Planks, for the memory
The Robert Lepage production of the Ring cycle will be shown complete (including the now de rigueur fifth part of the pentalogy, Wagner’s Dream) September 11-14 on PBS
Recent Stories
In the day of success
“I have learned by the perfectest report they have more in them than mortal knowledge.”
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).
Questions and antlers
Verdi’s only successful comic opera, Falstaff, is notably hard to produce.
Puccini three ways
Puccini’s evening of one-act operas Il Trittico seems to be riding a wave of popularity over the last few years, with a new production at the Met and several high-profile productions in America and Europe.
The king who would be man
Sometimes an obscure opera is revived, and everyone hails a lost masterpiece.
Tone deaf item
Which Met diva will sing two numbers “down a minor second” in her performances during the 2012-13 season?
Window of opportunity
You may recall a couple of weeks ago La Cieca spoke to Giuseppe Filianoti about the “lost” aria from Cilea’s L’arlesiana he had reconstructed to include in a concert performance of the opera.
Does anyone still wear an intermission feature?
As Leon Botstein has never said, “I digress.” La Cieca invites you too, cher public, to digress here in your weekly intermission feature.
Smiles on a summer night
Apparently, we learn very little in life; the follies we pursue with haste in youth are answered by the follies we commit in age with great deliberation.
Andromache sings again
Alexandra Deshorties will perform the key role of Juliana Bordereau in the Dallas Opera’s 25th anniversary production of Dominick Argento’s The Aspern Papers.
Uncle Smania
Scoring the Fire and Music contest was tricky, cher public, as the selections were both quite brief and relatively obscure.
Wer nicht mit dem Woolfe heult
Zachary Woolfe (not pictured) makes his way to Bayreuth to try to unravel the Evgeny Nikitin mystery.
See the pretty diva in that mirror there
The diva must be a Diva in Adriana Lecouvreur. Fact.
Flying down to Bayreuth
The opening performance of the already-notorious 2012 Bayreuth Festival, Der Fliegende Holländer, begins at noon today EDT and is relayed on a number of web-available radio stations.
That’s the ticket!
In a startling move sure to dominate the news cycle, presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney has tapped bass-baritone Evgeny Nikitin as his running mate in the 2012 Presidential race.
Disoriented
The most wonderful thing about opera on video is the vicarious thrill of seeing performances of important works in the most glamorous foreign theaters in gala presentations with musicians of great renown for a piddling fraction of the cost.
Thirds and music
Richard Wagner told Cosima he first got the idea of composing an opera about Tristan and Isolde while he was conducting Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi starring his muse, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, in the trouser role of Romeo.
Symbolic weight
Evgeny Nikitin‘s controversial tattoos have left many people puzzled and given rise to a good deal of speculation.
Joy cometh in the mourning
Is the threnody, the lament over a beloved corpse, the oldest form of song? Surely it is among the oldest; one of the most widespread and stylistically various, millennia before opera was devised.
Murder ink
Evgeny Nikitin has withdrawn from the Bayreuth Festival’s new production of Der Fliegende Holländer after a German television program revealed the bass-baritone has a swastika tattoo.
Mind over matter
“Scientist, lover, gambler, unwed mother — the 1700s French intellectual Émilie du Châtelet was all these and more.”