I entered the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Saturday night for LA Opera’s 30 year old revival of their production of Salome with a combination of enthusiasm and apprehension.
The very first Vienna post-war performance of Elektra.
The DVD of Thomas Agerfeldt Olesen‘s 2013 opera The Picture of Dorian Gray.
With Christmas Eve 2016 falling on a Saturday, the Met offers contrasting orchestral splendors at noon and 6 p.m.
I can think of no other role that provides the most unique promise of humiliation, and consequently the most opportunity for glory.
Operatic history can be cruel where multiple works with the same subject are concerned
Leonie Rysanek, would have turned 90 today.
What to do with all those glorious short operas: play them alone or find companion pieces?
Now we have considered the three “winners” in the Tristan competition, let’s turn to the also-rans, or, to be more optimistic, the runners up.
Your alte Jungfer’s requisite Kuschelkatze (pictured) arrived on my doorstep in Mariahilf with the name of Tristan.
This week, I offer you a classic rendition of Richard Strauss’ tale of the House of Atreus starring Ursula Schröder-Feinen, Astrid Varnay, Leonie Rysanek, Theo Adam, and Hans Hopf under Karl Böhm’s direction.
Have you ever had the unfortunate experience of listening to someone tell a joke badly?
The focus in this 1974 performance of Salome from Orange is (mostly) on the Herodes of Jon Vickers.
Capriccio was a great pleasure on Friday night, March 4. This was a co-production of Opera Philadelphia and The Curtis Institute, presented in the intimate Pearlman Theater at the Kimmel Center.
Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s 1949 musicalization of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country has found a tentative home on the opera stage.
Fidelio but with an unhappy ending, Bedrich Smetana’s stirring Dalibor opens 2016’s “Trove Thursday” in a 1968 German-language broadcast from Bavarian Radio.
Enthusiasm is contagious–you have to cover up carefully lest it make you sick.
Unlike my friend Greg Freed, who entertainingly wrote of his ambivalence about seeing Il trovatore in a movie theater this season, I have embraced the Met Live in HD transmissions as a part of the modern operagoing experience.
Simply put, Christine Goerke is a stupendous Elektra.
I guess you have spoken: “Bring us insane divas in operas we already know!”
I was greatly anticipating Karita Mattila’s recital on Friday in Toronto’s Koerner Hall.
Richard Strauss’s many one-act operas make excellent concert programs, both for their length (usually under two hours) and the primary place each gives the orchestration, a specialty where Strauss’s brilliance seldom deserted him.
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.
Karita Mattila is a gift to this planet.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
×
Sign up for Parterre’s free newsletter.
Exclusive opera reviews, commentary, and top reads
delivered to your email weekly…ish.