La Cieca
As La Cieca predicted a fortnight ago, the Met Opera today announced a partnership with SIRIUS Satellite Radio to broadcast live and archival Met performances. The series will begin on Monday, September 25th, with a live broadcast of the Met’s opening night gala performance of Madama Butterfly, conducted by Music Director James Levine and directed…
Wow, news gets around fast! Within an hour after La Cieca mentioned in passing the sorry state of the peeling gold-leaf ceiling at the Met, a staffer from the house (requesting anonymity) emailed saying that this particular bit of upkeep is, sadly, not to be included among the “nips and tucks” preliminary to the new…
La Cieca notices that The Met’s website metopera.org has relaunched with an abundance of new content, focusing at the moment on the eagerly-awaited opening night whoop-de-do, but also pointing to the first week’s revivals of Gioconda and Idomeneo.And that’s just the tippity-tip of the iceberg, because deeper in the site there’s a magazine’s worth of…
Avast ye, cher public! La Cieca salutes International Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19) with music from The Pirates of Penzance and Maria Stuarda. (Don’t worry, that makes more sense than you would think.)
Now, that’s more like it, La Cieca squealed to herself when she saw this morning’s news about the multi-venue simulcast red-carpet whoop-de-do surrounding the Met’s opening night production of Madama Butterfly. It’s a celebrity-centered universe we live in; no getting around that, so why indeed not promote the Metropolitan Opera as the most glamorous show…
Here’s a YouTube clip of the original telecast of Luisa Miller, complete with the screamed “Brava Maria Callas!” before Renata Scotto‘s first solo. La Cieca is informed that (reasonably enough) this interruption had been edited out of the eagerly-awaited DVD version. Note, too, that the DVD will feature state-of-the-art video and audio restoration, unlike this…
After more than a quarter of a century, Renata Scotto gets the last word over that silly queen who made a career of disrupting her Met performances. The DVD of the “Live from the Met” telecast of Luisa Miller was released today, and is available at Amazon.com at a 30% discount off the list price.…
The Artists Formerly Known As The Love Couple made one of their now-rare duo appearances last weekend singing something called “Come Prima” at a BBC concert in London’s Hyde Park. The poster for the event suggests that Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna are shall we say, growing apart. Why the distance between the once-inseparable team?…
That “Age of the Diva” soprano, Renee Fleming, swept into Los Angeles last weekend to lay down video tracks for her upcoming DVD of Traviata. Los Angeles Opera cleverly captialized on the public’s interest in America’s Sweetheart by selling high-priced tickets to the taping, calling the event a “gala opera performance.” We will of course…
The first donnybrook of the Gelb era may well be the Revolt of the Standees. As most of you know, the Met’s Standing Room policy for the past 20 years or so has been to sell tickets for each week’s performances on Saturday morning. The queue that formed early in the a.m. has been under…
La Cieca is always quick to encourage the clever use of Photoshop, especially when it involves her two favorite subjects, i.e., opera and naked guys. That’s why she strongly recommends a look at the site called Bare Naked Men, where the Vancouver-based “Michael” digitally strips such hunks as William Burden, Nathan Gunn, Simon Keenlyside, David…
Dame Margaret Price sings Mozart in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in the summer of 1983. Gone indeed are this level of singing — and, sadly, this opera audience.
As La Cieca rather broadly hinted yesterday, the Met Opera will indeed bump up their number of broadcasts (and telecasts) this season. Six simulcast video performances (to be viewed in movie theaters) and “more than 100” audio-only Web and satellite radio presentations are promised according to a press release on the Met’s website. The first…
If you call yourself a “serious” Met fan — in other words, if your existence literally revolves around opera, you will be delighted to hear that in the very near future the Gelb-era Met Opera is planning to increase its number of radio broadcasts by as much as 500%. Yes, that’s right, four or five…
The celebrated dramatic soprano Astrid Varnay died earlier today in Munich. She was 88 years old. A few highlights from her 55 year career can be heard in this podcast. Included are scenes from Die Walkure, Tannhauser, Elektra, Der Fliegende Hollander, Der Rosenkavalier, Parsifal, Siegfried, and Tristan und Isolde. powered by ODEOUPDATE: one of the…
Or, what it would look like if Lucy Ricardo and the Wednesday Afternoon Fine Arts League did a production of La gioconda. (Actually the video is from the Liceu in 1978, but it does like the sets were paid for with a postdated check.)
Speaking of the Ynimitable Yma, La Cieca was just sent a track from the Queen of Exotica’s 1971 acid-rock classic “Miracles!” You only think you know Camp until you experience “Let Me Hear You.”
An image La Cieca herself would have been proud to Photoshop, along with a skeptical take on the Met Opera’s new advertising blitz, over at Gawker.
La Cieca has been experimenting with animation software, as well as harvesting some choice sound bites from YouTube videos.
A Very Special Guest Diva introduces La Cieca’s latest podcast, Verdi’s Aida as performed at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden on 12 April 1973. And the performance is pretty special, too: Gilda Cruz-Romo as Aida, Carlo Bergonzi as Radames, Mignon Dunn as Amneris, Gian Piero Mastromei as Amonasro . . . and Kiri te Kanawa…
You may recall, cher public, that last December La Cieca had some rather unhappy holiday tidings for a pair of Met sopranos. Well, it looks like history is repeating itself. La Cieca hears that two Met sopranos, both in the same Fach (though a different Fach from the two divas discussed in the December item),…
Among the celebs at the opening of Brecht’s Mother Courage presented by the Public Theater, glimpsed were Renee Fleming (who perhaps should have been reminded that she was on hand to see Mother Courage, not to be Mother Courage) , and the perennial Jessye Norman, whose transformation into Star Jones is now complete.
Not many people know this, but soprano Virginia Zeani was actually born in Brooklyn under the name “Amy Camus.”
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
