Lead balloon
At Wolf Trap Opera, a season-closing Tosca is weighed down by an incoherent setting during Italy’s Anni di piombo.
Victorien Sardou
10 pieces since 2009.
10
pieces
18
years
His mouth is always scandalous
A Pasolini-inspired Tosca at La Monnaie does not quite find the pleasure in the pain.
French revolution
Benjamin Bernheim opens up to Emma Hoffman about what really makes a French tenor ahead of his New York recital debut.
Crossing over
Without furnishings to distract them, the cast prowled the stage with sinister energy, exchanging significant looks and deadly secrets as though fearing Nihilists behind every drapery.
Double cross
Sonya Yoncheva’s first-ever Princess Romazov was one of this summer’s casualties but Trove Thursday steps up with a rare 1960 in-house pirate of Giordano’s Fedora starring Renata Tebaldi, Giuseppe di Stefano and Tito Gobbi along with a pair of Tebaldi-di Stefano Puccini highlights from the early 1950s.
I think we’ve got her number
“Are we Team Guelf or Team Ghibelline?”
Word problem
I’ve been picking away yet again at the mysterious symbiosis between an opera’s words and its music.
Canard en retard
Please forgive the lateness of this week’s howler, which in any event is something more of a squeaker anyway.
Cross purposes
It was while attending a performance of Fédora in Naples in 1885 that eighteen year-old Umberto Giordano fell in love with Sardou’s then immensely popular play; the protagonist was none other than Sarah Bernhardt, the creator of the title role. He immediately asked the French dramatist to sell him the rights, a request Sardou did […]
Tosca’s dress
So the question was raised (on opera-l, actually, but La Cieca doesn’t mind discussing it in more downmarket venues): in Luc Bondy‘s production of Tosca, Karita Mattila appears in the third act in an entirely new outfit, a sort of tailored trenchcoat of dark leather-like fabric, but whatever she’s wearing, isn’t is a mistake?