Robust possibilities
After success at the Met as Turandot and before a historic Medea, soprano Anna Pirozzi talks to Harry Rose about her voice, her repertoire, and where her “second explosion of career” is taking her.
Oberon
21 pieces since 2011.
21
pieces
16
years
Oberon
Mark Elder conducts a performance of Weber's opera live from the Royal Albert Hall
Streamed August 6, 2026 at 2:00 PM
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A matinée, a Pinto play
Perhaps a piece of Mahler’s? For Wagner Month, Chris’s Cache offers the unexpected collaboration Die drei Pintos, started by Wagner-predecessor Carl Maria von Weber and completed by one of Wagner’s followers, Gustav Mahler
Act III at last
John Yohalem reports from the New York Dramatic Voices performance of Act III of Die Walküre
The boys from Syracuse
Trove Thursday begins February with two striking versions of Rossini’s Tancredi.
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.
Fairies at the bottom of our Wagner
Ordinarily we’d be listening to Bayreuth Festival broadcasts this week but instead Trove Thursday steps up with a true Wagner rarity: Die Feen from the Wiener Staatsoper starring as Ada, the fairy in love with a mortal, Gundula Janowitz, who turns 83 on Sunday.
Thou mighty monstre sacré
Trove Thursday relishes neglected works, operas in translation and irreplaceable divas, and this week it presents a pair that embody all three affections: Cherubini’s Les Abencérages and Weber’s Oberon in Italian with the glorious Anita Cerquetti, conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini and Vittorio Gui respectively.
Faust class
Michael Spyres as Faust, despite a few flickers of indisposition, was nearly ideal.
Keeper of the flame
Elina Garanca’s glorious Marguerite transformed La Damnation de Faust into the Met’s first essential must-see of the year.
Silver lining
On this day in 1975 soprano Roberta Peters celebrated the 25th anniversary of her Metropolitan Opera debut, singing Despina.
Lone, wild, and strange
Trove Thursday presents Michael Fabiano in one of his specialties as the dashing hero of Il Corsaro torn between Tamara Wilson and Nicole Cabell.
Mr. Fabulous
Michael Fabiano is a boss. This is a fact.
Human, all too human
Siegfried is, in a sense, The Ring’s odd one out.
Abendstern
“Trove Thursday” celebrates the thrilling Finnish soprano Karita Matilla in the ultimate diva role.
Tomb service
An outstanding performance of Weber’s Euryanthe to share on “Trove Thursday.”
Embroidered silk
Maria Agresta‘s delicately-acted, sumptuously-sung seamstress transformed what might have been just an average Wednesday night revival into something finer.
Tomb raider
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?
Captivating in Babylon
Verdi’s first operatic masterpiece is well served by this DVD
of a performance from the Teatro Regio di Parma.
First steps
There’s something charming and almost irresistible about early Verdi opera. I always equate it to seeing a grade school test from Albert Einstein.
One more “Kiss”
The Poisoned Kiss derives its plot from the legend of the girl raised on poison so that her very kiss will kill.
Sail, away
Sir Arthur Sullivan, the son of an Irish father and an Italian mother, studied Mendelssohn’s composition style in Leipzig. He was therefore, inevitably, the supreme English theater composer of his day, and his often Mozartean style of melody is not out of place in a bel canto festival. After all, in the fourteen operettas he […]
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!
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).
