Coming as Peter Gelb did from the music industry, opera lovers hoped that he would display a more distinctive knack for casting and an improved talent pipeline than Joe Volpe offered during the waning years of his tenure.
As someone who thinks Verdi is the greatest composer who ever lived and who feels pretty meh about Mozart, I expected to love the Verdi and be bored by the Mozart. I wasn’t far wrong.
Oh, we’ve a veritable stew of canards to feast upon this week, cher public, courtesy of our old friend Rupert Christiansen.
Each year, Leon Botstein leads the American Symphony Orchestra in a concert opera or two.
An impresario with a hit on his hands—Emanuel Schikaneder, for instance, after the initial run of Die Zauberflöte—will crave nothing so much as an opportunity to hit the same bell.
It’s hard to come up with any sensible reason to dislike Joyce DiDonato.
After the success of its Don Giovanni in 2011, Lincoln Center invited Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra to return for the Mostly Mozart Festival premiere (!) of the first of Mozart-da Ponte’s three masterpieces Le Nozze di Figaro late Sunday afternoon at the Rose Theater.
When people talk about an opera “production,” they tend to mean “the sets and costumes,” that is, the physical production.
Morningside Opera’s ¡Figaro! (90210) is a staging/translation (into English, Spanish, et al.) of Le Nozze as if in contemporary Beverly Hills (as if!), and it’s playing at the NSD Theater on Bank Street near the Meatpacking District through next Sunday.
On this, the occasion of her 37th birthday [see below], La Cieca is happy to repeat the story of how she came to be born (as first told in the pages of parterre box, issue #28.
So, Piotr Beczala (left) has gone and blabbed to Luister, which is some sort of Dutch glossy classical music magazine…
The performance at the Metropolitan Opera last night proved that yes, it is possible to kill this opera. I don’t know how they managed it, but they did.
Richard Strauss’s “last romantic opera,” as he called Die Frau Ohne Schatten, is and has always been a problem child.
Kate Royal withdrew as Mozart’s Contessa the other night (May 3) in Munich and we were forced to accept as substitute—gosh!—Anja Harteros
I could feel my face (to say nothing of my spirits) sink as I opened an envelope from La Cieca containing a new Decca CD
to review.
If the Arthaus Musik release of Le nozze di Figaro from La Scala feels like a slouchy revival pulled haphazardly from the video vault, the singers are certainly not at fault. Ildebrando D’Arcangelo and Diana Damrau, starring as Figaro and Susanna, are bankable stars who live up to the hype. At the podium, Gérard Korsten…
I’ve been a big fan of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena since I first heard it on recording and have always felt that it deserved a definitive recorded performance. Here’s a brief tour of why this hasn’t happened. There’s the Bible, also known as the live Scala relay with Callas and Simionato and musical cuts so egregious…
When Mojca Erdmann’s new debut CD for Deutsche Grammophon was reviewed in the September issue of Opera News, the disc’s cover art showed the lissome German soprano in a thin, revealing white dress, lying on a bed of roses. The album was then called Mostly Mozart. When that review questioned the titling, DG must have…
“Gioia!” is the title of Aleksandra Kurzak‘s debut aria recital, her first international release under a new exclusive contract with Decca Music Group, and—not surprisingly—this writer’s response to the soprano’s sparkling vocalism. In the liner notes, the Polish soprano explains that the title of this recording was her agent’s suggestion: “He said that he can…
An aged Giacomo Casanova, forgotten and bored with life’s prospects, has decided to kill himself. This man, who has always lived according to the liberties of his chemical attractions, allowed himself to be ruled by Nature, now at the end attempts to assert control. But Nature, too crafty to be denied, holds him back from…
Handel’s Orlando is one of three operas Handel based on episodes from Ariosto’s best-selling sixteenth-century epic, Orlando Furioso. The story was, in 1733, well known throughout the Mediterranean world, and everyone set it to music—Vivaldi’s and Haydn’s settings have enjoyed recent revivals, and the libretto Handel set had originally been devised for Domenico Scarlatti. Intricate…
When sending out CDs to for me to review, our doyenne could not know that I have a fetish for 1950s vintage import LP jackets. I remember combing through the LP bins gazing admiringly at the import disks of a generation of middle-European singers who I was too young to have heard in person, who…
Scanning this summer’s Mostly Mozart schedule one wondered if New York really needed another Don Giovanni right now? And one with a non-starry cast where the best-known name was the Commendatore, Kristinn Sigmundsson?
Sony Masterworks has released on CD
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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