By now you probably know that if he were still around, he’d be 250 today. In the midst of the barrage of tributes, it occurred to me that Mozart and I go way back; I saw my first Mozart opera* twenty (yea, verily, twenty) years ago. So I thought I’d write a retrospective of the […]
Via Sarah of Prima la musica, poi le parole comes an irresistible meme: nominate four currently living, breathing people likely to produce interesting and stageable libretti, and four books which could be re-worked into, again, interesting and stageable libretti. As I commented over at Sarah’s blog, I have a hard time coming up with anything […]
RIP, Birgit Nilsson. Go read Sarah’s roundup of tributes, and listen to La Cieca’s tribute podcasts over at Parterre Box. Another project for 2006: get over my Wagnerphobia so I can listen to her Isolde and Brunnhilde. (Fellow operaphiles in your 20s and 30s, do you, too, sometimes feel like you were born several decades […]
1. Cole Swensen’s Oh, a very short book that does for opera what her later books of poems did for the Tres Riches Heures and the history of illumination. A fellow LibraryThing user recommended it, and I snapped it up, because I dug Goest big time, and there are so few poets who write about […]
I’ve just returned from the Ash Lawn Opera Festival expedition filled with the sort of contentment one only gets from eating a good dinner outdoors in enjoyable company, listening to promising young sopranos sing of love turned to suicidal despair, and wallowing unabashedly in melodramatic emotion. In other words, it was a great evening. My […]
This is amazing: the Metropolitan Opera now has a huge database of information on every performance since 1883. And don’t miss the "Sights and Sounds of the Met" historical timeline either. (Via infoshare.) [P.S.: speaking of opera, I’m going to the Ash Lawn Opera Festival‘s production of Madama Butterfly next week. First live performance I’ve […]
I haven’t been very communicative lately, not just here but with everyone. Between the exhausting heat (we had several days during which going outside was like stepping directly into a furnace), the gloom about current affairs that’s been seeping into so many of the conversations I’ve been in lately, and the way it’s finally starting […]
I came home from a midday expedition downtown expressly to listen to the last Met radio broadcast of the season; this weekend it’s La Clemenza di Tito, and we’re now at the intermission. How fabulously dark the end of Act 1 is. The audience digs Anne-Sofie von Otter, and so do I. There are other […]
So, the longer report on Tuesday’s concert with Katarina Karnéus: Thanks to the luck of the Tuesday Evening Concert Series ticket-buying procedure, wherein if you aren’t a subscriber you have to get on a waiting list and then they give you the first sold-back tickets they can find for you, I got a seat in […]
Tomorrow’s going to be a big day. In the evening I’m going to hear Katarina Karnéus give a recital at Old Cabell Hall. I’ve never heard her sing, but the program looks marvelous (Mahler, Strauss, Grieg, a few bits from my favorite Baroque guys here, a dash of Weill there). And for once I lucked […]