August 2011
Your doyenne and parterre are back from wherever it was they were. Bless you all, cher public!
Entrepreneur, philanthropist, humanitarian and Democrat Agnes Varis died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. Besides her advocacy of prescription-drug reform and financial support of the Jazz Foundation of America, she was a managing director of the Metropolitan Opera, where her projects included the Agnes Varis and Karl Leichtman Rush Tickets Program and the underwriting…
UPDATE: The answer is: George Manahan is out. FURTHER: La Cieca hears a very reliable rumor indeed that NYCO is in serious negotiations with El Museo del Barrio to relocate the troubled company there. EARLIER: La Cieca’s flawless if rather vague sources inform her that some big news is about to break concerning New York…
Necrophiliac pedophilia? Or a slow descent into madness? What really happened at Bly? After listening to Glyndebourne’s 2007 Production of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, released in a live recording under the festival’s own label, one is still left in the dark as to what really transpired at that English estate. Perhaps this…
Winners of the seventh annual F. Paul Driscoll Awards for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence, or, as they are colloquially known, the Opera News Awards, have been announced. Accepting the coveted “Effies” on Sunday, April 29 at The Plaza in New York City will be sopranos Karita Mattila and Anja Silja, baritones Dmitri…
It seems a thing incredible but fifty years ago Richard Strauss was regarded as the wunderkind composer of a few tone poems, three notable operas (all produced before the First World War) and then nothing notable during forty years of repetitious senility. Even Ariadne auf Naxos, today one of the most popular works in the…
After the Georges Antheil opera that was my first assignment from La Cieca, I have to confess feeling slightly relieved when I opened the parterre package to find: Billy Budd! And not only a Billy Budd, but one starring John Mark Ainsley! The rest of the cast looked similarly starry (pardon the pun), so I…
Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades straddles two genres. With a macabre plot that explores the boundaries of human obsession, it’s an early psychological thriller that makes the audience engage in a kind of voyeurism Alfred Hitchcock loved. Yet the plot drawn from Pushkin and the striking Romantic score with its references to Mozart, Bizet and Grétry firmly…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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