Longtime Friend of the Box Zachary Woolfe (pictured) sits down with Marc Scorca of Opera America for a “Conversation about Opera in America,” implausibly enough. The free event is tomorrow at noon at the National Opera Center, 330 Seventh Avenue.
“’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]
“La Rondine, which began as a light Viennese operetta before being transformed into an Italian tearjerker, is not a natural diva vehicle, with its wispy emotions and clunky plot…. Yet despite the work’s slightness, Ms. Opolais seemed to live within it, growing in stature as the evening went on and radiating the kind of aura—one that demands that you watch her, and sympathize with her—that defines a star.” Once again, Zachary Woolfe nails it.
“So is opera as vibrant as ever, or is it hanging on by a thread? How to write the history of an art form that hovers, Schrödinger’s catlike, simultaneously alive and dead?”
“Alden Drops the Ballo: His Milquetoast Take on Verdi’s Classic Fizzles at the Met”
“In the space of a few words, the leading role in a major new production had been reassigned. But why?”
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