Blind leap
Which much-disliked diva at the Met will be replaced for the 2017 New Year’s Eve gala, repaid thus after only eight seasons on the roster?
Recent Stories
An open letter to Sarah Billinghurst
Before you depart the Met at the end of this season, Ms. Billinghurst, you have the chance to do some good for both the Met audience and James Levine.
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).
Save the date!
La Cieca asks all members of the cher public in the New York City area to pencil in 3:00 pm on Sunday, November 24 as combination meet-and-greet of the parterriani and viewing of the HD film of Les Vêpres siciliennes at Symphony Space.
Stay! Plotz!
La Cieca expects a capacity audience for this week’s discussion of off-topic and general interest subjects.
X, Y and Anna
What better way for the world’s leading opera diva to celebrate Halloween than to dress up as “Slutty Zombie Circa 1972 Elizabeth Taylor?”
Slow curtain
La Cieca has just been informed that Deborah Voigt‘s engagement as Leonore in Fidelio at Liège has quietly disappeared from her website.
Gesamtcanardwerk
“An ‘opera production’ is defined as a collection of sets and costumes plus a list of instructions of movements from one part of the stage to another.”
Das glückliche Ungeheuer
What better way to welcome Halloween than with that scariest of all operas, Salome, in a performance culled from one of Mike Richter‘s magnificent CD-ROMs?
Desk set
“Two Boys demonstrates that Mr. Muhly is capable of very great things indeed, offering extended glimpses of the kind of masterpiece he just missed writing here, and, more happily, of the kind of masterpiece I feel confident he will write in the future.”
Mary will be wearing ribbons down her back
“A wonderful collection of them in Mary Garden, mushroom and Cossack turban styles; they are trimmed with quills, wings, French flowers and soft messaline ribbon.”
A hymn to heme
That 60 Minutes piece everyone’s been talking about, with Peter Gelb describing opera as “blood sport,” after the jump.
A river runs through it
I can think of no other case that resembles Handel’s complex relationship to the story—derived from Ovid’s Metamorphoses—of the ill-fated love between the shepherd Acis and the sea nymph Galatea.
Mama’s talkin’ loud
Sleep soundly tonight, Kasper Holten: your Vêpres Siciliennes casting problem has just been solved!
Show business
Now that many of us are leaping to the altar unfettered by those pesky legalities of yore the problem of what to put on the bridal (or groomal) registry has become an atrocious head scratcher. So many of us have had housekeeping set up for so long now that we really don’t want for anything. […]
Courage… du courage!
La Cieca hears that soprano Alex Penda is en route to London on a rescue mission, for which her friends (young or otherwise) are doubtless giving thanks.
Fall back
Just think of it, cher public, a whole extra hour in which to discuss off-topic and general interest subjects!
Breaking Baden
Baden-Baden 1927 is the title Gotham Chamber Opera has given to its evening of four brief operas that premiered together at a festival in, yes, Baden-Baden on July 17, 1927.
The laundry of fate has been placed upon the ironing board of the gods
With visuals like this, how can anyone say opera is only about singing?
You don’t have to be Druids to love it
“The Met’s production, originally directed by John Copley, is still a hideous, confusing mess. But with Ms. Meade and Ms. Barton acting with moving subtlety, singing generously and feeling deeply, it was hard to care.”
In memoriam Mike Richter
Serious opera fan and internet pioneer Mike Richter died earlier this week.
Dimples of iron
Well done, rgz: your Photoshop of the Guilty Pleasures CD cover was just exactly right!
Golden “Boys”
Who knows what to expect from an opera about the Internet?