“’I’m analytical, not wild,’ [Elina] Garanca told an interviewer in 2009. ‘When I’m onstage my brain is running like a computer.’ If that is no way to be a singer, it is also no way to direct an opera.” [New York Times]
“This, after all, is opera, opera in New York, not some dainty pastime like professional hockey, and the stage is crowded with grumbling members of the old guard who aren’t renewing subscriptions, disenchanted reviewers, vendors of vitriol on blogs like Parterre Box…” [New York Times]
If it’s in the New York Times, it must be true, right? “To this day there is no applause at the end of a Parsifal performance in Bayreuth.” Read more »
George Steel announces that New York City Opera is destroying, giving away or selling off most of its stock of repertory productions.
“In the space of a few words, the leading role in a major new production had been reassigned. But why?”
“The article also referred imprecisely to offerings in the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 2012-13 season.”
Zachary Woolfe (not pictured) makes his way to Bayreuth to try to unravel the Evgeny Nikitin mystery.
I have a confession to make about Britten’s opera Billy Budd: I don’t like it very much.”
Cher Public