The annual Richard Tucker Gala is probably the event of the year to indulge your love of verismo staples and can belto screaming.
This “new-to-Chicago” production is a sheer pleasure from beginning to end.
It seems almost comical to think now but the designer-director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, who died in 1988, was at one time considered the height of regie-theatre scandal.
New York City isn’t a bad place to live, operatically-speaking.
My memory is fading but the events I recall most vividly of the last season seem largely to have been concert performances.
A production as delectable as the current one (through Sunday) at the Juilliard Opera will make you wonder why Il Turco is not as well known as L’Italiana, Il Barbiere, La Cenerentola, even the odd and occasional Il Viaggio a Rheims.
A young friend messaged me to ask if I knew Rossini’s Macbeth.
Kitsch is alive and well in Rossini’s La Cenerentola at the War Memorial.
The legions of New York opera buffs who now can’t talk about anything but Javier Camarena will be happy to know that there’s now a DVD release
of their new favorite tenor in Rossini’s Le Comte Ory available.
Joyce, Javier and now Julia—this week these three remarkable Js brought New York City memorable “Cinderella stories.”
The Met stage was filled with considerable magic Monday night when its dizzily effervescent revival of La Cenerentola starring Joyce DiDonato and Javier Camarena stirred a bewitched audience to some of the most ecstatic ovations heard this season.
I think we’re all aware by now of the wicked libel that the French dramatist Victor Hugo concocted about the fair Lucrezia Borgia with his depiction of her as a murderous virago.
For better or worse, Decca’s new Norma recording
will ultimately be embraced—or dismissed—by those reacting directly to Cecilia Bartoli’s controversial portrayal.
Beethoven expressed it best when he reportedly threw Rossini shade: “Any other other style than opera buffa would do violence to your nature.”
The Underworld as corporate boardroom, Pluto a “suit,” the damned a bunch of clerks tapping away at laptops.
Few singers today cause me as much consternation as Vivica Genaux.
While major stars like René Pape and Piotr Beczala had to wait until they were over 40 to record a solo aria CD, Julia Lezhneva has just done her first—and she’s only twenty-one! After a drought, CD companies are issuing a surprising number of debut recitals; Nino Machaidze, Olga Peretyatko, Mojca Erdmann, and Aleksandra Kurzak…
The cover of Joyce Di Donato’s third recital disc Diva, Divo immediately tells the listener that either the famed mezzo (along with the Orchestre et Choeur de L’Opera National de Lyon under Kazushi Ono) has decided to release a recording of music from Victor/Victoria, or her new CD will feature her performing arias as male…
And now, cher public, let’s put today’s singers, the Contemporary Divas, under the microscope. How do they stack up?
I have to confess to a certain bias: I adore Rossini’s music. Barber was the first album I ever bought, and fittingly, the first opera I ever sang. Rossini was an astonishingly prolific composer, writing more than thirty-five operas, as well as numerous secular and sacred choral works, songs, and chamber music.
1817 was a fertile and diverse time for 26 year old Gioachino Rossini. It opened with his last true opera buffa, La Cenerentola, continued with his most important semiseria, La gazza ladra, and ended with two operas, which, although both nominally belonging to the seria genre, could not be more different from each other.
Our Own Gualtier Maldè (right) escaped today’s Armida dress rehearsal at the Met with his wits intact. He reports:
Let me take you back, Parterreians, to the spring of 2009. Shortly before the Met’s new La sonnambula opened, murmurings began to be heard, rumors began to circulate. After the open dress rehearsal, reports were filed as opera fans looked on in horror. At the première, a shell-shocked audience rained down boos on the production…
It took the Metropolitan Opera decades to catch up with the rest of the world and finally stage La Cenerentola. Gioachino Rossini’s opera buffa, one of his most beloved and accomplished works, received its belated Met debut in 1997, amidst legitimate suspicions that the new production was less a genuine desire to add a belcanto…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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