If you feel you are up to reviewing an average of one new release per month, and you can realistically promise a one-week turnaround on reviews (e.g., you receive the disc on a Monday and you email a review by the following Monday), then let your presence be known by the following procedure:

Write a review of 300-500 words of a recent CD or DVD purchase. It doesn’t have to be a brand new release, but it will help if it’s not something that’s been reviewed to death already (the Decca/Solti Ring, for example). Email the review to lacieca@parterre.com and La Cieca will take it from there. Please include in your email your username at parterre so La Cieca can byline the review properly if she decides to publish it.

If you’re chosen to be a reviewer, La Cieca will send on a new release for you to write about, again with the reminder that a one-week turnaround is optimum.

La Cieca also solicits reviews of “local” (outside New York) live perfomances.

Hoelterhoff frames the current crisis of music direction at the Met elegantly but frankly:

[James] Levine, a Met fixture for 40 years, receives constant credit for improving a second rate orchestra. But that was decades ago and for whatever reasons — self-absorption? shyness? — he never engaged with the cultural life of this city, despite huge pay checks (most recently around $1.5 million a year).

What a pity. The arts in New York could really use a charismatic music spokesman.

The paralyzed board really should stop issuing sentimental garlands of gratitude and add “emeritus” to Levine’s title. It’s sad that the maestro didn’t have the judgment to step down, but he didn’t, and now should be assisted into the next phase of life.

A colleague of La Cieca’s queried whether that phrase “assisted into the next phase of life” might be construed as the writer’s urging euthanasia on Levine, but your doyenne assured her correspondent that our Manuela would never pussyfoot around the issue thuswise: she would more likely say “isn’t it about time someone whacked him on the head with a mallet?”

Hoelterhoff (not pictured) is, as always, entertainingly vitriolic, if in this case a bit Godwinny (“For comparable magical thinking, you’d have to go back to Hitler dreaming of rescue in that bunker in Berlin.”)  Her tartest comic sally is the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that Joe Volpe is the man to run NYCO; pardon La Cieca whilst she wipes away the tears of laughter!

The first deep reading of the Lepage Ring is by Zachary Woolfe, naturally.

Loyal parterrian Jondrytay (not pictured) looked in on the Royal Opera’s Anna Nicole and shared this thoughts on his blog Not So Wunderbar.

As a second production of its Verdi Festival the Teatro Regio presented I vespri siciliani on October 10,  starring Giacomo Prestia as Procida, Leo Nucci as Monforte, and the lovebirds Daniela Dessì and Fabio Armiliato as Elena and Arrigo. 

Armiliato receives a fair amount of boos during the performance.  Right before the fifth and last act, the management announces that Armiliato is indisposed, but has agreed to finish the performance.  This does not prevent further boos at curtain calls, while, as it always happens, other member of the audience were trying to shush the booers.

In televised interviews right after the performance, both Armiliato and Dessì claim that the fracas had been caused by a very small group of “facinorosi” (bullies) intent in damaging not so much Armiliato as the Verdi festival itself.

A couple of days later Armiliato writes on Facebook that the day after the premiere he has been seen by a leading expert at the hospital of Brescia, and he has been diagnosed with a labyrinthitis.

The Teatro Regio asks tenor Carlos Ventre to be on call for the second performance, but Armiliato insists in going on stage.

Enrico Stinchelli, famous critic, co-host of the RAI radio show La barcaccia, writes an opera letter to Armiliato on the Italian forum Opera Click.  In brief, while Stinchelli is sorry to hear about the tenor’s health problems, he adds that in his opinion Arrigo is not a role suitable to Armiliato’s voice to begin with.  According to Stinchelli, Armiliato does not have the facility in the upper register to perform this part (and for the record, this production cuts Arrigo’s arietta with its high D at the beginning of the fifth act).

Armiliato replies with his own open letter, disputing Stinchelli’s assessment and comparing the booers to the Serbian hooligan who had forced the Italy vs. Serbia soccer match in Genova to be suspended with their vandalism just a few days before.  He also claims that there is a whole tradition of Italian spinto and dramatic tenors tackling the role of Arrigo, and throws himself in the famous age-old diatribe of pitch in the 19^th century.

Then Armiliato cancels the third performance.  Apparently Carlos Ventre is no longer available, so the management sends on stage a young Korean tenor, Kim Myung Ho, dressed in civilian suit and holding a score.

Who knows what is going to happen in the next two final performances?

Besides creating out of whole cloth the notion that Rolando Villazon was supposed to sing a Strauss opera earlier this summer, Lebrecht manages to insult Joyce DiDonato by implying that her current success is based not so much on talent but simply her willingness to show up on time, broken leg or no. (“That is why she is now every opera house’s mezzo of choice, taking the prime roles that were once Cecilia Bartoli‘s.”)  You will not be surprised to hear that along the way he takes a detour to piss on Luciano Pavarotti‘s grave. [The Telegraph]

La Cieca will start the ball rolling this morning by musing (ahem!) that it was perhaps not Shirley Apthorp who wrote her review’s lurid lede with its gratuitous Godwinning, but rather the executive editrix (not pictured) of Bloomberg’s arts and leisure section, who (imagine!) has a book coming out next year on what is apparently her idée fixe, i.e., a certain German dictator’s association with the festival.

Because, you see, it’s hard to convincingly criticize the criticism (as Kellow does in the “current” Opera News, but don’t bother to check because it’s not online) without having heard the thing criticized.

BK goes on to rip Anthony Tommasini‘s coverage of Leonard Slatkin‘s ill-fated foray into Verdi, even going so far as to say that Tommasini’s review “[wound] up causing the withdrawal of a respected conductor.”

But as always it seems La Cieca’s on the wrong side of the argument, because she thought that the Slatkin review showed a welcome hint of snarky spine in Tommasini, who, for all his moistness over barihunks, is after all a well-trained and intelligent musician.

For once (or for rarely anyway) AT worked up a bit of righteous anger over what he saw as a massive artistic blunder. He didn’t explain it away by saying Slatkin had an off day, or maybe his old war wound was bothering him, or, you know, Traviata is such a rare and difficult gem that he deserves kudos for even making the attempt. No, Tommasini yelled “tripe” when tripe was served, to paraphrase one of those early sixties sitcoms La Cieca is talking about so much today.

Kellow does make one solid point, which is that Tommasini might have made “a point-for-point case for how [Slatkin] failed at various points in the evening,” that is,offering specific examples from the score of what went haywire and how. To attempt such an analysis in a daily paper would be folly, of course, even in the capacious pages of the Times. But blog space is cheap, and the NYT even has the advantage of multimedia capabilities.  They could have done a score animation, for example, demonstrating the same passage as led (differently but with equal validitiy) by a couple of recognized experts, as contrasted with the Slatkin stumbling.

Or, then again. As fond as La Cieca is of examples (ask any of her writers what her edits invariably ask for more of), there does come a point when, if only for reasons of convenience, the general reader wants to let the critic do the heavy lifting and then deliver a few carefully-chiseled adjectives to sum up: “is this worth my $200 or should I stay home and catch up on my Real Housewives?”

Chéreau’s production shares a lot of ingredients with Luc Bondy’s embarrassing Tosca: the director’s French inflection, the same set designer, slovenly costumes, a lugubrious air, dingy lighting, and simulated onstage sex. But if Tosca’s vapid avant-garde clichés raised the alarm that the Met’s Peter Gelb might be miring the company in trendiness, From the House of the Dead reassuringly suggests that the same sensibility can also yield a terrific show.

La Cieca’s fan of Justin Davidson‘s writing (though not all the time), but I don’t get the point of using a rave review as an excuse for axe-grinding.

Or what do you think, cher public?

After the first 10 minutes of listening, I was so happy I got it.

In preparing for this review, I read about the hostile reception the Mass was given. After listening to this performance I have come to realize that Bernstein was a man ahead of his time. I think the piece had to simmer within us before we could actually accept it. When the piece was composed, hippies were still on the fringes, so were Vietnam protesters, Roe v. Wade was two years in the future and nobody dared to question the church or God (not openly, anyway.)

I think we needed to go through wars, AIDS, catastrophes and all the emotions, doubts and anger they brought with them before we could collectively open to this piece. Musically, we also needed to go though Jesus Christ Superstar, Glam Rock, Miss Saigon and Rent, before we could accept a (mostly) classical piece that did not conform with the norm. Maybe it was the fact that when that first audience saw the piece they were not able to recognize themselves in the cast.

There were no nicely coiffed diva singing, nor was a nice guy in a tux, clutching a score and running through scales. Instead they got a mass for the young, with the young and with all the brash, in-your-face attitude of the young. Let’s face it, just like Rent and Hip-Hop, Bernstein’s Mass was never meant for the elites, nor the conformists. It was always a work for the irreverent and non-conformists, and we now have a wider audience for the piece.

The new Naxos recording is a welcome addition to the discography of this work. What I liked the most about this recording is how unabashedly un-operatic it is. I was not prepared to how much I was going to like the performance, nor for the emotional impact the performance was going to have on me. I was also surprised at how easy to listen it was. Before I could even think about it, I was in track 19! Unlike the new “castration” effort from Decca, Listening to this performance didn’t feel like a chore. I happily went back for a second listening.

Leading the pack is Marin Alsop, who has crafted a balance of the serious and the profane that gives this recording a contemporary feel. How many pieces can you name that still feel fresh nearly 40 years after their premiere? It simply does not feel old; it sounds modern, relevant, fierce.

Honor place must go to the Baltimore Symphony for their excellent playing. The orchestral meditations are played beautifully, but so it the rest of the piece. They provide the singers with a fantastic cushion of sound to work their magic; and work their magic they do. The Mass is a bitch to learn and perform for the chorus. At the end of the performance you just want to sit on a bath and soak, ’cause you are sore as all hell.

Morgan State and their students should be very proud of their chorus. They not only sounded fabulous, but the music is performed with accuracy and spirit. Bravo to all the chorus members for their fabulous effort. Big bravo also to the Peabody Children’s Choir. Their work in appropriately described as angelic, specially in the Sanctus.

I think one of the issues that the earlier generation had with the Mass, besides the irreverent tone, is the fact that it is hard to classify. Is it classical? Is it Broadway? It certainly has elements of both and one of the ones that sticks like a sore thumb is the many small roles that call for singers to do everything their teachers told them not to do.

Naxos has outdone themselves in casting singers that fill these parts with fierce determination. What they might’ve lacked in vocal polish, they more than made up in creating an atmosphere. The one drawback is that while they are listed on the program, they are not named in the tracks they sing.  Shame, because they are fabulous and they deserve individual credit for their efforts.

In the center of this and any Mass is the priest, or the celebrant. I have come to realize that you need a good baritenor or a belter for the role– a Ted Neeley of sorts, someone who just sings without thinking of how this F is placed, or how am I going to hit this Ab here. This is a role that requires guts and the ability to leap into the abyss without much fear.

I think casting Jubilant Skyes as the celebrant was a stroke of genius on Naxos’ part. His singing is beautiful and polished. It is not a perfect performance, here and there are sings that he had to work hard to reach some of the higher notes in the score, but he does what many would expect: he leaves the “serious baritone” sound behind and delves into the character’s descent into doubt convincingly.

Let’s be honest here, the Celebrant is not a traditional baritone role, even less a serious one. Skyes is obviously a trained baritone, but his interest in jazz and his experience singing gospel makes him almost perfect for the role; you get the burnish sound of a baritone with the mind of someone who knows when to let go and use tricks from a different bag to create a portrayal that is convincing and that carries a huge emotional impact.

His “Simple Song” is, as needed, simple, beautifully vocalized. As the character is beset with doubts, Skyes proved how intelligent a singer he is by gradually leaving behind the operatic sound and using a more pop sound culminating in a riveting anger scene.

In summary, Naxos has brought together a fabulous performance that transcends whatever blemishes you might find along the way. I think this performance should be in any Bernstein’s fan’s library. I am glad it somehow made it into mine and I am sure this recording will bring me many hours of enjoyment.

Now, if we could get a producer to stage this piece on Broadway!

A new revelatory, superbly cast recording of the simultaneously fascinating and boring Nixon in China would probably be happily snapped up by those who are more of a fan of this opera than I am. The new CD on Naxos is so not that recording.

For some reason Nixon in China tempts its interpreters to bellow and declaim. Since all productions are amplified and the lines are relatively sympathetically written for the voice this vocal distorion seems unnecessary. I’m willing to bet that Marc Heller (who “sings” Mao Tse-tung) is actually pretty fierce: he sounds like he can make some noise and his credits are impressive. Unfortunately, here he just screams and pushes his voice until pitches are unrecognizable. Or maybe Adams is just not his forte.

The same could be said of Chen-Ye Yuan as Chou En-lai. It’s obviously an interesting instrument but is not shown at an advantage in this ungrateful role. Tracy Dahl makes some impressive sounds in the extreme top of Madame Mao’s music but whenever she sings around an A natural (which is often) her vibrato loosens dangerously close to a wobble. I also couldn’t understand one damn word she sang.

The Opera Colorado Chorus tries their best but this is not a world-class ensemble and the choral music in this opera is not easy.

It’s not that this recording is completely awful. There are strengths.  Marin Aslop knows her way around American music, and her reading is taut and inspired. She moves the action along (as much as Adams’s music allows) and keeps excitement bubbling (again, as much as the music allows).

Pat and Dick are both interesting here. Maria Kanyova, as Pat, is the only singer who sings like this is opera. Her other roles include Butterfly and Violetta and it shows. The voice is fluid, beautiful and ballsy. She’s also the only singer that phrases beautifully. “This is prophetic” is easily the highlight of the recording. Kick-ass singing.

Robert Orth manages to be charismatic and idiomatic as Nixon while singing with grainy, unsupported tone. It’s a believable and truly interesting portrayal. It’s just hard to listen to.

All of this begs the question of Naxos- what was the point of this recording? Just Aslop and Kanyova? They’re great, but it’s not enough to warrant a $25 price tag. If I were you I’d say bump both recordings and watch the broadcast of the original production on Youtube for free. But hey, if you love a good arpeggiated chord and have money to burn then by all means, skip on over to Amazon and order yourself up a copy.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/6TcOAMmY8yY" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

So I was skeptical when I began watching Callas Assoluta from ArtHaus Musik. Arguably the most documented and analyzed of singers, Callas features in at least seven other documentaries. Her life story has been told many times – her childhood in New York, her move back to Greece as a teenager, her studies with Elvira Hidalgo, her estrangement from her mother, etc.

I was hoping to hear wonderful music, but no single scene or aria is allowed to play in its entirety. Even the famous Tosca scene in which she kills Scarpia is only played in brief excerpt.

All of her well-known roles are represented, but the included book doesn’t list what the excerpts are or from what year. That information is listed in the final credits but scroll by at a such a fast clip, I had to keep rewinding to read them all. What I did find fascinating was all of the photos of Callas as a child and young adult.

Technically, the DVD is a mess. Several scenes either stalled the first time and then played, or stalled permanently and then jumped to the next scene. The English narration is atrocious. Two examples jumped out at me. In one, the word “epitome” is pronounced with a long o and no final e, and in the other, recounting the incident when Covent Garden management came to plead with her to show up for a fourth Tosca after she canceled the first three, the narrator says she “relinquished,” when it should be “relented.” Furthermore, despite the fact that the film was made in 2007, there is no Dolby sound.

There is one musical moment that tantalizes, however. In 1952, she sang Konstanze (in Italian) and there is a brief excerpt of “Marten aller Arten.”

If you know nothing about Callas, this might be a good introduction, but there are so many better documentaries about her that I’d skip this one.

La Cieca welcomes Our Own Sanford to our stable of reviewers.

• More (and Better) Callas Documentaries

Those of you who have already emailed will receive your review materials in due course; others La Cieca will ask to wait until the next round.

Or… if you have a performance to review (of an opera or concert you’ve already made arrangements to attend) or else if you feel like getting all thoughtful, La Cieca is open to pitches for live reviews and think pieces, appreciations and what have you. Pitch, public, pitch.

La Cieca is holding auditions this week, looking for a few good reviewers of opera CDs and DVDs.  If you think are the next Irene Cara or Gene Anthony Ray of the opera critics, email lacieca@parterre.com with the following details:

• A mailing address where you can receive packages
• Your general area of interest or expertise in opera
• Your preferred format (CD or DVD)

La Cieca will then ship you couple of things to review, and she’ll expect a piece back from you within a week after your receipt of the package.

After the piece is published on parterre.com, we’ll see how La Cieca and the cher public like it.  The goal here is to find a couple of reviewers who will get the bulk of the new releases and will become regular contributors here for some compensation.

Questions you can ask in the comments section, or email La Cieca personally.

La Cieca should know by now that any think piece that kicks off with the locution “I have from time to time wrestled with this conundrum” is just going to piss her off and she should just close the tab. But she didn’t, and this is what she found a little lower down (in more than one sense of the word):

I have always been rather disgusted by Benjamin Britten’s distinctly unhealthy interest in young boys. There is no proof he ever engaged in sexual activity with any of them: but his behaviour would today come under the heading of “grooming” and he would have been put on the sex offenders’ register. Much of Britten’s music I find magnificent; he is possibly the only true genius among our 20th-century composers. Yet the homoeroticism of some of his later works, or rather the paedophilia, I find repulsive

That this same Simon Heffer manages to drag in the tiredest of all Wagner canard (the Ring is “laden with half-hidden hints of anti-Semitism”) doesn’t surprise me in the least: those who triumphantly spout one bit of received wisdom are likely to believe just about anything they’re read a hundred times before.

But let La Cieca stay within her bailiwick here and simply remind the smarmy Mr. Heffer that “homoeroticism” and “paedophilia” are two distinctly different things, the confusion of which has led to much hatred and discrimination against gay people. If he finds homoeroticism repulsive, at least he should be be man enough to say it straighforwardly, not with the weasel words he chose.

Bo Skovhus and Danielle de Niese in an "unseen" moment from the Met's "Figaro." Photo by Marty Sohl.

A revival of Le nozze di Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera puts first things first, boasting a breezy, uncluttered performance of Mozart’s ravishing score.

The sexy comedy unfolds on the wedding day of Figaro, ex-barber of
Seville (John Relyea) to lady’s maid Susanna (Danielle de Niese), who is busy fending off their lecherous boss Count Almaviva (Bo Skovhus).

Misreading the curtain time robbed me of the first act on September 26, but in the remaining three, conductor Dan Ettinger coaxed elegant woodwind sound and crystalline string playing from the Met’s luxe orchestra.

Rising to his level was Isabel Leonard in the cross-dressing role of the love-struck boy Cherubino. Her shimmering mezzo-soprano, deadpan acting and sleek styling of the song “Voi che sapete” are incentive enough to return for her complete performance.

Soprano de Niese just released a solo CD, but ironically her voice is the least interesting thing about her. A knockout with dark flashing eyes, she puts over the Lorenzo da Ponte libretto with such verve it’s easy to follow the story even if you don’t speak Italian. But her suave aria “Deh vieni” turned bumpy and coarse.

Emma Bell as the heartbroken Countess won the night’s longest ovation after the aria “Dove sono,” even though her blurry soprano veered out of tune as she mushmouthed the poetic lyrics to a muddle of “uh” and “oo” noises.

Among the men, healthy-voiced bass Reylea won the girl, but baritone Shovhus stole the show as the aristocratic player hilariously lacking in skills, a real Don Wannabee. Veteran British tenor Philip Langridge etched a cameo as bitchy music teacher Don Basilio.

Of Jonathan Miller‘s 1998 production, little detail remains besides a silent Almaviva daughter who pops in occasionally to witness her dad’s misbehavior.  Sets by Peter J. Davison and costumes by James Acheson drag the bubbly comedy to a level of beige good taste, like a faded print of a Merchant Ivory film. — James Jorden

Opera being a delightfully paradoxical medium, this whole debacle left me in an upbeat mood. The Met is refusing to repeat itself and is seeking, by trial and error, a new theatrical identity. One or two meetings might be in order to determine how things went awry, and once Bondy is safely on the plane back home it should be relatively easy to devise new stage business to replace his lamer notions. The audience was, at least, paying attention.