Dad, I’m seria
Sir Simon Rattle and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra strike (almost) all the right notes in their new recording of Mozart’s Idomeneo.
Lucio Silla
24 pieces since 2007.
24
pieces
20
years
It’ll all be Auger
A perfect meeting of voice with composer occurred when Arleen Auger took part in the rediscovery of early works by Mozart.
Queen’s evidence
Trove Thursday’s belated contribution to last weekend’s Platinum Jubilee is a broadcast from Aldeburgh of Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana with Christine Brewer and Tom Randle as Elizabeth and Essex, an opera which premiered 69 years ago yesterday.
Quicksilver princess
Trove Thursday remembers Edita Gruberová with live recordings of two of the three operas I heard her perform at the Met: a 1985 Munich La Traviata with Neil Shicoff and Wolfgang Brendel conducted by Carlos Kleiber and an I Puritani from Vienna 1994 featuring two other artists who recently left us too soon: Marcello Giordani and Dmitri Hvorostovsky.
The boys from Syracuse
Trove Thursday begins February with two striking versions of Rossini’s Tancredi.
Holding out for a hero
Trove Thursday finally welcomes Wagner’s Lohengrin arriving in a concert performance conducted by Georg Solti with Siegfried Jerusalem, Julia Varady, Eva Randová, Hermann Becht, Hans Sotin and Wolfgang Schöne.
Love, loss, and what I sang
Sunday is Handel’s 335th birthday, an event Trove Thursday celebrates with Rodelinda, Regina de’Longobardi, one of the composer’s most popular works.
Mithridates is dead
Trove Thursday marks Mozart’s 264th birthday on Sunday with the 14-year-old’s remarkable opera seria Mitridate, Re di Ponto .
When in Rome
Mozart was barely sixteen when he wrote Lucio Silla to open the Carnival in Milan in 1772.
Prodigy
Maria Callas’s most outstanding Adalgisa, out of all she partnered with, was Fiorenza Cossotto.
Königin of Mozart
The third installment of my 50th anniversary tribute to Edita Gruberova was impossible to narrow down to one selection.
Over the garden wall
Renée Fleming makes her belated “Trove Thursday” debut as Sandrina in a rare early performance of Mozart’s La Finta Giardiniera.
Stage struck
“Trove Thursday” presents a performance from 40 years ago: an inspired Renata Scotto as Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur.
Drunk in both head and heart
This week’s “Trove Thursday” offers Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice featuring Anthony Rolfe Johnson.
While you were sheeping
To mark Mozart’s 260th birthday tomorrow, “Trove Thursday” offers his infrequently performed bucolic opera Il Re Pastore with the sublime Arleen Augér as its heroine and Edith Mathis as her shepherd-lover.
Ezio said than done
Ezio was an inspired choice for Boston’s feisty Odyssey Opera to open its “When In Rome” festival.
All about my mother
On her 90th birthday “Trove Thursday” presents the late great Belgian mezzo Rita Gorr parenting Régine Crespin in Massenet’s Hérodiade.
The lady or the Tiber
On his 86th birthday last month, the great Austrian conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt announced his retirement.
Martyr system
William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants made a much-anticipated appearance at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival Saturday performing Theodora.
A passel of pirates
Many live treasures (and some duds) began to take up more and more space—first in my dorm room, then in my first little studio apartment thanks to a group of quite special men, none of whom I ever met face to face.
Words and music
As is happening increasingly in opera productions today (e.g., the Rosenkavalier in Stuttgart), the action of Moses und Aron at the Komische Oper begins some minutes before the music does.
Just my Gluck
For all his historical importance Christoph Willibald Gluck remains one of the least known and performed of the great opera composers.
Rock stars
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?
Barenboim sings again!
Introducting a new guest critic, Giulia Grisi, who blogs regularly for “Il Corriere della Grisi.” La Scala’s 2007-8 opera season opened last night (December 7) with a new production of Tristan und Isolde. The Milanese theatre hadn’t presented Wagner’s masterpiece since 1978, when Carlos Kleiber‘s masterful interpretation became an instant classic, in spite of a […]
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!
