Rock stars
Scanning this summer’s Mostly Mozart schedule one wondered if New York really needed another Don Giovanni right now? And one with a non-starry cast where the best-known name was the Commendatore, Kristinn Sigmundsson?
East Coast
Agnes Varis 1930-2011
Entrepreneur, philanthropist, humanitarian and Democrat Agnes Varis died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. Besides her advocacy of prescription-drug reform and financial support of the Jazz Foundation of America, she was a managing director of the Metropolitan Opera, where her projects included the Agnes Varis and Karl Leichtman Rush Tickets Program and the underwriting […]
Gold digger of 2011
It seems a thing incredible but fifty years ago Richard Strauss was regarded as the wunderkind composer of a few tone poems, three notable operas (all produced before the First World War) and then nothing notable during forty years of repetitious senility. Even Ariadne auf Naxos, today one of the most popular works in the […]
Ripped from the headlines
They’ve been celebrating the centennial of Gian-Carlo Menotti lately, spouting wild claims for the immortality of his music. He did have an impressive run of successes in the 1940s, but he lived till 2007 with many more premieres and nary another hit.
Not enough, too soon
While major stars like René Pape and Piotr Beczala had to wait until they were over 40 to record a solo aria CD, Julia Lezhneva has just done her first—and she’s only twenty-one! After a drought, CD companies are issuing a surprising number of debut recitals; Nino Machaidze, Olga Peretyatko, Mojca Erdmann, and Aleksandra Kurzak […]
Abel bodied
I received a package in the mail this afternoon from La Cieca, and eagerly tore it open. I knew that this was to be my parterre review assignment… rapture! It was a CD of an opera: The Brothers composed by… George Antheil? Who the fuck is that? After researching him for a bit, I got […]
Do Tell
Trying to suggest erstwhile world-renown of Guillaume Tell to a 23-year-old who had never heard of it, a friend of mine mentioned The Lone Ranger. “What’s The Lone Ranger?” replied the youth. And the sun rises and the sun sets and all things must pass. But surely he knew Bambi Meets Godzilla, which also uses […]
Two ghosts
The ENO was filled with ghosts last week. Spectral, possibly illusory figures fleetingly materialized in the Internet chatrooms that provide the setting for much of Nico Muhly’s new opera Two Boys, and brutal boarding school memories came back to troubled life in director Christopher Alden’s dark take on Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Outside the box
While nursing her sunburn after yesterday’s New York Pride parade (were these things always five hours long?) La Cieca wandered about the web a bit until she found a copy of the text of the 1922 edition of Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home by her fellow doyenne Emily Post.
Meet and grate
La Cieca’s spy attended today’s confab between George Steel (representing NYCO) and 29 singers and production personnel (AGMA) and 24 orchestra members (Local 802). The spy’s observations after the jump.
Blow’s job
Despite baby-steps over the years, America’s musical scene, especially opera, remains decidedly un-HIP. (HIP: “historically-informed performance,” also called “period performance.”) While European opera houses turn increasingly to “original instrument” orchestras and specialist singers for seventeenth and eighteenth century works, this rarely occurs in the US.
Moving targets
In what may qualify as the most unholy alliance of Peter Gelb‘s tenure at the Met so far, since February the “Live in HD” performances from 2009 of both Turandot and Aida issued by Decca have been available from… Target. Only Target. They are scheduled for international release this July. Up until recently there has […]
Kokusai himitsu keisatsu
You perhaps will not be completely flabbergasted that La Cieca has a spy following the Met’s Japan tour (pictured). The reports thus far (I mean, once the ragtag band of misfits finally landed in the Land of the Rising Sun) are not particularly scandalous, but, please give our operative time!
Unchained melody
When a new production of Fidelio premiered at the Met in 1960, the opera had been absent from the repertoire since 1951, the post-war return of Kirsten Flagstad as a still effective Leonore and led by Bruno Walter. In the period between the two productions a new generation of singers had begun to make their […]
Le déjeuner sans l’herb
Five decades before the Met turned to computer-assisted planks to help tell the story of Wagner’s Ring cycle, the company stirred controversy and comment with another staging of the tetralogy. General Manager Rudolf Bing imported a stark, abstract production from the Salzburg Festival in order to secure the services of Herbert von Karajan, who not […]
À l’opéra ce soir
When I was a kid growing up in Paris, there was a weekly TV broadcast of a theater play called Au Théatre Ce Soir that I loved. But that my father would rarely let me watch this show, because the plays were all were silly comedies, usually badly acted and filmed without any creativity or […]
The gospel truth
“The critical reaction to the Robert Lepage’s new production of Die Walküre at the Met leaves this contrarian reviewer in something of a quandary. Not only was pretty much everybody underwhelmed, but there was a consensus about what (they thought) was wrong: the clunkiness of The Machine, the lack of poetry in the latter part of the […]
Quantum of Naxos
La Cieca’s spy reports from the Met: “A promising and delightful final dress of Ariadne yesterday.”
Prima la musica e mai le parole
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 […]
Maxed out
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 […]
Tarnished rose
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.
Sweets to the sweet
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 […]
Lepage turner
“Near the end of Robert Lepage‘s production of Wagner’s Die Walküre, which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, there is a moment of arresting visual beauty. The raked stage slowly rises and, with the help of projections, turns into a looming, stark, snow-covered mountain. It’s a breathtaking transformation, one that encapsulates everything that’s wrong […]
I’ll take the fall
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).