On this day in 1924, the Metropolitan Opera presented La bohème, a performance visiting critic Ernest Newman didn’t seem to like one bit.
Anita Rachvelishvili and Quinn Kelsey towered over an otherwise pedestrian if still exciting Il Trovatore.
Mr. Fabiano proceeded to pour gasoline over the audience and toss a lit match into the crowd with his rendition of “Granada.”
For all their orchestral and vocal attractions, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s 15 operas are rarities in the West.
James Levine turns 72 this year. Even though his health has improved considerably in the past year and he may continue to conduct for a decade or more, it seems inevitable that he will step down as the Met’s Music Director sometime in the next few years to assume the role of Conductor Laureate.
New York City isn’t a bad place to live, operatically-speaking.
2014 was a year of lemons into lemonade.
Opera-lovers who attend too much modern opera may find that it feels like duty.
It’s time to bring out the canard again, this time a whole row of them in fact.
Coming as Peter Gelb did from the music industry, opera lovers hoped that he would display a more distinctive knack for casting and an improved talent pipeline than Joe Volpe offered during the waning years of his tenure.
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.
The Met’s financial challenges are not meteorological, demographic, or cyclical; they are structural.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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