CLASSICAL ICONOCLAST

Alfredo Catalani and Giacomo Puccini, both born in Lucca, four years apart. Everyone knows Puccini. Yet Catalani was a respected composer...

Rigoletto LIVE from the Royal Opera House on Tuesday 17th April at HD cinemas all over the world.  Note, it's "live", which ...

Marta Eggerth is 100 years old today and still singing. We need to know because she's a living relic, or as the Japanese say "A ...

Sandrine Paiu and Roger Vignoles teamed up  for the latest concert in Vignoles's "Perspectives" series at the Wigmore Hal...

At last, a report from someone who knows the opera well and was at the Berlin Barenboim Lulu.  Mark Berry in Boulezian. Read more HERE. So...

Stefan Herheim's  Rusalka is magical, capturing the opera's true depths and mysteries. Watch the stream from La Monnaie/De Munt a...

You can tell nothing's happening in London when the newspapers send their folks to distant regions or to things that don't usuall...

Lulu minus Act III/1? Of the 1326 bars in the Third Act, only 87 were not fully notated by Berg, and enough sketched of the remainder to ...

Richard Tauber and Jimmy Durante? In Forbidden Music ( The Land without Music ) they join forces to capture the popular market. Crossove...

" I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die;  and whoever lives by believing in...

Made in the exotic alpine environs of Denham Studios, London,  in 1936/7, Richard Tauber's English language Pagliacci ! Apparently th...

If it's Easter it must be Parsifal,  Bach, and Cav and Pag. New to Medici TV is the Mascagni/Leoncavallo  double bill streaming HERE ...

Interesting interview with Thomas Quasthoff in Der Spiegel HERE . It's good because the questions are honest and not hagiographic.TQ...

Some of the live Lieder performances last week on the BBC Spirit of Schubert series were unremarkable but Ian Bostridge's Viola D783 ...

Easter brings out the pious. Some genuinely so, some by rote!  So here is Eduard Mörike, set by Hugo Wolf. The poem is Karwoche. "...