La Cieca is starting a new series of Words Critics Need to Stop Using. The word of the day is “shambolic,” much beloved of British critics, and more or less meaningless, as in “[Les Contes d'Hoffmann] is an extraordinary and rather shambolic work based on three stories by the 19th century German writer of fantasies ETA Hoffmann, who is also the main character in the opera.” (The fact that the writer uses the more mundane and precise word “muddled” later in his review demonstrates that “shambolic” is just so much posing.)
Houston Grand Opera’s Brit-in-Chief Anthony Freud will take an early departure of his post (recently extended to 2015) to move into the power vacuum created by the departure of William Mason from Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2012, says Culturemap Houston.
“A profile of Richard Eyre – ‘All good actors are quick-witted’, 27 November, page 12, Review – mentioned the theatre director’s recollection of having played one of the Three Little Maids in a school production of The Pirates of Penzance. Clarification has since come from the interviewee that in Pirates he played Kate, one of four maids, the daughters of Major-General Stanley (the Three Little Maids, for their part, belong to The Mikado).” [The Guardian]
Next time you feel like rolling your eyes at one of La Cieca’s informal for-entertainment-only polls, put then back in your head and gaze on this silliness.
Impresarios from Cornwall to Caithness are delighted to hear today that another traditionally Albion-adminstered opera company has begun the succession process with the search for a new heir-presumptive. Or, in other words, Glimmerglass General and Artistic Director Michael MacLeod is out the door at the end of the 2010 season, and now we just have to wait to see which Brit will get the job next. [Opera News]
“To Kettles Yard in Cambridge for the premiere of a new song cycle by Richard Baker, performed by baritone Christopher Purves and pianist Andrew West. Having started off in Harvey and the Wallbangers, Purves is now a rising British operatic star: he will sing Beckmesser at Welsh National Opera alongside Bryn Terfel in Die Meistersinger this summer and, he told me, will make his La Scala debut in Peter Grimes in a couple of years. One day this man will make a wonderful Wotan.” [The Guardian]
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