‘beauty’, veered close to the merely boring.

His celebrity-sibling, the soprano Nancy Storace, a favourite with Emperor Joseph II and prima buffa in the Italian opera troupe that he had established at the Burgtheater two years earlier, sang the ...

Operas that had middling (or less) success during the composer’s lifetime have been recorded, with music that often strikes the ear as quite familiar, since Rossini, understandably, employed the ...

“Prokofiev considered himself to be primarily a composer of opera, and his return to Russia in the mid-1930s was partially motivated by the goal to renew his activity in this genre. His Soviet career ...

Composed originally for a Vienna premiere in 1864 the present version of Les FÈes du Rhin, or Die Rheinnixen, was published in the last few years as part of the critical edition of the complete works ...

First Performance: 11 March 1867 at the OpÈra, Paris. Revised version 10 January 1884 at Teatro alla Scala, Milan.

Like a hallucinogenic sugar cube, this Medici Arts DVD of Hans Werner Henze’s *Der junge Lord*, with libretto by Ingeborg Bachmann, will take viewers on a wild ride and really put it to the system.

Staged in conjunction with Joffrey Ballet Chicago, the production features both dance and singing. Since Oropesa sings with silver tones and moves as gracefully as a dancer, she is a natural for the ...

‘Canticle’ is the term Britten used to denote an extended setting of a text of spiritual substance. The five Canticles span his career: the first dates from 1947, two years after the celebrated ...

compilation is at once a celebration of Mahler’s enduring music in sound ...

the final phase of his operatic career. Here, finally, he found his true ...

Of today’s opera stars, tenor Rolando Villazón may be the “hottest” (if readers will allow that Entertainment Tonight term). He has gone from being an Operalia winner a few years back to assuming ...