Grand Tier Grab Bag hearkens back to the days when Sondra Radvanovsky — who is singing no Verdi at all next season — seemed like the Verdi soprano of reference.

Parterre Box features the Met’s current Eugene Onegin, Iurii Samoilov, in a performance of Rossini ahead of a return to Pesaro this summer.

Nostalgic for bass month, Parterre Box offers excerpts from two young basses to watch: Giorgi Manoshvili and Patrick Guetti.

Rosa Feola, still scheduled for a run of performances as Violetta in New York this spring, is the subject of this week’s Grand Tier Grab Bag.

With Nixon, Klinghoffer, and Andris Nelsons on the mind, Parterre Box offers a recording of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s recent John Adams outing.

American tenor Charles Castronovo performs a bit of Weber’s Der Freischütz ahead of the opportunity to hear Berlioz‘s take on the score at Carnegie Hall next week.

My favorite Verdi performance is Claudio Abbado Don Carlo opening of the Scala.

The purely musical performance preserved here is thrilling, ratcheted to a higher intensity than the Deutsche Grammophon studio recording

Victoria de los Ángeles has always been my Violetta of choice, a portrayal that never ceases to move me.

I feel that the best years of Maria Callas’s vocalità, when we hear such a unique freedom and generosity in her singing, were captured in her early recordings.

Before the screams of horror begin, it says ‘favorite’, not best.

Elisabeth Grümmer was, of course, very good at Wagnerian prayers, but she also shines in this Verdi prayer.