The most happy outcome
After what surely ranked as among the busiest (and silliest) pre-season ditherings ever, that scene everyone was so worried about, La Cieca is informed, is back where it belongs. The decision to restore the aria was made this afternoon, and the reason? Well, let’s just say the “purely dramaturgical” will always be trumped by the “prima donnaturgical.”
Since WHEN do stage directors make MUSICAL decisions? ‘Shows you one more example of why this art-form is flushing itself down the toilet!!!
My assumption when it was first announced was that someone (perhaps not terribly sympathetic to bel canto, even if a fucking genius) had the perception that the opera ran too long and McVicar had figured out the easiest cut was Percy’s scene.
If this is so, it wasn’t a case of the stage director making a musical decision.
That makes more sense to me. To my knowledge, McVicar does not have a rep for messing with the score. There certainly were no cuts in his Giulio Cesare. At Lyric, my bladder barely made it to the end of the 90 min. first act. I’m sure I’ll be fast corrected, but that production had few, if any cuts.
If Lyric presented the same version of McVicar’s production as is on DVD, then there were a few, though very few cuts. I think Sesto has an aria at the end of Act 2 which was eliminated.
Hate to break it to you operagirl40, but directors have been involved in musical decisions for decades now. The musical version of a new production is a collaboration between the conductor and the director. The days of a conductor mailing his cut list to Desire Defrere to block are long gone.
Good news!
Costello will now be under a lot of pressure to hit it out of the ballpark. Anything less than spectacular, and people will be saying that the scene should have been taken out in the absence of a tenor who.. blah, blah, blah. Hard to win these things. And tough on such a young artist.
I don’t think he will be under any more “pressure” than normal for this difficult piece. He did “hit it out of the ballpark” in the two performances I saw in Dallas a few months ago. Also, though this is a much rarer opera, I feel that cutting the Vivi tu in Bolena is akin to cutting Che gelida manina in Boheme!! Glad that the end result is that he will sing it. I think the Met received numerous emails (I know I wrote one!) about this subject) and that and Netrebko wanting a bit more rest before her long and demanding final scene did the trick, especially the latter! Stephen was prepared to sing it from the get go!
He won’t be under any more pressure than normal because the overwhelming majority of people who go and see Anna Bolena won’t have the slightest inkling about the storm in a tea cup tha has taken place over all this. He’ll sing it, people will like it, or not, and Netrebko can have a last minute trill work-shopping session in her dressing room ahead of Piangete voi.
Exactly. Has there ever been an official announcement one way or another about this? Strikes me only parterre readers will know it was in danger of being cut.
Still, I’m grateful for the whole affair. At least we’ve learned that it’s acceptable to cut Mozart or Strauss but not Donizetti.
Heeehee Cocky – you can be withering sometimes!
Someone should write a mystery novel: Anna and the case of the missing trill.
But Anna has now miraculously found her trill, hasn’t she?
Yes, but you should have heard Sutherland’s trill.
Ach, my dear kashie, I did! A late Lucia with Bergonzi. I also saw her Esclarmonde in 1984 or so, but remember very little about it apart from her cardboad chariot zooming into space with a dummy Joanie aboard at the end of Act 1.
Is Anna in New York already rehearsing? I thought that rehearsals started after Labor Day.
that scene everyone was so worried about
“Everyone”? I’m pretty certain that I didn’t lose so much as a nanosecond’s sleep over whether five more minutes of rum-ti-tum Donizetti was going to be performed or not.
Who is going to sing Greta and Fritz in the Bonn Der Ferne Klang next season, now that’s a different story.
Ingeborg Greiner
Michael Ende
Q: Who is going to sing Greta and Fritz in the Bonn Der Ferne Klang next season, now that’s a different story.
A: Ingeborg Greiner, Michael Ende
Quite a different story indeed….
This is almost as much fun as Crowbar the Magnificent.
I love the music from that movie. I STILL hum some of it. But watching it feels like a really bad acid trip. I can never tell if the actors are americans impersonating weird germans or germans impersonating weird americans.
Plus, some of the characters – the bat guy – made me feel uncomfortable when I was a kid.
Goodness Henry, that’s the second time recently you’ve reacted over-sensitively to what is essentially a figure of speech. I don’t give a monkey’s whether he gets his aria either, but I don’t see anything to get my knickers in a twist over if somebody uses a jovial ‘everyone’ to make a point. We’ve grasped that your tastes are not centred on the standard C19th rep by now.
I wasn’t being over-sensitive, I was being disdainful, there’s a difference.
We’ve grasped that your tastes are not centred on the standard C19th rep by now
We’ve grasped that QPF posts inane YouTube videos. We’ve grasped that Camille will affect to be the female leader of a Parisian salon, tossing off “Mon ami”‘s and “Mon chere”‘s as if to the Provencal country house born. We’ve grasped that the Vicar of Wakefield actually can’t stand British operas or performers.
I could go on for a whole page, you know.
The page down button, it’s your friend.
…someone is having a REAL BAD DAY, …it appears….!
Someone has a perpetual chip on his shoulder.
Haha @ you lot. I’d love to see Anna bolena at the Met, but I’ve decided I want to see Othmar Schoeck’s Penthisilea in Frankfiurt even more and one has a limited budget! I’ll make do with Anna’s Anna live in HD and we can all have a heated debate about Percy’s cut – do you prefer your Percys cut or uncut? – during the intervals.
Regina, I see that production features both Tanja Ariane Baumgartner and Marion Ammann – who were both really impressive in the Vlaamse Frau. Baumgartner got rave reviews when she sang the opera before – in Basel or somewhere. She has the most beautiful Germanic mezzo I’ve heard live, I think.
I hope she’s not related to Sebastien Baumgartner!
“We’ve grasped that the Vicar of Wakefield actually can’t stand British operas or performers.”
For such a wit you’re pretty dense sometimes. Too many weeks of Stockhausen?
Among my flatmate and my favorite singers:
Anthony Rolfe Johnson
Sarah Walker
Margaret Price
Thomas Allen
Felicity Palmer
Stuart Burrows
Ian Partridge
Lynne Dawson
The Vicar’s favorite post 1950 opera:
THE TURN OF THE SCREW
But whatever.
Aha! Nerva Nelli! Aha!
Not one of the singers you list is authentically British. Each and every one of them are products of a secret lab located somewhere in the South Seas where a nefarious scheme is being hatched to permeate the opera houses of the world with singers of merit and taste, making us all dissatisfied with the Italian school of generalized bleating. (With the possible exception of Burrows, who was Welsh. And Price; she was Welsh too. Thomas Allen has tried to pass for Welsh in a recent Welsh Pride Parade, but was stopped by the gendermes. )
The ONLY real British singers are Eva Turner and Maggie Teyte. Well, Maggie Teyte was really French. And Eva, well, she is disqualified because . . . well, because . . . well, I’ll let you put in your usual comment used in these situations. Not that there’s anything wrong with riding side-saddle, but certain people have to be kept in their place, right?
I’d be willing to let Peter Dawson be British if he really wanted to, except that he kept looking at my sittie-down place during the reception for Pola Negri and I’m not quite sure he doesn’t ride side-saddle also.
The less said about Heddle Nash, the better.
[img]http://parterre.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/images.jpg[/img]
Speaking of British singers….
Here is a pic from a couple of weeks ago of legendary stars Thomas Round and Valerie Masterson at the Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in Buxton England where they awarded prizes.
Thmoas Round, 96 years old! star of D’oyly Carte and Sadler’s Wells for many years, created the tenor lead in Delius’ opera Irmelin under Beecham, big hits in Merry Widow, Lilac Time, appeared in a TV Traviata as Alfredo with Heather Harper.
Valerie Masterson, likewise a G&S star, then with English National Opera, adored in France in French operas, a great Handelian, many recordings of musicals and operettas.
Great to see them both looking so well and staying busy!
OK Vicar, mock away…….
Your “disdainful” dismissal of Donizetti is a jejune demonstration of ignorance. Yet more ignorant still is your inability to appreciate the fantasia of your fellow-posters’ fictional personae.The carnivalesque is an integral component of “Parterre Box.” There are plenty of other blogs grimly devoted the anti-bel canto sensibility.
PS – I genuinely appreciate your knowledge and enthusiasm for modern German opera. I consider “Lulu” to be a supreme masterwork. However, having studied with a student of Zimmermann (and having attended live performance and studied the score), I can state without qualification that “Die Soldaten” is truly just dogshit, qualitatively inferior to any of Donizetti’s output.
Why would THAT keep you awake it’s listed on both the Bonn Opera website and operabase?
Never again will I doubt the influence of Parterre in NY…
Most of these stars are now cut from the MET too by powers far greater than stage directors.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=AhjIqra4iC0
QPF, thanks. That was fun!
Big stars … Big hair.
Except Bing, who had practically no hair, but was very handsome.
Sorry for the failed attempts. One more time:
My Stars.
What a vanished world! “How magnificent”, indeed.
It was terrible to watch this and think of the ends awaiting both poor Mr. Gentele, so abruptly and so soon thereafter, and the lingering in limbo of Mr. Bing. It seems more like it has been a hundred years rather than the forty–give or take a year– that this occured.
As always, thank you for posting, QPF.
Unless I missed something, which is quite possible, those wonderful clips do not show some of the biggest stars who were there on that five-and-a-half hour long occasion. Sutherland and Pavarotti sang the Act One duet from Lucia, Caballe and Domingo sang “Tu, tu, amore? tu!” from Manon Lescaut, Tucker and Merrill sang “Invano Alvaro” from Forza. Leontyne Price sang “Dove sono”, Corelli and Teresa Zylis-Gara sang the love duet from Otello and Nilsson in the closing scene from Salome conducted by Karl Bohm capped off the whole shebang.
And in the audience were Bidu Sayao, Zinka Milanov and Maria Jeritza!!!
Yes a vanished world all right.
Lee –
Breath control: 10
Musicianship: 8.5
Interpretation: 2
Drag: 10
It is indeed a vanished world. Fortunately it was my world and now one hungers for the new successes of those who grace the stage.
I love the thought of all those fantastic singers applauding their boss wildly. (And, gosh, Moffo was pretty.)
Yes, remember the muted ovation that Joe Volpe got at his gala? And his was in front of the curtain. No big assemblage of singers behind him.
Sempre la piu bella, anzi, BELLISIMA!
Just ask Sanford, her faithful cavalier.
But Grace looks pretty damn gorgeous too, in her move obviously ausstrahlend way.
She OWNS that dress as very few could. Camille dosn’t go in much for glitter (excepting for that dear Mariah Carey!) But La Grace really pulls this one off!
Agreed, though there is definitely a Christmas tree factor as well.
Grace was and remains divine. I think the dress was one of her African inspired créations. Was the original telecast was only transmitted in black and white? (Maybe we only had a B&W TV back then. but many ears later, the color versions appeared from pirated sources and videos from Japan.)
I love the way she somehow always manages to be in the frame shamelessly flirting the whole time….
I doubt that Gelb at any age would ever garner that sort of ovation.
And to think people used to call her Monsterfat Cowbelly!
Wow.
What is that piece of Kryptonite on her finger?