
“I’ve lived with mendacity!—Why can’t you live with it? Hell, you got to live with it, there’s nothing else to live with except mendacity, is there?” Big Daddy explodes with this cynical world view during Act 2 of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and that speech crossed my mind as I pondered the two recent releases of “Vivaldi” operas on my desk.
The “inverted commas” stem from the knowledge that both CDs include scads of music that either cannot be definitively ascribed to Il Prete Rosso or that is explicitly attributed to other composers, yet only his name is sprayed all over the packaging and publicity. Read more »
The best joke in Offenbach’s delicious Orphée aux Enfers is the opening premise: Orphée and Eurydice are miserably married, due to her utter boredom with his old-fashioned music. That’s a thumb in the eye of classical myths adored by highfalutin Frenchies (and especially the deification of Gluck’s Orfeo, which is quoted in Act II). In Dona D. Vaughn’s production for the Manhattan School of Music’s Senior Opera Theater Workshop, mariage à la mode is wittily sent up by dressing the unhappy couple as the bride and groom on a wedding cake.
“The spring season at the Met is as changeable as March weather in New York: crisp and brilliant for a day or two, and then suddenly as dismal as Thursday night’s Faust.” [
Cher Public