A few of La Cieca’s cher public wrote in to complain that last week’s podcast, the Beverly Sills farewell gala, offered lots of gala but not much Sills. So we’re remedying that this week on “Unnatural Acts of Opera,” with an all-Sills program featuring music by Handel, Mozart and R. Strauss.
After what an insider described as a “messy” dress rehearsal that included several cracked high notes (due to allergies? or nerves?), Olga Borodina may or may not be singing the prima of Cenerentola at the Met tomorrow night. On dit that Joyce di Donato has been rushed through the staging in preparation for a last-minute jump in. (Maybe we should start calling Borodina “Milena Skittish?”)
….Last scene of all
That ends this strange eventful history
Is second childishness and mere oblivion
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste…
But those eyebrows aren’t going anywhere!
Have the years flown that fast? Well, you tell La Cieca. She just this past weekend realized that it’s been 25 years since Beverly Sills retired from singing. To put that in persepctive, the duration of her retirement (1980 – 2005) is now exactly equal to the duration of her New York City Opera career (1955 – 1980). Yes, that means that Bev debuted at NYCO 50 years ago this year! And yet, to La Cieca, 1980 seems like, if not yesterday, then at most the day before. To mark these anniversaries (silver, silver, and gold, respectively), La Cieca is [...]
La Cieca sat through Terrence McNally‘s latest effort, Dedication, Sunday afternoon, and the best thing she can think to say about it is that this play makes a whole lot of opera librettos look like masterpieces of literature. There’s this husband and wife children’s theater team who are trying to convince a dying grande dame to give them this old playhouse she owns; also along for the ride are the wife’s druggy rock-star daughter and her roadie boyfriend. In the most contrived and unlikely ways possible everyone chooses to unburden themselves of decades-old secrets right there on the stage of [...]
The recently-premiered opera The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is webcast by the BBC this afternoon at 2:25 New York time, a broadcast from the English National Opera. The Beeb’s website describes the work so: “Gerald Barry‘s new opera, based on the play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, translated by Denis Calandra, exploring the tortured connections between desire and power. Petra von Kant, a successful but arrogant fashion designer in her mid-30s, falls passionately in love with Karin, a beautiful, cunning young woman who wants a career in modelling. Watching over everything, but never uttering a single word, is the [...]
You know, it’s one thing to flounce around dusting the floor of a church with your silken train, the meantime flaunting your bosom to the Blessed Virgin, but it’s another thing altogether to take a heartfelt hymn like “Amazing Grace” and transform it into cheap soundtrack music. Can’t someone stop this woman?
Cher Public