Yet another “Tosca” — this one captured live at the 2024 edition of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. The production garnered widespread acclaim, not least for its stark pseudo-fascist décor, evocative of today’s authoritarianism worldwide. But how do its musical qualities fare, and do they warrant the release of Naxos’s new CD set? The performance is entrusted to the capable {…}
Mascagni’s “Zanetto” does not fit squarely into any one category. Premiered in 1896, it is a one-act miniature with a late scapigliato sensibility—not unlike Alfredo Catalani’s “La Falce” (1875), or, for that matter, any of the soft-aesthetic, off-the-beaten-path operas of fin-de-siècle Italy. Significantly, Mascagni himself originally dubbed “Zanetto” a scena lirica—an anti-”Cavalleria,” one might say. By all evidence, its storyline {…}
With his latest release, Jonas Kaufmann ventures deep into the little-charted territory of Austro-Hungarian operetta. “Magische Töne” (“Magical Sounds”) is indeed a potpourri of Belle Époque mystique: playful, mischievous, and bittersweet. Its 22 tracks comprise lyrical evergreens like the “Wolgalied” (“Es steht ein Soldat am Wolgastrand”), alongside the rather obscure “Julia” by Paul Abraham, as well as Fred Raymond’s {…}
“I want to fly with the music; we have to swim inside the music,” said Michele Mariotti in 2017, when Lisette Oropesa appeared in a rehearsal video for the Royal Opera House’s “Lucia di Lammermoor.” Fast forward to 2026, and she still sings the “Mad Scene” with unequivocal ease; her voice soars to vertiginous heights before collapsing into the {…}
Leoncavallo’s “Signore! Signori! Scusatemi” may well be the most famous captatio benevolentiae in all of opera. A grand theatrical gesture, it also serves as the title of Anthony Clark Evans’ debut recital for EuroArts. By all appearances, one might expect a veristic—or at least Italo-Romantic—show of force. “Pagliacci” is indeed followed by arias from Giordano and Puccini; yet it {…}
New Yorkers might remember tenor Petr Nekoranec from his participation in the Met’s Summer Recital Series. That was in 2017, when he performed repertoire staples (think “La donna è mobile”) across all five boroughs—just a few months before making his proper house debut in “Cendrillon.” Since then, his career has largely evolved overseas, and U.S. audiences must rely on his {…}
“Puccini Heroines,” “Puccini’s Heroines,” “Heroines”—or “Eroine”—of Puccini. This myriad of near-identical album titles reflects the indiscriminately amorous fascination the composer’s female protagonists have exerted upon a century of operatic singers and spectators alike (after all, 2026 marks the centennial of “Turandot”). Therefore, another “Puccini Heroines”—this time from Pentatone—comes as little surprise. It features Sondra Radvanovsky, whose career has followed the {…}
Rarely has a single performance so cornered the discographic record of an opera as Claudio Abbado’s “Simon Boccanegra” from 1977. And my use of the possessive is, in this case, far from aleatory: Abbado lays claim to the score with an authority scarcely less than Verdi’s own—or would Hugo Shirley otherwise have spoken in superlatives so unsparingly when Gramophone revisited {…}
Historiography operates through superlatives. All too easily, it compresses organic development into the quasi-religious advent of the monstre sacré. This antiquarianism of sorts keeps a particularly tight grip on the development of Italian opera: There’s Monteverdi at one end, Puccini at the other—no ante, no post. But what about Ottorino Respighi, born some twenty years after the composer of {…}