Bel canto: Is it a bop?
I need to get something off my chest. I love bel canto.
Anthony Tommasini
24 pieces since 2005.
24
pieces
22
years
A view to a kill
You’d want to expect that every Met retread would draw the same curiosity, the same large crowds, to Lincoln Center.
Madness on the moors!
The new cast at the Met suggested an alliterative retitling of Lucia di Lammermoor was needed—perhaps Lost Loonies in Love or its Italian equivalent?
Angel of the mourning
The most distinct pleasure of The Merry Widow at the Metropolitan Opera was the polished, yet warm, performance of Susan Graham as Hanna Glawari.
Una vittima della sventura
Remember the disastrous 2010 Traviata at the Met, “conducted” by Leonard Slatkin?
Plummeting in love
The Met’s current production of Verdi’s La Traviata is something of a mixed bag.
Leonie on the Nile
Leonie Rysanek, would have turned 90 today.
Bleeding love
I have always wanted to see a production of Strauss’ Elektra that made my ears bleed.
But the Levy was dry
The redevelopment that took place at Lincoln Center during Reynold Levy’s tenure as president of Lincoln Center represents a considerable accomplishment.
Lost and found
Verdi must have gotten tired of tossing and turning by now and has gone back to resting in peace.
Making it that way again
Twenty years ago, a sad and lonely gay man sat down with a pair of scissors and a glue stick and said, “I think I’ll make a magazine.”
Pick your poison
I think we’re all aware by now of the wicked libel that the French dramatist Victor Hugo concocted about the fair Lucrezia Borgia with his depiction of her as a murderous virago.
No one who speaks German could be an evil man
If Frank Castorf‘s work on Der Ring des Nibelungen at Bayreuth accomplishes nothing else, it should serve as a sort of loud disorganized reminder of the dangers of indulging in the intentional fallacy.
Petered out
Daniel Wakin reports that “WQXR pulled a blog posting critical of the Metropolitan Opera’s new Ring cycle last month after the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, personally complained to the radio station’s top executive…”
I hear American singing
Since an early appearance as Schaunard in Baz Luhrmann’s Broadway La bohème, barihunk Daniel Okulitch has been steadily building a substantial career. Along with noteworthy performances as Don Giovanni in New York and Figaro in Le nozze di Figaro in Los Angeles, much of his career has been centered on contemporary work. He has leading […]
Together wherever we go
La Cieca must say that, for a chick, Katharina Wagner sure doesn’t talk much. But perhaps her reticence is something of a blessing, since it prevents her from spouting such facile generalizations as “…’Die Meistersinger,’ Hitler’s favorite Wagner opera.”
Who criticizes the critics?
See, La Cieca thinks Brian Kellow is asking for trouble when, in the second paragraph of his analysis of last March’s Slatkinshchina, he admits, “I did not attend the March 29 opening-night performance of La Traviata, nor did I listen to it on Sirius Radio.”
La Cieca’s favorite couple of sentences from that Vanity Fair piece, and why
“Volpe, who is 69, wants to set the record straight, now that Peter Gelb is being held up as the architect of a new, dynamic Met: with enough money, he too could have been creative. ‘Peter spends money in ways I never could,’ Volpe told me. ‘If I had Mercedes Bass and I could have […]
Von Kopf bis Fuss
La Cieca is delighted to begin a new series on parterre.com dedicated to the fretting, brooding and dithering of the Wazier of the Worriers, Anthony Tommasini. Our first examples (of many) follow the jump.
“L’etoile fait tout”
“Maybe this bold staging was a little overwrought. But when you have Ms. Garanca as Carmen, why not?” Anthony Tommasini offers an object lesson in the art of Criticism as Starfucking.
My old flame
Anthony Tommasini‘s Sunday Times think piece about opera direction (fetchingly adorned with the Susannesque headline “Halfway Won’t Do”) is online now. La Cieca thinks TT’s heart is in the right place (and of course she’s still all aglow after the Babs interview), so she’s going to stay mum about that Herbert Wernicke production of Die […]
earthy kid
In the almost four years since La Cieca pointed out Anthony Tommasini‘s curious penchant for “strapping,” the NYT scribe has been forced to reach, well, a bit farther back on the shelf for his modifiers. TT’s current pet adjective, as La Cieca is sure you all have noticed, is “earthy.”
doubleplusungood
A loyal member of the cher public noticed this howler by Need You Ask in the online NYT earlier today: Unfortunately for La Cieca (and, well, yes, for anyone else with journalistic standards — so sue me!) the Times has already managed to do one of their “Ministry of Truth” numbers on the offending paragraph […]
Thank you, Sir, may i have another, Sir?
Cher public, those of you who have written to La Cieca wondering at the frequency Anthony Tommasini uses the word “strapping” to describe opera singers of the male persuasion — well, wonder no more. According to the New York Times archives, Tony has flogged his favorite modifer no fewer than 44 times in the past […]