Back to Rameau again this week with Samson at the Opéra Comique, my third Rameau production in as little as three months, after Les Fêtes d’Hébé in the same house, and Castor et Pollux at the Palais Garnier.
When the birthdays start to pile up in the double digits in big round numbers, you start to examine your past and review what you have done with your life.
For those who complain (not entirely unfairly) that Handel operas are “just a string of da capo arias,” I sometimes mutter to myself, “Have they ever tried Rameau?”
Next Wednesday is the composer’s 337th birthday, so Trove Thursday previews this spring’s most enticing Handel performance with two very different live versions of his delightful Serse,.
Trove Thursday celebrates Pride with a Bible-based homoerotic sort-of opera not by the guy who wrote “Depuis le jour”: Charpentier’s David et Jonathas with Mark Padmore, Laurent Naouri and Jaël Azzaretti led by Emmanuelle Haïm.
As Phaedra’s tragic, all-consuming passion for her stepson Hippolytus has fascinated artists for centuries, Trove Thursday offers two of its lesser-known musical settings: Pizzetti’s opera Fedra with Régine Crespin and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson performing the cantata Phaedra, Britten’s final vocal work.
The Paris Opera assembled an all-French cast to stage arguably the most well-known example of opéra-ballet, Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes.
The most disappointing performance in 30 otherwise glorious years of William Christie and Les Arts Florissants visiting New York City.
“The heavens are telling” begins the famous chorus that ends the first section of The Creation.
Sometimes the fates conspire, preventing an artist from recording the role for which he is his generation’s touchstone.
I had my head in my hands groaning in disbelief instead of joining in the general applause around me.
On Saturday Juilliard 415 welcomed the sterling 10-member Belgian group Vox Luminis for a striking program of “Handel in Rome.”
“Trove Thursday” presents Altre Stelle, a fascinating performance piece which includes superb renditions of excerpts from operas by Berlioz, Cherubini, Gluck and Rameau.
This Sunday marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson from breast cancer.
Jean-Philippe Rameau was nearly 80 when he composed his final masterpiece Les Boréades, but it had to wait over 200 years to reach the stage.
When LaCieca asked me to choose my favorite live recording, I had to think… and think.
What must have raced through the mind of the none-too-comely Spanish Infanta when she learned that the opera to be performed during the celebrations for her 1745 wedding to the French Dauphin revolved around the comeuppance of an ugly yet vain water nymph tricked into believing Jupiter was her ardent suitor?
The New Year’s Eve gala at the Met ushering out 2011 was the world premiere of the much-anticipated mash-up The Enchanted Island AKA “baroque opera for those who hate (or at least don’t know) baroque opera.
Despite baby-steps over the years, America’s musical scene, especially opera, remains decidedly un-HIP. (HIP: “historically-informed performance,” also called “period performance.”) While European opera houses turn increasingly to “original instrument” orchestras and specialist singers for seventeenth and eighteenth century works, this rarely occurs in the US.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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