Skirting the leafy, patrician Berkshires of Western Mass, and flush with wine coolers and white people, pastoral Tanglewood doesn’t much resemble the dark Nibelung settings of Norse myth.
In May of last year tenor Piotr Beczala and soprano Anna Netrebko sang in Lohengrin for the first time under the baton of Christian Thielemann in his home house at the Staatskapelle Dresden.
From up close, the miked opera singer can be a bit tough to take.
The wild tempest that whipped and drenched the audience as it exited the Met after Tuesday’s season premiere of Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer mirrored the finer features of the evening.
Kaufmann conveys Lohengrin’s immense loneliness in a profoundly moving way. I am happy to report that vocally he sounds completely recovered.
In our circle, Mexico City in the summer was the opera capital of the world from the late 1940s and early 1950.
With Christmas Eve 2016 falling on a Saturday, the Met offers contrasting orchestral splendors at noon and 6 p.m.
What to do with all those glorious short operas: play them alone or find companion pieces?
Well, that didn’t last long.
“Never in my life having enjoyed the true happiness of love I shall erect a memorial to this loveliest of all dreams…”
There has been a conspicuous absence of chat on Parterre about this year’s Bayreuther Festspiele.
That little place just two hours from the city is on the list of things I shall never understand, like the plot of Parsifal.
First seen in 2005, Siegfried makes a welcome return as a stand-alone production this season.
Live recordings of Hans Knappertsbusch conducting Parsifal seem to proliferate like stairways in M.C. Escher prints.
Pierre Boulez continuously challenged me and totally changed the way I listen to music.
Hopefully the assignment of Herman Melville’s endless whaling opus Moby-Dick as compulsory reading for High School students is a thing of the past.
By some quirk of fate, I tend to hear about the deaths of many operatic legends via radio news while out driving.
“Disciplined and intelligent.”
The Deutsche Opera an Rhein production of Handel’s Xerxes (which is shared with the Berlin Komische Oper), though I saw it three nights ago, has taken a while to settle down in my brain.
Contemporary stagings of Parsifal tend to be spare, abstract affairs scrubbed of religious associations, knights in armor and, sometimes, a grail.
If works like Salome and Erwartung defined modernism in the first decades of the 20th century, Die Tote Stadt and Palestrina represented the regressive avant garde.
The visit of the Mariinsky Theater’s resident company to the glittering opera house of the Brooklyn Academy of Music consists of three ballet programs with starry casts preceded, last night, by a single performance of Rodion Shchedrin’s opera, The Enchanted Wanderer.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith… I am nothing.”
Wednesday brought the Met’s “real” season opener, an indelible, indispensable night at the opera: a starry revival of Verdi’s Macbeth crowned by Anna Netrebko’s demented Lady.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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