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Music

Happy Mozart’s birthday!

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 […]

Too bad I can’t just commission these.

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 […]

Birgit Nilsson

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 […]

Things I’m reading and thoughts occasioned thereby

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 […]

Despite the heat, the show goes on

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 […]

Adding “Metropolitan Opera archivist” to list of dream jobs

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 […]

Saturday opera blogging redux

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 […]

Saturday opera blogging

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 […]

In which I go to a recital

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 […]

Waiting for tomorrow

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 […]