The Daily Klang

Coming out of a hibernation to say that the photos for Opéra de Montréal‘s upcoming season are simply stunning. It’s that time of the year in which I start going over September performances for my listings gig at Gramophone, and sometimes the marketing campaigns make my eyes cross, but these shots h

I do not like Roberto Cavalli’s Artemisia. I do, however, like Francesco Cavalli’s Artemisia (1657). And—if you’ll pardon the egregious pun—it all comes down to…framework! Okay, actually, what it came down to was once again the recording. Claudio Cavina and the ensemble La Venexiana do for this Cava

The more I think about it, the more I loved Christopher Alden’s Così fan tutte at New York City Opera on Sunday. Which is saying a lot as I find that the three operas by Mozart and Da Ponte are three of the hardest to convincingly stage for a contemporary audience. While the framework of [...]

Oh, Cavalli… Cavalli… Cavalli… I thought we were done here. But no, two orchestras just HAD to do world premiere recordings of Cavalli’s operas in the last few months. So we’re going even further back in time for La Rosinda, which was released last October on the Ludi Musici label from a live perfor

How awesome would a Quentin Tarantino-directed Elektra or Salome be? Really freaking awesome. In the latest addition to Operavore’s Warm Up series, Thomas Hampson is “an extraordinarily cheap drunk.” A look at operas that like other operas in light of Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Bel Canto Get some free

Via the always provocative (if not downright incendiary) Daniel Felsenfeld,”critic, curator, cultural commentator and film-maker” Igor Toronyi-Lalic writes for the Telegraph: National opera companies should treat new opera in exactly the same way that Harvey Weinstein would treat a new movie. Focus

I never tire of watching this video of “N’est-ce plus ma main?” from the Vienna Manon starring Trebs and Alagna. Those last few minutes, when he tears his clerical collar off as he sings “Manon!”? Toes are officially curled. I wrote about the Met’s new Manon before it opens later this month, going i

It’s raining here in New York. It’s been raining for the last day-ish, big fat prohibitive drops. Thank goodness for Cesti’s Orontea. Or, more appropriately, thank goodness for René Jacobs. His hair kind of looks like Jonas Kaufmann’s curls mated with James Levine’s afro, but the cases he makes for

Since so much of my writing goes into WQXR’s Operavore and a multitude of amazing speaking and typing stuff for Q2… Here’s what I did this week. Listen to two hours of music by post-millennial mavericks (American and otherwise) on Cued Up (my personal fav is the pairing of Judd Greenstein’s Change w