COVID, The Met, and How Does Opera Go Forward in 2022?

While I wrote a couple weeks ago about choruses singing and rehearsing with and without masks, and one case of the dire consequences of the latter, the largest performing organization in the United States, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, managed to pull off 196 performances in its 2021-2 season without cancelling any. The company’s […]

Why Study Old Italian Arias?

For those studying singing at the beginner and intermediate levels, studying old (17th and 18th century) Italian arias seems to be a nearly universal recommendation.   Why is this so? What are the magical properties of this repertoire? What are these arias?  Where are they from? These “Old Italian” arias are from operas of the 17th […]