“Hailed ‘the Meryl Streep of opera’…” begins one sentence of a promotional piece for a Diana Damrau recording of another opera, reproduced on the soprano’s website.
Saturday evening conductor Will Crutchfield revived Donizetti’s La Favorite—unheard in New York for fifteen years.
Mezzo Rinat Shaham takes a short break from being the world’s busiest Carmen and rehearsing for the theatrical concert “The Sorrows of Young Werther” to dish with your doyenne.
As the world knows, Anja Harteros dropped out of this series of Don Carlo for a stab at Aïda in Rome. Illness sidelined Ramón Vargas from the title roles in both Don Carlo and Werther. While Wiener Staatsoper has been plagued with cancellations all season (even substituting L’elisir d’amore for La Juive at the last…
Imagine two tenors releasing French opera aria collections at the same time without duplicating a single track!
New York City isn’t a bad place to live, operatically-speaking.
2014 was a year of lemons into lemonade.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith… I am nothing.”
When Norman Lebrecht is declaring on an almost daily basis that classical music is dead, it’s perhaps heartening that four of today’s prominent tenors have recently released what might be called fluff/vanity albums.
It’s been a bitterly cold winter in NY. When it’s bitterly cold, the air is dry.
Life is not fair. There are rules that apply to Jonas Kaufmann, and rules that apply to everyone else.
I suspect most New York City opera-lovers had long since given up hope that the fascinating soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci would ever return to their city.
Thérèse is a compact work consisting of two short acts and clocks in just under seventy minutes.
As a child I had but a few criteria that were necessary to ensure a happy entertainment. These included mostly ball-gowns, fairy godmothers and Julie Andrews, though Sally Ann Howes was acceptable in a pinch.
Jules Massenet’s Don Quichotte was one of a number of commissions from the Monte Carlo Opera that occupied the composer at the end of his life.
Jules Massenet wrote Werther at the midpoint of his very successful career.
It is hard to know just who is the intended audience for this release of Pelléas and Mélisande.
Decca has released a remarkable performance of Massenet’s great romantic tragedy Werther. Filmed live in January 2010, this performance stands out primarily for the great singing and dramatic vitality of the principals, particularly the remarkable Werther of Jonas Kaufmann. It is rare to hear a tenor voice with this much heft, body and color phrase…
Ioan Holender was General Manager of the Wiener Staatsoper for nineteen years, the longest anyone has held this post, and the august institution honored him with the gala to end all galas in the final days of his administration. With the goal of commemorating each of the 40 new productions premiered at the Staatsoper during…
Our Own Ercole Farnese discovered and translated this interview in La Stampa with Jonas Kaufmann, in which the tenor discusses his “his idolatrous success with ladies and gay men, four fifths of the opera-goers.”
As part of the massive CD/DVD release celebrating the 40th Anniversary of James Levine at the Met, “In Concert at the Met, 1982-83” offers generous excerpts from three memorable Gala Concerts: from February 1982, Troyanos-Domingo-Levine; from March 1982, Price-Horne-Levine; and from January 1983, Domingo-Milnes-Levine. I had the pleasure of being in the house for each…
1. Webcast technology has been refined enormously in the barely two years since the pioneering (and frustrating) effort at streaming a performance of Il Sant’Alessio. The embeddable (!) player didn’t skip once that I could see, and the sound was consistent. Neither, obviously, was exactly HD quality, but the experience felt quite seamless.
Leyla Gencer: The very name is exotic. She was an artist of Turkish ancestry who, during the 1950s and 60s, held her own despite the presence of Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Renata Scotto, Montserrat Caballe, and Magda Olivero, all of whom shared roles in her repertoire. Ironically, Gencer has a number of important credits attached…
You could say last night at the Met was a typical Aprile Millo performance, if that expression were not essentially an oxymoron. “Typical” and “Millo” really don’t intersect in this dimension (maybe somewhere on a spiritual plane? But I digress.) Let’s just say that, what happens at a Millo night, happened last night, which is…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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