Elsa Dreisig, Jonas Kaufmann, and Malin Byström lead recent album releases.
Christof Loy’s production of Pablo Luna’s gender-bending Orientalist farce Benamor proves to be irresistible.
A stark, sweltering performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk shocks the Komische Oper Berlin.
What better sentiment can we embrace as the year ends then to hope, often against against hope, for peace and love in a world of chaos?
A starry (and potentially annual) Christmas gala lights up Carnegie Hall.
Jacquelyn Stucker talks to Kevin Ng about repertoire, tearing down the Fach system, and what it takes to make music from baroque to George Benjamin her own.
I so don’t get why any company in the Anglophone world ever bothers to perform Continental operetta in English.
Despite not being very happy with the state of the world (and the union) and not looking forward to the New Year, this past December I took in many festive holiday offerings including a pair of oratorios.
Operettas always seem to be on the menu for New Year’s Eve, so Chris’s Cache joins in with a broadcast of Offenbach’s delicious La Grande-duchesse de Gérolstein featuring Stephanie Blythe in the title role.
Rachel Willis-Sørensen might be the greatest American soprano right now who doesn’t sing much in America.
parterre box is excited to present again Mike Richter’s collection of recordings of Rose Ader along with this biographical tribute in honor of a significant artist whose Jewish identity perhaps prevented her from achieving the renown she deserved
Today’s Chris’s Cache features live recordings of Otello most noteworthy for their Desdemonas: (in chronological order) Teresa Stratas, Julia Varady, Eva Marton and Karita Mattila.
It’s nice to see Sony Classical backing a serious operatic soprano and not some crossover refugee from Britain’s Got Talent or another syrupy Christmas album from the world’s reigning Heldentenor.
Jordi Savall and William Christie, 80 and 77 respectively, stand as the two senior masters whose recordings and appearances have done the most over the past decades to build a healthy local enthusiasm for pre-Classical music.
Un ballo in maschera—but instead of a tragedy, an opera buffa—and in Danish?
Part vaudeville, part opera concert and part drag ball, Heartbeat Opera’s pageant was like a cup of eggnog spiked with a dash of LSD.
American soprano Gianna Rolandi died Sunday morning, according to a number of her friends and colleagues. She was 68.
The Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions were one of the last events I attended in person in 2020. Now, one year on, the competition has returned, this time in an online format, and this time with an entirely new name: The Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition, after the event’s new sponsors.
During the 70s, Kiri Te Kanawa, particularly singing Mozart, became one of my favorite singers.
Trove Thursday follows tradition and bids farewell to 2020 with an operetta: Lehár’s Die Lustige Witwe starring Edda Moser as a most commanding Hanna Glawari!
A recent discussion here about Gianna Rolandi prompts Trove Thursday to present the American soprano in a rare trouser role in an even rarer opera, Cimarosa’s Gli Orazi e I Curiazi paired with Anna Caterina Antonacci.
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.
Trove Thursday goes mini-epic with Gustave Charpentier’s naturalistic slice-of-life of fin-de-siêcle Paris in a rare 1999 Renée Fleming performance of Louise co-starring Jerry Hadley, Samuel Ramey and Felicity Palmer.
Brigitte Fassbaender‘s sound is piquant and, I’d hazard to guess, instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with her work.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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