Questo e Quello
La Cieca is nothing if not infinitely suggestible, particularly when the suggestion in question is clever and elegantly expressed. So, on the prompting of commenter M (pictured above) La Cieca would like to remind the cher public about a few contemporary opera projects on the immediate horizon.
The definitive postwar dramatic soprano was born May 17, 1918.
His Regie recognition is as fleet as his singing: it took iltenoredigrazia only six minutes to guess correctly that Elektra was the opera depicted in our most recent quiz. La Cieca invites him (and the rest of you, of course) to lock horns with a more knotty puzzler, after the jump.
Why you chose it I can’t say: I guess you like it better this way. At any rate, this afternoon’s chat (by popular demand) will revolve around a broadcast of Il turco in Italia from the Royal Opera, Covent Garden. Here’s the BBC 3 Player, and the live chat is in the usual location.
“Maestro Placido Domingo took to the stage in Qatar for the second time on Thursday night, when he was joined by the ‘Antologia de la Zarzuela’, with whom he gave an amazing performance of traditional Spanish music at the Pearl-Qatar.” [Gulf Times]
Before the Los Angeles Ring cycle has even begun, two of the leading singers have thrown director Achim Freyer under the bus. Particular non-collegial is leather-larynxed heldentenor John Treleaven, who blames his crappy singing on the production, but the mot du jour is: “Domingo was out of town and unavailable to answer questions.” [Los Angeles…
On the other hand, only moments ago La Cieca got a call from member of the cher public who gushed, “I just heard the greatest ‘Egli vede ch’io piango!’ ever!”
La Cieca doesn’t want her cher public to scatter to the four winds just because the Met’s broadcast season has drawn to a close. So let’s choose an internet radio broadcast to enjoy (and to discuss) next Saturday.
“The Met at this point is not a place where even a talented opera director can make good, strong work, let alone a place where a director inexperienced with the genre — as so many of Mr. Gelb’s favored artists are — can be guided toward an understanding of it.” Gadfly-at-large Zachary Woolfe takes “A…
La Cieca is happy to announce that voting season has begun for the 2010 first annual parterre box awards for excellence and repugnance in operatic production and performance during the 2009-2010 season. And now, here’s your chance to choose among this year’s nominees for the “Lorgnette d’Or.”
The DVD of the 1980 Met telecast of Lulu is now on sale!
See, La Cieca thinks Brian Kellow is asking for trouble when, in the second paragraph of his analysis of last March’s Slatkinshchina, he admits, “I did not attend the March 29 opening-night performance of La Traviata, nor did I listen to it on Sirius Radio.”
“I hate musicals. Why doesn’t the opera bother me?” The first visit to the Met with an enthusiastic host, here enacted by The Awl‘s lavishly-bemiddlenamed Mary HK Choi and Seth Colter Walls (of whom more soon). Photo: Ken Howard / Metropolitan Opera
While we’re waiting for further news on the final Tosca of the Met season, La Cieca suggests we consider the diva and the non-diva, on the other side of the jump.
Our own JJ reviews the Met’s Lulu. [NYP]
Well done, Jim: the opera in question was indeed Fidelio, and La Cieca has no idea what that horse is all about either. Better you should ask Benedikt von Peter, who directed it for the Komische Oper Berlin. And while you’re at it, maybe he’ll offer a guess or two what’s going on after the…
So the drama continues. After the first act, the conductor summons the Decider to his dressing room to complain that the prima donna has made an unmusical mess of the opera thus far.
Welcome to the Saturday afternoon chat about Alban Berg‘s Lulu, as broadcast from the Met beginning at 1:00 pm.
To be, or not to be? This is the question. But for the producers of opera on DVD, the question is really, to be an opera or to be a film. The producers of the 1991 DVD of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito as produced by Glyndebourne that same year seemed to have been sitting…
Don’t worry: no clips from The Music Lovers to mark the 170th anniversary of the composer’s birth. Instead, after the jump, a treat from the summer of 2009.
Carl Orff’s 1949 opera (or quasi-opera, as some critics have called it) Antigonae has been issued on 2 CDs on the Profil label, in a Munich radio recording from 1958. This recording, conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch and featuring the German soprano Martha Mödl in the title role, is a most welcome addition to this work’s…
La Cieca presents the first in a series of speculations why seemingly talented and well-respected artists don’t get hired — or rehired — by the Met.
Wearing her own hair (in a Zeffirelli production!) and sounding fabulous: a snippet of Anna Netrebko‘s Micaëla from Vienna on May 3.
Legendary mezzo-soprano Giulietta Simionato died this morning. She was 99. [Corriere della Sera]
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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