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Cher Public

  • Buster: We get Edith Haller in L’Upupa soon, with John Mark Ainsley ...
  • La Valkyrietta: Of course that was Eileen Farrell singing for Eleanor Parker...
  • Indiana Loiterer III: I don't know whether she deserves another award, but no doub...
  • Quanto Painy Fakor: If course people who sing at the MET pay for private coachin...
  • La Valkyrietta: There does not seem to be her Ernani Involami in youtube. ...
  • kashania: Oh, I'm leaving for a week's vacation today. Sorry to miss ...
  • That Guy: "Heard" is an overstatement, at least based on the one perfo...
  • grimoaldo: I noticed a couple of comments expressing surprise that toni...
  • kashania: Does that mean that Fleming will be semi-fake-acting?
  • grimoaldo: Siegfried will be Jay Hunter Morris who replaced the replace...

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Stand by Mimi

netrebko_mimi“The Met’s been cleaning house of its lavish Franco Zeffirelli productions, mothballing his Tosca and Carmen earlier this season. But his staging of Puccini’s La Boheme remains a keeper, packing a punch 28 years after its premiere.”

Our Own JJ goes gaga for Anna in the New York Post.

chi mai?

maiThis month Deutsche Grammophon will scrape the bottom of the barrel and present a new recording of Leoncavallo’s genre-bending “symphonic poem for tenor and orchestra”  La Nuit de Mai, studded with stars Plácido Domingo and Lang Lang.

Dark horse Alberto Veronesi conducts — indeed, the same Muti-maned steed who was recently announced to succeed Eve Queler as music director of the Opera Orchestra of New York in 2011.

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Le Mot du Jour, extramural edition

oh_snapOrdinarily La Cieca bestows the Wildean accolade upon a local cher pube. This time, though, she cannot resist praising one of the commentariat at Unpop!, Daniel Stephen Johnson‘s new project over at the New Haven Advocate. Read more »

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When projections attack

The Catalan theatre company La Fura dels Baus, under the baton of Zubin Mehta, brought forth a new production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in 2007 in Valencia. The brochure for the DVD release calls this “A Ring for the 21st Century” and tells us that stage director Carlus Padrissa has employed “…imagery for a young, 21st century audience familiar with the visual language of the Star Wars and Harry Potter films.” Uh-oh. 

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Reinforcements?

La Cieca has just heard from a generally reliable source that one of the principal artists has withdrawn from all performances of Attila at the Met.  We’ve emailed the company’s press office for confirmation of the rumor.

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Regie, pagliaccio

It is not perhaps so surprising that even with the cleverest of the cher public participating, nobody jumped in with the right answer for last week’s Regie quiz. After all, the work depicted was Die Blume von Hawaii, the 1931 operetta composed, as you all know, by Paul Abraham to a libretto by Alfred Grünwald, Fritz Löhner-Beda, and Emmerich Földes. 

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Nobody nose

Three seasons of cancellations, a schlocky “reality” show, that haircut, and now… Rolando Villazón has gone full “Dr. Patch.” [Yahoo News]

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Es gibt ein Chat

Let’s get conversational this afternoon, cher public, for the Met broadcast of Ariadne auf Naxos.

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