UPDATE: La Cieca has just heard from Ernesto Palacio, manager for Elina Garanca, who confirms that the mezzo-soprano is pregnant. EARLIER: The news has just broken that Elina Garanca “is expecting a baby at the end of October…. Garanca and her British-born husband, conductor Karel Mark Chichon, had informed their friends of the good news […]
“Sophie Koch, a mezzo-soprano favoured by the current management over Brits Alice Coote and Sarah Connolly, sang Charlotte very intelligently and musically, without ever suggesting a woman on the brink of losing self-control.” [The Telegraph]
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).
So, who had the idea first: Robert Lepage or Kenneth Branagh? (Or would it be Stan Lee and Jack Kirby?)
*O, meine Götter! This just in from the Met’s press office: “Derrick Inouye will conduct this evening’s performance of Die Walküre, replacing James Levine, who is ill.” Earlier this week Levine appeared at a 40th Anniversary Gala fundraiser on Sunday evening and conducted Walküre on Monday night. He also was interviewed yesterday by Terry Gross […]
La Cieca’s spy reports from the Met: “A promising and delightful final dress of Ariadne yesterday.”
“Adams : Nixon in China. Théâtre du Châtelet – du 10 au 18 avril 2012. Ensemble Orchestral de Paris. Mise en scène par Chen Shi-Zheng avec June Anderson (Pat Nixon) et Sumi Jo (Madame Mao)” [ODB Opéra]
Won’t you join La Cieca (pictured, left) for tonight’s chat during the Met’s broadcast of Orfeo ed Euridice starting at 8:00 pm?
The Bronx Nightingale is 81 today!
The career of Sondra Radvanovsky has had an odd trajectory. A veteran of the National Council Auditions and the Lindemann Young Artists program, much of her work has centered on the Metropolitan Opera, which her press materials call her “home” theater. Yet her early career there was slow in starting. After numerous Aida Priestesses, around […]
When our coquine Doyenne invited those interested to review recordings I kindly requested Italian belcanto and early French works. Instead, I got a DVD of Schubert’s Alfonso und Estrella (ahem, in German!), thus the title of this review. It was one of those WTF? moments, and I thought La C. was in a PMS attack. […]
“When the lights went up, Levine beckoned 620 guests to join him on stage where tables decorated with white hyacinths and tulips showed off vintage photographs of the maestro illuminated by flickering votive candles.” [Bloomberg]
This Cleofide must have been conceived as a perfect target for haters of Italian baroque opera. While many might (grudgingly?) acknowledge that Handel is indeed an important operatic composer, here we have a virtually unknown name often relegated to dusty music history books. Not only has no one ever heard (nor probably even heard of) […]
When is a DVD recording of a performance without audience more desirable than a CD? Perhaps when the greatest performer of Schubert’s Winterreise cycle is the singer in this DVD. Watching Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau perform with Alfred Brendel at the piano is to experience the intensity and variety of the cycle in a more personal setting, […]
Morris dancing returns to the Met for a revival of Orfeo, and our own JJ is there to review it. [New York Post]
Demonstrating that delicate exotic fruits need not always be ignorant, dear Lady Bracknell guessed correctly that our most recent Regie quiz was, in fact, Salome. Thilo Reinhardt‘s production from the Komische Oper Berlin was not very well received, alas, though, on the bright side, it did provide a lively subject for the cher public’s guessing. […]
A documentary about the heldentenor Max Lorenz would seem to be an ideal prism through which to examine the moral ambiguities and trade-offs of artistic life in the Third Reich. The preeminent Siegfried, Tristan and Tannhauser of the Nazi era was considered so essential to the success of Bayreuth that Winifred Wagner told Hitler that […]
It’s Saturday afternoon, which of course means only one thing, the parterre chat, which today will be focused on Verdi’s Il trovatore, starring, in the demanding dual roles of Leonora and Conte di Luna, Joyce DiDonato.
La Cieca has been advised not to expect any sort of announcement about the New York City Opera’s 2011-2012 season, even whether there will be such a season, until after a meeting of the board of the company on May 19. In the meantime, AGMA has announced they will not pursue a job action against […]
“[Dr. Jonathan] Miller openly wonders if his defiantly naturalistic approach to opera makes him unfashionable in an art form bent on conceptualism.” La Cieca, in constrast, openly wonders when this whingeing old prat will finally shut the fuck up and retire already. [straight.com]
Glyndebourne’s release of a live Rosenkavalier from 1965 longs to be loved and cherished by listeners. Featuring a thrilling Traumcast composed of Montserrat Caballé, Otto Edelmann, Teresa Zylis-Gara, and Edith Mathis, one would certainly expect it to deserve much praise and admiration. The sound quality is, however, a stunning disappointment.
Sometimes it seems as though DVDs are released just for the sake of filling a hole in the catalogue. Considering the lack of anything truly distinctive in this 2007 production of Verdi’s La forza del destino from the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, that would certainly seem to be the case here. (If anyone is wondering, the […]
UPDATE: The Met’s press office states, “At the beginning of Act III (‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ scene) of last evening’s performance of Die Walküre, one of the planks that comprise the set descended to the stage floor rather than stopping opposite the stage apron. As a result, the artist singing Siegrune, mezzo-soprano Eve Gigliotti, […]
You may recall, cher public, that a few weeks ago La Cieca challenged you to identify the blurbs for that new picture book (James Levine: 40 Years at The Metropolitan Opera, and yes, it’s available on Amazon!) Where was I, oh, yes. Anyway, La Cieca supplied three of the back cover blurbs and you were […]
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