By popular demand, the return of the Regie quiz. La Cieca will not ask you to identify the above photo because the identity of the opera is so obvious. Instead, use your reasoning powers on the photos after ths jump. As always, cher public, if you actually recognize the production, stay quiet while others guess!
While nursing her sunburn after yesterday’s New York Pride parade (were these things always five hours long?) La Cieca wandered about the web a bit until she found a copy of the text of the 1922 edition of Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home by her fellow doyenne Emily Post.
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).
Danish composer Poul Ruders, having been deeply moved by Lars von Trier’s 2000 film Dancer in the Dark, used his third commission from the Royal Danish Theatre to create a 75-minute opera based on this tragic story of a mother’s sacrifice to save her son from hereditary blindness. The result is a small masterpiece, renamed […]
The centennial observances of Gustav Mahler’s death have not turned up a surfeit of newly discovered performances, probably because his symphonies and song cycles have long been a calling card for serious artists and record labels. Though the industry archives may be picked clean, the estates of dead musicians are at least starting to kick […]
For you, cher public (pictured), your weekly off-topic general discussion thread.
Sir Arthur Sullivan, the son of an Irish father and an Italian mother, studied Mendelssohn’s composition style in Leipzig. He was therefore, inevitably, the supreme English theater composer of his day, and his often Mozartean style of melody is not out of place in a bel canto festival. After all, in the fourteen operettas he […]
On this first day of full equality here in New York, La Cieca is going to be just the teensiest bit quizzical and suggest listening to a couple of works that prove that not all operas are created equal! The two grand selections follow the jump.
Which NYCO board member—who haunted the company’s Lincoln Center venue for many years—has just taken a walk, resigning in sympathy with the unions?
“A singing crossbreed—a fox with human intelligence—stars in Leos Janacek’s opera, The Cunning Little Vixen. If only the New York Philharmonic’s semistaged performance Wednesday night were as successful a hybrid.” [New York Post]
Which legendary musician secretly went into surgery over the weekend, in hopes of once more becoming the (ahem) backbone of his company?
La Cieca’s spy attended today’s confab between George Steel (representing NYCO) and 29 singers and production personnel (AGMA) and 24 orchestra members (Local 802). The spy’s observations after the jump.
UPDATE: La Cieca has just heard from Rosalind Elias‘s management with the news that the veteran mezzo will indeed transfer to Broadway with the Kennedy Center company of Follies. Apparently Playbill was given erroneous information.
La Cieca is informed that the New York City Opera and AGMA are meeting today for discussions relating to the company’s 2011-12 schedule—which, by the way, is supposed to be announced sometime this week, but La Cieca isn’t holding her breath.
“That high E-natural must be up there somewhere,” these two ladies seem to be saying in unison: Voice of the Century Joan Sutherland and Voice of the Xtabay Yma Sumac.
For you, cher public (pictured), your weekly off-topic general discussion thread.
If a new release of Verdi songs from Telos masquerades as a vanity project by Diana Damrau, the packaging takes the blame. Despite a starring place on the slip cover and top billing, Damrau sings less than a third of the tracks. It’s a pity, because she clearly found something of interest in the works […]
Your season planning for Opera Orchestra of New York, cher public, looks a lot more interesting than what the company’s own artistic adminstration is likely to come up with. Thus far, La Cieca has heard one date for certain: that Eve Queler default choice Rienzi, this time with Elisabete Matos—presumably in the not very interesting […]
La Cieca congratulates the marketing department of the heretofore flailing New York City Opera, who seem finally to have hit upon a strategy that will get a response from the company’s understandably confused subscribers. The latest appeal, after the jump.
Today is the 211th anniversary of the day the events in Puccini’s Tosca took place, June 17, 1800. (This detail is not mentioned in the libretto, but it is specified in the stage directions for Victorien Sardou’s play La Tosca: “La scène à Rome, le 17 juin 1800.” To celebrate this anniversary of this most […]
La Cieca’s lovely and talented colleague Olivia Giovetti takes on the Met’s gift shop in the latest installment of her WQX-Aria blog. La Cieca herself is of at the very least two minds about the changes to the gift shop, but she’ll invite you, the cher public, to chew on this issue before starts gnawing […]
Despite baby-steps over the years, America’s musical scene, especially opera, remains decidedly un-HIP. (HIP: “historically-informed performance,” also called “period performance.”) While European opera houses turn increasingly to “original instrument” orchestras and specialist singers for seventeenth and eighteenth century works, this rarely occurs in the US.
The Metropolitan Opera expects to achieve a balanced budget in 2011, the first for the company since 2004. In other good news, contributions and grants were up about 21% between 2009 and 2010; program service revenue rose about 6% in the same period. Maestro James Levine took a 5% pay cut, sending his 2010 compensation […]
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