Rossini crescendo
Juan Diego Flórez, who — if this costume design is to be believed– is planning to play Almaviva as a gay pirate, will headline a mini-company from the Met appearing on “Late Night with David Letterman” tomorrow night, November 8, 2006, at 11:35 p.m., ET, on CBS. The boyish Rossini tenor and his colleagues Diana Damrau, Peter Mattei, John Del Carlo, and Samuel Ramey will perform a fully-staged version of the Act 1 finale from the Met’s new production of Il barbiere di Siviglia, conducted by Maurizio Benini and directed by Bartlett Sher. (Dave’s other guests include Dustin Hoffman and “Naked Chef” Jamie Oliver — oh, yes, it’s sweeps month, all right!) Of course, Wednesday is a school night, La Cieca will set the DVR, and she is sure the scene will be available for next-day viewing on the streaming video page of cbs.com.
In response to your demands, cher public, La Cieca has scheduled another of her wildly popular live chats for the evening of Friday, November 10. You are invited to join in what will no doubt be a most spirited discussion of the Sirius/RealNetworks broadcast of the opening night of the Barber. The room will open at 7:45 for the 8:00 start of the performance.
It was a complete disaster. 90 seconds of music; no introduction of the singers; no context. And you could barely heard individual singers, the camera work was awful. It was a great idea with awful execution. Whoever agreed with this should be shot and I feel sorry for the singers who didn’t come off well at all. Poor Ramey — he looked like a 70 year old drag queen.
I agree with you bill bookbinder. I was so sorry I stayed up so late on a work night for so little and for such a poor representation. I believe the idea of trying to reach a wider audience is fine, but surely the execution of this left so much to be desired that I can understand how a member of Letterman’s TV audience would consider opera as a rather bizarre, unappealing art form (and be justified for thinking so on the basis of this “event”). I also believe a golden opportunity was missed by not having any sort of commentary or discussion with Florez or any of the other singers
Well – it wasn’t Beverly Sills sitting in for Johnny Carson – but despite the overall lack of production value, I think it was a significant stepto get opera back in pop culture. It would have been great to interview the singers – or at least to mention their names – we can only hope that this is not a one off.
Letterman seemed to have no idea who these people were singing, no idea of what an Opera was, and he was his normal snarky self. Since they were standing on the floor where the greats of the 50s and 60s stood on those great Sunday nights, Ed S. must have spun in his grave. At least when Birgit came on after the spinning plates guy Ed made sure everyone knew that Great Singing was going to happen.