June 2011
La Cieca’s lovely and talented colleague Olivia Giovetti takes on the Met’s gift shop in the latest installment of her WQX-Aria blog. La Cieca herself is of at the very least two minds about the changes to the gift shop, but she’ll invite you, the cher public, to chew on this issue before starts gnawing…
Despite baby-steps over the years, America’s musical scene, especially opera, remains decidedly un-HIP. (HIP: “historically-informed performance,” also called “period performance.”) While European opera houses turn increasingly to “original instrument” orchestras and specialist singers for seventeenth and eighteenth century works, this rarely occurs in the US.
The Metropolitan Opera expects to achieve a balanced budget in 2011, the first for the company since 2004. In other good news, contributions and grants were up about 21% between 2009 and 2010; program service revenue rose about 6% in the same period. Maestro James Levine took a 5% pay cut, sending his 2010 compensation…
Sony Masterworks has released on CD
You asked for it, cher public, and La Cieca is happy to olige: a post to anchor the week’s off-topic and general converation threads.
Briefly, according to Zachary Woolfe: “No one came.” More elaboration, plus speculation on “What That Means,” in the New York Observer. And for those of you with a taste for hash, the subject is revisited as well in the New York Times.
“Je les tiens dans les mains, je les tiens dans la bouche… Je les tiens dans le bras, je les mets autour de mon cou… Je n’ouvrirai plus les mains cette nuit!”
In what may qualify as the most unholy alliance of Peter Gelb‘s tenure at the Met so far, since February the “Live in HD” performances from 2009 of both Turandot and Aida issued by Decca have been available from… Target. Only Target. They are scheduled for international release this July. Up until recently there has…
A few spoilsport commentators have complained that the clever marketing video for Nico Muhly‘s Two Boys at the English National Opera doesn’t accurately represent the somewhat dark subject matter of the new opera. La Cieca won’t take sides on this matter of vital import, but she will reveal to you, the cher public, that a…
You perhaps will not be completely flabbergasted that La Cieca has a spy following the Met’s Japan tour (pictured). The reports thus far (I mean, once the ragtag band of misfits finally landed in the Land of the Rising Sun) are not particularly scandalous, but, please give our operative time!
Our own Dawn Fatale (pictured) dreamt up the Konzept for the following challenge, to which La Cieca is sure the cher public will respond with their usual zeal and whimsy. In this game, it is up to you to program the 2011-12 season for Opera Orchestra of New York, based on a set of criteria…
Our Own Batty Masetto gently prods, “The first cycle of the San Francisco Ring starts Tuesday, and time’s running out for those who haven’t checked in yet to share in the Parterre festivities. A dazzling array of Parterrians (pictured) have signed up already, so you won’t’ want to miss out on the meet-ups at the…
Yes, we know, earthquakes, radiation, diva cancellations and all that. But it does still seem a bit strange to La Cieca that the “new” Met, where Peter Gelb so vocally trumpets the vital importance of new productions, should send the shabby 30-year-old John Dexter production of Don Carlo (above) on tour to Japan the very…
As Groucho Marx would say, this is certainly a way of beating the heat; it’s also a a way of creating it. Well, all right, it’s actually something Dick Cavett said that Groucho might say, but the point stands that at 2:00 PM EDT the Opéra Royal de Wallonie production of Salomé will be webcast…
A member of the cher public has an interesting offer: “I have about 40 years’ worth of the British magazine Opera, most of them bound, which I would love to get rid of (no charge.) No library here is interested, but I thought some opera fanatic might want them. He or she would have to…
Last year, La Cieca dedicated a blog post to a production of Salomé scheduled to take place in the Palais Opéra in Liège, with two surprising late career debuts by June Anderson as Salomé and Kammersängerin Mara Zampieri as Hérodiade. Now, a year later, I could not resist La Cieca’s request for a review, especially…
The ever-alert PR people at the English National Opera (why can’t we have a company like this?) have assembled a “what if?” video to promote Nico Muhly‘s impending Two Boys, and thrown in an admirably scruffy “reality” actor to boot.
UPDATE: David Alden‘s manager Angela Maria Blasi confirms that he resides in London and has no home in Beverly Hills. What a pity: how La Cieca imagines David striding to the very lip of that brutalist fireplace and holding forth on the halcyon days of the ENO Mazeppa!
The setting: a dark plaza extending directly in front of a storied opera house. The time: just after a ho-hum revival of something Puccini. The crowd streams out, moderately satisfied but also far from bowled over. A group open to a proposition, you could say.
New York City Opera Education and the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture presented an evening of discussion, poetry and music from Scott Joplin’s opera, Treemonisha last night to an overflow crowd.
Julius Rudel writes: “I cannot sit by and watch as the legacy that was built by a company, if not a family, of talented, dedicated people is cast aside.” [NYT]
Meet Jacques Snyman of South Africa, former rugby player, current fitness model and anti-bullying activist, and possible future opera star.
Paul Curran, who has been head of Norway’s National Opera since 2007, has resigned, ending his contract with the company two years early. His immediate plans include staging La bohéme at Santa Fe this summer, then returning to Oslo to direct Die Zauberflöte before stepping down from his post at the end of December.
When a new production of Fidelio premiered at the Met in 1960, the opera had been absent from the repertoire since 1951, the post-war return of Kirsten Flagstad as a still effective Leonore and led by Bruno Walter. In the period between the two productions a new generation of singers had begun to make their…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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