parterrebox @parterrebox@wonkodon.com
Joined Nov 2022
Act two: Chris’s Cache sends Renata Scotto a valentine ahead of her 89th birthday next week with rare in-house recordings of eight (!) mid-career performances spanning 1971-1977.
I vespri siciliani: This new production of Verdi's grand opera will star Piero Pretti, Marina Rebeka, Luca Micheletti and Dmitry Belosselskiy. Streaming and discussion begin at 2:00 PM.
Anticipating Leontyne Price’s 97th birthday on February 10, Chris’s Cache presents the American diva in an epic collection of live performances.
Included are her earliest recorded Aïda, three Puccini operas, Honneger’s Jeanne d’Arc au Bucher and the Rossini Stabat Mater, plus eight bonus arias that Price rarely sang in public, from Handel to Giordano.
Damiano Michieletto, in a revelatory production of "Salome" that premiered (in a somewhat compromised form due to Covid) in 2020 and now arrives in Milan at full force, takes the (literal and metaphorical) reflectiveness of Wilde’s play and uses Strauss’s music to explode its scope to dense, rewarding, and thrilling ends.
That time in the early 1980s when everyone at the Met went to the same hairdresser.
Pragmatism and ideology: It doesn't get more classic than John Dexter's Dialogues des Carmélites.
‘Elisir’ not quite ‘rara qualita’
On paper, the Met's revival of L’elisir d’amore looked like a lovely evening. And at times it was—a few scenes hinted at what it could be and what it might yet become.
https://parterre.com/2023/01/13/elisir-not-quite-rara-qualita/
Rebranding the Met: A quick survey of the Met website shows wide swaths of available seats for the upcoming performances of La traviata and L’elisir d’amore. Only new works like The Hours and Fire Shut Up in My Bones have been achieving sold-out houses.
Mass Appeal: Chris’s Cache offers a pair of Schubert Masses (including the D. 950), both conducted by Riccardo Muti and featuring Krassimira Stoyanova, Rosa Feola and Michael Spyres among the nine soloists.
The world is treating me bad: We constantly wonder whether the young man will embrace him—or slit his throat.
https://parterre.com/2023/01/10/the-world-is-treating-me-bad-misery/
Dad flawed: Du Yun is the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer of Angel’s Bone. Her new opera, In Our Daughter’s Eyes, a one-act monodrama for bass-baritone and an orchestra of six, opened the current tenth Prototype Festival, in a performance at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, starring erstwhile Met regular Nathan Gunn.
Morning/Mourning, put on by the ever-innovative Prototype festival in a welcome return to form, is concerned with singing from absence, songs of lament and futurity in a world without us in it. But it’s also concerned with the way our absence may not threaten wholeness, when in terms of the earth and the universe, and what that might mean for us now.
https://parterre.com/2023/01/09/how-stable-everything-appears/
“Ne me refuse pas!” So, give me three good reasons we sshould not hear Jamie Barton as the mother of Salomé?
Nacht im Haus: On this day in 1949 tenor Max Lorenz sang his first Tristan of the season at the Metropolitan Opera.
Soprano Ermonela Jaho brings her celebrated interpretation of "La traviata" to the Met at long last.
Streaming and discussion begin at 7:55 PM EST. #opera
Coming attractions: Chris’s Cache begins 2023 with a pair of bel canto operas featuring two artists soon to make their Met debuts: Sabine Devieilhe in the title role of Donizetti’s La Fille du regiment and Xabier Anduaga driving Lisette Oropesa crazy in Bellini’s I Puritani.
Poison of interest: Following new productions of Tosca in 2017, Adriana Lecouvreur in 2018, and the Anna Netrebko-led Puccini orgy of 2019, New Year’s Eve at the Met has come to signify that verismo, as this school tends to be known, is still kicking.
Fedora: Love, intrigue and nihilism collide in Giordano's opera, opening tonight at the Metropolitan Opera.
Streaming and discussion begin at 6:30 PM.
