Oh my stars. Just look at this: The superb mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson makes one of her very rare operatic appearances as Orpheus in Gluck’s early masterpiece. Lisa Milne is Euridice, whom Orpheus rescues from the underworld, and Heidi Grant Murphy sings Amor, the spirit of Love. The virtuoso Mark Morris directs and choreographs, and […]
I’m back from a trip to DC with my friend R. to see the National Opera’s production of La Clemenza di Tito this past Saturday night. There’s a pretty thorough review of this production over at ionarts, with which I mostly agree. I thought Marina Domashenko, as Sesto, and Cristina Nassif (that night’s Vitellia) were […]
A group that performs opera in bars. Neat! Why am I not living in Canada so I can hear them? (Hat tip to wolfangel, who did get to hear them.)
Hey, local folks — anyone thinking of seeing this? Student production of Carmen, free, outdoors, this weekend and next. Hearing it in English is going to be a little weird, but I’m still planning on going to see it this Saturday night if it doesn’t rain. (Update several days later: Well, that was a nice […]
I don’t care how many "skinny guys with moppy hair" sharing "short, loud adolescent messages" there are on YouTube. I won’t hear a word against it if it means getting to see Natalie Dessay singing Monteverdi. (Mille grazie, Sarah! And what a voice!) And look at Tatiana Troyanos singing Strauss, Marilyn Horne and Joan Sutherland […]
Psst, readers in Charlottesville who read this blog for the music bits (all two or three of you): The Jefferson-Madison Regional Library’s annual Friends of the Library book sale is an unexpectedly good place to find classical music CDs. I spent the earlier part of the afternoon there and walked away with Cecilia Bartoli’s 18th-century […]
Today I learned about Musipedia from two of my colleagues. Sheer brilliance. It’s basically a Wikipedia-esque encyclopedia of tunes (classical, popular, and folk, plus hymns and national anthems), and you can search it by humming the tune you want to identify. I haven’t had a chance to try the latter feature (I need a microphone […]
Via Clancy at CultureCat: The University of Newcastle on Tyne is conducting a Musical Listening Test. You listen to pairs of short tunes and then indicate whether they’re exactly the same or different. I got 28 out of 30, and, like one of the commenters at Clancy’s, am now wondering if there’s a link between […]
Thinking back to more or less a year ago, I realize it’s become a pattern: in early spring, get on the waiting list for a Tuesday Evening Concert featuring a mezzo I don’t know as well as I could; luck out and get a great seat within bouquet-tossing distance of the performers; spend the evening […]
I’m going to hear Magdalena Kozená sing tomorrow night! Gluck, Rameau, Rebel, and some as-yet-unannounced Mozart. Huzzah for other people’s last-minute ticket cancellations! I think I’m going to be pretty close to the stage, too. Cole Swensen’s poems are hard to describe: you never know where she’s going subjectwise, but the way she breaks up […]