Questo e Quello
In honor of the final Oprah episode, La Cieca invites the cher public to Oprahfy themselves or favorite divas, then email the resulting images to [email protected] from whence your doyenne will post them for everyone’s enjoyment. (If you can figure out how to download and then upload the photo, you can just insert it into…
The cher public’s opinion to the contrary, the Met has cast Ekaterina Gubanova as Giovanna Seymour.
“Zambello, a busy stage director, should have become director of New York City Opera a few years back but was rejected by a sexist board.” [Lebrecht] On a completely unrelated note, happy birthday Beverly Sills!
The Bay Area Chapter of Parterre (pictured) would like to invite all out-of-town Parterrians for a social schedule of sniping, snarking, and general conviviality (hair-pulling strongly discouraged) during the three cycles of the San Francisco Ring.
At a time when New York’s opera companies are supposed to be going into estivation (I mean, Peter Gelb is in Vietnam, for heaven’s sake!) there’s certainly no lack of breaking news about New York City Opera. Today’s heart-rending roundup, after the jump.
Providing continuing proof that at any given time there are only about a dozen opera administrators in the entire universe, the currently restructuring Washingon National Opera has selected as its artistic advisor the otherwise criminally underemployed Francesca Zambello.
“Opera star Renee Fleming came to Manhattan’s Grand Ballroom to record her vocals for Steven Spielberg’s new animated feature Tintin. Singing live with a 69 piece orchestra, Ms. Fleming was also filmed for motion caption. To ensure her animated character reflected all of her natural facial expressions they place green markers on Ms. Fleming’s face.”…
Not everything a genius creates is … a work of genius. Y’know? Mozart, for example: Sure, he was a prodigy at four, and at ten, and even at fourteen, but did he actually compose anything spectacular before he turned, say, seventeen? I’m thinking of “Exultate, Jubilate,” if you want to know.
Now Anthony Tommasini has gone rummaging for the good news (“a place that could set the cultural tone for its neighborhood, much the way the Public Theater defines the life of its East Village environs”) so completely obscured by the dark clouds of recent reports from NYCO. But even a cockeyed optimist like Tommasini has…
“Eva, Anna Gabler, is pretty as a picture; all the more disappointing, then, that she has neither Amanda Roocroft‘s naturalness of movement in the WNO production… nor Felicity Lott‘s former long-breathed radiance.” [The Arts Desk]
UPDATE: A full story of NYCO’s woes, including distressing quotes from George Steel is now online at the New York Times.
And now Anthony Tommasini has joined the chorus calling for James Levine “to make his next contribution to the company he loves and step aside as music director.” Even the headline of his NYT piece echoes the talk on parterre a fortnight ago.
At long last (or, anyway, a whole year later) La Cieca (pictured) is delighted to announce the event of events here at parterre.com, the 2010-2011 Parterre Cher Public Choice Awards. You, the aforementioned cher public, now have your chance to vote on the best, the worst and the most divalicious events of the season, as…
“The critical reaction to the Robert Lepage’s new production of Die Walküre at the Met leaves this contrarian reviewer in something of a quandary. Not only was pretty much everybody underwhelmed, but there was a consensus about what (they thought) was wrong: the clunkiness of The Machine, the lack of poetry in the latter part of the…
Heads are about to roll at New York City Opera, probably including George Steel‘s—though given the troupe’s bizarro history for the past few years, who can say? This is in the wake of a letter leaked to the Wall Street Journal from singers and production staff of the embattled company, which includes this chilling statement:…
Sean Michael Gross, Director of Marketing and Special Projects for 21C Media Group, who is in charge of public and press relations (in North America) for Anna Netrebko, has informed La Cieca that the rumor-magnet diva “‘is not pregnant.”
And now, live from Pittsburgh, one of La Cieca’s newest and nicest friends, Web 2.0’s answer to Louella Parsons, the inimitable Rowna Sutin with her video review of the Met’s production of Die Walküre!
So what does it mean when the owner of Anna Netrebko‘s fan blog says, “An ‘a-priori’ important press conference will be held in Munich on Monday 17. May 2011… We are looking forward to hearing what are the news….”?
La Cieca wishes you happiness today, her 35th birthday. Or, to put it more accurately, the 35th anniversary of the day La Cieca was “born,” hearing Suor Angelica sung by Renata Scotto (not pictured).
The time has come to say “Leb wohl, du kühnes herrliches Publikum,” at least so far as the matter of the regular Saturday afternoon Met chat goes. See you all online at noon on Saturday for Die Walküre?
You, the cher public have voted, and the results are in. Have we chosen the Met’s next Giovanna Seymour? The results were very close indeed!
We’re going to be hearing a lot about pasticcios in the next seven months, as we run up to The Enchanted Island at the Met. We’d better get used to the idea, and what better way to do so than to go hear a home-made pasticcio at far lower prices?
The annual Duke of York’s Picturehouse Eurovision Party, which is apparently a gay institution in Brighton, is pre-empted this year because of demand for tickets for the Met’s HD of Die Walküre. [BBC News] (Voigt photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera)
Says the Met press office: “Yonghoon Lee will sing the title role in Don Carlo during the Met’s Japan tour, replacing Jonas Kaufmann, who has withdrawn for personal reasons. [Yeah, we knew that, but, wait, there’s another paragraph]…. Ekaterina Gubanova will make her Met role debut as Eboli in the same production, replacing Olga Borodina,…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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