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Sunday opera blogging

Personal anthology: Frank Bidart

I’m listening to Zinka Milanov and Jussi Björling singing their hearts out as Aïda and Radames on the Sunday Opera Matinee this afternoon, and this poem popped into my head as suddenly apropos. For the Twentieth Century Bound,  hungry to pluck again from the thousandtechnologies of ecstasy boundlessness,  the world that at a drop of […]

Sunday opera matinee live

Feel like listening to the Sunday Opera Matinee on WTJU with me? You can now listen to live streaming audio. If you tune in right now, you can catch the second act of Rigoletto with Placido Domingo and Ileana Cotrubas. It’s nice to know that wherever I end up after this, I’ll still be able […]

Giulio Cesare in my living room

The glorious thing about recorded opera, on the radio or otherwise, is that you can listen to it on a lazy Sunday afternoon in your living room, with the windows flung open to let in the unusually mild winter air (sorry,  any neighbors of mine who may not share my penchant for the Baroque). The […]

Home from Thanksgiving: the Birgit Nilsson remix

WTJU’s Sunday Opera Matinee has already prompted enough posts here that I’m instituting a “Sunday opera blogging” category just to talk about whatever’s being broadcast. I missed most of this afternoon’s broadcast, having spent a good part of today in transit back from a Thanksgiving visit to my native city. Getting there was something of […]

Sunday afternoon operatic radio blogging

Happiness is coming home from an afternoon’s grocery-store trip, turning on the Sunday Opera Matinee in mid-broadcast, thinking "hey, is that Strauss?" and then realizing, as the strains of Baron Ochs’s waltz emerge from the radio, that they’re playing Der Rosenkavalier, and one has arrived home in time to hear all of the last act. […]

L’amour est un oiseau rebelle

Today’s Sunday Opera Matinee on the radio is Bizet’s Carmen (this recording, I think) and, as I type this, I’m listening to Tatiana Troyanos singing the Habanera aria. She sings it less sultrily and more reflectively than other Carmens I’ve heard, almost (at least at first) as if the aria were half soliloquy. But her […]

Furniture? We don’t need no stinkin’ furniture! We have bel canto!

I’m still furnitureless, and the apartment still smells of smoke, but the landlords have promised to send someone around tomorrow to check the vents and figure out what else needs to be done. Which is good, because I was having visions of myself going slowly mad, "Yellow Wallpaper"-style, trying to find the source of the […]