“Trove Thursday” leaps to the end of the cycle with a slightly abridged Götterdämmerung featuring Amy Shuard as Brünnhilde.
Helga Dernesch is the singer whom I largely credit for rekindling my love for opera.
Academy of Vocal Arts’ Rusalka—surprisingly, only their second venture in many years into the Slavic repertoire—left a divided impression.
No other singer of Die Amme approaches the towering standard set by the German mezzo Tanja Ariane Baumgartner.
Riccardo Chailly’s appointment as La Scala’s new music director was news that I greeted with enthusiasm when first announced in 2013.
The New Camerata Opera performs a double bill of John Blow’s Venus and Adonis, sometimes dubbed the first English opera, and Gustav Holst’s Savitri.
Director David Pountney and his splendid designers have brought Lyric Opera of Chicago a visually spectacular Siegfried full of daring ideas.
I count myself as privileged to have witnessed Götterdämmerungat the Royal Opera House during this season’s revival of Keith Warner’s Ring.
This Sony Classical set of live performances covers a golden quarter century in the singing and staging of Wagner. Birgit Nilsson shared it with many other legends, and many of them appear on these discs.
Lightning struck again here when, after a wait of 39 years, San Francisco Opera unveiled a new production of Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux.
As Brünnhilde invokes the gods of an empty Valhalla for one last time and strides confidently into a wall of flame, we pause for a moment, unsure of what will follow.
Siegfried is, in a sense, The Ring’s odd one out.
If Das Rheingold is an opera about infinitude, the illusory idea that the world is large enough to satisfy all of our desires, passions, and lusts, Die Walküre is an opera about scarcity.
“Trove Thursday” turns for the third of Verdi’s four Schiller adaptations to a recent I Masnadieri with risen stars Lisette Oropesa and Russell Thomas.
A very particular tension—between angry political resistance and gloriously sex-positive, buoyantly confidant celebration of queerness—fuels the immense energy of Taylor Mac’s A 24-Hour Decade History of Popular Music.
Next, I asked Marko Mimica which basses he prefers to listen to on recordings.
On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of your birth, I am perplexed as to what to write about you that isn’t of the highest, most ecstatic praise and of deliriously effusive encomiums.
“Trove Thursday” presents a live Tristan 2 concert featuring one of my favorite dramatic sopranos. Gertrude Grob-Prandl.
Christine Goerke‘s puzzling high register has become an increasingly troubling aspect of her singing. One just never knew what was going to come out from one moment to the next.
I struggle to articulate the notion of an erotics of art.
On this day in 1957 soprano Martha Mödl made her Metropolitan Opera debut as the Siegfried Brunnhilde.
Even those of us who consider Guillaume Tell Rossini’s greatest opera understand why it has not been his most frequently staged.
It’s a fairly traditional post-Patrice-Chereau Ring, set during the Industrial Revolution.
The second installment of Lyric’s Ring Cycle proved an evening of glorious singing, moving drama, great conducting and orchestral playing.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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