When Mojca Erdmann’s new debut CD for Deutsche Grammophon was reviewed in the September issue of Opera News, the disc’s cover art showed the lissome German soprano in a thin, revealing white dress, lying on a bed of roses. The album was then called Mostly Mozart. When that review questioned the titling, DG must have…
An aged Giacomo Casanova, forgotten and bored with life’s prospects, has decided to kill himself. This man, who has always lived according to the liberties of his chemical attractions, allowed himself to be ruled by Nature, now at the end attempts to assert control. But Nature, too crafty to be denied, holds him back from…
Classical music writer and opera critic Robert Levine has written a very pleasant new book, Weep, Shudder, Die, A Guide to Loving Opera, published by HarperCollins Books. Levine sets up the book’s premise early in his introduction: “Could singing… make one, as the composer Vincenzo Bellini said, ‘weep, shudder, die’ and at the same time…
Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades straddles two genres. With a macabre plot that explores the boundaries of human obsession, it’s an early psychological thriller that makes the audience engage in a kind of voyeurism Alfred Hitchcock loved. Yet the plot drawn from Pushkin and the striking Romantic score with its references to Mozart, Bizet and Grétry firmly…
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…
Sony Masterworks has released on CD
Not everything a genius creates is … a work of genius. Y’know? Mozart, for example: Sure, he was a prodigy at four, and at ten, and even at fourteen, but did he actually compose anything spectacular before he turned, say, seventeen? I’m thinking of “Exultate, Jubilate,” if you want to know.
What do opera composers do on vacation? If the researches behind this performance at the Rossini in Wildbad Festival are correct, they gather their nearest and dearest and dash them off a quickie opera for performance en famille. That, in any case, is what Giovanni Pacini did during down-time between presenting seventy-odd operas to the…
The cover of Joyce Di Donato’s third recital disc Diva, Divo immediately tells the listener that either the famed mezzo (along with the Orchestre et Choeur de L’Opera National de Lyon under Kazushi Ono) has decided to release a recording of music from Victor/Victoria, or her new CD will feature her performing arias as male…
“Theater ohne Regie gibt es nicht – das ist ganz einfach dann lediglich Literatur.” So writes Jürgen Flimm in the Berliner Morgenpost: “Theater without direction does not exist; it is simply only literature.” UPDATE: Our Own Batty Masetto has provided a translation after the jump.
The Australian conductor and authority on the operas of Janácek and Mozart died earlier today in London. He was 84.
Idomeneo is one of those operas I always meant to get around to, but never did. Composed in 1780, it’s considered Mozart’s first “mature” opera. If you collect live recordings of significant debuts, this 1964 Glyndebourne Festival live recording might be of interest. So far as I can tell, this may be the first full…
Packaged with a peek-a-boo cover exposing only Bryn Terfel’s lovely left eye (the effect of turning the page to reveal the Welsh bass-baritone’s head in its entirety brings to mind this Encyclopedia Dramatica entry) and an oddly hip-hop-flavored gray-on-black treatment of the album’s title, Terfel’s Bad Boys seems designed for those who like their divos…
I own almost every recording of the 13 operettas Sir Arthur Sullivan wrote with W.S. Gilbert ever made. Twelve Mikados, 14 Pirates of Penzance, 10 Iolanthes, right on down the line to the rarely heard Utopia, Ltd. I was a G&S fan long before I got into opera; when I was a teenager, their operettas…
I really haven’t paid much attention to “opera regie,” so I can’t give you a firm definition of it. A while ago, a pithy and biting piece called “How to Opera Germanly” made the internet rounds, and it serves as a handy guide for we who are un- or under-initiated. This production of Haydn’s Orlando…
1. DON’T STAGE THE OVERTURE. Surprise: Verdi and Rossini and Wagner Mozart actually worked in the theater most of their lives, so give them credit for knowing that the overture is there to get the audience in the mood, to ease their transition from “outside” to “inside.”
The day after opening the 2009-10 season with Hugo Weisgall’s Esther, New York City opera presented one of the most beloved operas in the entire repertoire, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in a new production by Christopher Alden.
Cecilia Bartoli’s latest vanity release bucks protocol to present an album heavy on historical concept. The classical recording industry has long feasted on the popularity of operatic solo records, especially during the last few years of industry-wide decline in CD sales. Incidentally, as record companies run out of ways to sell the standard repertoire to…
 La Cieca realizes that some of her younger readers (and aren’t you all?) may not remember Dr. Repertoire, La Cieca’s serious and near-pedantic colleague of the zine era. Dr. Repertoire used to answer questions about operatic roles, vocal technique and (mostly) Manuela Hoelterhoff, and so La Cieca feels he is the appropriate one to…
La Cieca was contacted this morning (not too early!) by a representative of the “Lebrecht Live” programme on BBC3. The show is set to discuss the burning topic “Is there cultural value in blogging?” And this is what La Cieca has to say, at least to begin with: One may read consistently brilliant cultural criticism…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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