That little place just two hours from the city is on the list of things I shall never understand, like the plot of Parsifal. So there I was rushing back from the realm of very large bugs and a terrifying lack of restaurants, waiting to see if I would make it back and across the bay in time for a one o’clock curtain. For better or worse, I did. Read more »
This season’s Met Donizetti Tudor Trilogy concluded with Roberto Devereux, given its penultimate performance by HD transmission Saturday, April 16. It is good to see these works finally given here; they are too important, too crucial a part of the operatic repertory to have been ignored for as long as they have. Read more »
Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival presents Don Giovanni, conducted and directed by Iván Fischer. Opera News calls it “a lively, giocoso take on the opera…provocative.” First performed to sold-out houses at Mostly Mozart in 2011, this can’t-miss staged concert of Mozart’s opera overflows with musical revelations and dramatic innovation. “I have seldom seen this climactic moment staged to such haunting effect,” wrote the New York Times’s Anthony Tommasini. Featuring the Budapest Festival Orchestra, Christopher Maltman, Laura Aikin, and Lucy Crowe. Performances are August 17th, 19th, and 20th at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater. Read more »
“David McVicar, on his knee, with… Mariusz Kwiecien during a rehearsal.” [New York Times]
Friday’s season premiere at the Met of Donizetti’s opera about the doomed Scottish queen proved surprisingly satisfying and a genuine success for Sondra Radvanovsky.
Enthusiasm is contagious–you have to cover up carefully lest it make you sick.
I always think of Don Giovanni as half of the greatest opera ever written. Or, actually, about 2/3 of the greatest opera ever written.
Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is his masterwork and its themes of social convention and unrequited longing surely struck a deep chord in a composer who, in late 19th century Russia, was gay and had to conduct himself carefully.
Last night, the Met opened the 2013-14 season with a handsome, fairly conservative new production of Eugene Onegin by Deborah Warner that replaces the handsome, fairly conservative one by Robert Carsen. (The trend is clear.)
Tonight at long last brings us to our first Met livechat of the season, cher public.
La Cieca predicts you won’t be seeing any puritans at the Met next season, except of course for the ones who slouch around during intermission hissing, “You call that a trill?”