La Cieca is going to go out on a not very long limb here and say that Dick Johnson in La fanciulla del West is a great role for Jonas Kaufmann and may well turn out to be one of his three or four greatest.
Those dear, dear people over The Greene Space at WQXR would like you, cher public, to join them this Friday for a concert saluting this year’s winner of the Richard Tucker Award, mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard.
Karita Mattila (pictured) sings a little Verdi.
How better to launch this week’s general interest discussion than with a video of Joyce DiDonato singing “Over the Rainbow” at the Last Night of the Proms?
La Cieca is most unhappy indeed to hear that coloraturafan, the undisputed monarch of opera on YouTube, has had his “fourth or fifth” account on the service deleted.
Soprano Elizabeth Blancke-Biggs sings the final scene from Salome in the Stefan Herheim production for Den Norske Opera.
La Cieca (not pictured) asks, is it just me (it usually is), or does the new trailer for the Royal Opera’s 2013 Summer season feel a little, oh, I don’t know, familiar?
Here, for the first time in 40 years, the CBS telecast of the April 21-22 gala honoring the retirement of Sir Rudolf Bing.
Finally some video of Stefan Herheim‘s Salome production shows up on YouTube.
On the final night of her farewell engagement at the Café Carlyle, cabaret legend Elaine Stritch took a few questions from the audience.
The gripping Calixto Bieito/Kent Nagano production of Boris Godunov from the Bayerische Staatsoper—with authoritative Alexander Tsymbalyuk in the title role…
Last night, La Cieca finally got around to watching that documentary about the rocky road to the new Ring at the Met, and she has a thought or two about this whole brouhaha.
All these years La Cieca has complained that nobody would write an operatic version of Valley of the Dolls, and what do you know?
Vot tsar’ vash!” Here is your Tsar, the 38-year-old Ukranian bass Alexander Tsymbalyuk.
The new Boris Godunov from the Bayerische Staatsoper (directed by Calixto Bieito and conducted by Kent Nagano) looks absolutely remarkable.
Director Daniel Moshel (not pictured) who created the YouTube sensation MeTube, sat down recently—and virtually—to chat with La Cieca (also not pictured.)
In this clip from an Italian quiz show of the 1950s, Toti dal Monte requires not even a whole phrase to identify the unique voice of Magda Olivero.
The Pierre Audi production of Guillaume Tell has opened at De Nederlandse Opera.
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.
