Questo e Quello
Vot tsar’ vash!” Here is your Tsar, the 38-year-old Ukranian bass Alexander Tsymbalyuk.
Take a break from your scheming, cher public, to participate in this week’s off-topic and general interest discussion.
If Jonas Kaufmann isn’t quite a household name yet, it’s only a matter of time.
With Wednesday’s stellar staging of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, the New York Philharmonic joyously put the ‘music’ back into the Broadway musical.
Here’s a chance for you to win two tickets to hear the winners of this year’s Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in the intimate ambiance of WQXR’s Greene Space.
José Cura will sing the role of Don José in the Friday, March 1 performance of Bizet’s Carmen, replacing Andrew Richards, who is ill.
La Cieca hears that the Met’s 2013-2014 season announcement will be made at approximately 5:00 PM today on the company’s website.
You can tell a lot about someone from their garage sale.
When is good enough not quite good enough?
Nearly 30 years after a Handel opera last played there, Carnegie Hall presented The English Concert opening a three-year opera-oratorio project on Sunday afternoon with Radamisto.
In any narrative, the unmentioned—the unmentionable—will always be more alarming than that which is carefully described.
Say this about Oedipus: The character’s got staying power.
The above showed up on the Met’s website.
The Met’s performance of Don Carlo Friday night was a tragedy, but not for the reason Verdi intended.
There is applause at the end of the opera, not none at all.
Take a break from eating sweets, cher public, to participate in this week’s discussion of off-topic and general interest subjects.
Following up on last night’s information dump of the (overdue?) Met season announcement for 2013-2014, La Cieca has obtained a somewhat more detailed rundown.
“One of the things I’m gradually learning as I’m coming up my the 20th anniversary of writing about opera for publication is that you have to be wary about making Pronouncements.”
As with all good myths, certainly all the myths at the heart of Wagner’s operas, the juggling of symbols and archetypes and themes in Parsifal opens the piece to a great variety of interpretations.
La Salustia was Giovanni Batista Pergolesi’s first opera, composed at the tender age of 21. In structure and storyline it’s a conventional baroque opera seria.
Promiscuous — it’s not a pretty word. But when a matron in black underwear cavorts with two dozen naked hunks, what else can you call her?
That’s what it must have been like in 1726 London when Handel composed Alessandro for perhaps the three most famous (and expensive) singers of the day.
Like the hero of Parsifal, who finds the Holy Grail after a lifetime of frustrated wandering, the Met’s audience was finally rewarded for its patience.
A parterre reader just back from the matinee of Powder Her Face relates this story of two elderly ladies seated in the second row…
Tell us: What’s your favorite Verdi performance?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
