The announcement of the 2013-2014 season at Lyric Opera of Chicago is not good news at all. Read more »
Noted junk sculptor Dr. Jonathan Miller is now the subject of a biography and it appears he’s mellowed in his old age. Just joking! He’s as bitter and mean as ever, and now he’s even got Nicholas Hytner doing his badmouthing by proxy: “I happened to see that [1998] Figaro which was hijacked by the most disgustingly plush, scandalously self-absorbed conducting I have ever heard [from that] fat monster in the pit, James Levine.” Brits! You can’t live with them and you can’t kill them. Read more »
“But not everyone is amused. On Twitter, SarahDuggers asked: ‘Is it really po-faced and prudish to find these billboards really vulgar and not very nice?’ …. Vivienne Pattison, director of Mediawatch-UK, said the ad was clever in itself but contributed to the hyper-sexualisation of society.” [Evening Standard]
La Cieca is starting a new series of Words Critics Need to Stop Using.
“Time and tide wait for no one” pontificates Myrtle the barmaid, setting the tone for André Previn’s opera about fleeting romance but enduring love: Brief Encounter. Loosely based on the play Still Life by Noël Coward and the screenplay for the film Brief Encounter by Coward and David Lean, this opera (now on CD) tells a similar story to all of its operatic predecessors: longing, love and loss.
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]
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