meme chanson, meme refrain
“Belgian Gerard Mortier said Thursday he hopes to turn Madrid’s Teatro Real into one of Europe’s top opera houses when he takes over as artistic director, adding that many of his productions would be from the 20th century.” [via AFP]
This must be a regie quiz. The First Emperor.
Of course not! It is clearly Mortier’s new production of Kovanshina!
Speaking of the First Emperor – how strange that it is nominated for a grammy.
I do not know what the Teatro Real’s finances are like, but one presumes that they have a considerably larger budget than NYCO. He could probably afford to hire Calixto Bieito to do a production of, oh, say Le Nozze di Figaro, set entirely in a brothel (run by a remarkably familiar OLD WOMAN).
The Teatro Real is AWASH with state money! They pay some of the highest fees in the world, higher than any American house and more than Covent Garden.
as a can soup commercial in my country used to say: “lo mismo…lo mismo…lo mismo…”
Lots of operas are from the twentieth century. There is nothing unusual about staging operas from the twentieth century. Is there something stupid about the way the guy talks about the twentieth century, as if it were a novelty?
I applaud the tenacity of Mortier, who seems to know how- in the end- to further his own self-interest. I just hope that his interests are that of the Teatro Real and it’s public.
As for NYCO- I believe they are most fortunate in dodging the bullet.
And curiously, I hear- on good authority- that an interm head of NYCO is in the works.
Didn’t he make the same statements about his goals for NYCO – right before he ditched them?
Lots of operas are from the twentieth century. There is nothing unusual about staging operas from the twentieth century. Is there something stupid about the way the guy talks about the twentieth century, as if it were a novelty?
Thank you. God, the amount of rubbish written on this site (and others) about Mortier in the last year could make a landfill burst. If you look at the operas he’s put on in Paris and his other jobs, you’ll find plenty of that bel canto and baroque nonsense. He *GASP* programs Puccini, though he loathes the operas. It’s like wingnut Republicans and their aversion to facts and reality when it comes to what Mortier was going to put on.
The sheer idiocy of people screeching “Mortier is a careerist, he only cares about himself” is so fucking beyond tired, it’s numbing, as if everyone else in the opera business is some monk, only in it for the purest of motives, that people approaching retirement age are scum for actually not wanting to retire.
Didn’t he make the same statements about his goals for NYCO – right before he ditched them?
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. The first season was a calling card, the subsequent seasons would have had plenty of crap for canary fanciers to discuss stuff like whether singer so-and-so negotiates the passagio or whether the chest voice of such-and-such projected and all that mind-numbingly boring (to me) singer-oriented stuff. Boo fucking hoo if Donizetti and Rossini and utterly ghastly Verdi opera’s like Stiffelio were going to be programmed less, I have zero sympathy for that whine, when I have to travel to Europe simply to hear stuff outside of the same Top 40 operas, repeated over and over, where doing uber-conservative stuff like Peter Grimes is actually considered “out there” in some quarters.