You have only until Sunday to catch the most heart-breaking moments seen on New York City operatic stages this season when the title characters of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s David et Jonathas—which opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday night—bid one another a final farewell. Frantically embracing the crumpled body of his dying friend, a destroyed David (played with searing intensity by Pascal Charbonneau) laments the tragic circumstances that have cost him everything he loves while a crowd proclaims him as their victorious new king in one of opera’s most wrenchingly unhappy “happy endings.” Read more »
Director Daniel Moshel (not pictured) who created the YouTube sensation MeTube, sat down recently—and virtually—to chat with La Cieca (also not pictured.) Read more »
At last, the quintessential targeted reader of parterre.com has been identified. Undoubtedly, he is “Marc,” the subject of Angela Christlieb‘s documentary Naked Opera, who “travels the world to see Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni in which he finds the perfect representation of a life without compromise: intense and profound, full of love and passion.” Read more »
After 23 years, the Queen of Carthage has finally made it to Manhattan.
I have a confession to make about Britten’s opera Billy Budd: I don’t like it very much.”
La Cieca has obtained this photo of Thomas Hampson headlining Camouflage Night at Powerhouse, uh, rehearsing for Heart of a Soldier at the San Francisco Opera. You can tell the scene is Northern Rhodesia in 1962, because that is where the British military first started offering complimentary personal training packages to their troops.
La Cieca hears that parterre fave David Daniels will get all eponymous and stuff for a world premiere opera entitled Oscar, based on the life of Oscar Wilde, for Santa Fe Opera in 2013, with Opera Company of Philadelphia to follow. The work is to boast music by Theodore Morrison and a libretto and stage direction by John Cox.
“What I find bizarre is the insistence that no one—not the school, not Opera North, not the local education authority—is being homophobic. Instead, we have the strange position that, because the children are of primary-school age, these lines are too difficult and confusing for them.” The lines in question are “Of course I’m queer/That’s why I left here/So if you infer/That I prefer/A lad to a lass/ And I’m working class/ I’d have to concur.” [The Guardian]
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