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At long last, Franco Zeffirelli opens up about his back-door route to the lap of luxury: “Ho dato il culo per fare carriera e mi è piaciuto.” [Attualisimo]
The Monday, 12th December, Weill Hall recital debut of Signora Chiara Taigi, a strikingly good looking Italian soprano, who had made her American operatic debut this past March, starring as Selika in the OONY production of Meyerbeer’s long-neglected L’Africaine, was something Your Own Camille had looked forward to with a high hopes and a faintly wondering glee, for several months now.
“This is the end of Western culture,” Richard Strauss proclaimed after a rehearsal of his penultimate opera Die Liebe der Danae, in Salzburg in 1944. The octogenarian composer, increasingly on the outs with the Nazis and switched off from contemporary music currents, could well have identified with his protagonist Jupiter, a once-mighty God caught up in an off-kilter world he finds impossible to understand.
Deborah Orr (“one of Britain’s leading social and political commentators”) doesn’t know much about opera, but she does know she prefers opera to al fresco gay sex. At least I think that’s what she’s talking about in The Guardian.
It is, as Noel Coward remarked, astonishing how potent cheap music is. According to Brockway and Weinstock’s World of Opera, Gounod’s Faust was performed, after a rather lackluster debut in 1859, a thousand times inParis at the Opera between 1869 and 1894—a gobsmacking average of once every nine days.
After a Monday that will go down in history as “the day nothing happened,” finally we may have a bit of excitement tonight as the Met broadcasts on Sirius and the web-based Listen Live. The occasion is the season premiere of La Fille du Régiment featuring Nino Machaidze and Lawrence Brownlee, with that lovely, litigious lark Kiri te Kanawa repeating her cameo as the Duchess of Krakenthorp. Discussion, of course, will ensue at 7:30 pm at La Casa della Cieca.
Cher Public