As of late, the Bay Area has been blessed with a few high-wattage, high-profile recitals as if to compensate for the chilly temperatures and gloomy weather. Roughly a month after Lise Davidsen made an ebullient debut at Cal Performances, the Bay Area welcomed French soprano Natalie Dessay last Saturday.
VIctor Herbert demonstrates in this slight, affectionate piece a talent for keeping his musico-dramatic balls in the air, as Madeleine’s spirits juggle, fall, rise again, and droop to elegant resignation at the last.
Soprano Ashley Marie Robillard and mezzo Siena Licht Miller evoke a journey to Paris, Venice, Berlin, and London.
Kurt Weill & Bertolt Brecht’s Mahagonny Singspiel, and Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium—are not only combined, but configured to overlap in sometimes revealing, occasionally confounding ways.
Norman Dello Joio, who was knocking about winning prizes for film and TV scores, composed The Trial at Rouen, his second opera on the subject, for NBC.
The American contralto, who created the title role in Menotti’s The Medium and introduced the song “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” died May 18. She was 92.
It’s just not true that Gian Carlo Menotti composed The Medium as an opera only because he couldn’t get Joan Crawford to do it when his libretto was originally a screenplay.
They’ve been celebrating the centennial of Gian-Carlo Menotti lately, spouting wild claims for the immortality of his music. He did have an impressive run of successes in the 1940s, but he lived till 2007 with many more premieres and nary another hit.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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