Puccini’s Girl closes out the 20th century and gallops into the 21st.
>Verdi’s marvelous yet neglected Luisa Miller finally returns to the Met later this month after an absence of a dozen years so “Trove Thursday” provides a preview.
The Summer of 1983 is when “it” happened.
Usually the longer I know a work the more I look forward to rediscovering it, but that’s just not the case with the Verdi Requiem.
Ali Baba ou Les Quarantes Voleurs continues straight-tone September with Teresa Stich-Randall as its heroine while Alfredo Kraus scales the heights with another Nadir.
You’d think by now I’d know better than to make snap judgments about an opera or a singer—but apparently not.
Diana Damrau has chosen for her new Erato recital disc Grand Opera 11 high-flying showpieces from ten operas by Giacomo Meyerbeer.
A brilliant production of La Juive like that of Peter Konwitschny generalizes the message that mindless hate does not pay and the mindless mob is always the enemy of civilization.
On her 90th birthday “Trove Thursday” presents the late great Belgian mezzo Rita Gorr parenting Régine Crespin in Massenet’s Hérodiade.
Between them, Maria Guleghina, Marcello Giordani, James Morris and John Del Carlo have nearly 150 combined years of service on stage.
In New York, tradition insists, there are no limits to where a preposterous idea, talent and relentless determination will take you, in defiance of all the odds.
A Birnam Wood of Macbeths and Ladys has come traipsing through New York this year.
Despite the continued popularity of Der Freischütz in German-speaking countries, are the magical mature operas of Carl Maria von Weber otherwise really so problematic, their libretti so unwieldy to explain their continued absence from the world’s stages?
Sergey Taneyev, pupil of Tchaikovsky and teacher of Scriabin and Rachmaninov, composed just one opera, Oresteia, premiered in 1895 when he was 39.
Love grand opera but wary of a six o’clock curtain with five hours of music behind it? (And nothing is grander than Berlioz’s Les Troyens, eh?) Your dilemma has been solved. Show up at the Met at 7:30 or 8:00, whenever they have the first intermission.
By the time Rossini was 20, he had produced six operas, most of them brief, comic and slight. He admitted to admiring Mozart (not then well known south of the Alps), but the melodies of his early works show more of the influence of Paisiello.
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…
Trying to suggest erstwhile world-renown of Guillaume Tell to a 23-year-old who had never heard of it, a friend of mine mentioned The Lone Ranger. “What’s The Lone Ranger?” replied the youth. And the sun rises and the sun sets and all things must pass. But surely he knew Bambi Meets Godzilla, which also uses…
As part of the massive CD/DVD release celebrating the 40th Anniversary of James Levine at the Met, “In Concert at the Met, 1982-83” offers generous excerpts from three memorable Gala Concerts: from February 1982, Troyanos-Domingo-Levine; from March 1982, Price-Horne-Levine; and from January 1983, Domingo-Milnes-Levine. I had the pleasure of being in the house for each…
Asking New Yorkers to travel two hours to the remote but beautiful campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson River Valley to see an opera can be like asking them to cross the Sahara. Yet if there is any opera I would put my life at risk to see again, it just might be…
What impressed La Cieca at the Caramoor concert of Semiramide on Friday was not so much the quality of the performance (though that was on a solidly high level) but the magnificence of the work itself. This magnificence stands out now in even greater relief after the comparison with Les Huguenots later in the weekend.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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