Given the choice, I’ll take Hans Neuenfels. Read more »
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]
A drag queen friend of La Cieca's -- long before she was La Cieca -- used to have an expression she to describe the terminally inept. The queen would say, "That guy could screw up a blowjob." By which she meant, of course, receiving a blowjob, i.e., just sitting there, or standing there or whatever. Read more »
"It was... immediately clear that neither Finnish soprano Soile Isokoski nor French mezzo Sophie Koch were going to provide wildly enchanting interpretations of the Marschallin and Octavian.... But the most exciting element of the evening was the Sophie of the young British soprano Lucy Crowe, floating through the ecstasy of the Presentation of the Rose with silvery clarity and painting a totally plausible figure of a gauche, gold-digging minx. Here is an outstanding talent, and I only hope the Royal Opera will nurture it." [The Telegraph]
Brit crit calls Nico Muhly’s work “slow, painful death”; Nico calls Brit crit “cunty” and makes fun of the funny way they spell stuff. Which means that the 2011 premiere of Two Boys at ENO should be great fun for all us sport fans. [The Guardian]
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): Read more »
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