Calling from 2066, Brendan Latimer argues that the best way to save opera might be to just blow up the standard repertoire altogether.
This summer’s festival, taking place amid record high temperatures and in the wake of its artistic director, Pierre Audi, featured a disquietingly zeigeisty focus on sexual violence.
Huw Montague Rendall’s new release Contemplation has been spinning in both my car and home players repeatedly for months now.
The Boston Symphony and Alban Berg’s “Wir arme Leut” spread musical riches at Carnegie Hall.
Last weekend, On Site Opera presented What Lies Beneath, a program of maritime-themed operatic excerpts staged aboard the 19th century schooner Wavertree (now a part of the South Street Seaport Museum).
Off-and-on since last fall my PPP (Personal Pandemic Project) has been assembling a chronology of the American Opera Society. For 19 years beginning in 1951 it presented a remarkable series of concert performances of works unperformed by either the Met or New York City Opera.
From the technical standpoint San Francisco Opera’s Billy Budd was pretty much flawless.
Britten’s penultimate opera, the anti-war ghost story Owen Wingrave, was composed for television performance in 1971.
“Trove Thursday” turns to Jacopo Foroni’s rare 1849 historical melodrama Cristina, Regina di Svezia to commemorate the 330th anniversary tomorrow of that enigmatic monarch’s death.
Peter Mattei, one of my two favorite baritones these days, in an unexpected title role, Britten’s Billy Budd.
Next, I asked Marko Mimica which basses he prefers to listen to on recordings.
Ah, finalmente!
This week’s “Trove Thursday” offers Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice featuring Anthony Rolfe Johnson.
This week we get closer to completing the operas of Benjamin Britten with The Rape of Lucretia.
“What fools these mortals be!”
Celebrating Simon Keenlyside, the most popular artist on your alte Jungfer’s Mixcloud Web site.
Passion propels more operas than almost any other human emotion; however, many musical dramas have a very different sort of passion—the final days of Jesus—as their subject.
Benjamin Britten’s final opera Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella, is given a lush and quite beautiful production from stage director Deborah Warner for the English National Opera.
What must have raced through the mind of the none-too-comely Spanish Infanta when she learned that the opera to be performed during the celebrations for her 1745 wedding to the French Dauphin revolved around the comeuppance of an ugly yet vain water nymph tricked into believing Jupiter was her ardent suitor?
When Winston Churchill was First Sea Lord, the story goes, an indignant admiral accused him of violating British naval tradition, to which Churchill replied that the only traditions of the British Navy were rum, sodomy and the lash.
In any narrative, the unmentioned—the unmentionable—will always be more alarming than that which is carefully described.
Sneaking in under the wire during the final week of May were two highpoints of New York’s opera season: the Cleveland Orchestra’s Salome with a stunning Nina Stemme and operamission’s revelatory US stage premiere of a complete edition of Handel’s first opera Almira.
Frustrated, perhaps, by the bulky requirements and dubious future of grand opera—and grand opera commissions—Benjamin Britten created some of his most intriguing and, nowadays, popular pieces for small casts and chamber orchestra.
After the Georges Antheil opera that was my first assignment from La Cieca, I have to confess feeling slightly relieved when I opened the parterre package to find: Billy Budd! And not only a Billy Budd, but one starring John Mark Ainsley! The rest of the cast looked similarly starry (pardon the pun), so I…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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