Rossini’s Zelmira is a powerhouse opera that features two coloratura tenors and equally demanding roles for soprano and mezzo.
Opera
Opera Album Review: Ermonela Jaho, a Soprano We Need Today
A world-star soprano, in her magnificent prime at age 36, offers her first recital CD, and you can participate in its online “launch.”
Opera Album Review: A Leading Master of 17th-Century Venetian Opera Struts His Stuff
Lovers of Baroque opera will welcome this release: the first recording — and a very accomplished and communicative one —of an important opera by a pioneer and master.
Opera Album Review: Who Knew? Brazil’s Finest Opera is in Italian
Antônio Carlos Gomes’s Lo Schiavo (The Slave) receives its first major recording — and stakes its claim in the repertory.
Book Review: A Treasury of Tall Tales That Make Opera Fun
Author Ethan Mordden serves up plenty of entertaining yarns, sometimes as exaggerated as the genre to which they pay homage.
Opera Album: A Deliciously Grisly “Comic Opera” from 1789 — the Year the French Revolution Began
Grétry’s Raoul Barbe-Bleue — the story of the original lady-killer, Bluebeard — receives its world premiere recording and it’s splendid.
Opera Album Review: Is Perfection Still Possible? Lully’s “Isis” under Christophe Rousset
Is it any wonder? An opera that angered Louis XIV in 1677 brings enormous pleasure in 2020.
Arts Commentary: Reviewing Music, Re-viewed
Our opera-loving reviewer contrasts his own pieces, written 48 years apart, on the same Offenbach operetta.
Opera CD Review: Spontini’s Wacky Comic Opera, in Which Nothing Is as It Seems
Metamorfosi is a marvelously effective and amusing one-act opera that would suit college opera workshops splendidly.
Opera CD Review: An Album of Beethoven Arias? Soprano Chen Reiss’s Imaginative New Solo Disc Pulls it Off
Immortal Beloved is a CD that will appeal to lovers of fine singing and to people curious about some hidden corners of Beethoven’s output.