Questo e Quello
Let’s get the new year started off right, cher public, with a tasteful, well-mannered discussion of off-topic and general interest subjects.
The Cologne Opera Fledermaus, announced as a concert performance turned out to be a much livelier and funnier affair than expected. Thanks to the excellent direction of the singers, the beautiful costumes, an unusually sparkling ensemble composed of great local favorites, and star singers for the two lead roles, this was as joyful and exciting a performance as any fully staged version.
But surely it only feels that long?
La Cieca can’t even…
Marc-Antoine Charpentier came along at the wrong time for a composer of French opera.
Bundle up warmly, cher public, and enjoy a weather-appropriate selection from the Mike Richter hoard.
I first became aware of the work of Austrian film director Michael Haneke a few years back when I followed a tip from a friend and rented the well-reviewed The White Ribbon.
“Ogni Cura si doni al diletto / E s’accorra nel magico petto,” the joke went back in the late ’90s. What wags we were!
The merits of Candide—Leonard Bernstein‘s musically glimmering yet dramatically awkward comic operetta based on Voltaire’s novella – are on ravishing display at the Menier Chocolate Factory.
As if listening live to tonight’s gala Met premiere of Die Fledermaus were not frivolity sufficient unto the end of the calendar year, La Cieca and Jungfer Marianne Leitmetzerin (pictured above, in no particular order) offer an alternative version of Strauss’s operetta for your amusement.
Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 2014-2015 season will consist of Tannhäuser, The Passenger, Tosca, Porgy and Bess, Il Trovatore, Anna Bolena, Capriccio and Don Giovanni.
“They have a menorah and a Christmas tree,” he said, alluding to their assimilated status.
“But like any production left out in the sun a few decades, it gradually faded into mere decoration.”
Eight hundred years ago, the “youth of Beauvais” in the north of France created a sacred festival “play,” Ludus Danieli (ludus—meaning a sacred event? a performance? a game? a joke?) for the annual Fool’s Night on January 1 at the cathedral.
The experience of watching Wagner’s final opera Parsifal is frequently elevated to a spiritual occurrence, and productions have historically emphasized the religious dimension of the opera’s core themes of redemption and the dangers of temptation.
f you like opera to look like a museum, the Arena di Verona’s latest video of Aida should jump to the top of your wish list.
I never thought I’d see the day when Giuseppe Verdi and Benjamin Britten would battle it out for musical superiority but that’s exactly what happened in Los Angeles this year.
“The often black-clad 41-year-old, described as the ‘Nick Cave of classical’…”
La Cieca invites the cher public to engage in lively but non-violent discourse on off-topic and general interest subjects.
Just a reminder, cher public, that the live webcast of La forza del destino from the Bayerische Staatsoper is at noon on Saturday, with concurrent chat at La Casa della Cieca.
“An opera production should look the way the music sounds.” — Lady Valerie Solti
Operetta and film star Marta Eggerth died yesterday in New York. She was 101.
Our good friends at Opera Depot are currently offering a free download of Parsifal conducted by Hans Knappertsbusch at the 1963 Bayreuth Festival.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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