New York City Opera has announced its 2010-2011 season, and it looks like La Cieca’s precognitions were about 90% correct. (Please, hold your applause.) Read more »
New York City Opera’s latest mailing invites the gays to “Learn to French!”
Hey, remember how New York City Opera threw this big gala last fall to salute the billionaire teabagger, Astroturfer and enemy of Net Neutrality David H. Koch? Now, La Cieca is sure that in the intervening months you have been asking yourself, “What could NYCO possibly do to top this ill-advised exaltation of someone who really doesn’t deserve to be honored? Who could NYCO possibly find who would be a less popular and appropriate target for veneration?”
I warn you, cher public, you are not going to believe who the honoree is for the spring gala. Read more »
La Cieca hears that a highlight of the 2010-2011 New York City Opera season will be the local premiere of Seance on a Wet Afternoon, the Stephen Schwartz tuner to star Lauren Flanigan. Read more »
The maniacal laughter of incorrigible NYCO nemesis Manuela Hoelterhoff continues to echo through the halls of Castle Bloomberg this morning, as yet another of the executive editor's gang of henchscribes gloats over yesterday's announcement of a curtailed season at the company that dared to snub Francesca Zambello. Poor paltry fools! Read more »
"There are thousands of papers, stretching back over hundreds of years, affecting Belle Reve as, piece by piece, our improvident grandfathers and father and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their epic fornications -- to put it plainly! The four-letter word deprived us of our plantation, till finally all that was left -- and Stella can verify that! -- was the house itself and about twenty acres of ground, including a graveyard, to which now all but Stella and I have retreated!" [NYT]
Here’s a rare glimpse of those bad old days at the (then) New York State Theater, before tens of millions of dollars were spent installing a sound enhancement system, ripping a sound enhancement system, and finally doing an acoustic overhaul.
Note how distant and “small” the voices sounded back in 1976. Read more »
The amazing acute hearing of Anthony Tommasini detects an improvement in the acoustic of that place they used to call the New York State Theater, in fact, he's willing to commit that the sound is "considerably better than it used to be." Which is pretty fucking impressive, considering that the last time TT heard an "unenhanced" opera performance in that space was more than 10 years ago. Read more »
Cher Public