The Price is right!

With the new year always come new year's resolutions, and La Cieca thinks that this year her resolution will be to stop making snap judgments. La Cieca hopes you understand that she only got into the habit of making all those snap judgments because she is right almost all of the time. But now and then, La Cieca does miss the boat, and she is the first to admit it. Or at least she is among the first. One such erroneous snap judgement La Cieca made was about Dame Margaret Price. Way, way back in the 1970s, when her brain was probably addled with too much, uh, disco music, La Cieca heard a couple of recordings of Dame Margaret's singing, and, well it just somehow rubbed La Cieca the wrong way. La Cieca used words like "hooty" and "straight tone" and perhaps the most destructive snap judgement of all, "not my cup of tea." Well, now it turns out that Margaret Price should have been La Cieca's cup of tea all those years, had La Cieca bothered to take more than a single sip. And so, on this week's episode of "Unnatural Acts of Opera," La Cieca presents a performance from, ironically enough, 1981, when Dame Margaret appeared as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony. She sings, first, the "Four Last Songs" of Richard Strauss, and then selections from "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" of Gustav Mahler. As an encore, we hear Agathe's "Leise, leise" from 1973. Unnatural Acts of Opera