La Cieca (pictured, right) invites you to peruse what’s making headlines today: the conclusion of Zachary Woolfe‘s analysis of the HD telecasts, an interview with former blogger Brad Wilber, and a peculiar take on the Met’s Ring from dance critic Alastair Macaulay.
The New York Times sends cub reporter (Get it? Cub reporter! Oh, La Cieca is killing herself with the puns!) Zachary Woolfe to the movie palaces of the heartland to assess the impact of the Met’s HD program.
“If you think that elegant transitions like these are the crucial elements in the Ring — if you view Wagner’s cycle primarily as a series of logistical puzzles waiting to be solved with advanced technology — Ka might convince you, as it apparently did Mr. Gelb, that Mr. Lepage is the man for the job. But if you care more about the cycle’s nuances — its characters and their relationships, its emotions, its philosophical complexities — then the idea of giving the reins to the creator of Ka, which is wholly devoid of all those complexities, is preposterous.” Zachary Woolfe went to Las Vegas and all we got was a thoughtful analysis of why Robert Lepage never was a good fit for the Ring.
“Though Mr. Herheim’s work is rigorous, it is also fun, and this Rusalka is serious but the opposite of dour.”
In what surely must count as La Cieca’s idea of a perfect storm, Zachary Woolfe interviews Calixto Bieito in the New York Times.
La Cieca is always happy (if a little envious) when another critic expresses exactly how she feels about a musical event (such as Jonas Kaufmann‘s recital last Sunday at the Met) because that means she doesn’t have to blather on and on about it. Instead she can simply reply, “Check out what Zachary Woolfe has to say in the New York Times.”
Of course, we all know a Marilyn Horne anecdote without a four-letter word is about as plausible as a martini without gin, but the tale that kicks off her Q&A with Zachary Woolfe is particularly bracing. You’ll be both shaken and stirred by this interview in the current Capital New York.
So, tell me this, what do Anthony Tommasini, Zachary Woolfe and James Jorden (not pictured) have in common? Well, according to John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute Heather MacDonald, these three “trendy” critics constitute “a press corps determined to push Met general manager Peter Gelb into conformity with European opera houses, where narcissistic updatings of opera plots are now de rigueur.” [City Journal]
Cher Public