parterre box

A little housekeeping on this lovely spring morning, cher public. Starting today, commenters will be required to log in to the site. Most of you are already signed up and logged in as it is, so this new condition will mostly apply to new visitors to parterre.com. The login will be helpful to La Cieca in keeping spam out of the comments and in filtering out the rare hit-and-run insult that shows up from time to time here. La Cieca thanks you for your patience and your understanding, and asks you to remember that she doesn’t hate you, she hates [...]

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La Cieca usually goes pea-green with envy when some other opera blogress launches a successful promotion, but in this case she’s going to make an exception because this story has the happiest ending imaginable. As detailed by Anne Midgette today in the Washington Post, Priscilla Barrow, who has taught music in public schools for over two decades, will attend Turandot at the Washington National Opera on June 4 and, the next night, the company’s annual Opera Ball at the German Embassy. The opera tickets were donated by Stephen Llewellyn, who won them in The Omniscient Mussel‘s Twitter competition, and WNO [...]

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La Cieca just listened to this new recording of Alcina starring Joyce DiDonato and Maite Beaumont. She’s not going to speak up immediately about her reactions, but will open the floor to discussion. (If you can’t see the amazon mp3 player above, please click here.)

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Anna Netrebko was not pregnant as of this morning, according to Jeffrey D. Vanderveen, managing director of Universal Music Classical Artists Management, who broke the non-news to Opera Chic. La Cieca will continue to keep you updated on the state of the soprano’s gravidity as the situation develops.

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Peter Mattei in Le nozze di Figaro. (La Cieca thinks the production is pretty cool too.)

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