Questo e Quello
“Miss Mary Garden, the prima donna, has some definite ideas about American customs laws which would make her an ardent tariff reformer if she were in politics.”
Just in time for the holidays, La Cieca has flung open the doors of her Shoppe of Holiday Delights!
So we may all be on the same page as we discuss, following the jump is the video of the December 7 Traviata from La Scala.
Our Very Own Marianne Leitmetzerin (pictured) has graciously shared a jewel from her vast coffer of recorded performances, a boon La Cieca hopes will become a regular Monday event here at parterre.
Our dear friends at Operavore (to whence Our Own JJ will be returning for another season early in 2014) have called for nominations for favorite operatic “party records.”
During what German audiences at Eugene Onegin like to call a “Briefpause,” the cher public (pictured) are invited to discuss, oh, this, that and the other thing.
“After attending the dress rehearsal in London I wrote the following to Mr Carsen to give him the opportunity to make changes.”
Falstaff, Verdi’s final opera, is exuberantly inventive, bubbling and roiling with ideas the 79-year-old composer was too impatient to develop.
Which resurgent maestro’s instructions to the musical staff have rung out clear as a bell: “Can’t stand those operas you’ve programmed in my absence, so get them off the future schedule?”
It’s the opening of the Met’s Saturday afternoon broadcast season, cher public, and the first opera in the series is Rigoletto.
Finnish bass-baritone Tom Krause died Thursday. He was 79.
Our Own JJ takes on an old frame (Der Rosenkavalier) and a new (Eugene Onegin) in his latest review for the New York Observer.
Our weekly find from the Mike Richter collection: Le nozze di Figaro from the Bayerische Staatsoper with a geniunely A-list cast.
As the celebrations for the 20th anniversary of parterre box continue, La Cieca (left) introduces a new feature: each week, a vintage issue of parterre box, the queer opera zine, scanned into PDF format for handy download!
Twenty years ago, a sad and lonely gay man sat down with a pair of scissors and a glue stick and said, “I think I’ll make a magazine.”
Today would have been the 90th birthday of the quintessential prima donna.
“There’s no hiding it. I find some passages of Wagner insufferably tedious.”
As we wait for Tuesday’s festivities, cher public, let’s pass the time with conversation about off-topic and general interest subjects.
I think we’re all aware by now of the wicked libel that the French dramatist Victor Hugo concocted about the fair Lucrezia Borgia with his depiction of her as a murderous virago.
Why Rufus Wainwright is turning a Roman emperor into a cock…
“Nicholas Hytner‘s ENO production of Xerxes, unveiled on the 300th anniversary of Handel’s birth and packed with visual conceits, might be seen as marking the beginning of the modern Handel renaissance on stage.”
Jane Archibald will sing the role of Adele in all 14 performances of the new production of Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus at the Met this season.
Among the many reasons La Cieca has to be thankful: the legacy of Mike Richter on his CD-ROMs.
Tell us: What’s your favorite Verdi performance?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
