Christopher Corwin

1 week ago | parterre.com | Christopher Corwin

Spring 2025 brings to New York two contrasting versions of Giulio Cesare, Handel’s most popular work: The English Concert brings it to Carnegie Hall (as well as several other venues) in concert, while R. B. Schlather stages it in his continuing Handel cycle at Hudson Hall. As a preview Chris’s Cache offers a rare pirate recording featuring Cecilia Bartoli, Andreas Scholl, and Les Arts Florissants. After Bartoli sang her first Cleopatras in Zurich in 2005, she waited a few years to try it out again.

2 weeks ago | observer.com | Christopher Corwin

Kathryn Lewek and Golda Schultz as the Queen of the Night and Pamina. Marty Sohl/The Metropolitan OperaOpera at the Met may mean expensively lavish stagings with the world’s biggest stars, but that’s not all you’ll find at Lincoln Center. Running there now concurrently are revivals of two Mozart masterpieces that amply demonstrate that the Met can also deliver wonderfully entertaining ensemble operas.

2 weeks ago | parterre.com | Christopher Corwin

For the conclusion of “Under-appreciated soprano” month, Chris’s Cache choses Johann Gottlieb Naumann’s Cora och Alonso, a little-known late German (really Swedish) baroque opera whose title lovers are sung by a pair probably too little heard in many households: soprano Inga Kalna and mezzo soprano Bernarda Fink. Born in Germany in 1741, Naumann became one of many itinerant opera composers active in the 18th century.

2 weeks ago | parterre.com | Christopher Corwin

Not only was Paul Plishka (who died on 3 February) a long-time Met stalwart, he also appeared often with Opera Orchestra of New York: twenty-two times in a astonishing variety of roles over more than a quarter-century. As this is “Donizetti Month” here on parterre box, Chris’s Cache offers Plishka and OONY with Carol Vaness in Anna Bolena and with Mariella Devia in the rarely heard Adelia. Plishka first appeared with OONY in the famous 1972 I Lombardi opposite Renata Scotto and José Carreras.

1 month ago | observer.com | Christopher Corwin

After its annual winter hiatus, the Metropolitan Opera reopened with a pair of productions that chronicle their protagonists’ dangerous, intensely personal quests. The journey in Moby-Dick, Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s adaptation of Herman Melville’s epic novel in its Met premiere, ends in death and destruction, while the latest revival of Beethoven’s Fidelio concludes with the victory of good over evil.