Radamès, non è deciso il tuo fato
Latest casting news from the Met: Stephen O’Mara will sing Radamès in Aida on Wednesday, October 24, replacing Marco Berti, who has withdrawn from remaining performances due to illness. The role of the Egyptian captain for the the remaining performances of the season (October 27 - November 8) will be sung by that popular man-about-town TBA.
La Cieca's idle speculation: it should be simple enough to get someone in to sing a single performance of Pinkerton on the evening of October 27, which would free up Roberto di Nazareth. La Cieca's prediction: not bloody likely, but she's been wrong before.
La Cieca's idle speculation: it should be simple enough to get someone in to sing a single performance of Pinkerton on the evening of October 27, which would free up Roberto di Nazareth. La Cieca's prediction: not bloody likely, but she's been wrong before.
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31 Comments:
O'Mara's web site says that he's covering Radames, Otello and The First Emperor this season at the Met. He's done Siegfried in a couple of Ring cycles in Europe.
According to the Met Archives O'Mara sang a lot of small tenor roles at the Met in the 1980's, including Parpignol, some messengers, etc. Is this to be a new James McCracken?
He sang his first Met Radames last Saturday. Anyone heard him?
Stephen is a very artful singer - very smart - uses his voice well. Should be a good performance. Congrats to him!
Alagna is scheduled for Aida in Barcelona, I doubt they would release them voluntarily from the first cast. Piero Giuliacci is a very good Radames alla Flaviano Labo (and Barcelona's second cast; he also jumped again for several Berti Aidas in Verona this past summer), plus Franco Farina is the current rehearsing Pollione, but his cover Philip Webb could deal with the daily schedule and Farina could be free for the rest of the Aida evenings.
Check out the pic of him as Menelas.
http://www.stephenomara.com/photosreviewsbio.html
If Mr Alagna is God among us, what does that make his saintly Mrs?
Judas.
Oh, brava, Sugarmezzo. Maybe Easter's come a little early this year.
Tenorma's really heating up. I was so hoping that Rolando would appear miraculously in December and take his turn in bed.
Was tonights replacement for Berti
really Stephen O'Mara, or was it Alan Glassman???
Tonight's Aida performance at the Met will take a special place in its history for two reasons: the worst Radames, and the worst Amonosaro ever to disgrace its stage. O'Mara has no business being
a standee and he'd be lucky to stay in the chorus of the Met. Pons, at 61, has nothing left exept for a colorless and flat sound. His Germont, Sr., replacing
the bowing out Hvorostofsky at the LA Opera last year, was as flat. A really sad day for Aida with the exception of some spark from Carosi and Borodina.
I had the pleasure of seeing the worst Amneris of all time a few years ago. I will refrain from saying who, because (despite the fact that she's slightly famous) it was not a singer I was familiar with, and it's entirely possible it was just a bad night.
Anyway, she finished her big scene, and a resounding SILENCE filled the hall. Whoever was conducting allowed the silence to continue, waiting for people to realize it was time to clap, and it never happened. Ever. At all. It was quite astonishing.
A worse Radames than Farina?
Constantine, I think you mean Bruson instead of Pons in the LA Traviata.
Whether Olga has the temperment or not for Amneris, I still love that voice. She can be my Amneris any day.
Thomas,
You're correct. I mixed up Pons with Bruson. At any rate, both are aged singers, more Bruson than Pons, who subject themselves and us to pain. Farina would be another abomination. Tonight, Gelp made his first mistake as a general manager, and I hope it's going to be his last one, unless he goes ahead with the hapless Farina as Radames. This is the Mighty Met we're talking about and not a small town opera company.
It used to be a mighty MET but for a long time it is very provincial.
When you run such a big house you will always have mistakes; many times not because you want to, but because on a short notice you cannot get anyone else. If Berti's cancelation happened today 5 hours prior to the curtain time in Vienna, Munich or Berlin you get example Giuliaci, Malagnini, Grisales, Armiliato, Kulko, Cura etc on a plane and in top 2-3 hours you have them. Tonight's mistake was not Stephen O'Mara's performance; he did what he could; the mistake for a house like MET was to hire him as the cover for Radames and Otello and First Emperor.I hope they realized, that they could not let him sub for Domingo or Botha later.
But Othello covers do not grow anymore on trees or Radames covers as well.
Where are the days when tenors even of the calibre of Raffanti, Beccaria, Lamberti or Lima were covers. Or earlier Vinay, Morrell,
Svanholm etc.
The mistake runs deeper than that - the root of the problem started when Gelb ditched the old "cover 8/sing 1 or 2" arrangement. There is simply no reason for better, more reliable, and fresher-sounding second-tier singers to cover at the Met any longer.
Why park yourself there with no guarantee of going on when you can take a gig someplace else that gives you performances? More importantly, why bother covering at all if management is just going to borrow a "star" over from another production to do the performance?
There is a decline in quality between who is covering in this new system and who used to cover in the old system, and it will continue to go downhill as good singers see there's no reason to waste a month or more at the Met anymore. Anyone who thinks differently isn't paying enough attention to the business.
Why doesn't the Met try to get Antonello Palombi, the guy who replaced Alagna at the Scala walkout? That should provoke some interest.
I understand Richard Margison was considered but he has a broken leg (or arm?)...
Can Borodina still sing Amneris? I love her voice but when she sang Eboli at the Met last time, she had no top left. Even transposing "O don fatale" down a semi-tone didn't help.
Kashania: Borodina was in glorious voice last Saturday matinee.
La Cieca: Glad to hear it, thanks. Perhaps, she was going through a bad patch during those Ebolis (though the rest of the voice was luscious).
LaCieca: how was borodina in the judgement scene and those climactic high notes? when i saw her as amneris, she rushed those dreaded high notes...
gorgeous voice, gorgeous woman, but high notes she doesn't have them... or the dramatic temperament.
Yes, the current MET cover casting
Gelb mistake runs deeper.
Hope he realizes soon that you need a solid musical education and/or solid opera experience to run the mighty MET. And Gelb does have only the solid corporate experience backed up by personal advisers like Matthew Epstein and previously Beverly Sills. He gloriously improved what he knows from his previous job, the MET visibility in the medias (broadcasts, telecasts, newspaper coverage) but still does have three major areas to improve:
a)solid cover system with people who can without compromise step in
or finish a performance (he needs also to learn to respect them and give them some guarantee of making them interested to cover; because if he oversteps you twice, like in the Raul Melo case; you are insulting the cover who could be more of use to you /by the way Melo's Rigoletto debut was not great, maybe fear, maybe partial indisposition that night, but he is a highly superior artist to majority of current covers or even singers performing there this season/ an oversteping him was partially caused by the second issue that Mr. Gelb does not care for middle aged, shorter or heavier set people (alla Carl Tanner, Susan Neves, Ruth Ann Swenson, Olga Makarina, Raul Melo,
Aprile Millo, Frederick Burchinal etc.) whoes contract got eliminated by him and their artistry is highly superior to their current replacements, but those are slimmer or taller (Futral, O'Mara,
Blancke-Biggs, Deshorties, Dobber etc.
I am surprised that there never was yet a discussion about the "Debbie little black Covent Garden Ariadne dress" at the MET currently very much happening, but silently without the press blow up like in her case.
And the third issue is to know voices in order to find new potential stars and to slowly build their careers, but for that you have to have the above mentioned experience and a team of people helping you, but as far as I know, Mr.Gelb until now strongly over-ruled all his current artistic
team members (alla Friend, Strauss etc) which were trying to help.
Even mighty houses cannot run 365 days on stars and many of them do not have that status elswhere (alla Giordani, who despite his sucess at the MET is not working at all in any other major house; opposite this summer even being fired
at a major opera house from 5 Rodolfo's after a dissastrous opening night, or singing at another one to very poor press and almost without any applause from the audience. He is a great singer in French high tessitura roles; but he is not the new Domingo, Pavarotti or Carreras). What a surprise that he is always free to jump in after Gelb's request).
Yes, the current MET cover casting
Gelb mistake runs deeper.
Hope he realizes soon that you need a solid musical education and/or solid opera experience to run the mighty MET. And Gelb does have only the solid corporate experience backed up by personal advisers like Matthew Epstein and previously Beverly Sills. He gloriously improved what he knows from his previous job, the MET visibility in the medias (broadcasts, telecasts, newspaper coverage) but still does have three major areas to improve:
a)solid cover system with people who can without compromise step in
or finish a performance (he needs also to learn to respect them and give them some guarantee of making them interested to cover; because if he oversteps you twice, like in the Raul Melo case; you are insulting the cover who could be more of use to you /by the way Melo's Rigoletto debut was not great, maybe fear, maybe partial indisposition that night, but he is a highly superior artist to majority of current covers or even singers performing there this season/ an oversteping him was partially caused by the second issue that Mr. Gelb does not care for middle aged, shorter or heavier set people (alla Carl Tanner, Susan Neves, Ruth Ann Swenson, Olga Makarina, Raul Melo,
Aprile Millo, Frederick Burchinal etc.) whoes contract got eliminated by him and their artistry is highly superior to their current replacements, but those are slimmer or taller (Futral, O'Mara,
Blancke-Biggs, Deshorties, Dobber etc.
I am surprised that there never was yet a discussion about the "Debbie little black Covent Garden Ariadne dress" at the MET currently very much happening, but silently without the press blow up like in her case.
And the third issue is to know voices in order to find new potential stars and to slowly build their careers, but for that you have to have the above mentioned experience and a team of people helping you, but as far as I know, Mr.Gelb until now strongly over-ruled all his current artistic
team members (alla Friend, Strauss etc) which were trying to help.
Even mighty houses cannot run 365 days on stars and many of them do not have that status elswhere (alla Giordani, who despite his sucess at the MET is not working at all in any other major house; opposite this summer even being fired
at a major opera house from 5 Rodolfo's after a dissastrous opening night, or singing at another one to very poor press and almost without any applause from the audience. He is a great singer in French high tessitura roles; but he is not the new Domingo, Pavarotti or Carreras). What a surprise that he is always free to jump in after Gelb's request.
Although I agree with most posts about last night's Aida, I wanted to put in a word in favor of Carosi. I thought she was excellent, even before awarding her a huge number of additional points for managing to stay on pitch and on track during the Nile Scene and Tomb Scene despite having to sing along with O'Mara's out of tune and out of tempo caterwauling. Oh well, O'Mara certainly is strapping, so I guess that's all that matters. Also, altho Pons is not what he was 15 years ago, his Amonasro had dignity and presence, and he knew the style he wanted to achieve, even if his voice occasionally let him down. Finally, Borodina turned in her usual beautifully sung but overly placid Amneris.
One of the legion of anonymice wrote:
"There is simply no reason for better, more reliable, and fresher-sounding second-tier singers to cover at the Met any longer."
Well, yes, there is. The pay. People sometimes get paid considerably more to cover at the Met than they do to perform a leading role at NYCO. I know three singers who are being paid not to sing Mozart this season at the Met. They are all three completely stage-worthy performers who never put in a bad show. In the past fortnight, two of them have told me they hope they DON'T get to step in for their roles. They just want the money.
We may regret that attitude, but I assure you that it exists.
I can't get inside your three sources heads to see how theire internal calculators work, but their math doesn't add up compared to what I know as fact.
As of last season, a very respectable cover fee at the Met was $3K a night. Two seasons ago, the top fee at NYCO was $3750 a performance. And a singer in that strata brings in fees around $4K - $7K a performance at good regional houses.
So I don't see how sitting at the Met and not singing is any more profitable for a singer, unless they're simply not good enough to draw that kind of money at NYCO or a regional house.
(And I don't want to hear fantasies of how the Met staff is going to embrace some diamond in the rough cover with open arms and years worth of first-cast contracts based on a few cover rehearsals - it rarely happened in the Volpe era, and it would be even more rare now. You better show up with a recording contract in hand at the Met these days, or they'll always look at you as a second-class citizen.)
There is at least one singer I know of who was asked to cover three leading roles over four months, no performances, and this is after spending several years on the Met roster as both a first cast player and a cover artist. This singer said no thanks and has a schedule full of actual performances both in the U.S. and Europe for the same period.
For singers who actually don't want to go on, more power to them, I guess. But they can't complain when no one will hire them any longer for real work - to borrow a phrase from academia, you either peform or perish, especially now when the pressure from the newest and hottest young things is greater than ever.
There's benefits to a cover contract beyond some decent fees that probably factor in to this equation. For starters there's free coaching from the Met staff, the opportunity to put the Met on your resume(and doesn't every singer want to do that), and the luxury of staying put for a few months with the time to prepare for other projects.
I think the Met has been in a damned if you do...situation regarding covers since the demise of the house singer (now that Hong's probably gone for good, who else is there aside from a handful of stalwart comprimario mezzos, character tenors and aging basses?). The company used to have a veritable army of second tier singers contracted for the entire season that sang almost all of the secondary roles and stepped in to the big parts when an emergency arose (Jean Kraft, Isola Jones, Batyah Godfrey, Shirley Love, Joann Grillo and Nedda Casei just to mention a few mezzos who racked up huge numbers of performances in the 70's and early 80's - It's taken Wendy White and Jane Bunnell nearly two decades to achieve the number of performances some of those women did in just five or six years). Nearly all of them have a few nights in big roles listed in the archives. That situation just doesn't exist anymore. The roles that used to be the house singers chance to shine on a nightly basis and made it worth their while to commit to a full contract now go to singers flown in for one or at most two productions. There's no longer a stable of go-to singers ALWAYS in the house. If you don't have a Jean Kraft waiting in the wings to pop off a last minute Herodias between her steady diet of Emilias and Mamma Lucias, what else are you going to do?
The Met, these days, does invest a lot in developing young talent, but after a few seasons of Bridesmaids and Flower Maidens all but a few get cut loose. If you're going to have experienced singers of high quality stick around for more than a few seasons to provide the backbone of the company (Think Elias, Baldwin, Hines, Alexander, and yes Hong - because they all mixed roles of various sizes throughout their Met careers) you have to give them something to do besides sit at home waiting for somebody else to get sick.
It was too obvious that Farina would be the only fast, less offensive solution, at least for the next two performances.
The rest is still TBA (maybe they give a try to Philip Webb if desperate; he is Farina's Pollione cover and scheduled for Radames in Portlan, OR). So at least the show can go on; the quality is another question at the MET for a long time despite the new boss.
here's the real question: who does the met have covering for netrebko?! I can only imagine their horror if/when she ever cancels!
Netrebko's cover is Olivia Gorra as Juliette and there is also a second cover (not usual these days at the MET) which is Dina Kuznetsova
wow, well i'll be PISSED if she cancels...lord knows I'm not seeing that bore of an opera for any other reason besides netrebko....you'd think they'd have gheorghiu or at least dessay on tap for someone as high profile as she.
This is interesting. Everything I have ever heard O'Mara in was absolutely brilliant. His Ballo is almost unrivaled. He was also a favorite at Covent Garden. I hardly see him as being a secondary singer.
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