The unusual and undreamed-of videos just keep popping up on YouTube. Here’s a scene from Norma with Elinor Ross and Mario del Monaco!
Not a whole lot of news on matters operatic in the past couple of days, so La Cieca has decided a competitive quiz is in order. The clip below is the “Sleepwalking Scene” from Verdi’s Macbeth divided among 14 sopranos and mezzo-sopranos. All you have to do is name the 14 singers in the correct order. (La Cieca has decided to be merciful this time and omit overly obscure singers. Each singer in this clip is or was internationally famous. However, La Cieca cautions you that not all these singers included Lady Macbeth in their onstage repertoire.)
When you believe you know all 14 voices, send your answer to lacieca@parterre.com. First correct answer will receive a gift certificate from amazon.com. Should there be no entry with all 14 correct answers by midnight on Tuesday, January 29, La Cieca will choose randomly among the entries with the highest number of correct answers.
In the meantime, please feel free to discuss and make wild guesses in the comments section.
UPDATE: As of Monday evening, La Cieca has not declared a winner. There is a tie for first place with two entries each naming 13 out of 14 correctly. Interestingly, they both mistake the same Lady. For those of you who might want to do a little more intensive study of the Ladies (and La Cieca doesn’t mean only the lesbians in the audience!), here’s the mp3 to download.
That superstar of the podosphere, Miss Frances Gumm, is back after six months of laying fallow. Or is La Cieca thinking of Frank Sinatra? Anyway, one of our absolute favorite online destinations, JudyCast, has returned with its distinctive mélange of entertainment gossip and otherworldy warbling as gaily subversive as ever. (No explanation is given for the hiatus, but La Cieca suspects that the recent TCM screening of the bizarre 1968 flick Skiddoo dislodged whatever was creatively blocking Carol Channing and the other JudyCast partipants.)
La Cieca’s dear friend Ed Rosen (doyen of Premiere Opera) sent along a clip from Rolando Villazón‘s first recital since his return to the stage early this month. According to Ed, “He first sings Massenet’s “Ouvre tes yeux,” followed by Tosti’s “Ideale.” Rolando’s voice sounds as beautiful as ever! The recital took place in Barcelona on January 13 of this year.” While we’re on the subject, do be sure to check out Ed’s always fascinating podcast.
La Cieca has to say she has never taken much interest in the music of John Corigliano; in fact, she believes she used the phrase “Technicolor twaddle” to describe The Ghosts of Versailles. But your doyenne must give credit where credit is due. Boyfriend is looking fucking amazing for a 70-year-old! Take a look at these two images that accompanied Steve Smith’s NY Times preview of the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s upcoming Corigliano festival: At left is Corigliano 8 years ago when he won the Academy Award for The Red Violin; at right is a recent photo of the composer. Is it [...]
La fée Manto (Francois Piolino) turns up the heat on old coot Anselme (René Schirrer) in this scene from Rameau’s Les Paladins.
A brainy reader points out to La Cieca that her little blog is mentioned this month in The New York Review of Books. The lovely and talented Sarah Boxer discusses a bevy of books on blogs and blogging, modestly mentioning only in passing her own tome on that very subject. As an example of the vast variety of blogs out there, she notes You can read about the Iraq war from Iraqi bloggers, from American soldiers (often censored now), or from scholars like Juan Cole, whose blog, Informed Comment, summarizes, analyzes, and translates news from the front. For opera, to [...]
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