Elina Garanca was radiantly present at Carnegie Hall Friday night performing a ravishingly somber Rückert-Lieder with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the MET Orchestra.
Christian Thielemann is widely regarded as our time’s preeminent master of the Austro-German symphonic ensemble.
For opening night 2018, the Met offered the creaky but appealing biblical epic Samson et Dalila, presumably as a vehicle for Elina Garanca and Roberto Alagna.
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.”
This week’s star-spangled “Trove Thursday” offers the second crazy-quilt installment of divas in the wrong language.
“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.
Next, I asked Marko Mimica which basses he prefers to listen to on recordings.
Maria Callas’s most outstanding Adalgisa, out of all she partnered with, was Fiorenza Cossotto.
Psychology is encoded in the composer’s vocal lines more than his librettist’s words.
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.
Endlessly extricating her from existing contracts then negotiating new ones must make being Sonya Yoncheva’s manager the hardest job in the music business.
“Take a good deal of trouble with it, because it is a fine subject, delicate and full of pathos.”
The Teatro di San Carlo in Naples is a pearl itself and this presentation proffers some of the best that company has to offer.
“Has anyone ever seen a truly great production of this opera?”
The grand illusion is that we know it all. From four hundred years of opera, we’ve distilled the worthy survivors.
Mounting Verdi’s French grand operas in their original language is no longer as unusual as it once was.
Saturday evening conductor Will Crutchfield revived Donizetti’s La Favorite—unheard in New York for fifteen years.
Celebrating Simon Keenlyside, the most popular artist on your alte Jungfer’s Mixcloud Web site.
Imagine two tenors releasing French opera aria collections at the same time without duplicating a single track!
One of the late Mike Richter‘s most endearing traits was his fascination with rare or downright offbeat recordings, such as this complete 1963 performance of Verdi’s Don Carlos in Russian by artists of the Bolshoi.
Short answer: yes. But let’s begin by dismissing the a blatant canard. One thing that the Metropolitan Opera does not need to do is to scale back the number of performances in a season.
Well, my dears, if you thought Frank Castorf‘s Ring or Stefan Herheim‘s Meistersinger were outré, then wait until you get a load of the radical take on Don Carlos by Peter Stein for the Salzburg Festival!
Giuseppe and I have always had a complicated relationship.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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