Grand Tier Grab Bag

My sister’s keeper

Grand Tier Grab Bag highlights La Scala's opening night prima donna Sara Jakubiak with an excerpt of her Chrysothemis recorded last year.

Photo: Camilla Greenwell

Grand Tier Grab Bag

Lightning strikes twice

New York audiences got a taste of Ben Bliss in Mozart this fall, but this week Grand Tier Grab Bag offers snippets of the tenor trying his hand at Handel earlier this year.

Composer Philip Venables / Photo: Harald Hoffmann

Feature

So brutal but also so joyful

Composer Philip Venables talks about queer utopias and bending gender and genre in The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions which opens at the Park Avenue Armory this week.

Photo: Metropolitan Opera

our own

Out of the mouths of babes

Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.

All the fine young cannibals

Offenbach's Robinson Crusoé is salvaged from obscurity. 

Photo: Fadi Kheir

Mezzo in the dark

It is a physical pleasure to hear Kate Lindsey at close quarters.

Scenes from a revolution

"This isn’t an opera that touches on queer themes; it’s a bundle of queer themes tied up in an opera."

Form over function

A consideration of Anika Kildegaard’s extraordinary recital in Philadelphia—and the oddity of recitals themselves. 

Joan Sutherland sings “The Twelve Days of Christmas”

Auntie Joan goes the whole nine yards on this one and invigorates it to make it work in a way as no one else can.

Jamie Barton sings “Maria Wiegenlied”

Like Type 2 Diabetes, symptoms of YAS (Yuletide Aversion Syndrome) commonly creep up on gay men after manopause.

Happy holidays from Mary Costa, Bing Crosby, and Robert Goulet

This month’s theme – “Opera singers celebrate the holidays” – conjured up a vast lexicon of memories of growing up in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Jonas Kaufmann sings “All I Want for Christmas Is You”

"It duz... not... SCHVING!!!!"

Kathleen Battle sings “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”

One of my favorite Christmas recordings is Kathleen Battle's A Christmas Celebration.