Quinn Kelsey, currently starring as Rigoletto, with Christian Van Horn, playing the four villains in Les Contes d’Hoffmann, visiting the Metropolitan Opera Club in New York.

 

Osvaldo Golijov and librettist David Henry Hwang’s Ainadamar is a flamenco 💃🏿- infused passion play loosely based on Lorca’s death at the hands of the Falange. It is not an opera in the usual sense, but it fires up the feelings of the Spanish Civil War effectively, without the usual iconography - Guernica, Hemngway, ¡No Pasarán! etc. Angel Blue as Margarita Xirgu, Daniela Mack as Garcia Lorca, Alfredo Tejada as Ramón Alonso, and Elena Villalón as Nuria.

 

Pianist Vikingur Ólafsson after a magnificent Brahms piano 🎹 concerto #1, with the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Maestro Manfred Honeker, and with a lovely encore of a Bach Prelude also in D minor.