As La Cieca’s clever public guessed six weeks ago, Renée Fleming is not going to sing Norma.
“The part just didn’t fit as she had hoped it would after living with it,” Fleming publicist Mary Lou Falcone said Thursday to the Associated Press. La Fleming, 48 (though she doesn’t look a day over 20, does she?), will perform Eugene Onegin under the baton of James Levine next summer at Tanglewood instead of the Bellini work.
“Legendary maestro Tullio Serafin once said that trying to perform Bellini’s Norma without a great soprano is as futile as attempting to cook risotto without rice. This month, the Metropolitan Opera experimented with such a recipe with less than palatable results.”
Our Own JJ reviews Hasmik Papian‘s Druidess in Gay City News.
La Cieca presents an all-purpose season brochure for an American opera company, done in the familiar “Mad-Lib” style. Enter text in the boxes below, then click the “Go Mad” button to read your version of The Season Brochure.
Send your version of the Season Brochure to La Cieca by copying and pasting the resulting text into an email addressed to lacieca@parterre.com. The author of the Season Brochure judged “most amusing” will be awarded a gift certificate from amazon.com
The Met announced this morning yet another media partnership, this one with iN DEMAND Networks “to offer all eight new performances from the Met’s second season of Metropolitan Opera: Live in High Definition to on-demand subscribers in the United States in both standard and high definition formats.” The basic idea is that the video from the Met’s live movie theater simulcasts will be offered on a pay-per-view basis within a month after the original performance date. The series will kick off with the December 15 performance of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, broadcast on iN DEMAND on Wednesday, January 16, 2008. [...]
Dame Kiri te Kanawa embraces her inner Alexis Morell Carrington Colby Dexter Rowan for this scene from the Handelian pastiche The Sorceress. Despite the film’s 1993 release date, the sensibility is pure ’80s: massive hair, voluminous frock, garish lighting design… and don’t overlook the multitude of smirking supers! (Just so you know, the aria is “Ah, Ruggiero crudel… Ombre pallide” from Alcina).
Our Own Gualtier Maldè reflects on Maria Guleghina’s first Met Norma. True confession: I love Maria Guleghina, I really, really love her. I know her flaws but her strengths are such that they sweep aside severe demerits that would consign any other artist to filth. Among contemporary singers she is one artist who thinks big, sings big with a big voice and gives everything she has even when it is more than she can afford vocally or artistically. She lives dangerously onstage and at the end of the night there is blood on the stage floor, sometimes hers, sometimes the [...]
Don’t forget, cher public: tonight La Cieca hosts a live chat on the topic of the Norma broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera, featuring Maria Guleghina‘s first local stab at the Role of Roles. Join La Cieca in the chatroom La Foresta d’Irminsul beginning at 7:15 PM. Dare we hope tonight’s performance will be as fabulous as this one?
“My theory: Composers who ignore significant parts of their being – nationality included – cut their creativity off at the knees. Barber was being derivative in self-defeating ways out of deference to the operatic genre. Bernstein, in comparison, was out to tell important stories using the most effective means possible…” David Patrick Stearns adds his voice to the debate about Vanessa in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Oh, and La Cieca has discovered where she read the line about Vanessa being the American Adriana Lecouvreur. It’s from the “Goings On About Town” column in the New Yorker. (Since the subject is classical [...]
“Ye Gods! In all the annals, can there be an opera containing more unmitigated codswallop than Erich Korngold’s Das Wunder der Heliane (‘The Miracle of Heliane’)?” Their Own Rupert Christiansen continues: Dreadfully overheated and over-loud, the prolix first act has a slavering and maudlin sensuality that gave me the creeps …. [T]he rapturous sublimity that glows through the last 20 minutes struck me as profoundly bogus and cheap. Why Jurowski and the LPO should wish to waste their talents and time on this tosh beats me …. I felt slightly sick when it was all over and had to lie [...]
Here’s Teddy Tahu Rhodes as Don Giovanni at Opera Australia. La Cieca is, for once, speechless. UPDATE: Imagine La Cieca’s surprise when she found out there is already video of this production!
Cher Public