“Has anyone ever seen a truly great production of this opera?”
The grand illusion is that we know it all. From four hundred years of opera, we’ve distilled the worthy survivors.
Too often I allow my memories of great singers to be dulled by late career behavior, delving into unsuitable roles or just plain laziness.
In how many operas does the heroine drink poison and then go lengthily mad?
Giuseppe Verdi was so unhappy with the first production of his Giovanna d’Arco at La Scala in 1845 that he swore an oath to himself that he would never entrust that theatre with a prima again.
With six leads in Gioconda, you can reliably hope that three or four will be worth listening to, or why would they have revived the opera?
By the time Roberto Devereux saw its premiere at Napoli’s Teatro San Carlo on 29 October, 1837, Gaetano Donizetti had lost, in an 18-month time frame, both his parents, two still-born children, and his beloved wife Virginia.
As portrayed by Vittorio Grigolo, Nemorino was a manic self-absorbed, probably bipolar, stalker who—against all odds and good sense—gets the poor girl.
With February 14th falling on a Sunday, there will be no Valentine’s Day Met performance this year.
When Maestro Carlo Rizzi lifted his baton and began leading the Lyric Opera Orchestra in a stirring, detailed account of the overture to Nabucco, the electrified audience knew we were in for an exciting evening of music making.
A “lone voice in the wilderness” booed Barbara Frittoli’s calamitous Nedda.
On Thursday evening Jennifer Wilson “finally” made a belated, disappointing Met debut as Turandot.
Between them, Maria Guleghina, Marcello Giordani, James Morris and John Del Carlo have nearly 150 combined years of service on stage.
Angela Gheorghiu‘ s idiosyncratically alluring, sometimes maddening, always fascinating Floria Tosca inevitably became the evening’s unmissable raison d’être.
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.
After nearly three years and over 20 performances Michael Mayer’s “Las Vegas” production of Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera still outrages many.
For all their orchestral and vocal attractions, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s 15 operas are rarities in the West.
LA Opera opened their 30th season with a pairing of two of their most popular productions, both of which were initially staged by filmmakers not unfamiliar with the vagaries of our industry outpost here in Hollywoodland.
Saturday evening conductor Will Crutchfield revived Donizetti’s La Favorite—unheard in New York for fifteen years.
Celebrating Simon Keenlyside, the most popular artist on your alte Jungfer’s Mixcloud Web site.
Imagine two tenors releasing French opera aria collections at the same time without duplicating a single track!
Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
It seems almost comical to think now but the designer-director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, who died in 1988, was at one time considered the height of regie-theatre scandal.
New York City isn’t a bad place to live, operatically-speaking.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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