parterre box

La Cieca wishes to thank you, cher public, for making this year’s Amazon Associates advertising program successful beyond her wildest dreams.

And now, the top ten most ordered items of 2008!

1. Wagner: The Great Operas from the Bayreuth Festival

2. Marilyn Horne – The Complete Decca Recitals

3. The Original Jacket Collection: Montserrat Caballé

4. Legendary Perfomances of Leyla Gencer

5. Vivaldi – Ercole s’ul Termodonte (Spoleto Festival 2006)

6. Lorraine at Emmanuel

7. Jonas Kaufmann: Romantic Arias

8. Rene Pape: Gods, Kings & Demons (Opera Arias)

9. La Nilsson: My Life in Opera

10. [Tie]

• Gaetano Donizetti – La Fille du regiment (Royal Opera House 2007)
• Verdi: La Traviata [DVD Video]
• The Copenhagen Ring: The Complete DVD Set

Eclectic “not news” site fark.com takes on high culture with their current Photoshop contest. The task: take an image from Francesca Zambello’s WNO production of the Ring (well, maybe the culture’s not so high after all) and then tweak the context a bit. Best entry so far:

The original image and its many variations may be found at fark.com.

Brothers under the Lederhosen: Alice Coote and Helmut Berger.

Something is busted on the Met’s website, but that shouldn’t stop you from applying for this week’s $25 weekend night tickets, which after all are for Fleming’s Thaïs and Angela Gheorghiu/Roberto Alagna in the new Rondine. Instructions for this week’s lottery are as follows:

Please enter our Weekend Ticket drawing by calling 212-362-6000 before 8:00 pm tonight, December 29. The available performances for this week are:

Thaïs – January 2, 2009 at 8:00 pm
La Rondine – January 3, 2009 at 8:00 pm

As we approach the new year, La Cieca is gearing herself up to revive the recently dormant Unnatural Acts of Opera. Your doyenne was thinking that an interesting theme for 2009 might be “The Greatest Pirates,” i.e., the most important and impressive live, non-commerical recorded documents of opera. La Cieca is now accepting nominations from the cher public and will open the floor to discussion of the ten most demented and therefore most indispensable of the opera pirates.

These videos showed up first on Opera Chic but were posted by babyfairy.

A snippet from “The View” documents the immaculate jawline and unfortunate Keely Smith diction of The Diva of the Future. In keeping with the season, she sings the classic “Awl be whom faw Krismuss.”