parterre box

100 comments

• rapt says:

  LC, your stepping in on this occasion has drawn this faithful reader out of the shadows to thank you for your judiciousness as a referee. While I’m here, I’ll thank you, too, for the wit and erudition that make your postings here (and JJ’s reviews) a unique pleasure.

  on September 17, 2008 at 9:04 AM
• HasmikPapian says:

  Hi folks!

  I would not agree by laughing and loosing your inside sources. La Cieca is not always very impartial (few examples Costello, Fleming etc. ).
  It is mostly entertainment and the blog owners opinion, but the owners blog would not exist without
  the inside tips (not sure if anybody would really pay as much attention to his reviews without the dirt part). La Cieca can do what he wants;
  but so can his informers and anybody who reads it.

  on September 17, 2008 at 11:06 AM
• armerjacquino says:

  Meanwhile, the last 17 posts in what had been an interesting thread are about what was a very uninteresting spat.

  Anyone want to get back to Salome etc?

  on September 18, 2008 at 2:21 PM
• LVPO says:

  SALOME!! THAT’s what the thread was about! Had forgotten all about it…

  Thank you armerjacquino
  for making a very good point!

  on September 18, 2008 at 2:52 PM
• kashania says:

  I think it has been pretty much settled that this HD screening will be released on DVD. And while I look forward to that, I wonder if Mattila will be able to match her stunning performance from a few years ago (I’m sure she’ll be good but we’ll she be as great as last time). That production also featured Bryn Terfel and had the superior conductor and it was filmed but never released. It seems to me that the Met will be leaving the superior performance on the shelves. BUT, I haven’t seen this one yet so who knows? I might be pleasantly surprised.

  on September 18, 2008 at 3:02 PM
• Scaramuccio says:

  Indeed, and remember it took what I thought was a fun turn with dream operatic Sound of Music casts. As I can’t remember where we were denouncing Bostridge, let me put him forward for Kurt. After all, it’s GOT to make more sense than the latest piece of crazy casting. After the Bostridge Idomeneo, guess what? Weill/Brecht’s Mackie Messer in what would otherwise have been a promising Dreigroschenoper at the Barbican.

  I know, I don’t have to go and see the guy, and if it’s a matter of him and whichever pianist – even Uchida – I won’t. But I do resent a promising looking line up with wacky Gruber conducting and Kirchschlager and Roschmann as Mackie’s girls being sabotaged. When WILL they learn? When the box office returns for this unfathomable star begin to trail off.

  And, oh yes, the froth-making Barbican brochure comes complete with some twaddle from the LA Times proclaiming ‘Bostridge sings as if from inside the music, as if he has found a way to produce pure, disembodied emotion’. Well, he could do that from a satellite circling Mars, please.

  on September 18, 2008 at 5:08 PM
• armerjacquino says:

  I think I’m the only person here who does, but I love Bostridge. He’s not my idea of an opera singer, granted- or of a Mackie, come to that (although that sounds like a car crash all round- I hate full-on operatic voices in Weill on the whole)- but the world would be a much poorer place without his Schubert or his stunning version of ‘Les Illuminations’.

  on September 18, 2008 at 5:14 PM
• Regina delle fate says:

  Thielemann conducted Fleming’s Marschallin at Covent Garden in 2000 with Susan Graham as Octavian and Barbara Bonney doing her last, I think, Sophies. Hawlata was the Ochs. He is conducting Renay again in Rosenkavalier in Baden-Baden next January with Sophie Koch, Diana Damrau and Hawlata. I guess a recording will finally be made, although alas without La Graham (it’s the Wernicke production from Salzburg, which Fleming and Graham also sang in Paris during Hugues Gall’s regime).

  on September 18, 2008 at 8:38 PM
• Regina delle fate says:

  Or maybe it was Rebecca Evans as Sophie…..

  on September 18, 2008 at 8:38 PM
• PushedUpMezzo says:

  Fleming, Graham and Christine Schafer sang in the first post-reconstruction ROH Rosenkavaliers.

  on September 19, 2008 at 5:00 AM