Canon fodder
Edgar has always been the odd man out in the Puccini canon, lying well outside the standard rep. The recent discovery of forty minutes of additional music is likely to do little to change that, but the...
View ArticleAn opening for a princess
I’m sure I do not need to tell the mostly New-York based readers of parterre this, but Turandot is an opera that can really be turned into a pageant. Not that that’s a bad thing. It is, after all a...
View ArticleHappy endings
Let me take you back, Parterreians, to the spring of 2009. Shortly before the Met’s new La sonnambula opened, murmurings began to be heard, rumors began to circulate. After the open dress rehearsal,...
View ArticleBig love
My tolerance for 17th century opera is generally low, but even I can appreciate the value in an underappreciated composer like Francesco Cavalli. One of the most celebrated composers of early Baroque...
View ArticleHow jolly was my jenkin
I own almost every recording of the 13 operettas Sir Arthur Sullivan wrote with W.S. Gilbert ever made. Twelve Mikados, 14 Pirates of Penzance, 10 Iolanthes, right on down the line to the rarely heard...
View ArticleNo way, Don José
Andrea Bocelli is a pop singer, and a wildly successful one at that. So why does he feel compelled to pretend to be a dramatic tenor? No one can deny that his voice is actually quite attractive, and...
View ArticleDesert island DVD
This is a performance I never thought I’d see. This 2003 Met performance of Ariadne auf Naxos was filmed, but got tied up in some kind of (legal?) dispute and never televised, and I had long written it...
View ArticleGay “Marriage”
These days, when James Levine is mostly in the news due to his back ailments, it is somewhat shocking to see this performance of Le nozze di Figaro begin with the Maestro fairly dancing around on the...
View ArticleTosca divina
This review was not going to be primarily about Shirley Verrett. She is not a singer I am all that familiar with and when I was sent this DVD of Tosca to review a week ago, I focused more on the...
View ArticleCold “Case”
First-time novelist Matthew Gallaway’s ardent love for Tristan and Isolde gushes through every page of The Metropolis Case. According to Gallaway, Tristan is the highest expression of human art, and...
View ArticleMy God, it’s full of stars!
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...
View ArticleFresh, direct
Directors love directing Wagner, or rather, they love directing their versions of Wagner. They don’t seem to like the operas very much. We all know what we’re going to see if we travel to Bayreuth or...
View ArticleDream a little dreamboat
Deutsche Grammophon has a new hunk on the market, ignoring the fact that he’s been around for twenty years. Ildebrando d’Arcangelo has been steadily building a career since the early 90s, getting a...
View ArticleBridging the Channel
It’s kind of shocking, when you really think about it, that the kind of international operatic model that the Royal Opera now operates on barely existed only 50 years ago. Until around 1960 most of the...
View ArticlePiotr, principally
I first heard Piotr Beczala as Tamino in San Francisco back in 2007, which was not a particularly noteworthy performance. He was fine, he sang very well, and if he walked his way through a 20-year-old...
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