UPDATE: La Cieca has just heard from Rosalind Elias‘s management with the news that the veteran mezzo will indeed transfer to Broadway with the Kennedy Center company of Follies. Apparently Playbill was given erroneous information. Read more »
Our own Dawn Fatale (pictured) dreamt up the Konzept for the following challenge, to which La Cieca is sure the cher public will respond with their usual zeal and whimsy. In this game, it is up to you to program the 2011-12 season for Opera Orchestra of New York, based on a set of criteria to be revealed after the jump. Read more »
In fact, Lucia is due in New York in less than a month, but current reports about the proposed prima donna are not encouraging. Read more »
So the gossip La Cieca has been picking up is that at some point there were plans at the Met to open the 2012-13 season with Eugene Onegin featuring Mariusz Kwiecien, Anna Netrebko and Matthew Polenzani. The soprano and baritone were also booked to open the 2013-2014 season with new production of La bohème. Then various things happened and the new Puccini production was canceled in favor of the sacred/cash cow Zeffirelli version, and the Tchaikovsky opera moved back a year using the casting (Mariusz, Anna, etc.) of the scuttled Bohème.
The updates on Brad Wilber‘s new Met Futures page are arriving almost daily now, with perhaps the most startling recent news the “removal” of Juan Diego Flórez from a projected new production of I puritani in April 2014. But there’s more to it, after the jump.
La Cieca notes that the Gran Teatre del Liceu production of Carmen, directed by Calixto Bieito and starring Beatrice Uria-Monzon, Roberto Alagna, Marina Poplavskaya and Erwin Schrott, will be broadcast to cinemas a couple of weeks from now.
As perhaps you know, if there’s anyone Norman Lebrecht hates more than opera singers and superstar conductors, it’s artists’ managers. So imagine his glee when he got his mitts on an email “leaked… in the dark of night” detailing “the balance of terror that prevails between a soloist and the person who supposedly has his or her best interests at heart…. the stuff of nightmares.”
Cher Public