Questo e Quello
As suggested in Part I of this piece, to experience Glass’s Satyagraha as a purely aesthetic experience is unfortunately to succumb to a romantic ideology promoting detached reflection on art which is wholly inapplicable to such a politically-charged opera. The idea that Gandhi’s action-oriented philosophy would be packaged and sold for the sake of passive…
According to a statement issued this morning, Opera Boston is ceasing operations as of January 1. [Boston.com]
That Philip Glass’s opera about Gandhi’s nonviolent civil disobedience should be revived by the Metropolitan Opera in 2011—a year marked by nonviolent revolutions and uprisings around the globe—is timely, to say the least. The most recent production of his Satyagraha (1979) was first premiered by the Met in the spring of 2008 as America stood…
Our Own JJ gets into the traditional holiday mood, journalist style, by cobbling together a listicle of last-minute shopping options. [New York Post]
Many American opera-lovers take the “Grand Tour”—a pilgrimage to Europe to attend opera at its great houses—Peter Grimes at the Royal Opera in London or Otello at La Scala in Milan, or perhaps for the more well-heeled a visit to the summer festivals of Glyndebourne, Salzburg or Aix-en-Provence.
“In an unlikely venue—a converted gymnasium off Avenue B—one of New York’s newest opera companies is keeping musical tradition alive.” [New York Post]
Here’s where the elite(?) will meet the week of December 18 for off-topic and general discussion.
UPDATE: A source at tonight’s Met Faust tells La Cieca that after Wendy White fell from a platform on her entrance into the garden scene, there was an intermission, then “…her cover [Theodora] Hanslowe went on from the ‘Eh quoi, toujours seule’ . . . . At second intermission now. Announcement just made that Wendy…
La Cieca has just heard that 800 tickets for the public dress rehearsal of the Met’s new Enchanted Island production will be distributed starting at noon tomorrow. The rehearsal will be Wednesday, December 28 at 10:30am, and naturally your doyenne encourages spies, agents, operatives, sleuths, snoops, spooks and spotters to attend this sneak preview and to…
Is this the new Mari Lyn?
At long last, Franco Zeffirelli opens up about his back-door route to the lap of luxury: “Ho dato il culo per fare carriera e mi è piaciuto.” [Attualisimo]
Capriccio skates along on a fine line between a fascinating idea-driven debate about the purpose of art in the wider world and a rather fussy narrow debate about text and music interesting only to those interested in opera as theatre.
The Monday, 12th December, Weill Hall recital debut of Signora Chiara Taigi, a strikingly good looking Italian soprano, who had made her American operatic debut this past March, starring as Selika in the OONY production of Meyerbeer’s long-neglected L’Africaine, was something Your Own Camille had looked forward to with a high hopes and a faintly…
“This is the end of Western culture,” Richard Strauss proclaimed after a rehearsal of his penultimate opera Die Liebe der Danae, in Salzburg in 1944. The octogenarian composer, increasingly on the outs with the Nazis and switched off from contemporary music currents, could well have identified with his protagonist Jupiter, a once-mighty God caught up in an off-kilter…
Deborah Orr (“one of Britain’s leading social and political commentators”) doesn’t know much about opera, but she does know she prefers opera to al fresco gay sex. At least I think that’s what she’s talking about in The Guardian.
It is, as Noel Coward remarked, astonishing how potent cheap music is. According to Brockway and Weinstock’s World of Opera, Gounod’s Faust was performed, after a rather lackluster debut in 1859, a thousand times inParis at the Opera between 1869 and 1894—a gobsmacking average of once every nine days.
After a Monday that will go down in history as “the day nothing happened,” finally we may have a bit of excitement tonight as the Met broadcasts on Sirius and the web-based Listen Live. The occasion is the season premiere of La Fille du Régiment featuring Nino Machaidze and Lawrence Brownlee, with that lovely, litigious…
Talk about this, that, or the other here, cher public, in your general discussion thread for the week of December 11.
Now that the retirement of James Levine is basically just a matter of patiently waiting out 18 months of inaction, it’s about time you, the cher public, were heard on the subject of the appointment of a new music director for the Met. A couple of polls for you after the jump.
Once again the Friday afternoon news dump reveals the Byzantine means by which the honchos and honchesses who rule the world of opera attain and consolidate their power.
James Levine will not conduct this spring or in the entire 2012-2013 season, says a press release from the Met. The most apparent result of this decision is that Fabio Luisi is now officially on the podium for all three of this spring’s Ring cycles. The complete press release follows the jump.
“After putting off for a week trying to make some sense of the horrific mess that is the Met’s new Faust, I’m finally just going to give up. There are some disasters that bear writing about as what you might call teaching opportunities: this season’s Don Giovanni, for example, as a cautionary tale about the…
“The reaction to Grandage’s Don Giovanni was revealing. For the critics, it seemed to fall between two stools: the show had been marketed as a theatrical event from a director who has won plaudits on Broadway; but what they got was something that looked, on the surface at least, rather old-fashioned.” The “dome-headed” general manager…
I’ve been a big fan of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena since I first heard it on recording and have always felt that it deserved a definitive recorded performance. Here’s a brief tour of why this hasn’t happened. There’s the Bible, also known as the live Scala relay with Callas and Simionato and musical cuts so egregious…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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