Today’s episode (in celebration of Countermelody’s first birthday!) picks up where the last one left off: more musicals, more opera (and operaish) singers! Excerpts from cast recordings, radio broadcasts, telecasts,

Todays topic is operetta and opera on Broadway. From the early days of the Great White Way, a large amount of the musical theatre repertoire was actually operetta. I begin with a discussion of the co

Our crossover series continues, this time with a full episode dedicated to more than a century of great tenors singing crossover material, beginning in 1902 with Fernando de Lucias recording of Sere

The American dramatic soprano Eileen Farrell (19202002) was one of the finest and most versatile singers the United States has ever produced. Her singing career lasted more than fifty years, and this

Last month marked the tenth anniversary of the death of the great Italian basso Cesare Siepi, one of the most important basses of the twentieth century, after such figures as Nazzareno de Angelis, Tancredi Pasero, and, particularly, Ezio Pinza,

The Hungarian soprano Sylvia Sass was a comet in the operatic firmament in the mid-1970s through the 1980s, most celebrated for singing the heaviest dramatic coloratura repertoire. In 1984 she also released a crossover album entitled Nézz körül,

Todays featured artist, the cosmopolitan yet earthy Julia Migenes, is certainly one of the most compelling and successful of all crossover artists. Beginning early in her career, she assumed roles

For the first of my Black History Month episodes back in February, I did a program featuring the extraordinary artist Muriel Smith, who in 1943, while still a student at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia,

Aux armes, citoyens! We have received advance warning that an army of foreigners masking as French speakers are storming the artistic gates, so to speak, and attempting to usurp Frances national arti

Another nation, la belle France, has a birthday right around the corner, and today I hoist the Tricolore to celebrate La Fte Nationale. I had planned this episode several weeks ago but when the world