October 2010
“After a 15-year collaboration that catapulted Renée Fleming from just another plush-voiced soprano to a glamorous, genre-crossing household name, the singer is parting ways with legendary publicist Mary Lou Falcone.” [New York Observer]
“At some point, Met officialdom will have to recognize the continuing failures of the current arrangement, under which the titular artistic director of the company, James Levine, makes sure that he gets the singers he wants for his own performances and seems content to leave Mr. Friend to improvise the remainder of the season.” How…
La Cieca is sure that at least a few of the cher public will want to tune in and sound off this evening as the Met broadcasts La boheme on Sirius and the online Listen Live. The Grigolity begins at 8:00 pm!
La Cieca (third from left) is delighted to announce to her cher public (also pictured) the first-ever East Coast Parterre Gathering , since, after all, we can’t let the West Coast chapter have all the fun! Your doyenne proposes an outing on Sunday, November 14. Details are after the jump.
La Cieca hears that Placido (“Simon Boccanegra is the only baritone role I’m interested in singing”) Domingo is going to expand his repertoire yet again, to Athanaël in Thaïs, sometime in 2012. The role after that, La Cieca hears, will be eponymous, but as of now the title is known to only a few chosen…
Some people have a lot of clout around the opera house. For example, take that diva who protested a tenor scheduled to sing opposite her. Even though he’s just won glowing reviews, the company replaced him with a less daunting colleague. With the lucrative buyout money and unexpected gap in his schedule, our tenor was…
“There’s a lot of Bernstein in many of the characters. [In François] there’s that fantasy of bisexuality or a gay man suddenly turning straight.” [Time Out New York]
I tried so hard to like Elina Garanca’s Habanera, an album of songs and arias about gypsies, but it was really difficult. I would’ve been able write this review earlier and quicker if I could just make myself like the album a lot, or even dislike it so that I could rail against the project…
There is no peace for Verdi in Parma. As a second production of its Verdi Festival the Teatro Regio presented I vespri siciliani on October 10, starring Giacomo Prestia as Procida, Leo Nucci as Monforte, and the lovebirds Daniela Dessì and Fabio Armiliato as Elena and Arrigo.
The relative obscurity of Karol Szymanowski‘s Krol Roger (King Roger, 1924) can only be blamed on its being in Polish. The music is often as thrilling as anything by Janácek or Bartók, and the libretto by Jaroslow Iwaszkiewicz (heavily adapted by the composer) is as full of provocative philosophical ideas as operas by those composers…
“Saturday night’s Met debut of Vittorio Grigolo in La Boheme was promising enough to suggest the tenor may one day live up to his own hype.” [New York Post]
“So, how is this new Pavarotti?” or, “This young tenor, what’s his name, I saw him on the morning show, is he any good?” When people who have never set foot inside an opera house—and know Maria Callas chiefly as the woman Aristotle Onassis dumped for Jacqueline Kennedy—start asking me such questions, then I…
“As the flirtatious Musetta, American soprano Takesha Meshe Kizart won the audience’s hearts with the charm and flair of her personality and a potent upper register, including some formidable high C’s for her Waltz Song.” [AP]
As we count down the weeks until the first live Met Saturday afternoon broadcast of the season, subjects for chat continue in rich array.
Simpler can be better, as Pocket Opera of New York demonstrated in the back of the Bechstein Showroom on Wednesday evening for their double bill of Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges and Debussy’s La chute de la maison Usher. When I heard these operas would be presented in English with piano accompaniment, I was initially…
“I saw the dress rehearsal of the Covent Garden Manon, and Vittorio had that metaphysical connection with the audience. I’m convinced of his potential.” [New York Times]
One of the buildings at Lincoln Center has become infested by a disgusting, blood-sucking parasite. And besides that, the David H. Koch Theater now has bedbugs. [AP] UPDATE: And now, like Beverly Sills and Sam Ramey, the bedbugs have “graduated” to the theater across the plaza. [Wall Street Journal]
You know La Cieca adores her some Gheorghiu, but the “scheduled” (not to mention the Soprano Math) just cries out for mockery.
“At the close of Boris Godunov, a leaderless Russia churns in chaos. Happily, the Met’s new production of Mussorgsky’s masterpiece — despite a last-minute turnover on the production team — ended triumphantly.” [New York Post]
At the risk of “pulling a Kathy Lee,” here’s a preliminary to tonight’s Met performance of Les Contes d’Hoffmann dedicated to Dame Joan Sutherland.
One of La Cieca’s favoritest bloggers in the whole wide world, Opera Cake, takes on the task of reviewing and explicating the “tough” Calixto Bieito production of Aïda, now running in Basel. And another scribe rapidly moving up in the ranks, Likely Impossibilities, takes a different but equally valid approach.
Performance Lab 115‘s adaptation of the first two parts of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, simply titled The Ring Cycle: [Parts 1+2], is a clever, well thought-out, if not entirely successful attempt to mythologize Wagner’s epic within the framework of 1980’s professional wrestling.
Our Own JJ remembers Dame Joan Sutherland in the New York Post and for WQXR. We can also report that tonight’s Met performance of Les Contes d’Hoffmann will be dedicated to Dame Joan, and on Sunday, the company’s Sirius channel will feature a playlist of historical Sutherland performances, including Lucia di Lammermoor, La sonnambula, Norma,…
“Playthings of the Gods: Essential Myths,” the Vertical Player Repertory’s evening of Monteverdi, Britten and Milhaud, heard October 8, was a satisfying treat. The soloists were excellent, although the venue, Christ Church Cobble Hill, had overwhelmingly boomy acoustics and robbed the audience of any nuance in the voices.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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