Questo e Quello
So, take a look after the jump and tell La Cieca the two things that are wrong (they’re related) about the cover of the Met’s new Ring DVD/Blu-ray.
Based on reliable reports about reshuffling of the Met’s repertoire for the 2013-14 season, the only reasonable conclusion is that James Levine will never return to conduct with the company.
La Cieca has put her little grey cells to work and deduced that Opera Orchestra of New York will present two performances next season…
Unlike Mozart, the young Gioacchino Rossini seldom let his ambitions strain relations with employers.
The Met’s controversial Ring cycle, directed by Robert Lepage (not pictured) and conducted by TBA (possibly pictured) makes its home video debut on September 11.
EMI Classics will release Fifty Shades of Grey – The Classical Album…
Has it been a year already? Apparently so.
We approach, beloveds, as unto a shrine, for these are no ordinary performances.
“Taking the libretto’s description of ‘panther-like’ literally, Bacchus appears in a shiny leopard-print suit…”
Live webcast from Salzburg, right now: the 1912 Ariadne/Le bourgeois gentilhomme.
Chatter away, cher public, for here is your foyer for off-topic and general interest discussion during the week of August 5.
With the country mired in a recession and the Met carrying a heavy load of debt, what better publicity can there be than a sycophantic profile in the Wall Street Journal featuring Peter Gelb snarfing up an $800 bottle of “explosively rich” wine?
Attention K-Mart shoppers!
In what surely counts as the most startling sleeper story of the week in opera, soprano Patricia Racette has been canonized a saint in the Russian Orthodox Church.
For whatever reason (Lack of James Levine? Incompetence of Robert LePage? The economy? Wagner overload?), next season’s Ring cycle at the Met doesn’t seem to be selling.
Soprano, television personality and fundraiser Marguerite Piazza died yesterday.
The Robert Lepage production of the Ring cycle will be shown complete (including the now de rigueur fifth part of the pentalogy, Wagner’s Dream) September 11-14 on PBS
“I have learned by the perfectest report they have more in them than mortal knowledge.”
Verdi’s only successful comic opera, Falstaff, is notably hard to produce.
Puccini’s evening of one-act operas Il Trittico seems to be riding a wave of popularity over the last few years, with a new production at the Met and several high-profile productions in America and Europe.
Sometimes an obscure opera is revived, and everyone hails a lost masterpiece.
Which Met diva will sing two numbers “down a minor second” in her performances during the 2012-13 season?
You may recall a couple of weeks ago La Cieca spoke to Giuseppe Filianoti about the “lost” aria from Cilea’s L’arlesiana he had reconstructed to include in a concert performance of the opera.
As Leon Botstein has never said, “I digress.” La Cieca invites you too, cher public, to digress here in your weekly intermission feature.
Tell us: What’s your favorite Verdi performance?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
