Questo e Quello
Recently your doyenne engaged in an email-based interview with David Alden, director of the Met’s new production of Un ballo in maschera, opening on Thursday.
As we fall back to standard time, La Cieca invites to to while away all those hours of darkness with discussion of off-topic and general interest subjects.
We need a ray of Light in these dark times.
It’s confirmed!
Italo Montemezzi’s La Nave, premiered in 1918 and not performed anywhere since 1938, concerns itself with nautical power, male and female archetypes, love and hate conjoined, sex and death, the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire — and the visionary future of Old Venice.
More bad news.
Then and now: the “Dio ti giocondi, o sposo” duet from Otello.
Oh, those Alps (“Loved her, hated him!”) have done it again, or at least for the first time.
La Cieca has just heard that Teatro Grattacielo’s performance of Montemezzi’s La Nave has been rescheduled and confirmed for Wednesday October 31 at 8:00 PM at the Rose Theater.
Death and its terrible aftermath hang like a pestilent fog over director Stefan Herheim’s fascinating and chilling production of Puccini’s La Bohème for Den Norske Opera.
“When the cross-dressing dude is the gifted singer Jeffery Roberson, and the opera is Menotti’s spellbinding The Medium, the result is prime musical melodrama.”
As an opera, La Traviata is defined by its characters.
You know how to whistle, don’t you?
It’s just not true that Gian Carlo Menotti composed The Medium as an opera only because he couldn’t get Joan Crawford to do it when his libretto was originally a screenplay.
The performance at the Metropolitan Opera last night proved that yes, it is possible to kill this opera. I don’t know how they managed it, but they did.
This DVD of Ernani is part of a series from the Teatro di Parma, a “Tutto Verdi” collection recently produced by Unitel Classica.
My mother asked me once, whilst staring aghast at my CD collection, why I needed so many copies of Don Giovanni.
Which Met prima donna whacked the leading man over the head with her score after he had the… what’s the word?… audacity to wear cologne to a rehearsal of their one scene together?
Can it be nearly a quarter-century ago that an Italian mezzo-soprano in her early twenties recorded her first recital?
Our Own Ercole Farnese demonstrated that his brain is as well-developed as his trapezoids by guessing, quickly and accurately, that last week’s Regie Quiz depicted Rienzi.
“Like the Shakespeare play it’s based on, Thomas Adès’ opera The Tempest is set on an enchanted island.”
At the age of thirty, Donizetti was already the experienced composer of about eighteen operas, both serious and farcical, but as Olivo e Pasquale (currently undergoing its American premiere run at Amore Opera) makes clear, the comic works were no slight matter.
Four of La Cieca’s favorite people, Diana Soviero, Ira Siff, Robert Lombardo and Ken Benson, assemble on November 9 at the impressively named “Metropolitan Opera Guild Learning Center”…
La Cieca predicts you won’t be seeing any puritans at the Met next season, except of course for the ones who slouch around during intermission hissing, “You call that a trill?”
Tell us: What’s your favorite Verdi performance?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
