A Countertenor Cabaret, starred no fewer than 14 of these once-rare songbirds, in the cabaret space of the Duplex on Sheridan Square.
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.
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.”
Three nights, three concert halls, and three incredibly diverse programmes.
Once upon a time, a man and a woman met. He could sing, she could sing. They fell in love, got married, and became a power couple to rival Billary.
I suspect most New York City opera-lovers had long since given up hope that the fascinating soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci would ever return to their city.
La Salustia was Giovanni Batista Pergolesi’s first opera, composed at the tender age of 21. In structure and storyline it’s a conventional baroque opera seria.
That’s what it must have been like in 1726 London when Handel composed Alessandro for perhaps the three most famous (and expensive) singers of the day.
Cecilia Bartoli and Joyce DiDonato are not the only ladies who have recorded recitals this year featuring music from the 17th and 18th centuries.
Natalie Dessay coyly bares a breast on the cover of Virgin Classics’ new Giulio Cesare.
When Giuseppe Filianoti isn’t busy being one of the world’s more versatile tenors, he plays detective.
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.
For all his historical importance Christoph Willibald Gluck remains one of the least known and performed of the great opera composers.
The Underworld as corporate boardroom, Pluto a “suit,” the damned a bunch of clerks tapping away at laptops.
Giovanni Simone Mayr was one of the most important musical figures of his day, a man Rossini referred to as the “father of Italian opera” whom Napoleon personally lobbied to come work in Paris. Though he wrote nearly 70 operas and taught Donizetti and Bellini, the Bavarian-born composer had the misfortune of hitting his peak…
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…
Long ago, in a galaxy far away – I mean, the era before supertitles became common in opera houses around the world – you could always tell the text-mad opera fan. He was the one who arrived early to the theater and spent the remaining minutes to curtain hunched over his libretto booklet, trying to…
To be, or not to be? This is the question. But for the producers of opera on DVD, the question is really, to be an opera or to be a film. The producers of the 1991 DVD of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito as produced by Glyndebourne that same year seemed to have been sitting…
Our Own Sanford reports from this afternoon’s National Council Grand Finals Concert at the Met. First things first: No hunkentenors, but Edward Parks is a barihunk, and Christopher Magiera is almost a barihunk. Now to the important stuff. There were nine singers in the final, and I would say that 10 of them deserved to…
The fascinating and unconventional artist Lorraine Hunt Lieberson died yesterday at her home in Santa Fe. We in New York heard her only infrequently in opera, most recently in Serse and La clemenza di Tito at the NYCO and Les Troyens at the Met. She was scheduled to sing Orfeo in a new production of…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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