Nicola Alaimo has won the Ettore Bastianini Award. The biennial accolade was given to the baritone for his achievements on the international opera stage and as one of the few baritones in the world who continues in the line of Bastianini. The award will be handed out by the Ettore Bastianini Association on Feb. 22 in Bergamo at the Domus {…}
Singers sharing birthdays is quite coming. Seeing three singers of the same exact voice type with similar repertoire sharing birthday? Rare. Seeing two of those very baritones, often considered among the greatest ever, born on the same exact day? Rarer still. And yet here we are. Ettore Bastianini and Cornell MacNeil were born on the same day, and Pablo Elvira, {…}
The opera world is filled with great tragedies throughout its history. The story of Ettore Bastianini is easily one of the saddest. Born on Sept. 24, 1922, Bastianini would go on to become one of the greatest baritones of all time. His voice was beloved by all. He began his training as a bass, singing his first concerts in 1940 {…}
Ettore Bastianini, Pablo Elvira, and Cornell MacNeil share a birthday – September 24. Two of these men, MacNeil and Bastianini were born on the same exact day. All three were baritones, overlapping a ton of repertoire. Of the three, Elvira’s career is perhaps not quite up to the legendary status of the other two men, with Bastianini often crowned as {…}
Sergei Prokofiev’s operatic output isn’t all that well-known. While small bits from many of his works have made it into the mainstream via different means (a violin transcription of the March from “The Love for Three Oranges, for example), only one opera has passed the test of time, his adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” The opera, which premiered {…}
Rudolf Bing’s name towers in the world of opera. The Austrian-born impresario, born on January 9, 1902, has an enduring legacy, in many ways tainted by the scandals and feuds Bing was known to have with the opera’s greatest figures and lesser-known figures during many of the company’s most tumultuous years. But to see the general manager who wielded his {…}
