If you had told me 20 years ago that at some point in the future I would have over 550 of the Metropolitan Opera’s performances, audio and video, at my command with the touch of a button I would say my eulogy had just been read and I’d been taken to my reward.
LoftOpera is just one, though perhaps the liveliest, of many homegrown opera troupes in Brooklyn.
There is a simple elegance to the single-composer recital album format. For the listener in the mood for, say, Puccini, it’s a chance to delve into his music without any pesky interruptions by those other guys like Verdi or Massenet. And if one is also in the mood for a particular singer’s art, then the…
The studio opera recording is a rare beast these days and its arrival always a cause for celebration.
It never occurred to me that each tape had to be individually dubbed or that others, maybe many, many others, might also be ordering tapes at the same time.
As the world knows, Anja Harteros dropped out of this series of Don Carlo for a stab at Aïda in Rome. Illness sidelined Ramón Vargas from the title roles in both Don Carlo and Werther. While Wiener Staatsoper has been plagued with cancellations all season (even substituting L’elisir d’amore for La Juive at the last…
My memory is fading but the events I recall most vividly of the last season seem largely to have been concert performances.
Whenever opera-lovers are canvassed about what neglected operas they hunger to see revived, the resulting lists inevitably feature a goodly number of grand operas, those once wildly popular monstrosities–particularly by Meyerbeer–written primarily for Paris in the mid-19th century.
Purchase of Manhattan was given its world premiere on Thursday evening at the Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue.
At the first intermission at last night’s Met revival of Aida, I turned to my companion and said, “So… what about the Aida? I thought she was supposed to be good.”
A great man has passed and our consolation is that so much of his art has been preserved for us on recordings.
Sondra Radvanovsky lent her luminous voice to Chamberfest for what was an unexpectedly unique recital.
In response to repeated urging by La Cieca, Our Own Dawn Fatale has contributed a “to do” list for the benefit of Met management, assuming the company makes it out of this summer alive.
It’s time to bring out the canard again, this time a whole row of them in fact.
Once again, beloveds, we approach the Milanese shrine that simultaneously attempted to cultivate and destroy the career of Maria Meneghini Callas.
The legions of New York opera buffs who now can’t talk about anything but Javier Camarena will be happy to know that there’s now a DVD release
of their new favorite tenor in Rossini’s Le Comte Ory available.
Lawrence Brownlee’s new album Virtuoso Rossini Arias demonstrate both how far the tenore di grazia has come in the operatic world.
Coming as Peter Gelb did from the music industry, opera lovers hoped that he would display a more distinctive knack for casting and an improved talent pipeline than Joe Volpe offered during the waning years of his tenure.
As someone who thinks Verdi is the greatest composer who ever lived and who feels pretty meh about Mozart, I expected to love the Verdi and be bored by the Mozart. I wasn’t far wrong.
Short answer: yes. But let’s begin by dismissing the a blatant canard. One thing that the Metropolitan Opera does not need to do is to scale back the number of performances in a season.
Our Own Jungfer Marianne Leitmetzerin (not pictured) takes us back to the turbulent 1970s at the Met for the spectacular company debut of electrifying Elena Obraztsova as Amneris.
f you like opera to look like a museum, the Arena di Verona’s latest video of Aida should jump to the top of your wish list.
I never thought I’d see the day when Giuseppe Verdi and Benjamin Britten would battle it out for musical superiority but that’s exactly what happened in Los Angeles this year.
Vanity project or not, these albums present a sensitive and talented artist showing off two little-seen sides of himself.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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