(A)nything (B)ut (C)armen
Calling from 2066, Brendan Latimer argues that the best way to save opera might be to just blow up the standard repertoire altogether.
Mignon
24 pieces since 2008.
24
pieces
19
years
Rubber soul
Video Artists International brings us back to a time when opera was carried over the airwaves by great voices—and a tire company.
O stars of wonder, stars of night
A starry (and potentially annual) Christmas gala lights up Carnegie Hall.
Psyché’d up
It would be difficult to find a better description for Ambroise Thomas’s newly-recovered Psyché, recently heard in a new recording from Palazzetto Bru Zane, than the one uttered by her suitors: “Charmante Psyché!”
All the fine young cannibals
Offenbach‘s Robinson Crusoé is salvaged from obscurity.
Let me change your mind about Mady Mesplé
Mady Mesplé’s voice has, sadly, become an acquired taste.
By Roger Pines
48 comments
A vision almost like a prophecy
Folks who have never attended a full-length, uncut Giacomo Meyerbeer grand opera have been known to pout and ponder: Why did the most popular opera composer of the mid-nineteenth century all but vanish from the stages of the world after a hundred years?
Grand design
Trove Thursday offers Offenbach’s delightful La Grande-duchesse de Gérolstein featuring Jennie Tourel, Laurel Hurley and Martial Singher, led by Arnold Gamson.
Nooks and crannies
Nathan Hull was an operatic Quixote who did not go it alone, but inspired bands of optimists, giving proper employment to the many worthy New Yorkers mad enough to study voice and pleasure rare elsewhere to those of us thrilled to take it in.
To love the language
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.
Silver lining
On this day in 1975 soprano Roberta Peters celebrated the 25th anniversary of her Metropolitan Opera debut, singing Despina.
Thousands cheer
Although Gustav Mahler never wrote an opera, his colossal Eighth Symphony “The Symphony of a Thousand” may give us some glimpses of what a Mahler opera might have sounded like
Minnie happy returns
Puccini’s Girl closes out the 20th century and gallops into the 21st.
More than words
This week’s star-spangled “Trove Thursday” offers the second crazy-quilt installment of divas in the wrong language.
The last ruse of summer
Flotow’s Martha, a work of 1847 that was popular around the world for a hundred years.
Woman on the verge of a repertoire breakthrough
Revive is a manifesto of sorts, declaring Elina Garanca’s intentions for the new direction in her career.
Castaway
The wonderful Spanish mezzo Teresa Berganza celebrates her 81st birthday next week and “Trove Thursday” gets the party started.
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress”
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.
Trick or trill
With help from the Met’s invaluable performance archive, here is a look back at just some of what you could have seen, and perhaps did see, on October 31st through the years at the Met.
Long ago and Farrar away
Geraldine Farrar has gone and the Gerry-flappers are disconsolate.
The Met: Can it be saved?
Short answer: yes. But let’s begin by dismissing the a blatant canard. One thing that the Metropolitan Opera does not need to do is to scale back the number of performances in a season.
Where the boys are
When Norman Lebrecht is declaring on an almost daily basis that classical music is dead, it’s perhaps heartening that four of today’s prominent tenors have recently released what might be called fluff/vanity albums.
Absolute assoluta
Only because I am a member of the You Can Never Have Too Much Callas School of Opera Listening can I recommend EMI’s new release The Callas Effect. The beautifully packaged production is the size of a small paperback book and consists of two CDs with 29 arias sung by Callas plus a new 70-minute […]
divan decadence
Our Own Gualtier Maldè reports: Not every opera has to be a masterpiece. I couldn’t subsist on a steady diet of Tristan und Isolde, Die Zauberfloete, Fidelio, plus Otello, Falstaff et al. Frankly the occasional light comic bonbon or trashy but fun melodramatic tunefest makes a nice palate cleanser. I am talking Adriana Lecouvreur, La […]
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!
