Impresario Gerard Mortier died earlier today of pancreatic cancer. He was 70.
I suspect most New York City opera-lovers had long since given up hope that the fascinating soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci would ever return to their city.
Love grand opera but wary of a six o’clock curtain with five hours of music behind it? (And nothing is grander than Berlioz’s Les Troyens, eh?) Your dilemma has been solved. Show up at the Met at 7:30 or 8:00, whenever they have the first intermission.
Cecilia Bartoli and Joyce DiDonato are not the only ladies who have recorded recitals this year featuring music from the 17th and 18th centuries.
Everyone who revives Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda, as the Collegiate Chorale did at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday night, calls the piece an “overlooked masterpiece.”
“Is a work an opera simply because its creators choose to call it one?”
Is the threnody, the lament over a beloved corpse, the oldest form of song? Surely it is among the oldest; one of the most widespread and stylistically various, millennia before opera was devised.
For all his historical importance Christoph Willibald Gluck remains one of the least known and performed of the great opera composers.
Almost exactly one hundred years ago on March 18, 1912, the Metropolitan Opera gave its final performance to date of Armide.
Many American opera-lovers take the “Grand Tour”—a pilgrimage to Europe to attend opera at its great houses—Peter Grimes at the Royal Opera in London or Otello at La Scala in Milan, or perhaps for the more well-heeled a visit to the summer festivals of Glyndebourne, Salzburg or Aix-en-Provence.
“Hey the line forms, on the right dear / Now that Macheath’s back in town / You’d better lock your doors, and call the law / Because Macheath’s back in town.” So concludes Marc Blitzstein’s famous English translation of the song that opens Die Dreigroschenoper.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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