La Cieca hears that the “TBA” Donna Elvira at the Met for the December run of performances will be Dorothea Röschmann (left) previously heard at the house as Susanna, Pamina and Ilia. She replaces the previously announced Petra Maria Schnitzer (not pictured). Read more »
Not a Regie quiz, but worthy of note for the “what were they thinking” factor. Here’s a production of Otello directed by the usually visually acute Paul Curran. So why was costumer Paul Edwards allowed to get up the principal artists like they’re en route to a Cypriot fancy dress party? From left to right, we have Desdemona as Helen Mirren in Caligula; Roderigo as the young Vanessa Redgrave, and of course poor Emilia, who couldn’t quite make up her mind between Wowkle and Brangäne.
As of this writing, Ben Heppner is still scheduled to go on tonight in the Met’s Queen of Spades, an event advertised on the company’s site with, under the circumstances, a rather unfortunate tag line:
The solution to our most recent Regie quiz? Seeing is believing! Download Yes, that’s right, the opera was again Aida! Now for this week’s Regie puzzler, which La Cieca promises is not going to be a Verdi opera set in ancient Egypt!
La Cieca has just about given up on the New York Times so far as accuracy goes, but it still rankles when a thoroughly disproven urban legend is casually quoted as factual truth. In a review of a novel called Winnie and Wolf, critic Patrick McGrath repeats the canard that Winifred Wagner supplied the paper upon which Hitler wrote Mein Kampf. This tale is approximately as apocryphal as the “bouncing Tosca” myth and even less entertaining. UPDATE: A member of the cher public writes this morning that the “canard” is not so cut-and-dried as La Cieca insisted: As far as [...]
La Cieca is always delighted to hear the merest whisper of a rumor that her old, old, old friend Madame Vera Galupe-Borszkh has been encouraged to grace the lyric stage yet once more. Therefore it is with the almost unutterable joy that your doynne notes that “La Dementia” will sing again in 2009 as a fitting finale to what may be the last musical season ever in New York City. A reliable source has revealed that the quasi-mythical traumatic soprano will tread the boards of the Thalia the last week of May 2009 in the company of erstwhile colleages Maestro [...]
A tipster writes: Word is: The artistic administraion of the Met, always concerned about maintaining the highest possible levels of intenational artistic experience for their paying audience, are allowing Marcello Giordani to decide, after his Berlioz matinee, whether or not he wants sing the 8pm Butterfly.
Cher Public