Recent Stories
Our Own JJ reviews A Flowering Tree in today’s New York Post.
[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/goFTDbMyRUs” width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /] The Gran Teatre del Liceu has posted 70 clips from a variety of their opera productions over the last decade or so. Great singing and improbable regie: who could ask for anything more?
La Cieca hears that after two days of negotiations a “tentative agreement” has been reached between AGMA and the New York City Opera. Members of AGMA will vote on August 20 whether they choose to ratify the agreement as the negotiating committee has recommended. According to our source, AGMA has made “some concessions,” though apparently…
According to Variety, Kate Winslet will star in a remake of Mildred Pierce, to be directed by Todd Haynes. Is this, like, the Hurricane Katrina of gay sensibility, or what? Let’s hope HBO goes for a fuller treatment of the story than the classic 1945 Joan Crawford vehicle, including Veda’s budding career as an opera…
Which recent cancellation really has nothing to do with the music, and everything to do with the fact that the stars don’t want to play a couple onstage when offstage they will soon be an ex-pair (in the legal sense)?
Classical Beatnik Anne Midgette, obviously still reeling from the experience of The Letter in Santa Fe, addresses a problem we’ve been seeing more and more of in opera: even those who supposedly love the art form, and who are involved in putting it on, are increasingly laboring under the delusion that it is inherently over-the-top,…
Here’s a glimpse of Marina Poplavskaya in the Willy Decker production of La traviata, coming to the Met in 2010. [kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/cJSjDBSnnUw” width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /]
“Les Huguenots… fell from my schedule due to concerns of distance and tedium.” La Cieca only wishes she had the blasé wit so consistently displayed at My Favorite Intermissions.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
Grand Tier Grab Bag
Grand Tier Grab Bag
Goodnight, Irene
Goodnight, Irene
Grand Tier Grab Bag features the American Zwischenfach mezzo Irene Roberts ahead of an eclectic season of Wagner.
Grand Tier Grab Bag features the American Zwischenfach mezzo Irene Roberts ahead of an eclectic season of Wagner.
Grand Tier Grab Bag
Poetic license
Poetic license
Parterre Box shines a light on Liparit Avetisyan, who made his Met debut as Alfredo earlier this spring.
Parterre Box shines a light on Liparit Avetisyan, who made his Met debut as Alfredo earlier this spring.
Grand Tier Grab Bag
Frau Miina-Liisa will es werde Nacht
Frau Miina-Liisa will es werde Nacht
Parterre Box features soprano Miina-Liisa Värelä, making her title role debut in Die Walküre in Munich next week, in a performance of Tristan und Isolde from 2021.
Parterre Box features soprano Miina-Liisa Värelä, making her title role debut in Die Walküre in Munich next week, in a performance of Tristan und Isolde from 2021.
Grand Tier Grab Bag
Lux aeterna luceat eis
Lux aeterna luceat eis
Grand Tier Grab Bag this week honors the late Limmie Pulliam with a bit of his Verdi Requiem.
Grand Tier Grab Bag this week honors the late Limmie Pulliam with a bit of his Verdi Requiem.
Grand Tier Grab Bag
Kathryn the great
Kathryn the great
Parterre Box previews Kathryn Lewek‘s upcoming Salome with clips of her as another unhinged lady of antiquity.
Parterre Box previews Kathryn Lewek‘s upcoming Salome with clips of her as another unhinged lady of antiquity.
Grand Tier Grab Bag
Count your blessings
Count your blessings
Fast-rising Verdi baritone Ariunbaatar Ganbataar is the subject of this week’s Grand Tier Grab Bag.
Fast-rising Verdi baritone Ariunbaatar Ganbataar is the subject of this week’s Grand Tier Grab Bag.
Hot hot hot Erwin Schrott is obviously not not not allowing fatherhood and impending marriage to distract him from quality gym time. More photos of the Schrott gun show (as seen recently in the Vienna Volksoper Theater an der Wien production of Don Giovanni) after the jump.
Angela Gheorghiu, not to be outdone by Anna Netrebko‘s cancellation of Violetta in 2010, has just announced that she will not sing Carmen in 2009. According to the Romanian diva’s website, “With deep regret Angela Gheorghiu has to announce that she has to withdraw just from the new production of CARMEN at the MET later…
La Cieca is proud to “hostess” a classic performance of Semiramide as performed at La Scala on 17 December 1962. Heading the starry cast are Joan Sutherland (Semiramide), Giulietta Simionato (Arsace), Wladimiro Ganzarolli (Assur) and Gianni Raimondi (Idreno). You can listen to the first act on the Unnatural Acts of Opera page.
After the jump is the cover of Cecilia Bartoli‘s new CD, which apparently is all castrato music, all the time. Oh, it hurts!
Now that single tickets are available for purchase by Met season subcribers, and as the NYCO continues to dribble out details about casting, it’s time for La Cieca to start organizing her social diary for the opening of “The Season.” Where will Le Tout New-York be tooting this time around, cher public? Let La Cieca…
The Royal Opera House, which in its past season glitzed up its programming with such gimmicks as a tabloid tie-in and a mezzo-soprano strapped to a wheelchair, now looks to be getting desperate. The venerable opera company has commisioned a “Twitter Opera,” with a libretto to be gleaned from sundry tweets posted via the popular social…
La Cieca hears that Angela Meade, triumphant in this summer’s Semiramide at Caramoor, has been invited back there in 2010 for her first Norma. Other future dates include Les Vêpres siciliennes in Vienna and a return engagement at the Met in Ernani. On the bill at Caramoor for 2011: that grandest of all grand operas,…
Anna Netrebko will not sing Violetta in New York during the 2010-2011 season, La Cieca has learned. The long-expected La traviata (as discussed on Met Futures and elsewhere) was to be a version of the Willy Decker production the soprano did at Salzburg in 2005. According to an interview the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Netrebko has…
Talk of the Town
The Talk of the Town
Yannick Nézet-Séguin is a great opera conductor
Yannick Nézet-Séguin is a great opera conductor
Historically, conductors were often viewed as rigid, authoritarian figures. Yannick Nézet-Séguin completely subverts this stereotype.
Historically, conductors were often viewed as rigid, authoritarian figures. Yannick Nézet-Séguin completely subverts this stereotype.
The Talk of the Town
Patrizia Ciofi should have made it to the Met
Patrizia Ciofi should have made it to the Met
The artist who I feel should have made it to the Met is Patrizia Ciofi.
The artist who I feel should have made it to the Met is Patrizia Ciofi.
The Talk of the Town
Giannina Arangi-Lombardi never made it to the Met
Giannina Arangi-Lombardi never made it to the Met
Giannina Arangi-Lombardi never sang at the Met.
Giannina Arangi-Lombardi never sang at the Met.
The Talk of the Town
Andrée Esposito and Alain Vanzo should have made it to the Met
Andrée Esposito and Alain Vanzo should have made it to the Met
This Mireille duet unites Andrée Esposito and Alain Vanzo and shows the timbral and stylistic qualities that made them exemplary.
This Mireille duet unites Andrée Esposito and Alain Vanzo and shows the timbral and stylistic qualities that made them exemplary.
The Talk of the Town
Ebe Stignani and Anita Cerquetti should have made it to the Met
Ebe Stignani and Anita Cerquetti should have made it to the Met
Subtlety is for cowards, say the blazing Anita Cerquetti and the blaring Ebe Stignani.
Subtlety is for cowards, say the blazing Anita Cerquetti and the blaring Ebe Stignani.
The Talk of the Town
Sena Jurinac should have made it to the Met
Sena Jurinac should have made it to the Met
Sena Jurinac, a celebrated Mozart and Strauss singer here as the Composer, a signature role.
Sena Jurinac, a celebrated Mozart and Strauss singer here as the Composer, a signature role.
Cher public, you may be interested or alarmed (as the case may be) to glean a little more information about the namesake of the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, home to, among others, the New York City Opera. Mr. Koch is chairman of the board of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which finances…
This is someone we need to hear more of. [kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/lOraQt705FY” width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /]
In the wake of a New York Times exposé of Milwaukee’s Skylight Opera Theatre’s welter of “demonstrations, petitions, mass resignations of performers, subscriber revolt and Facebook vitriol interpreted by management as violent threats,” Playbill News reports this morning that Eric Dillner, the “vilified” managing director of the company, has resigned. According to a story this…
[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/zeMMG440Ce0″ width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /]
La Cieca has just heard the shocking, shocking! news that Margaret Juntwait will step down as host on Metropolitan Opera Radio.
What impressed La Cieca at the Caramoor concert of Semiramide on Friday was not so much the quality of the performance (though that was on a solidly high level) but the magnificence of the work itself. This magnificence stands out now in even greater relief after the comparison with Les Huguenots later in the weekend.
“Thrilling musical ideas rapidly alternate with banalities, as if Meyerbeer feared he was writing for an audience with the attention span of a gnat.” Our Own JJ weighs in on Les Huguenots in the New York Post.
Congratulations and best wishes to newly wed couple Ira Siff and Hans Pieter Heijnis, who were married Saturday in a politically-charged ceremony in Amsterdam. [via Reuters]
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