December 2009
Which married divo and “adored” diva were seen playing grab-ass as they left the canteen, presumably to return to rehearsal, only to lose their way for at least 20 minutes, evoking a frantic call over the house wire imploring their return to level C?
“Rache serviert genießt man am besten kalt!”
I was still warming frigid fingers Friday night, when before me unfolded something like a history of the world viewed from a small café: an enchanted journey from the gaslights of Berlin to the crowded alleys of Buenos Aires.
Cher public, La Cieca welcomes you to the season’s first chat, coinciding with the Toll Brothers-Metropolitan Opera International Radio Network’s Saturday matinee broadcast. This afternoon’s opera is of course Puccini’s Il trittico. Chatting begins at noon in preparation for a 12:30 pm curtain time.
Just a reminder that parterre.com is your place to chat the light fantastic tomorrow at 12 noon, when the Met kicks off its 2009-2010 Toll Brothers Broadcasts with Il Trittico! Intermission features will include interviews with Deborah Voigt, Stephanie Blythe, and Joseph Calleja!
Elektra occupies a special place in the Met’s rep, in a cheap way. It’s no easier to cast than any number of things that inspire well-rehearsed refrains of “put it away for fifty years,”* and really over the last quarter century many a somber compromise has been made in casting. What sets it apart is…
Here’s the place for all your chatting needs, cher public, during tonight’s broadcast of Elektra from the Met. The official chat begins at 7:45 pm for an 8:00 curtain.
Long before there was Miranda, there was “La Perle Noire du Brésil,” Natalia De Andrade.
We all know and love Fauré, but how many of us can say we’ve seen his opera Pénélope live and in person? As of last night, I number myself among the few.
La Cieca’s old, old, old friend Zachary Woolfe will take to the airwaves tomorrow morning to discuss, among other less titillating topics, the controversial omission of pastied boobage from the Met’s impending HD of Les Contes d’Hoffmann. You can hear Zack on WQXR’s Arts File at 8:30am, on 105.9FM or wqxr.org.
“I knew Hofmannsthal… he in fact begged me not to go and see it… telling me he was ashamed of it!”
The Zeffirelli saga continues. According to the Corriere della sera, yesterday “lo Zeffirelli furioso” held what could mildly be described as an “animated” press conference in Rome for the presentation of the new season.
“Michael Jackson was the true postmodern castrato,” says Cecilia Bartoli. [El País]
1. DON’T STAGE THE OVERTURE. Surprise: Verdi and Rossini and Wagner Mozart actually worked in the theater most of their lives, so give them credit for knowing that the overture is there to get the audience in the mood, to ease their transition from “outside” to “inside.”
Okay, La Cieca is finally ready to add another hard and fast “don’t” to her Rules for Stage Directors. To wit: Even if a scene calls for something fantastical, and even if the mezzo doesn’t actually walk out of the production when she first sees the costume… if your imagery immediately and inevitably screams “Star…
The dreaded Regie rears its ugly head in an unexpected venue: a children’s Christmas pageant! “Humbug teachers at a primary school have come under fire for re-writing this year’s Christmas pantomime of Hansel and Gretel – to make them hooded yobs. “The fairytale characters have been re-cast as violent thugs who terrorise their neighbourhood and…
The indisputable star of the new Naxos DVD of Franco Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac, filmed at the Palau de les Arts ‘Reina Sofia’ in Valencia and directed by Michal Znaniecki, is, as in all other stage, operatic and film adaptations of the Cyrano story, the enormous prosthetic nose worn by the title character. The nose…
One of the other American critics to cover La Scala’s HD Transmission of Carmen, Sarah Bryan Miller of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, shared our own squirrel’s view of the production. But she had some help from her friends at the “Associated Press and elsewhere.”
“I cannot clothe them! I need models!” Miuccia Prada “reportedly groaned” when confronted with “curvy” supers hired for the Met’s new production of Attila. [Page Six]
Preternaturally boyish composer Jake Heggie is putting finishing touches on his orchestration for his opera Moby-Dick. The cetacean tuner, “huge strings” and all, is set for an April debut in Dallas. [KERA]
“…the director doesn’t end with the ties between Offenbach and Hoffman. He connects the thematic dots, as if it were logically inevitable, to Kafka, who — wait for it — was also a Jew! This is indeed true, but Mr. Sher could just have easily have chosen Norman Podhoretz.” [NY Observer]
Snippet from yesterday’s Carmen telecast.
Which complex new staging has the Met crew jumping through hoops? The resulting backstage congestion may result in the draft of an estranged director for a comeback!
“It was… immediately clear that neither Finnish soprano Soile Isokoski nor French mezzo Sophie Koch were going to provide wildly enchanting interpretations of the Marschallin and Octavian…. But the most exciting element of the evening was the Sophie of the young British soprano Lucy Crowe, floating through the ecstasy of the Presentation of the Rose…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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