My recollections of Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in Louisiana twenty years ago today, come with a pair of odd bookends: it starts with Verdi’s Don Carlo and ends with Puccini’s Il trittico.
Finding Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia on the Academy of Vocal Arts calendar was both a pleasure and something of a surprise—the latter because the work is far from central repertoire, even in a conservatory.
As Phaedra’s tragic, all-consuming passion for her stepson Hippolytus has fascinated artists for centuries, Trove Thursday offers two of its lesser-known musical settings: Pizzetti’s opera Fedra with Régine Crespin and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson performing the cantata Phaedra, Britten’s final vocal work.
While last year’s finals were dominated by early nineteenth-century bel canto arias, this year’s finalists took on a remarkably broad range of music from a variety of repertoires.
There are two delights here: a delectable score too rarely heard and an introduction at close quarters to half a dozen young singers ready for takeoff, indeed already flying.
This week we get closer to completing the operas of Benjamin Britten with The Rape of Lucretia.
LoftOpera gives performances of exceptional musical and theatrical polish in offbeat corners of Brooklyn.
LoftOpera is just one, though perhaps the liveliest, of many homegrown opera troupes in Brooklyn.
The Rape of Lucretia, now (through Sunday) enjoying a superb three-performance run at the Juilliard Opera’s Willson Theater (tickets are scarce; hie thee to the waiting list), was Benjamin Britten’s third opera and first “chamber opera,” composed for the tiny original theater at Glyndebourne,
In any narrative, the unmentioned—the unmentionable—will always be more alarming than that which is carefully described.
Frustrated, perhaps, by the bulky requirements and dubious future of grand opera—and grand opera commissions—Benjamin Britten created some of his most intriguing and, nowadays, popular pieces for small casts and chamber orchestra.
Gustav Holst was always searching for deep theses from which to suspend his art.
Actress, singer, arts advocate, socialite, TV personality (and New Orleans native) Kitty Carlisle Hart has died at the age of 96. La Carlisle made her Broadway debut in 1933 in the musical Champagne Sec (a version of Die Fledermaus), then went to Hollywood for a brief stay highlighted by her turn as “Rosa Castaldi” in…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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