Jiggoletto
“The stage production of Rigoletto contains very brief partial nudity, which will not be shown in the Live in HD transmission of the opera.”
“The stage production of Rigoletto contains very brief partial nudity, which will not be shown in the Live in HD transmission of the opera.”
Peter Hall 1982 Macbeth
LOTS of boos opening night of TROVATORE with Sutherland/Pavarotti and also boos the opening night of the Zeffirelli TURANDOT too.
Was that booing for Budai? Or was she only in San Francisco.
Booing for the Zeff sets? I cannot imagine Marton nor Domingo being booed at that particular moment in time and space.
There was booing for Budai, definitely, but the really thunderous booing at the opening of the Met Trovatore in 1988 was for the designer. You know how there can be a jump in the volume of the ovation when a much admired diva comes out for her bow? Such was the jump in the volume of the booing when the designer came out. The booing was like an ovation.
More like a boo-vationmaybe?
Forget about the 1988 “Trovatore” -- how about the Graham Vick “Trovatore” circa 2000? That was a true disaster. The Met audience is less eager to boo individual performers though -- unlike Italy where they will personally attack people.
A note about Nadja Michael -- she actually got an enthusiastic response at the end of her Met “Macbeth” performances (I actually went two times -- to hear George Gagnidze’s fine Macbeth). I don’t remember hearing booing. In fact Scotto was one artist who attracted booing -- this was in the late seventies and early eighties. She was heckled (by one Gaston a demented Callas widow) during the telecast of “Luisa Miller” and at the “Macbeth” and “Norma” premieres. Leonie Rysanek also had dedicated booers at the Met. Once there was a bomb threat if she was allowed onstage as Desdemona for a matinee broadcast with McCracken I believe.
The real warning about the production should be about the ‘translation.’ A suitable warning about be ‘what is sung onstage is not what appears on the seat in front of you’
Amazing! First Rigoletto premiere thread here and no one is offering any opinion about the musical/dramatic values of the performance itself???? Cieza’s regie band play on!
I hear ya, phoenix.
“Staging tends to take precedence over music and singing, at least if critics are to be believed”
“Has the pendulum swung too far? Are opera and its critics focused too much on staging and dramaturgy at the expense of the music?”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/theatreblog/2011/mar/01/opera-reviews-music-critics
From most reviews I’ve read, it seems that most everyone sound good or great. You have to remember that it’s much more fun to focus on the bad things than to focus on the good things.
Bernheimer doesn’t like the production very much:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/22cf6ad6-69fc-11e2-a7d2-00144feab49a.html#axzz2JOtKs3kC
but praises the performers:
“Michele Mariotti enforces useful sweep in the pit. Despite occasional pitch problems, Željko Lucic balances power and sympathy in the title role. Fresh from maternity leave, Diana Damrau looks a bit matronly yet sounds generally ethereal as the teenage Gilda. Piotr Beczala rings the rafters as a Sinatra-esque Duke, and sustains surprising finesse in the process.”
Well, the effete knives were out in chat last night, so some of us got our critical ya-yas out already.
much safer to do it on the chat where the public [apparerntly] can’t search the archives of your comments …
This bodes ill for the Dave St Pierre Boheme I’m assisting on in 2017.
I am reminded of a friend of mine who worked for a marvelous show back in the 1960s called Les Poupées de Paris. Created by puppeteers Sid and Marty Krofft it was a marionette version of the Lido de Paris and Folies Bergère right down to “les nudes”. Like their real life sisters the puppets wore elaborate headdresses and feathered trains but with bare -- wooden -- breasts. When the show was playing San Fransisco the “showgirls” were topless for the evening performances but, by city ordinance, had to wear pasties for the matinees. Sally said the strangest thing she ever did in her life was to put tiny pasties on wooden boobs to cover the nipples.
Does anyone remember a Magic Flute in Santa Fe where the three ladies and their Queen were, well, dressed like Las Vegas show girls? I remember few things from 30+ years ago but that production was one of those things I cannot forget.