The rehearsal diary of the Sydney-born mezzo, currently singing with the UK’s Grange Park Opera. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in
Susan and Isaac Wakil’s $1.5 donation will subsidise ticket prices over the next five years. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in
Meet Opera Australia's new Figaro, the Italian bass baritone who's turning 'buffo' into a total art form.
Aussie soprano, aged 25, scores at Plácido Domingo’s Covent Garden competition for budding opera talent. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in
An almost great production with one unfortunately conspicuous weak link.
The annual APRA AMCOS Awards celebrating “diversity and vibrancy” sees increase to first time nominees this year. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in
As part of our July feature, Victorian Opera's Artistic Director chooses his top recordings.
With opera companies more and more regularly dazzled by the lights of Broadway, we investigate the seemingly irresistible rise of musical theatre.
Joyce El-Khoury on being thrown to Donizetti's lions.
Baroque specialist, harpsichordist and pioneering conductor of Handel opera passes at 80. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in
★★★★★ Donizetti was one of the most prolific opera composers of all time, an appealingly personable fellow (if you read the letters), and an extraordinary professional capable of turning out a work in just a few weeks. That very facility though has led to a general dismissal of his music as too easy, rushed, derivative, or worse. Les Martyrs disproves all of these. A late work (1840), this grandest of his French grand operas was written simultaneously with the slighter, yet inexplicably more popular La Fille du Régiment, but the two works couldn’t be more different – one a trivially sucrose French confection, the other a profound meditation on faith and duty. But while Daughter of the Regiment went on to conquer the world, Les Martyrs sank without a trace. That latter statement isn’t entirely true. Les Martyrs was itself an expanded reworking of Poliuto, an opera Donizetti had written for Naples that fell foul of the censors and so never made it to the stage. Poliuto has been championed intermittently over the years (there’s a superb live version with Callas, Corelli and Bastianini) and Glyndebourne have just given its British premiere, but Les Martyrs is a horse of a…
Trio of great performances help four hours of passion and politics fly by.
The 66-year-old Italian bass talks to Limelight about Kings, Christoff, Karajan and the secret of vocal longevity. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in
