Opera Teen (pictured, second from left) is not kidding us: he had an interview with Peter Gelb, here seen sporting a futuristic yellow helmet.
La Cieca has just reviewed the parterre circulation numbers and she is delighted and not a little perplexed to note that the day of the Great Opera News Kerfuffle provided our site with the highest number of pageviews in history, a total of 33,565 views in the 24 hours of Tuesday May 22. Thanks to this story and the WQXR drama a few weeks earlier, parterre is on track for its busiest month ever. Read more »
The repertory for the 2012-2013 season of the English National Opera (also known as “Peter Gelb‘s shopping list”) boasts the premiere of a new opera by Philip Glass, The Perfect American, which imagines the last days of Walt Disney. It’s a co-production with Madrid’s Teatro Real and stars bass Christopher Purves as the legendary filmmaker. The company’s program also features nine new productions, including stagings by Peter Konwitschny, Calixto Bieito, David McVicar and Richard Jones. [the arts desk]
“After putting off for a week trying to make some sense of the horrific mess that is the Met’s new Faust, I’m finally just going to give up. There are some disasters that bear writing about as what you might call teaching opportunities: this season’s Don Giovanni, for example, as a cautionary tale about the perils of timid conservatism. But there’s nothing to be learned from this Faust besides, perhaps, ‘never hire Des McAnuff to direct another opera under any circumstances’.” [Musical America]
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