A starry (and potentially annual) Christmas gala lights up Carnegie Hall.
Pacific Opera Project’s high-spirited revival of Fra Diavolo is both therapy and an escape.
A brilliant L’italiana in Algeri in Rome has Larry Wolff once again thinking about “singing Turks”
John Yohalem reports from the New York Dramatic Voices performance of Act III of Die Walküre
Chris’s Cache celebrates Ewa Podles‘s long connection with Handel by featuring her in three complete, decidedly un-HIP operas spanning over twenty years
Trove Thursday previews next week’s BBC Proms presentation of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius with a 2008 broadcast conducted by Colin Davis with Sarah Connolly, Ben Heppner and Gerald Finley.
The only correct version of Don Carlos must be in French. That is the language that Verdi composed it in and he made all his revisions in that language.
From an exposure standpoint, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the best thing to happen to opera since Beverly Sills.
In an era when the Metropolitan Opera cannot cast an Aida, Trovatore or Forza consistently, New Amsterdam Opera managed to cast large, attractive and fully technically capable voices in all the cruelly demanding principal roles in I Vespri Siciliani!
Lawrence Brownlee and Michael Spyres are two singers at the top of their game, as this concert showed, virtually peerless in music as punishing as it is pretty.
While the Met reruns over-familiar HDs, Trove Thursday offers a Puccini rarity: Edgar, the composer’s second opera, starring Latonia Moore and Marcello Giordani.
Trove Thursday relishes neglected works, operas in translation and irreplaceable divas, and this week it presents a pair that embody all three affections: Cherubini’s Les Abencérages and Weber’s Oberon in Italian with the glorious Anita Cerquetti, conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini and Vittorio Gui respectively.
Many now have scads more time for listening so Trove Thursday will offer several epic operas during May beginning with Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (this week aka Guglielmo Tell) in a concert performance featuring Giuseppe Taddei in the title role and Teresa Zylis-Gara and Franco Bonisolli as the war-crossed lovers.
Michael Spyres as Faust, despite a few flickers of indisposition, was nearly ideal.
Elina Garanca’s glorious Marguerite transformed La Damnation de Faust into the Met’s first essential must-see of the year.
Amore Opera, an old-fashioned, adventurous little company that performs ambitious and sometimes delectably obscure but worthy repertory at the Riverside Theatre, is now (through Sunday) presenting Un ballo in maschera.
As opera’s reigning tenor-superstar, Jonas Kaufmann can pretty much do whatever he wants and a sizable adoring public will lap it up.
This week’s star-spangled “Trove Thursday” offers the second crazy-quilt installment of divas in the wrong language.
Trove Thursday wades into the murky musicological waters of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann..
Next, I asked Marko Mimica which basses he prefers to listen to on recordings.
Even those of us who consider Guillaume Tell Rossini’s greatest opera understand why it has not been his most frequently staged.
Psychology is encoded in the composer’s vocal lines more than his librettist’s words.
Diana Damrau has chosen for her new Erato recital disc Grand Opera 11 high-flying showpieces from ten operas by Giacomo Meyerbeer.
A brilliant production of La Juive like that of Peter Konwitschny generalizes the message that mindless hate does not pay and the mindless mob is always the enemy of civilization.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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