Celebrating its third anniversary and next week’s Met opening, “Trove Thursday” offers a sumptuous banquet of the third and final chapter of divas in the “wrong language.”
Next, I asked Marko Mimica which basses he prefers to listen to on recordings.
At “Trove Thursday” it’s May Night, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1880 comic opera, in a recent broadcast from Moscow led by pianist-conductor Mikhail Pletnev.
I clearly remember the day I first heard the voice of Cesare Siepi.
Usually the longer I know a work the more I look forward to rediscovering it, but that’s just not the case with the Verdi Requiem.
The tendency to rank—to create subjective lists of best or greatest, or to organize things in ascending or descending order—is a human compulsion.
No amount of scholarly diligence has kept Les contes d’Hoffmann from being the messiest of all standard-repertory messes.
If everything you see is great, you are either new to opera or chronically easy to please.
Anticipation of events like the Metropolitan Opera’s 50th Anniversary bash turns me back into the newly opera-soused kid who begged his parents to let him watch the highlights of the Bing Gala on the family color television.
“Trove Thursday” presents a recording of the rare L’Olimpiade featuring Joan Caplan and Rita Shane in the two leading castrato roles.
Revive is a manifesto of sorts, declaring Elina Garanca’s intentions for the new direction in her career.
If you were in New York on July 7, 1975 chances are you were at the Met reveling in the visiting Bolshoi Opera’s Eugene Onegin.
“Has anyone ever seen a truly great production of this opera?”
With February 14th falling on a Sunday, there will be no Valentine’s Day Met performance this year.
Two months after my last visit to this season’s sixteen-performance run of Puccini’s Turandot, I returned eager to witness the latest chapter in the sporadic Met career of Nina Stemme. Rising stars Anita Hartig and Alexander Tsymbalyuk also appeared in their roles for the first time at the Met, so Monday evening turned into a…
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.
While the celebrity-studded, expensively-dressed audience gathered for the gala opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2015-2016 season seemed genuinely enthralled by Monday evening’s performance of Otello, it was more likely swept away by the power of Verdi’s genius than by Bartlett Sher’s puzzling, inert new production.
The studio opera recording is a rare beast these days and its arrival always a cause for celebration.
Coming from placid, luxurious Geneva, where I am currently living, Berlin felt even more jarring than usual.
Certain operas are better in theory than practice.
Olga Peretyatko has officially left the chorus.
There is something so very Don Draper about René Pape .
Opera-lovers who attend too much modern opera may find that it feels like duty.
In Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, all the Russian people starve and suffer, but none has suffering like the mental agonies of Tsar Boris.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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