This Bard production, led by Leon Botstein, makes the strongest possible case musically, dramatically and visually for Smetana’s opera Dalibor.
Max Ophuls, one of the greatest film directors, made masterpieces in French, German, English and Italian, as well as an amusing comedy in Dutch; he also clearly loved opera.
Fourteen years ago this month, James Levine conducted a tryout at Juilliard of a quite pleasant production by Stephen Wadsworth of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride (in English) intended for the Met. Unfortunately, that transfer never happened and New York has been the poorer for it.
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.
Chris’s Cache offers up a quintet of intriguing “forgotten” Leonora-Azucena pairings from the 1970s.
Trove Thursday offers Shostakovich’s 1962 Katerina Izmailova with Australian soprano Marie Collier as its anti-heroine and Jon Vickers as her lover.
Teresa Stratas turned 83 yesterday and Trove Thursday features one of the recent past’s most interesting yet frustrating artists in two rare broadcasts.
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.
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.
It was love at first hearing. The music was glorious, the conducting bouncy and pointed, and the singers sure sounded terrific to me.
When soprano Yihan Duan started to sing her aria, you could feel an almost electric charge that something special was happening.
“Trove Thursday” ushers in February with Catalani’s La Wally with a mountain-top cast of Renata Tebaldi, Renata Scotto, Mario del Monaco, Giangiacomo Guelfi and Giorgio Tozzi conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini.
Another five-Thursday month invites “Trove Thursday” to offer a combo of shorter works.
Bard College presented a semi-staged concert of Halka on Saturday evening as part of its impressively wide-ranging two-week “Chopin and his World” festival.
A poster outside Carnegie Hall proclaimed “Mahler Well Met” and to some degree it proved to be true.
“If you’ve overdosed on Der Rosenkavalier in the past week, let’s go back a few years to Richard Strauss’ first operatic hit: Salome.
“Trove Thursday” presents Sena Jurinac‘s radiant portrayal of Janacek’s Jenufa opposite the implacable Kostelnicka of Martha Mödl.
Between them, Maria Guleghina, Marcello Giordani, James Morris and John Del Carlo have nearly 150 combined years of service on stage.
By some quirk of fate, I tend to hear about the deaths of many operatic legends via radio news while out driving.
Our Own Sanford reports from this afternoon’s National Council Grand Finals Concert at the Met. First things first: No hunkentenors, but Edward Parks is a barihunk, and Christopher Magiera is almost a barihunk. Now to the important stuff. There were nine singers in the final, and I would say that 10 of them deserved to…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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