Cher Public
Act now to join the starry ranks of The Talk of the Town contributors for a new quarter of à propos chitter chatter!
This month: French Baroque from Opera Lafayette, German Requiem at Carnegie Hall, family friendly Haydn from little opera theater of NY, and Wagner’s satin and perfume fetishes?
At the parterre box Calendar, nature is refurbishing herself. Spring varieties abound with the usual Met fare and all manner of recitals and rarities. We’ve got our eyes on these from our friends and sponsors.
Readers, writers, and stars reflect on the 30th anniversary of “the most essential blog in opera” (NYT)
Zachary Woolfe reflects on the legacy of parterre box founder James Jorden and three decades of “remembering when opera was queer and dangerous and exciting and making it that way again”
An undeniable divide stands between the great idiomatic tradition of operatic performance and the current training models meant to prepare that tradition’s executants.
La Cieca (pictured) wishes her cher public a sensible and safe “Cyber Monday” shopping experience!
Enjoy spectacular savings on everything from tablet computers to RIce Krispies during Amazon Prime Days!
A parterre box reader has had to cancel an opera trip to Germany scheduled from November 29 – December 6 and wants if possible to share his tickets with members of the cher public.
UPDATED: Now with even more operatic tackiness! A sampling of Diva Dress Disasters submitted by the cher public.Seen worse disasters? Email La Cieca!
In order to stem what seems to be a rising tide of anonymous postings (and to save herself the hassle of deleting them) La Cieca offers these instructions on how to post comments using a Nickname. When you click on the “POST A COMMENT” link, you go to the “Leave your comment” form. At the…
La Cieca’s DVR hard drive will be overflowing by the end of this November since the indispensable Turner Classic Movies has scheduled a whole month of “guest programmers.” Among the celebrities gracing the tube to introduce their favorite flicks will be some of particular interest to the parterre crowd. For example, this Thursday, November 8,…
An interview with director Krzysztof Warlikowski in the current issue of Takt, the house magazine for the Bayerisches Staatsoper, confirms that you, cher public, were exactly right about the “slant” of his new production of Yevgeny Onegin opening tonight in Munich. In the interview (available online, as is the rest of the magazine, in pdf…
UPDATE: And now, my dears, we’ve even reached the AP! (How long before we’re on the UP and every other damn P?) La Cieca’s young, young, young friend Maury D’anatto writes: “Too funny, La Cieca: did you coin hunkentenor? Because there was just this intermission interview with Joseph Kaiser that went somewhat off the rails…
Ever since everyone’s favorite apocryphal diva (with the possible minority exception of Lena Geyer), the oracular Oltrano herself, Marwdew Czgowchwz, vanished across the ocean at a time (time out of mind) that was somehow both 1956 and 1975 and yet neither, La Cieca, like all the rest of you, has reread her first copy of…
La Cieca predicted a cast change earlier, and what do you know, so it came to pass! Soprano Lisette Oropesa will sing the Tuesday prima of the Met’s revival of Le nozze di Figaro and at least one more performance. She is jumping in for the enceinte Isabel Bayrakdarian. Ms. Oropesa is not only a…
La Cieca wasn’t “in the house” for the Lucia prima last night like so many of her colleagues; instead she hosted perhaps the most popular of all her online chats thus far. Approximately 120 of you cher public logged in at some point during the night, with 75 or so on average staying for the…
La Cieca’s chat returns Monday night to welcome in the new Met season. Topic of discussion: the evening’s prima of the new production of Lucia di Lammermoor, as broadcast on SIRIUS Internet Radio. Please check back on this site after 5:00 pm Monday for a link to the room, which will open at 6:15 pm…
Those of the cher public who want to attend opera on the cheap or who just want to get a jump on the season should check out New York City Opera’s Opera for All program. The NYCO is offering three performances this week with all tickets priced at $25: a gala concert on September 6,…
Congratulations to NYT writer Michael Kimmelman, whose post-mortem on Katharina Wagner‘s Bayreuth Meistersinger contains a sentence that beats all world’s records for running, standing and equivocation: The approach is not, in the abstract, without merit, Beckmesser having always seemed a proto-Jew to Wagner, awaiting modern redemption; the opera’s end comes across as the screed it…
To wind up this summer’s Wagner festival on Unnatural Acts of Opera, La Cieca plans to play the composer’s first “canonical” opera, Der Fliegende Hollander. But which live performance, she wonders. That’s where you come in, cher public. La Cieca lists below a selection of exciting live Hollanders, and you get to vote on which…
Bayreuth scion-apparent Katharina Wagner‘s production of Die Meistersinger opened yesterday at the Festspielhaus. As you can see, this production is rather curiously cast with David Beckham as Walther and Aprile Millo as Eva. Oh, well, all right, La Cieca must have her little joke, you know. The tenor is in fact Klaus Florian Vogt, whom…
More proof (as if any were needed) that 70 is the new 50: “Viva la Diva: Gala zum 70. Geburtstag von Grace Bumbry.” The concert (performed at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival on July 17 of this year) featured the septuagenarian siren in a demanding program of arias and scenes from Aida, Ernani, Les Troyens and…
As La Cieca is sure her cher public has heard, the term “to ski” is now used widely in Craigslist personal ads to indicate an interest in recreational use of cocaine. The divine Grace Moore here demonstrates how these ideas became associated.
Sponsored
Did somebody say something?
Act now to join the starry ranks of The Talk of the Town contributors for a new quarter of à propos chitter chatter!
×
Sign up for Parterre’s free newsletter.
Exclusive opera reviews, commentary, and top reads
delivered to your email weekly…ish.