In Bayreuth, a confident Magnus Vigilius and luminous Jennifer Holloway attempt to elevate Wagner’s populist Rienzi.
A well-known Met Aïda with a starry cast from 1967 is TildyDiva’s Favorite Verdi Performance
Madama Butterfly at Opera Colorado plays it safe — and never fully takes flight.
Ahead of their opening in Don Carlo in Dallas tonight, Christopher Corwin chats with Nicole Car and Étienne Dupuis — and offers a special edition of Chris’s Cache!
Simon Boccanegra has never felt as foreboding or prophetic as it did at a recent performance at La Fenice.
This week, Parterre Box shares Quinn Kelsey and Jennifer Rowley in a duet from a Verdi opera rumored to be returning to New York this time next season.
Daniele Rustioni, who starts his tenure as Met Principal Guest Conductor with Don Giovanni this week, might just be the opera conductor we’ve all been waiting for — and he’s betting on a long haul.
According to the memoirs of Alma Mahler, her third husband, Franz Werfel used to wander around the cafés of Paris with one of his chums, singing arias from obscure Verdi operas at the top of their lungs until the management would ask them to move on.
For Niel Rishoi, a new CD of Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi by Eleonora Burrato for Pentatone can’t help but invite unflattering comparisons
The American bass, a fixture of the Metropolitan Opera between 1967 and 2018, was 83.
Chris’s Cache wishes Gundula Janowitz a happy 87th birthday today with three early live broadcasts of a favorite soprano in works by Pergolesi, Haydn, and Schumann.
As an opera fanatic who was baptized by the blood of Leontyne Price, the Messa da Requiem by Giuseppe Verdi appeared on my radar fairly soon after I started delving into the operatic canon.
It is a measure of Verdi’s genius that throughout the four rambling acts, his musical invention in the service of creating characters never failed him.
This Sunday marked a muted return of the Richard Tucker Foundation Gala, which had the dubious distinction of the fourth edition not to feature a prizewinner and perhaps the first not to provide complete orchestral and choral accompaniment for its performers.
On October 20th, a wet but warmish Friday night, the Metropolitan Opera opened this season’s revival of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera in David Alden’s 2012 production.
In sum: not a perfect Simon Boccanegra—is there such a thing?—but a grand and often great one.
This week Chris’s Cache features Maria Chiara, Elena Mauti-Nunziata, Rita Orlandi-Malaspina and Orianna Santunione in L’Amico Fritz, Mefistofele, Simon Boccanegra and La Fanciulla del West, respectively.
Old opera productions at the end of their performing life can be sad affairs.
On this day in 1987 the Met raised the curtain on Franco Zeffirelli‘s production of Turandot.
Cotton, a world-premiere song cycle commissioned by Philadelphia’s Lyric Fest, takes its audience on a journey through Black American history that extends from the Deep South to the contemporary urban landscape.
Eleanora Buratto at this fully matured point of her career has a warm, creamy full lyric soprano that has the roundness and sweet warmth of a Freni but can also expand into the spinto power of a Tebaldi.
Lyric Opera of Chicago scored a smashing success on Sunday with its “Verdi Voices” concert, featuring soprano Tamara Wilson, tenor Russell Thomas, and Lyric Music Director Enrique Mazzola conducting Members of the Lyric Opera Orchestra in what might be termed a program of Verdi’s Greatest Hits.
In the last weeks of January, as the Metropolitan Opera season wound to a close (prior to the winter hiatus) two striking sopranos were thrust into the limelight.
Happy 75th birthday to actress, singer and dancer Liza Minnelli.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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