Questo e Quello
In the calendar year 2012, parterre.com garnered an estimated five million pageviews, with over 1,600,000 visits and more than 300,000 unique visitors.
It’s easiest to write reviews when there are soaring triumphs and miserable failures.
It’s the week of Maria Stuarda, cher public, sure to be near the foreground in our latest discussion of off-topic and general interest subjects.
Elizabeth Bishop will sing Didon today at the Met, replacing an ailing Susan Graham.
“So is opera as vibrant as ever, or is it hanging on by a thread? How to write the history of an art form that hovers, Schrödinger’s catlike, simultaneously alive and dead?”
As if last week’s survey wasn’t enough, a few more recent diva-recital disks remain worthy of attention particularly since they arrive from five front-rank singers.
Feel free to bare more than just your shoulders, cher public, as you discuss this week’s off-topic and general interest subjects.
The controversial production of La traviata from La Monnaie directed by Andrea Breth is now available for viewing online.
American tenor Bryan Hymel will make his Met debut, singing the role on December 26, December 29 matinee, January 1, and January 5 matinee (the date of the global HD transmission).
“Il Leone di Lucca” (as La Cieca has never heard the composer called) was born December 22, 1858.
Pretty Yende will make her Met debut as Countess Adèle in this season’s performances of Rossini’s Le Comte Ory.
La Cieca (pictured) would like to remind those members of the cher public with last-minute gift shopping needs that purchases from the Little Shop of Arias completed today (Friday) can still reach the recipient by December 24.
“Somehow with opera, just as with theatre, it turns out that the monster’s head still hasn’t been cut off. Or else, like any monster worthy of the name, it keeps finding ways to rise from the grave.” Occasional friend of the box Joseph Cermatori offers an obituary of sorts for opera in New York in…
“La Scala has canceled the inaugural ballet of its season because of a strike by the chorus.”
The Trojan Horse seemed like a great idea—that is, until it led to disaster.
Which heaven-sent young artist is about to make a late Christmas present of his talents to an opera house that now (uselessly, no doubt) regrets not casting him in the first place?
While male half of a famous operatic couple has now become involved with a “chick” with whom he recently co-starred?
La Cieca invites all of you to spend this intermission in a constructive way: not rioting for Italian independence, but discussing off-topic and general interest subjects, as people do.
Love grand opera but wary of a six o’clock curtain with five hours of music behind it? (And nothing is grander than Berlioz’s Les Troyens, eh?) Your dilemma has been solved. Show up at the Met at 7:30 or 8:00, whenever they have the first intermission.
Perhaps La Cieca did not quite play fair with you on the most recent Regie quiz, cher public.
You can see the logic of it: The Juilliard School wants to show off its opera program, the Ellen and James S. Marcus Institute for Vocal Arts, which is (on the evidence) brim-full of talent.
Turn of the Screw is an incredibly frightening ghost story really at the heart of it but with a very modern edge.
Of particular visual interest in last weekend’s Lohengrin (though not perhaps so tantalizing as Jonas Kaufmann‘s aristocratic bare feet, pictured above) is the very obvious change in the staging that was made between the antegenerale (in which Anja Harteros sang Elsa) and the telecast opening night.
The soprano and political dissident of the postwar Soviet Union died yesterday in Moscow. She was 86.
Tell us: What’s your favorite Verdi performance?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
