Questo e Quello
“Take a sexy comedy, add Rossini’s scrumptious melodies, then fold in world-class singers and a Tony-winning director. Now pray it doesn’t turn out like the sodden soufflé that is the Met’s new Le Comte Ory.” Our own JJ is in a severe mood in today’s New York Post.
La Cieca has heard from a reliable source that two Met divas have already privately announced they “are not taking their young children to Japan and are not going themselves.”
Like the double or triple negative (where theoretically pairs of “nots” cancel each other out, but in practice you can’t be so sure) this tidbit of news La Cieca just read has her confused and uncertain. It seems that at a recital in Tulsa last night, Dame Kiri te Kanawa sang as an encore a…
A source close to the Met tells La Cieca that “all the house’s union representatives” will meet with Peter Gelb today to discuss rank and file “anxieties” about exposure to radiation and other safety concerns during the company’s planned tour to Japan scheduled for June. The bulk of Met personnel are scheduled to depart on…
Renée Fleming (who will not be wearing the dress depicted, probably) leads the cast in tonight’s performance of Capriccio at the Met, and La Cieca is counting on you, the cher public, to lead the chat beginning at 8:00 pm.
Former Editor of Opera News and Director of Opera-Music Theater at the National Endowment for the Arts Patrick J. Smith (pictured) yearns for the ancien régime: “We used to go to the opera for the voices. Zinka Milanov…” And so, anyone who has serious informed criticism of how Peter Gelb runs the Met now can…
“Esoteric music staged by an operatic outsider paid off for the New York City Opera on Friday night with Monodramas, a program of three single-character operas.” [New York Post]
Before and after:
Which divo, as is his habit, refused to wear the costume assigned him for the climactic scene of a recent production, favoring instead “more sexy” garb?
The Met’s general manager indulges in the sincerest form of flattery by opening today’s New York Times response to his critics with a blind item in the style of a certain low-rent gossipmonger. After you figure out the identity of the “star soprano, [who,] thinking she might have been poisoned, withdrew from the cast,” you…
The very best wishes to the ultimate prima donna on the occasion of the 101st anniversary of her birth!
Directors love directing Wagner, or rather, they love directing their versions of Wagner. They don’t seem to like the operas very much. We all know what we’re going to see if we travel to Bayreuth or Berlin or Stuttgart for an evening: the regietheater world of concept grafted over concept grafted over concept with the…
Much too easy was the recent “Reverse Regie” quiz: all too obviously A Kiss to the Flame is a version of Il trovatore! A return to our traditional format does not mean a return to traditional staging, as you will see after the jump.
Chat tonight, naturally, during the prima of Le Comte Ory from the Met.
“Puppets, of course, can be diverting, but they have no depth. This is fine if your audience has, as Mr. Lepage must hope, childlike emotional demands. But ultimately, for an adult, watching puppets is simply boring after a while, not because they’re not beautifully done, but because they’re not alive. After the initial burst of…
The world has come to an end and we are at the end of the world, the collapsed ruins of a bridge that can no longer be crossed. There is no greenery; the few trees that are left are dead and being chopped down for fuel. Shell-shocked survivors wander through this hellscape, fighting over the…
Three of the Met’s most cunning vocalists, Juan Diego Flórez, Joyce DiDonato and Diana Damrau, wrap their tongues around the trio from Le Comte Ory.
This just in from the Met press office: “On the advice of his doctors, James Levine will reduce his conducting dates at the Met for the rest of the current season while he continues to recover from recent procedures to alleviate back pain. His planned performances of Das Rheingold on March 30 and April 2 will…
Pornography being the seminal [sic] art form of our time, through which every other art is interpreted (I lament this, but what can you do?), and opera being in one of its periodic up-cycles, new ones being composed and premiered, old ones being dusted off for re-use, and stage directors feeling impelled, as they do,…
Just five hours from now: Parsifal! Musikalische Leitung: Manfred Honeck; Regie: Calixto Bieito; Gurnemanz: Attila Jun; Amfortas: Gregg Baker; Parsifal: Andrew Richards; Klingsor: Claudio Otelli: Kundry: Christiane Iven; Titurel: Matthias Hölle.
Opera is about the possibility of transformation. An unassuming woman can walk in through the theater’s stage door and emerge on stage as fiery princess capable of making the walls rattle. Alas, these transformations inevitably fail to stick. Every Turandot must hang up her crown; every Elektra must put down her ax one final time.…
Kasper Holten, director of the hunkalicious film Juan as well as current artistic director of Royal Danish Opera, will succeed Elaine Padmore as director of opera at the Royal Opera House starting next year. [The Stage]
First night in Berlin, since the feared jet lag did not, in fact, do your doyenne in, was spent at the Komische Oper seeing Die Entführung aus dem Serail in the “notorious” Calixto Bieito production. La Cieca’s opinion?
La Cieca will next post from the dear old Deutschland, cher public!
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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