Headshot of La Cieca

Cher Public

  • operalover9001: Siegfried from Munich video: http://www.youtube .com/watch?v=GkisP ef77Zg&feat... 3:26 PM
  • Camille: Clita–I am listening since beginning of B.’s awakening but can’t get into chatroom or I... 3:17 PM
  • Camille: I never said that, Ma’am! Bananas are an excellent, convenient, and natural source of potassium, so... 3:12 PM
  • WindyCityOperaman: Born on this day in 1938 soprano Elizabeth Harwood httpv://www.youtub e.com/watch?v=BW48 hfg8PJ8 2:50 PM
  • louannd: Thank you La C for posting the link to Mr. Madison’s blog. A new discovery for me, and another... 2:38 PM
  • willym: well I just talked to the spouse – we looked at the programme again and decided this was a not to be... 2:18 PM
  • oedipe: Willym, I don’t know, but I am willing to give Ceci the benefit of the doubt. At any rate, this is a... 2:06 PM
  • Bill: Willym – the critics say 5 hours – apparently Bartoli sang all 8 of Cleopatra’s arias and... 1:55 PM

Wholly Grail

Certain opera productions become the stuff of legend as much for the circumstances surrounding the performance as for the musical results. Harry Kupfer’s 1992 Parsifal for the Berlin Staatsoper came at an epochal time, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and just after Daniel Barenboim was appointed the company’s music director. Putting an especially strong cast of under Kupfer’s direction was thought to portend a Renaissance for a house that had languished in the communist East, and hint at broader artistic possibilities for the reunified German republic.   Read more »

Twilight of the Machine

“Now that it has become apparent that Robert Lepage‘s production of the Ring at the Met is a fiasco (too soon? Nah.)… well, anyway, since arguably the production is a dreary, unworkable, overpriced mess whose primary (perhaps only) virtue is that it actually hasn’t killed anyone yet, and since, let’s face it, the Machinecentric show turned out to be so mind-bogglingly expensive (all those Sunday tech rehearsals with stagehands being paid, no doubt, in solid platinum ingots!), something has to be done. In this article, I intend to propose that ‘something’.” Our Own JJ gets prescriptive at Musical America. (Image based on photos by Ken Howard)

“Lehman’s Syndrome” bewilders medical establishment

From the Met press office: “Jay Hunter Morris will sing the role of Siegfried in Siegfried on April 21 matinee and April 30, 2012, and in Götterdämmerung on May 3, 2012. He replaces Gary Lehman who has withdrawn due to illness.”

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Put a Ring on

La Cieca (not pictured) was just leaked the information that the next planned revival of the Met’s Ring production (after next season) will be in the spring of 2017, i.e., about five years from now. That’s handy, because five years is the approximate lead time of casting big projects like these; the current crop of Wagnerians treading the Machine were selected circa 2007. A challenge for you, after the jump.

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Regie, redeemed

Stefan Herheim’s production of Parsifal for Bayreuth is the regie Holy Grail—a production that completely fulfills the promise and purpose of Regietheater.

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Sacred and Propane

Fertilization; birth; growth; decay. Eating; digestion; defecation; fermentation; biogas recovery; food production. Wagner’s Tannhäuser is a meditation on the relentless, repetition of cycles that define our existence and man’s insistence on the possibility salvation despite all the biochemical evidence to the contrary.

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Erlösung dem Erlöser!

La Cieca has just heard that the acclaimed production of Parsifal by Stefan Herheim will be telecast and filmed for DVD release next summer in Bayreuth.

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“Treulosem Rat gab sie ihr Herz dahin!”

La Cieca (not pictured) dons her “early adopter” hat once again as she prepares to watch the live telecast of Lohengrin from the Bayreuth Festival on Sunday. It’s an online pay-per-view event (a ticket is €14.90), though the presenters promise it can alternatively be watched “on demand at a time of your own choice between the 15th and 30th of August 2011.”

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