The New York Post‘s Clive Barnes is going to blush beet-red when he hears from the publicists (or the lawyers) who handle Placido Domingo. In a review of the Met’s Rigoletto, Barnes refers to PD as “the 72-year-old tenor.” Domingo admits to 65, though some gossips have long sniped that this figure doesn’t add up with the dates of his earliest documented performances. (La Cieca might as well say right now that there are even a few Placidophobes out there who would add, “and they got the ‘tenor’ part wrong too,” but she’s not even going to go near there.)

And in the Times this morning (La Cieca so loves her morning papers!), Ben Ratliff does a Critic’s Notebook about rare jazz and pop music videos found on YouTube.com — the site La Cieca has been using to share a few opera vids with her cher public. La Cieca rather likes the first half of the piece, in which Mr. Ratliff salivates over footage of George Clinton and Sarah Vaughan he’d never seen before. Inevitably (and sadly) though, the larger part of the article is concerned with what the author calls “legal and ethical problems.” An anonymous spokesnazi for the RIAA intones, “uploading or distributing copyrighted material, without permission from the copyright holder, is illegal,” but an entertainment lawyer offers the opinion that YouTube is protected by a safe harbor in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. In the meantime, remember that you too can upload favorite operatic video content to share with the parterre community (as explained here), subject of course to YouTube’s terms of service.

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