The controversial production of La traviata from La Monnaie directed by Andrea Breth is now available for viewing online.
By La Cieca
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Camille Saint-Saëns was such a brilliant, facile musician that pals like Wagner and Liszt felt a distinct schadenfreude when he suffered composer’s block.
You Parterrestrials know all about Santa Fe Opera’s amazing mountain setting and open-sided theater affording breathtaking sunsets, weather-related drama and–when the back stage wall is opened–starry backdrops, but it was my first visit, so indulge me a little.
By Lee B. Ahmo
Is the threnody, the lament over a beloved corpse, the oldest form of song? Surely it is among the oldest; one of the most widespread and stylistically various, millennia before opera was devised.
By John Yohalem
You may remember, gentle readers, that last year about this time Peter Gelb decided to enter into an unholy alliance with Target to benefit their mountainous number of opera loving customers by pre-releasing two Met performances exclusively in their fine emporiums.
By Patrick Mack
Certain contemporary opera directors have taken to portraying Wagner protagonists as visual artists to better illuminate the characters’ moral and aesthetic struggles.
By Adriel
The case for this DVD production of Puccini’s La Boheme from Opera Australia is all about the “inspired concept” of director Gale Edwards to move this oft-told tale from 1840’s Paris all the way to the Berlin at the end of Weimar-era Germany. Hmmm.
By Patrick Mack
Last year, La Cieca dedicated a blog post to a production of Salomé scheduled to take place in the Palais Opéra in Liège, with two surprising late career debuts by June Anderson as Salomé and Kammersängerin Mara Zampieri as Hérodiade. Now, a year later, I could not resist La Cieca’s request for a review, especially…
By Buster
Once again we have an email from a budding member of the cher public (and you know La Cieca never could resist a budding member), so put on your thinking caps, cher hive mind, and offer a little advice:
By La Cieca
Among the “auditions” that have come flooding in from the cher public are reviews of three very different productions of Don Giovanni. Your doyenne has taken the liberty of combining the three critiques into a single posting, but she urges you to remember, remember well the names of the authors of this troika of treatises.
By La Cieca
A bit of Salome from the Royal Opera, with a somewhat less skittish sense of cinematography than what we got from the Met’s HD! [kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/nBAbXZptfIk” width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /] Finally a chance to see Naked Busker Guy Duncan Meadows in action! (And, forgive La Cieca for saying so, but if your leading lady sounds…
By La Cieca
“The chief judge of the federal appeals court in California, Alex Kozinski, has contributed to a Web site that featured sexually explicit materials …. [including] a photograph of naked women painted to look like cows. . .” [via NYT] Â
By La Cieca
The Royal Opera House (you know, that place with the naked buskecutioner) is looking for “budding” filmmakers to produce a 40 second long version of Romeo and Juliet. The company asks for the finished featurettes to be uploaded to the Royal Opera’s YouTube site, which is just so Web 2.0 La Cieca can hardly stand…
By La Cieca
Dear Addison DeWitt once said, “You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point.” Actually he didn’t say it to La Cieca, but that’s neither here nor there. Since your doyenne is what you might call pathologically determined to see both sides of every questions, she’s going to reopen the can of worms here…
By La Cieca
Two of the cher public (thanks, Paul and Michael!) have tipped La Cieca to what may be the ne plus ultra of operatic Regie, a new production of Un ballo in maschera in Erfurt. According to an article in the Telegraph, This “different . . . provocative” staging of the Verdi warhorse sets the tale…
By La Cieca
La Cieca has just learned more details about the Royal Opera’s Naked Executioner Guy and she’s sure that we all want to stay right on top of the story. Naked Executioner Guys’s real name is Duncan Meadows. He is a busker who, like so many in the busking biz, does the bulk of his bulking…
By La Cieca
The Met announced this morning yet another media partnership, this one with iN DEMAND Networks “to offer all eight new performances from the Met’s second season of Metropolitan Opera: Live in High Definition to on-demand subscribers in the United States in both standard and high definition formats.” The basic idea is that the video from…
By La Cieca
