dial-a-diva
Something is busted on the Met’s website, but that shouldn’t stop you from applying for this week’s $25 weekend night tickets, which after all are for Fleming’s Thaïs and Angela Gheorghiu/Roberto Alagna in the new Rondine. Instructions for this week’s lottery are as follows:
Please enter our Weekend Ticket drawing by calling 212-362-6000 before 8:00 pm tonight, December 29. The available performances for this week are:
Thaïs – January 2, 2009 at 8:00 pm
La Rondine – January 3, 2009 at 8:00 pm
the Thais the other night was the biggest drivel I have ever heard in an opera house. Neither the production which was boring and dull nor the music would ever get me back there. I was never as bored with anything in my life. I do like Manon but this was beyond dull. So 25$ is a waste and more of a waste is the time which I will never get back. I stayed until the end thinking it might get better but it never did.
Feldmarschallin – I agree Thais is a rather dull opera. The other night at the Met, the Meditation had the longest applause. But then if Maria Jeritza could be reincarnated, another visit to the opera might be change my mind about Thais.
$25??? I will not go unle….ss
I get paid $275 at least!!!
It is really sad when the concertmaster becomes the star in an operatic performance. Tuesday’s performance was beyond dull – the principals seemed disinterested. Both ranged from inaudible to overtaxed. And the damned thing went on until 11:25pm. As I walked out into the plaza I thought to myself, “Merry Christmas, Sucker!”
That poster is so much racier, so much more melodramatic than the lousy movie it advertises. Bette was looking for vehicles to show off her new hubby, Gary, after All About Eve. This was not a good one. Shelley plays a cheap whore – what a change of pace for her! (Not.)
The only time I’ve ever really enjoyed Thais was at the Mary Garden silent movie. She was 43 years old when she filmed it, but she knew what it was about. Whether Fleming or Massenet ever did is highly debatable. (Sills was ghastly too.)
Massenet could do cheap floozies and self-dramatizing poets and MAYBE Byzantine empresses, but he really couldn’t musicalize the inner quest of a saintly (or unsaintly) mystic. The opera only works when it stars a woman really into its excesses – all vamp for the first half, all repentant sinner the second. The only time Renee ever struck me as having that kind of abandon was when she sang I Could Have Danced All Night – inexplicably omitted on Dec. 23rd. (And who would PAY to hear her sing it that way?) Definitely too staid for the role, kind of like Rita Hayworth’s Salome without the sex appeal. Make that Gloria Swanson’s Salome without the sex appeal. The gowns are hideous too.
“But then if Maria Jeritza could be reincarnated, another visit to the opera might be change my mind about Thais.”
Um, Bill, with all due respect to your Viennese bent, Jeritza was meant to be *terrible* in it– French style was certainly not her thing.
You need Garden or Heldy or Doria or someone with pizazz and style, who takes more interest in the text and mood than the gowns.
After seeing Mary Dunleavy ace Offenbach’s Giulietta, I’d like to see her do THAIS, which she did to acclaim in St. Louis.
There is a school of thought that Thaïs is a deeply serious opera all too often disguised beneath a pile of kitsch. I’ve yet to see it done seriously. I must say Ms Fleming was most enjoyable in the concert performances she did with the Royal Opera and I am not distraught that the RO decided not to go the whole hog and stage it. Grange Park Opera did a pretty ghastly updated staging a couple of years ago, with a FRENCH soprano in the title role. But most people left it thinking Thaïs was a piece of rubbish, not worth staging today, alas. I shall have to go back to the other Renée’s older recording (Doria) and imagine a serious production of Thaïs with native singers….
I recommend Josef Hassid playing the Meditation; it is on Youtube.
does anyone know where the doria recording is available?