It’s maybe not a surprise that Carmen is neither a good vocal nor temperamental fit for Isabel Leonard.
From the multiple standing ovations, to say nothing of the gentleman in the front row waving the Mexican flag, I can safely say that a very good time was had by all.
Today is Mozart’s 266th birthday and I had already planned a Trove Thursday celebration when I learned that Maria Ewing had died on January 9.
Trove Thursday offers a nearly forgotten 19th century opera with a most marvelous name: Le Roi d’Ys by Éduoard Lalo featuring a superb French cast led by Alain Vanzo, Andrea Guiot, Jane Rhodes and Robert Massard.
As one can see from the chronology published earlier this year, the American Opera Society, in addition to reviving a number of now familiar operas, introduced many singers who became important local figures; however, there were shooting-star exceptions like today’s Trove Thursday offering of d’Albert’s Tiefland featuring Angeles Gulin and Ion Buzea.
From an exposure standpoint, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the best thing to happen to opera since Beverly Sills.
On this day in 1968 mezzo-soprano Shirley Verrett made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Carmen.
As New Yorkers swelter in the Fahrenheit 90s. Trove Thursday escapes to wintry Vienna 1920s for Richard Strauss’s Intermezzo (in English) sumptuously conducted by Julius Rudel and starring the incomparable Elisabeth Söderström as the delicious, exasperating wife of Alan Titus.
I’ve enjoyed these streamed recitals, warts and all, and always appreciate the chance to watch performers let their hair down, so to speak.
The great Dalai Lama once said, “whenever there is a challenge, there is also an opportunity to face it, to demonstrate and develop our will and determination.”
Trove Thursday celebrates Christa Ludwig with live excerpts from 1955 through 1982.
Franco Corelli was born on April 8, 1921 in Ancona and Trove Thursday celebrates the matinee-idol tenor’s centenary with a pair of his rare non-Met US appearances; seducing Marie Collier in La Fanciulla del West and vacillating between Ilva Ligabue and Grace Bumbry in Il Trovatore.
Trove Thursday offers Offenbach’s delightful La Grande-duchesse de Gérolstein featuring Jennie Tourel, Laurel Hurley and Martial Singher, led by Arnold Gamson.
Now, through the auspices of the Metropolitan Opera, we have Sonya Yoncheva—and if anything, the diva-dom has been kicked up a notch!
Diana Damrau and Joseph Calleja presented an uneven program in a lavish setting this weekend in the most recent entry in the Met’s concert series.
Nathan Hull was an operatic Quixote who did not go it alone, but inspired bands of optimists, giving proper employment to the many worthy New Yorkers mad enough to study voice and pleasure rare elsewhere to those of us thrilled to take it in.
My first exposure to Lucia di Lammermoor came under the auspices of The Three Stooges.
Starring Anita Hartig, Anita Rachvelishvili, Aleksandrs Antonenko and Ildar Abdrazakov; conducted by Pablo Heras-Casado. Transmitted live on November 1, 2014.
This video recording of Il trovatore is sensational for all the right and wrong reasons simultaneously.
Trove Thursday offers a problematic yet fascinating work that would almost certainly not be staged today: Il Guarany by Carlos Gomes featuring João Gibin, Gianna d’Angelo, Piero Cappuccilli and Nicola Zaccaria.
Two of the leading postwar Czech sopranos appear together in Janacek’s Kát’a Kabanová when Trove Thursday presents Gabriela Benacková‘s gleaming heroine in her US debut relentlessly persecuted by Nadjezhda Kniplová’s implacable mother-in-law.
With most of us dug in for the duration, there’s no better time to tuck into a CD box set of neglected treasures. Not that I needed an excuse, mind you.
Who could doubt that Leontyne Price contains multitudes?
It was love at first hearing. The music was glorious, the conducting bouncy and pointed, and the singers sure sounded terrific to me.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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