La Cieca
James Jorden (who wrote under the names "La Cieca" and "Our Own JJ") was the founder and editor of parterre box. During his 20 year career as an opera critic he wrote for the New York Times, Opera, Gay City News, Opera Now, Musical America and the New York Post. He also raised his voice in punditry on National Public Radio. From time to time he directed opera, including three unsuccessful productions of Don Giovanni. He also contributed a regular column on opera for the New York Observer. James died in October 2023.
La Cieca congratulates the marketing department of the heretofore flailing New York City Opera, who seem finally to have hit upon a strategy that will get a response from the company’s understandably confused subscribers. The latest appeal, after the jump.
Today is the 211th anniversary of the day the events in Puccini’s Tosca took place, June 17, 1800. (This detail is not mentioned in the libretto, but it is specified in the stage directions for Victorien Sardou’s play La Tosca: “La scène à Rome, le 17 juin 1800.” To celebrate this anniversary of this most…
La Cieca’s lovely and talented colleague Olivia Giovetti takes on the Met’s gift shop in the latest installment of her WQX-Aria blog. La Cieca herself is of at the very least two minds about the changes to the gift shop, but she’ll invite you, the cher public, to chew on this issue before starts gnawing…
The Metropolitan Opera expects to achieve a balanced budget in 2011, the first for the company since 2004. In other good news, contributions and grants were up about 21% between 2009 and 2010; program service revenue rose about 6% in the same period. Maestro James Levine took a 5% pay cut, sending his 2010 compensation…
You asked for it, cher public, and La Cieca is happy to olige: a post to anchor the week’s off-topic and general converation threads.
Briefly, according to Zachary Woolfe: “No one came.” More elaboration, plus speculation on “What That Means,” in the New York Observer. And for those of you with a taste for hash, the subject is revisited as well in the New York Times.
“Je les tiens dans les mains, je les tiens dans la bouche… Je les tiens dans le bras, je les mets autour de mon cou… Je n’ouvrirai plus les mains cette nuit!”
A few spoilsport commentators have complained that the clever marketing video for Nico Muhly‘s Two Boys at the English National Opera doesn’t accurately represent the somewhat dark subject matter of the new opera. La Cieca won’t take sides on this matter of vital import, but she will reveal to you, the cher public, that a…
You perhaps will not be completely flabbergasted that La Cieca has a spy following the Met’s Japan tour (pictured). The reports thus far (I mean, once the ragtag band of misfits finally landed in the Land of the Rising Sun) are not particularly scandalous, but, please give our operative time!
Our own Dawn Fatale (pictured) dreamt up the Konzept for the following challenge, to which La Cieca is sure the cher public will respond with their usual zeal and whimsy. In this game, it is up to you to program the 2011-12 season for Opera Orchestra of New York, based on a set of criteria…
Our Own Batty Masetto gently prods, “The first cycle of the San Francisco Ring starts Tuesday, and time’s running out for those who haven’t checked in yet to share in the Parterre festivities. A dazzling array of Parterrians (pictured) have signed up already, so you won’t’ want to miss out on the meet-ups at the…
Yes, we know, earthquakes, radiation, diva cancellations and all that. But it does still seem a bit strange to La Cieca that the “new” Met, where Peter Gelb so vocally trumpets the vital importance of new productions, should send the shabby 30-year-old John Dexter production of Don Carlo (above) on tour to Japan the very…
As Groucho Marx would say, this is certainly a way of beating the heat; it’s also a a way of creating it. Well, all right, it’s actually something Dick Cavett said that Groucho might say, but the point stands that at 2:00 PM EDT the Opéra Royal de Wallonie production of Salomé will be webcast…
A member of the cher public has an interesting offer: “I have about 40 years’ worth of the British magazine Opera, most of them bound, which I would love to get rid of (no charge.) No library here is interested, but I thought some opera fanatic might want them. He or she would have to…
The ever-alert PR people at the English National Opera (why can’t we have a company like this?) have assembled a “what if?” video to promote Nico Muhly‘s impending Two Boys, and thrown in an admirably scruffy “reality” actor to boot.
UPDATE: David Alden‘s manager Angela Maria Blasi confirms that he resides in London and has no home in Beverly Hills. What a pity: how La Cieca imagines David striding to the very lip of that brutalist fireplace and holding forth on the halcyon days of the ENO Mazeppa!
Julius Rudel writes: “I cannot sit by and watch as the legacy that was built by a company, if not a family, of talented, dedicated people is cast aside.” [NYT]
Meet Jacques Snyman of South Africa, former rugby player, current fitness model and anti-bullying activist, and possible future opera star.
Paul Curran, who has been head of Norway’s National Opera since 2007, has resigned, ending his contract with the company two years early. His immediate plans include staging La bohéme at Santa Fe this summer, then returning to Oslo to direct Die Zauberflöte before stepping down from his post at the end of December.
What’s the diminuitive of “Normina?” Well, you’d better start coining the word, because Cecilia Bartoli is recording Bellini’s Norma, with John Osborn, Sumi Jo and Michele Pertusi; leading the Orchestra La Scintilla will be, well, Bartoli mostly, but nominally in charge will be Giovanni Antonini.
On this first summery weekend, La Cieca hopes you will all enjoy the balmy weather; but, if you must, there’s chat, and quite a lot to chat about there is too!
When George Steel predicted that the New York City Opera’s budget for 2011-12 would be “significantly smaller” than the $22 million alloted for 2010-11, he wasn’t kidding. The gulp-inducing details follow the jump.
NYCO’s director of artistic planning Ed Yim is leaving the company to to serve as a consultant at the New York Philharmonic. [NYT]
An “unbelievably honest narrative of a woman caught in a dangerous cycle of addiction and illness who overcame her demons in an utterly triumphant way” — that’s what publisher Harper Collins is calling the forthcoming memoir by Deborah Voigt, tentatively titled “True Confessions of a Down to Earth Diva.” The tome is scheduled for publication…
Tell us: What’s your favorite Verdi performance?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
