The American mezzo-soprano and soprano is 79 years old today. Read more »
Maria Guleghina‘s Turandot on PBS right now, and, holy hell, I didn’t realize just how incredibly awful it sounded. How could anyone let such a thing be released — no, escape — on HD? Read more »
Some things, like hearing an evening of chamber music on a barge in the East River, sound better on paper than they actually are. And some things work exactly the opposite way: for example, the composer David del Tredici. Bargemusic presented soprano Courtenay Budd in a program of two song cycles from the 1990s by the iconoclastic composer Saturday night as part of their Here and Now series.
Neo-Romantic is not the most fashionable moniker for a composer these days, and art song is a tricky territory for composers with unabashedly traditional or sentimental leanings (Leonard Bernstein’s Arias and Barcaroles comes to mind.) But del Tredici gives us music that is direct and honest but remains in the realm of tasteful and new. Read more »
It truly is a red-letter day when La Cieca manages to propose a Regie quiz that fails to elicit from you clever pusses even a single correct guess. Last week’s opera was something of a double whammy, as it consisted of a modern piece produced in a non-traditional manner. Enough suspense: the work was Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers as performed at the Aalto Musiktheater Essen, directed by Karoline Gruber. Shall we try again?
Some of you may remember a few weeks ago comments veered off into a discussion of relative sizes of 19th century theaters vs. modern opera houses and, specifically, the issue of a stage apron, a playing area that extended past the proscenium into the auditorium proper, therefore allowing singers to take advantage of warmer acoustics and greater proximity to the audience.
Carlos Álvarez has withdrawn from the Metropolitan Opera’s January 2011 performances of Rigoletto. Veteran Verdian Leo Nucci will take on the title role for these five performances, including the Saturday broadcast.
Which singer was not unwell when he withdrew “because of illness” from that production already rife with cancellations, but rather was fired because he had not yet mastered his music?
“I’m a contrarian! We contrarians question everything! The only thing we contrarians never question is the cheques we collect for writing our silly bloody contrarian codswallop! Oh, bugger those silly toffs in their poofy frocks! Cheque, please!” [The Guardian]
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