Tone deaf item
Which Met diva will sing two numbers “down a minor second” in her performances during the 2012-13 season?
Questo e Quello
Window of opportunity
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.
Does anyone still wear an intermission feature?
As Leon Botstein has never said, “I digress.” La Cieca invites you too, cher public, to digress here in your weekly intermission feature.
Smiles on a summer night
Apparently, we learn very little in life; the follies we pursue with haste in youth are answered by the follies we commit in age with great deliberation.
Andromache sings again
Alexandra Deshorties will perform the key role of Juliana Bordereau in the Dallas Opera’s 25th anniversary production of Dominick Argento’s The Aspern Papers.
Uncle Smania
Scoring the Fire and Music contest was tricky, cher public, as the selections were both quite brief and relatively obscure.
Wer nicht mit dem Woolfe heult
Zachary Woolfe (not pictured) makes his way to Bayreuth to try to unravel the Evgeny Nikitin mystery.
See the pretty diva in that mirror there
The diva must be a Diva in Adriana Lecouvreur. Fact.
Flying down to Bayreuth
The opening performance of the already-notorious 2012 Bayreuth Festival, Der Fliegende Holländer, begins at noon today EDT and is relayed on a number of web-available radio stations.
That’s the ticket!
In a startling move sure to dominate the news cycle, presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney has tapped bass-baritone Evgeny Nikitin as his running mate in the 2012 Presidential race.
Disoriented
The most wonderful thing about opera on video is the vicarious thrill of seeing performances of important works in the most glamorous foreign theaters in gala presentations with musicians of great renown for a piddling fraction of the cost.
Thirds and music
Richard Wagner told Cosima he first got the idea of composing an opera about Tristan and Isolde while he was conducting Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi starring his muse, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, in the trouser role of Romeo.
Symbolic weight
Evgeny Nikitin‘s controversial tattoos have left many people puzzled and given rise to a good deal of speculation.
Joy cometh in the mourning
Is the threnody, the lament over a beloved corpse, the oldest form of song? Surely it is among the oldest; one of the most widespread and stylistically various, millennia before opera was devised.
Murder ink
Evgeny Nikitin has withdrawn from the Bayreuth Festival’s new production of Der Fliegende Holländer after a German television program revealed the bass-baritone has a swastika tattoo.
Mind over matter
“Scientist, lover, gambler, unwed mother — the 1700s French intellectual Émilie du Châtelet was all these and more.”
What is chat?
Says Betsy Ann Bobolink: “Today’s Chat Check is especially for the losers among us, those who fail at all the quizzes and games set before us.”
Malgré Gardens
Well, that was one race that was won at a walk.
A soprano, a tenor and a rabbi walk into a psychiatrist’s office…
Renée Fleming, “who’s been known to kid her diva image, along with her art form”…
Rodent show
This Hans Neuenfels staging for the Bayreuth Festival caused quite a stir at its 2010 premiere, but now, with time and distance, how radical is the production?
49 shades of grey
A singer who was monochromatic long before she started appearing in “Obsession by Calvin Klein” circa 1986-styled music videos, Elina Garanca …
It’s the pictures that got small
“Norma, from Teatro Antico, Taormina, Italy.”
I’ll take the fall
The days are getting shorter, but you can keep the prattle going this fall’s Talk of the Town! You will, you can, you must join in the discussion about: Great mezzo soprano performances (October),
Gained in translation (November), Teleport me back to… (December).