It’s nice to see Sony Classical backing a serious operatic soprano and not some crossover refugee from Britain’s Got Talent or another syrupy Christmas album from the world’s reigning Heldentenor.
After the break the ladies stepped up their game so much that it elevated the night into legendary status: definitely one for the books!
The crown jewel of this year’s Munich Festival is undoubtedly Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which opened the Festival on June 29 and will close the Festival with an “Opera for All” screening on July 31.
The Met recently submitted another eye-roll inducing entry for the Woke Olympics with their Women’s History Month slate.
Whatever you think of Angela Gheorghiu, she epitomizes a star sound, the kind of voice that’s recognizable within three seconds, and she definitely knows her way around a performance.
It was a meaty program. But both singers had the chops for it.
For this, the 250th edition of Trove Thursday, [hold for applause] a broadcast of a memorable evening at Carnegie Hall—and I was there: Smetana’s stirring Libuse, the Czech national opera, with a transcendent Gabriela Benackova as its titular prophetess.
Renée Fleming presented a satisfyingly eclectic and quietly daring program of songs and arias, an interesting timestamp on a career that, despite its crepuscular vibe, seems as active as ever.
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.
On the first viewing of this Idomeneo, with a cast clad mostly in military khaki green set against a green sky, the eye starts to tire from the dullness of the surroundings.
Two of the leading postwar Czech sopranos appear together in Janacek’s Kát’a Kabanová when Trove Thursday presents Gabriela Benacková‘s gleaming heroine in her US debut relentlessly persecuted by Nadjezhda Kniplová’s implacable mother-in-law.
Trove Thursday completes its Prévost–trifecta with Puccini’s Manon Lescaut starring Sondra Radvanovsky and (pre-Met) Aleksandrs Antonenko conducted by Riccardo Chailly plus an added Radvanovsky-Puccini bonus: Suor Angelica.
Opera for families may not generally be my thing, but I loved feeling like I was a tiny part of shaping a new opera.
Christine Goerke‘s distracted, tentative Isolde turned out to be the least potent feature of what was an otherwise exciting and effective second act of Tristan.
Sunday’s Richard Tucker Gala at Carnegie Hall was unusually satisfying despite a less than usually superstarry line-up.
When soprano Yihan Duan started to sing her aria, you could feel an almost electric charge that something special was happening.
“Trove Thursday” remembers the company’s very first Lady Macbeth via Leonie Rysanek’s NYC debut in a concert performance of Verdi’s Shakespeare masterpiece less than a year before her first Met appearance.
Saturday August 17 the Merola Opera Program wrapped up its annual Summer Festival with the Merola Grand Finale concert at the War Memorial Opera House.
“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” went the introduction to the 1940s radio program The Shadow, an apt description for the San Francisco Opera’s production of Rusalka.
Saturday night, Lyric Opera of Chicago gave us a wonderful evening of vocalism in honoring Renée Fleming’s 25th anniversary at Lyric.
Così fan tutte, Mozart’s final Italian comedy with Lorenzo Da Ponte, is this season’s heaviest lift for Philadelphia’s Academy of Vocal Arts (AVA).
Academy of Vocal Arts’ Rusalka—surprisingly, only their second venture in many years into the Slavic repertoire—left a divided impression.
A 1985 broadcast of Don Giovanni featuring Cheryl Studer, Gundula Janowitz (as Elvira!), Krisztina Laki, Gösta Winbergh, Hermann Prey (in a rare outing as the Don) and Malcolm King conducted by Jeffrey Tate.
The conclusion of our Fanciulla del West video overview in three parts looks at a trio of performances from the 2010s.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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