LOC to toddle as planned
This just in: Lyric Opera of Chicago and the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA) have reached a tentative contract agreement for the coming season. All performances will proceed as planned.
Recent Stories
Metropolitan Opera Offers to Pay “The Situation” To Stop Attending Its Performances
With their quick rise to fame, the cast of MTV reality show “Jersey Shore” has cashed in on a number of endorsement deals, including weight loss supplements, alcohol and bronzer. But here’s a first. Manhattan culture retailer The Metropolitan Opera is offering to pay Michael “The Situation” Sorrentino not to attend its performances.
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).
You other brothers can’t deny
Revealed: James Levine has had two back surgeries since the spring, but is described (by Tom Levine) as “very, very positive and very, very optimistic.” [NYT]
Midsummer madness
Handel’s Orlando is one of three operas Handel based on episodes from Ariosto’s best-selling sixteenth-century epic, Orlando Furioso. The story was, in 1733, well known throughout the Mediterranean world, and everyone set it to music—Vivaldi’s and Haydn’s settings have enjoyed recent revivals, and the libretto Handel set had originally been devised for Domenico Scarlatti. Intricate […]
Back to the “Futures”
The controversy over the demise of Brad Wilber‘s Met Futures site goes mainstream, thanks to (who else?) Zachary Woolfe.
Buyer’s market
La Cieca was cced the following letter sent by a “long-time patron of NYCO” in response to “the recently received Subscription Renewal Brochure.” She has withheld the patron’s name by request.
Intermission feature
La Cieca invites the cher public to comment, speculate, complain and natter on any and all off-topic subjects during the week of August 15.
The long matinee
Here’s your discussion thread for this morning/afternoon’s webcast of Lohengrin from Bayreuth, cher public. La Cieca herself is grabbing a bite of lunch and will join you later!
Attack of the killer metaphors
“It’s difficult to push a boulder up a hill, recognizing that we’ll never get there,” says George Steel, adding, “If I have to take tomatoes from here to there, I can live with that.” For a translation of that poetic flight of fancy, La Cieca has resorted to Josephine Baker, after the jump.
“Treulosem Rat gab sie ihr Herz dahin!”
La Cieca (not pictured) dons her “early adopter” hat once again as she prepares to watch the live telecast of Lohengrin from the Bayreuth Festival on Sunday. It’s an online pay-per-view event (a ticket is €14.90), though the presenters promise it can alternatively be watched “on demand at a time of your own choice between […]
Cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, picket a little more
This just landed in La Cieca’s inbox: “We regret to inform you that Lyric Opera of Chicago season is in peril. Yesterday Lyric advised us that if we do not accept their one year demand for a two week reduction of employment, an elimination of wage parity with the orchestra, and an additional 5.2 % […]
The blind leading the blind
Those of you who feel like an idiot for missing the previous blind item (about how the Met has managed to wriggle out of a contract and say “good day!” to a disastrous co-production) should now spring to attention and clear your minds for a clue about the identity of the director scheduled for his […]
Kukla, Fran and Fafner
La Cieca just stumbled across this casting call for “puppeteers.”
It ain’t necessarily bold
Musical theater doyen Stephen Sondheim is not amused by plans to “revamp” (or, La Cieca might venture to pun, “devamp”) Porgy and Bess, thus “to transform the classic 1935 opera into a commercial Broadway musical.” La Cieca thinks this controversy will make for a very interesting sidebar in the ongoing Regie debate.
You will, David, you will
La Cieca hears that parterre fave David Daniels will get all eponymous and stuff for a world premiere opera entitled Oscar, based on the life of Oscar Wilde, for Santa Fe Opera in 2013, with Opera Company of Philadelphia to follow. The work is to boast music by Theodore Morrison and a libretto and stage […]
A Rita bird talk
When sending out CDs to for me to review, our doyenne could not know that I have a fetish for 1950s vintage import LP jackets. I remember combing through the LP bins gazing admiringly at the import disks of a generation of middle-European singers who I was too young to have heard in person, who […]
RIP Brad Wilber’s “Met Futures” page
After 15 years of astoundingly accurate forecasts of future Met seasons, the invaluable resource by Brad Wilber has been, apparently, permanently expunged from the internet. Those of you who, like La Cieca, will cherish the last bits of wisdom from this site may want to download and save this PDF of the most recent cached […]
Intermission Feature
If you are going to cut something, you cut someone else’s off-topic discussion, not mine!
Perder quell’angelo?
Our own JJ (not pictured) received a belated birthday present in the form of an excerpt from last night’s concert in Vienna in which Anna Netrebko spreads her wings for a performance of “D’amor sull’ali rosee,” assisted by the luxe Manrico of Jonas Kaufmann.
Just salvage
Santa Fe has done a brave and laudable thing is presenting the first major revival of The Last Savage in decades, and if the libretto were, perhaps, translated into Hindu, the production values, excellence of cast, and directorial choices could conceivably work their magic of, if not pulling a rabbit out of a hat, then […]
Blindfolded item
That hunch you had was right: that very badly reviewed co-production is no longer on the Met’s future schedule. An American director is taking on what may be a fool’s errand of bringing this classic to the stage.
Rock stars
Scanning this summer’s Mostly Mozart schedule one wondered if New York really needed another Don Giovanni right now? And one with a non-starry cast where the best-known name was the Commendatore, Kristinn Sigmundsson?
Die Frau Ohne Schallplattenaufnahme
Not a fairy kingdom, but rather an unheated postwar Vienna ballroom transformed into an improvised recording studio: that’s the setting for Christof Loy‘s new production of Die Frau Ohne Schatten at Salzburg. The production is also (if not more so) notable for Christian Thielemann‘s virtuouso conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic and the hair-raising performances of […]