UPDATE: La Cieca has just heard from Rosalind Elias‘s management with the news that the veteran mezzo will indeed transfer to Broadway with the Kennedy Center company of Follies. Apparently Playbill was given erroneous information. Read more »
La Cieca is informed that the New York City Opera and AGMA are meeting today for discussions relating to the company’s 2011-12 schedule—which, by the way, is supposed to be announced sometime this week, but La Cieca isn’t holding her breath.
“That high E-natural must be up there somewhere,” these two ladies seem to be saying in unison: Voice of the Century Joan Sutherland and Voice of the Xtabay Yma Sumac. Read more »
For you, cher public (pictured), your weekly off-topic general discussion thread.
If a new release of Verdi songs from Telos masquerades as a vanity project by Diana Damrau, the packaging takes the blame. Despite a starring place on the slip cover and top billing, Damrau sings less than a third of the tracks. It’s a pity, because she clearly found something of interest in the works she did sing. Verdi’s song output is small, and negligible in importance next to his more famous works. Sometimes we glimpse the sweeping vocal lines, and recognize a passage that would resurface in later operas, but they never match up to his skills in larger [...]
Your season planning for Opera Orchestra of New York, cher public, looks a lot more interesting than what the company’s own artistic adminstration is likely to come up with. Thus far, La Cieca has heard one date for certain: that Eve Queler default choice Rienzi, this time with Elisabete Matos—presumably in the not very interesting role of Irene—on February 29, 2012. Meh. The best of your choices after the jump.
La Cieca congratulates the marketing department of the heretofore flailing New York City Opera, who seem finally to have hit upon a strategy that will get a response from the company’s understandably confused subscribers. The latest appeal, after the jump.
Today is the 211th anniversary of the day the events in Puccini’s Tosca took place, June 17, 1800. (This detail is not mentioned in the libretto, but it is specified in the stage directions for Victorien Sardou’s play La Tosca: “La scène à Rome, le 17 juin 1800.” To celebrate this anniversary of this most protean of operas, La Cieca invites you, the cher public, to share anecdotes, memories and the usual YouTube clips relating to the Roman diva.
Cher Public