Be sure to check back here on parterre.com at noon (17:00 GMT) tomorrow for the First Unnatural Acts of Opera Gala and Quiz, featuring performances by Leontyne Price, Placido Domingo, Beverly Sills, Simon Keenlyside, David Daniels, Regine Crespin, Piero Cappuccilli, Regina Resnik, Diana Soviero and Eleanor Steber. (There will be some filth as well, but you’ll have to listen to the show to find out who the perpetrator is.) The quiz will consist of three opera-related questions; the first email received will win a pair of tickets to the English National Opera’s Billy Budd; three runners-up will receive historical opera DVDs. You can listen to the show directly through a link on this page beginning at noon, or you can download the show through Itunes. Until noon, then!
Debuting today on Il Gran Teatro della Cieca, “Femmes Fatales,” a program featuring deadly divas. Featured are complete and demented performances of L’incoronazione di Poppea, Macbeth, Samson et Dalila, Jenufa and Turandot.
The lethal lovelies in question are Anna Caterina Antonacci, Shirley Verrett, Oralia Dominguez, Anja Silja and Montserrat Caballe; victims and co-conspirators include David Daniels, Kurt Moll, Piero Cappuccilli, Nicolai Ghiaurov, Jon Vickers, Ernest Blanc, Karita Mattila, Jerry Hadley, Luciano Pavarotti, Leona Mitchell and Giorgio Tozzi.
The very quick turnaround on this show can be credited to two amazing pieces of shareware, MP3 Surgeon (for direct editing of MP3s without decoding to wav, and, consequently, no degradation of sound through re-encoding) and Audiograbber, the fastest ripper La Cieca has ever seen, and, girls, would you believe it’s free?
All right, boys, get your bold-faced fonts out. It seems that at Oprah Winfrey‘s “Legends Ball,” none other than Leontyne Price asked specially to meet fellow guest/legend Mariah Carey. La Carey (who admits that at first she thought the diva mistook her for someone else) reports that Lee chatted with her about her music and her recent video. Who knew? The pop star (or, La Cieca guesses, her publicist) then gushed “. . . this is a woman who has made history and paved the way for just everybody.” (Next, I suppose, we’ll hear that Tom Cruise wants to meet David Daniels.) And, you know, it’s not like Lee and Mariah were short of someone to talk to; Oprah’s guest list also included Maya Angelou, Ruby Dee, Roberta Flack, Coretta Scott King, Gladys Knight, Patti LaBelle, Della Reese, Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Cicely Tyson, Halle Berry and Nancy Wilson. Anyway, here’s the story: MARIAH THRILLED THAT OPERA DIVA PRICE KNOWS WHO SHE IS.
You could say last night at the Met was a typical Aprile Millo performance, if that expression were not essentially an oxymoron. “Typical” and “Millo” really don’t intersect in this dimension (maybe somewhere on a spiritual plane? But I digress.) Let’s just say that, what happens at a Millo night, happened last night, which is to say: People you never see at the opera were there. Like me, for example, and I actually went through the whole ritual of buying a single out in the plaza ten minutes before eight. But everybody was there, definitely a gathering-of-the clan sort of [...]
Cher Public