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Claire Black of the Scotsman meets American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato in Milano (click the link for the full article): Pop stars, soap stars, Big Brother contestants – it seems that anyone can now be a diva as long as they behave badly enou (read full article)
Anthony Tommasini reports from Bayreuth: There is a general and well-founded perception of the Bayreuth Festival as an elitist stronghold for opera, as much a shrine to Wagner as a festival of his works. And there is no ticket harder to come by. Wag (read full article)
Danielle de Niese’s new album Diva is released on Decca on 12 July. (read full article)
I’ve just bought the Runnicles/BBCSO Tristan und Isolde. I played the Liebestod and was surprised and annoyed at the burst of applause and cheers at the end. I know it’s a recording of a live-in-front-of-an-audience concert, but I feel that keep (read full article)
Anneliese Rothenberger as Lulu Anneliese Rothenberger, an internationally known German soprano who sang with the Metropolitan Opera in New York in the 1960s, died on Monday in Switzerland. As befits a diva, her exact age had long been shrouded in obs (read full article)
The re-opening of one of the world’s leading opera houses helped to kick off Argentina’s 200th birthday celebrations on Monday, as the curtain was raised at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires for the first time in almost four years. An audience o (read full article)
Heard part of Emmanuel Chabrier’s opera Briséïs today. Can’t imagine why Chabrier thought he was being “modernist” though – didn’t seem that different to me – lovely music, great harmonies and what a sense of drama. I thoroughly enjo (read full article)
I must say, having listened recently to Benjamin Britten’s recording of The Dream of Gerontius that like cholesterol there is good and bad vibrato. Yvonne Minton (what a beautiful voice) represents the good creative use of vibrato whereas Peter Pe (read full article)
Copenhagen, Denmark: An art work which is part of the project SevenMeters, using red blinking LED-light, to symbolise that the world is moving towards a climate catastrophe – 24km of red blinking lights will appear during the climate summit I read (read full article)
The only pig in Afghanistan Wagner’s music has long been easiest to take in “bleeding chunks”, and indeed in chunks which are purely orchestral, from which that is to say the singers are excluded. The reason for the popularity of such chunks is (read full article)
What’s the present opinion of this opera? I know there was a lot of controversy about it at the time it was first put on (1953). I think it had revivals in the ’60s (Sadler’s Wells), and more recently, and I think the general opinion now is th (read full article)
I am much saddened to hear of the passing of Hildegard Behrens. In my limited experience of live opera she was one of the three great post-war Wagnerian sopranos along with Birgit Nilsson and Rita Hunter. They are all gone. Not only was hers a gorge (read full article)
I learn that Kiri Te Kanawa is to retire from the operatic stage, something I thought she had done some years ago, actually. I didn’t think she had ever got started! Good voice but no idea about musicianship. She’s known as the “can opener” (read full article)
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