Opera on the air: Star Edition

This week's opera broadcast include some of my favorite living voices! First up, WFMT is broadcasting Il Postino, from the LA Opera with Placido Domingo as the poet Neruda. This should be on air Saturday July 16 at 1pm ET ("PREFEED: Friday, July 15, 2011 - 1500 ET | LIVE FEED: Saturday, July 16, 2011 - 1300 ET").

WETA is playing Handel's Alcina with a cast headlined by two excellent singers: Anja Harteros (Alcina), and Vesselina Kasarova (Ruggiero). Broadcast at 1pm ET July 16.

Finally, NPR's World of Opera is featuring Ernani, with one of my favorite living basses, Ferruccio Furlanetto, as Silva. (He was an adorable Leporello to Sam Ramey's Giovanni in a memorable 1987 Salzburg Festival performance with Karajan.) The rest of the cast is none too shabby either: Rudy Park (Ernani); Dimitra Theodossiou (Elvira); and Marco De Felice (Don Carlo). WDAV is livestreaming this.

"Opera's Shakespeare:" why Verdi made one NYT critic's Top Ten

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/top-10-composers-hailing-operas-shakespeare-and-its-proust/ And I couldn't agree more!

Opera blog : Likely Impossibilities

http://likelyimpossibilities.blogspot.com/ A great read about all things opera- thanks for posting!

Verdi: the Falstaff fugue - Spring 2011

Verdi’s last opera may well be his greatest, and Falstaff has received its share of analysis and interpretation from multiple angles, as befits this great magnum opus. This paper will address some details of the overall work, while focusing in greater depth on the fugue[1] at the end of Act III, a topic which receives less attention than others in this opera.

Falstaff, Verdi’s last opera, premiered when the composer was nearly 80 years old. The project had been germinating in his mind for years,