Sometimes when you find the club that will have you as a member, you do not easily give up your spot.
You don’t often hear the grand operas of Benjamin Britten on smaller stages.
Capriccio was a great pleasure on Friday night, March 4. This was a co-production of Opera Philadelphia and The Curtis Institute, presented in the intimate Pearlman Theater at the Kimmel Center.
The revival of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Music Center downtown, last seen at LA Opera in 2013, is reason for jubilation for everyone except perhaps the singers engaged.
Fans of divas who sing 19th and 20th century opera may find themselves searching in vain for CDs to buy with this season’s gift cards, since their idols so rarely put out solo recitals these days.
Lilith. Pandora. Circe. Salome. “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” Carmen. Brigid O’Shaughnessy: the eternal “femme fatale” still fascinates us.
With a primary color, projection-heavy English-language Magic Flute that’s going to feel like a matinee whenever you see it, the SFO season has lived up to its initial promise.
When John Adams’ A Flowering Tree had its world premiere in Vienna in 2006, critical reaction from the Austrian and German press was mixed-to-negative.
Although she began her career nearly 25 years ago recording and performing lots of baroque music, I was surprised to see German soprano Dorothea Röschmann promoted as the star attraction of an all-Purcell concert Sunday at Carnegie Hall.
A confession: I have a real love/ hate relationship with Mozart’s Die Zauberflote.
Olga Peretyatko has officially left the chorus.
Clemency tends to get a bad rap these days, as polities demand swift action by leaders whose mandates to govern are violently threatened by “terrorists.”
As someone who thinks Verdi is the greatest composer who ever lived and who feels pretty meh about Mozart, I expected to love the Verdi and be bored by the Mozart. I wasn’t far wrong.
Having recently reviewed Glass’s The Perfect American on this site and participated in spirited discussions about the film Saving Mr. Banks, it is perhaps not surprising that Walt Disney should spring to my mind as I watched the Unitel Classica video
of Die Zauberflote from the floating stage of the Bregenzer Festspiele.
An impresario with a hit on his hands—Emanuel Schikaneder, for instance, after the initial run of Die Zauberflöte—will crave nothing so much as an opportunity to hit the same bell.
This DVD
of a Diana Damrau recital (accompanied only by the harpist Xavier de Maistre) is sure to please her legions of fans.
I’ve long been a fan of Kenneth Branagh, even though this fandom feels a bit like being a camel in the desert.
East is West and West is East—the border ever less easy to fix.
American mezzo Jamie Barton, who has steadily been winning fans in the US over the past few years for her rich and nuanced singing, took the international opera world by storm last weekend by winning both the Song Prize as well as the overall prize in the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition.
For decades thousands and thousands have attended Handel’s Messiah (usually around Christmas or more appropriately near Easter) making it easily one of the most widely known works of classical music.
As if last week’s survey wasn’t enough, a few more recent diva-recital disks remain worthy of attention particularly since they arrive from five front-rank singers.
Richard Strauss’s “last romantic opera,” as he called Die Frau Ohne Schatten, is and has always been a problem child.
Reflecting my new mantra — “and would have gone on longer, had he not died” – here is The Curate’s Egg edition of the Saturday breakdown.
The Poisoned Kiss derives its plot from the legend of the girl raised on poison so that her very kiss will kill.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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