The Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions were one of the last events I attended in person in 2020. Now, one year on, the competition has returned, this time in an online format, and this time with an entirely new name: The Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition, after the event’s new sponsors.
The Met recently submitted another eye-roll inducing entry for the Woke Olympics with their Women’s History Month slate.
Now, through the auspices of the Metropolitan Opera, we have Sonya Yoncheva—and if anything, the diva-dom has been kicked up a notch!
For those pining for Puccini with the Met out of commission. Trove Thursday steps up with the composer’s brief first opera Le Villi with Krassimira Stoyanova, José Cura and Franz Grundheber, led by Simone Young.
Opera Philadelphia Channel invites viewers to revisit a 2015 production of La Traviata, captured on the Academy of Music stage, that’s notable for Lisette Oropesa’s debut as Violetta Valéry.
Performance from January 18, 2020: Karel Mark Chichon; Aleksandra Kurzak (Violetta Valéry), Dmytro Popov (Alfredo Germont), Quinn Kelsey (Giorgio Germont).
A recent discussion here about Gianna Rolandi prompts Trove Thursday to present the American soprano in a rare trouser role in an even rarer opera, Cimarosa’s Gli Orazi e I Curiazi paired with Anna Caterina Antonacci.
With La Scala’s plan to open on December 7 with a new Lucia di Lammermoor thwarted, Trove Thursday sets its Wayback Machine to nearly 50 years ago to present two of the 20th century’s greatest madwomen—Joan Sutherland and Beverly Sills—denounced by Plàcido Domingo and Alfredo Kraus respectively, with the former pair consoled by Kurt Moll‘s luxurious Raimundo.
I’ll just note that Cameron and I listened separately; we didn’t compare notes; and on our own, came up with the same list of top three singers… none of whom were among the actual winners.
“Once upon a time / Lived a foolish king. / Mocking Death, his crime, / Pure chaos he bring.”
On the 21st of this month Romanian soprano Virginia Zeani will celebrate her 95th birthday and Trove Thursday salutes her versatility with two markedly different 20th century works: Menotti’s The Consul and Mascagni’s Il Piccolo Marat, one of many collaborations with her husband Nicola Rossi-Lemeni.
Today’s offering is an electric performance of Verdi’s early potboiler Attila conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli with Nicolai Ghiaurov, Piero Cappuccilli and the weirdly exciting (or is it the other way around?) Mara Zampieri.
Trove Thursday uncovered two broadcasts of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia that share a fascinating nexus: in each an enduring superstar tenor—José Carreras/Alfredo Kraus—is poisoned by a soon-to-vanish rising-star soprano—Vasso Papantoniou/Margarita Castro-Alberty.
We can delight in films that make use of motif to give opera-lovers an extra little jiggle.
My first exposure to Lucia di Lammermoor came under the auspices of The Three Stooges.
“Dying in the third act is much more intense, as the sickness has the same symptoms as COVID-19, so suffocation, pain, agony, fever—all this must be present and real.”
What options are there for the Met and the other performing arts organizations trying to envision restarting performances in the fall?
In operatic pathology, diseases are endowed with preposterous mythological properties: they are both an emblem of desire and the punishment for desire. They are crime, confessional, and executioner all rolled into one.
With most of us dug in for the duration, there’s no better time to tuck into a CD box set of neglected treasures. Not that I needed an excuse, mind you.
While Harry Rose finishes his senior thesis on Gabriele d’Annunzio, Trove Thursday joins in his fascination with Dante’s damned adulteress with two settings (both from Amsterdam!) of Francesca da Rimini.
On this day in 1892, Adelina Patti sang her first and only performance of La traviata at the Metropolitan Opera House.
While last year’s finals were dominated by early nineteenth-century bel canto arias, this year’s finalists took on a remarkably broad range of music from a variety of repertoires.
The season’s second cast delivered a satisfying, if not transcendent, La Traviata at the Met last night as they struggled to emerge from piles of jewel tone brocade and gold filigree.
For those of you keeping track at home that’s four substitutions for three roles and the curtain hasn’t even gone up yet.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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