Tancredi Pasero is so noble in mien and rich-voiced here, a perfect complement to Caniglia’s earthy Leonora who honestly charts the movement from despair to fervent, transcendent faith in this duet.
As part of Bass Month at the Box, Niel Rishoi considers six versions of “Vi ravviso, o luoghi ameni” from La sonnambula for Perspectives on an Aria.
Easily the Met’s new Sonnambula, where cast and production team delivered a gorgeously sung and well thought out concept for a libretto often derided for its simplicity.
Two recent Paminas feature in concerts at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.
Rolando Villazón opens up about his production of La sonnambula, how he develops characters, and what makes opera dance.
Parterre Box features an exclusive sample of Lawrence Brownlee‘s jump-in performance in La sonnambula from this weekend
A new production of La sonnambula at the Metropolitan Opera is musically charming if dramatically confounding.
Chris’s Cache offers Nadine Sierra and Xabier Anduaga, the stars of the upcoming production of La sonnambula, in a performance of another favorite bel canto opera
La sonnambula at Teatro Nuovo overcomes uneven casting to highlight the many charms of Bellini’s bel canto masterpiece
It may be blasphemy to admit—particularly this month—but usually I can either take or leave Donizetti’s serious operas. However, I love the composer in comic mode, so Chris’s Cache runs with that sentiment in offering three recordings of Don Pasquale.
Patrick Mack looks back on “a great, nay, historic evening,” Renata Scotto‘s 1981 performance of Il trittico, now newly available on Met Opera on Demand.
In a splashy new recording of Norma, Marina Rebeka “is doing something very untoward, and it appears destructive to her voice.” It has Niel Rishoi worried.
Lisette Oropesa, a product of the Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artist Program, has not been seen much on the stage of the Met in recent seasons.
Quite simply, the singers are not around today who are steeped in the tradition of verismo, or for that matter the later part of the 19th century.
On this day in 1918 the Metropolitan Opera presented a new production of Bellini’s I puritani featuring soprano Maria Barrientos.
Chris’s Cache sends Renata Scotto a valentine ahead of her 89th birthday next week with rare in-house recordings of eight (!) mid-career performances spanning 1971-1977.
When I saw that Richard Bonynge AC CBE, conductor and musicologist supreme, had authored a book titled Chalet Monet about the home he shared with his wife, La Dame Joan Sutherland OM AC DBE, in Les Avants, Switzerland I practically had to wipe my chin.
These are my findings and opinions (and I welcome rebuttals)!
Beverly Sills and Renée Fleming perform 30 years apart the same work with the same orchestra in the same venue!
Eleanora Buratto at this fully matured point of her career has a warm, creamy full lyric soprano that has the roundness and sweet warmth of a Freni but can also expand into the spinto power of a Tebaldi.
Who’s been hiding tenor Benjamin Bernheim from me all this time?
Were Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Horne 20th century opera’s ultimate same-sex pairing?
Trove Thursday offers Offenbach’s delightful La Grande-duchesse de Gérolstein featuring Jennie Tourel, Laurel Hurley and Martial Singher, led by Arnold Gamson.
Off-and-on since last fall my PPP (Personal Pandemic Project) has been assembling a chronology of the American Opera Society. For 19 years beginning in 1951 it presented a remarkable series of concert performances of works unperformed by either the Met or New York City Opera.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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