Iris, hence away
Endlessly extricating her from existing contracts then negotiating new ones must make being Sonya Yoncheva’s manager the hardest job in the music business.
L'Orfeo
37 pieces since 2007.
37
pieces
20
years
For a few dolors more
LoftOpera’s accurately but unpromisingly named Pergolesi & Vivaldi stumbled rather than soared.
No contest
Richard Wagner viewed dance as an essential element of art, though he used it sparingly in his operas.
Queen sized
The last day of December a parcel arrived in the mail containing an absolute delight: “Semiramide—La Signora Regale.” One of best vocal recordings of 2014, this sumptuous 2-CD set on Deutsche Harmonia Mundi features the marvelous Italian mezzo-soprano Anna Bonitatibus and includes 90 minutes of rarely-heard music written for the legendary Babylonian queen.
Ulysses in Midtown
In the program for Opera Omnia’s production of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno di Ulisse, Crystal Manich, the company’s stage director, speaks of producing “baroque works in non-traditional ways.”
Belief in a higher power
The behavioral phenomenon of limerence has been described as “an involuntary potentially inspiring state of adoration and attachment to a limerent object involving intrusive and obsessive thoughts, feelings and behaviors from euphoria to despair, contingent on perceived emotional reciprocation.”
Deeds of kindness to review
For decades thousands and thousands have attended Handel’s Messiah (usually around Christmas or more appropriately near Easter) making it easily one of the most widely known works of classical music.
Joy cometh in the mourning
Is the threnody, the lament over a beloved corpse, the oldest form of song? Surely it is among the oldest; one of the most widespread and stylistically various, millennia before opera was devised.
Beach, beach, beach
Here’s the thing about puns, Betsy: summer going to enjoy them and summer not.
Discounted Island
We’re going to be hearing a lot about pasticcios in the next seven months, as we run up to The Enchanted Island at the Met. We’d better get used to the idea, and what better way to do so than to go hear a home-made pasticcio at far lower prices?
Mind over Mater
It’s Holy Week (as I write) and I just received this new CD from our Doyenne. Good timing. For the concert stage (and the opera house), I think of Pergolesi as essentially a one-hit wonder (each). I won’t pretend to know his opera buffa, La Serva Padrona, let alone hide the fact that I drove right […]
Royal Hunt
Les Troyens is one of those things, or often two of those things, that should be a big event or it practically needn’t happen at all.* The keynote is grandiosity in the best way, from the subject to the musical demands (let’s include the implicit challenge of one singer performing both Cassandre and Didon—not because […]
Sweet and low
Gender-bending diseuse Zarah Leander crosses over into opera to sing “Che farò senza Euridice” in this scene the 1938 film Heimat. It may be noted that the sub-contralto Leander chooses a lower key for this aria than the written C major David Daniels will sing tomorrow night! For more about the iconic Zarah, see Ben […]
I’ll take the fall
The days are getting shorter, but you can keep the prattle going this fall’s Talk of the Town! You will, you can, you must join in the discussion about: Great mezzo soprano performances (October),
Gained in translation (November), Teleport me back to… (December).
Win a Free Ticket to Opening Night at the Met!
Quinn Kelsey and Lise Davidsen star in the Met's new Macbeth. We're giving away one ticket, so screw your courage to the sticking place and enter now!
