Well, it had to happen sooner or later, and so it did happen, sometime between last night and tonight. La Cieca has decided she’s taking Roberto Alagna‘s side in The Scandale. Yes, yes, La Cieca hears your gasps and snorts of disbelief and contempt, but you know, cher public, La Cieca is, deep in her…
Fred Kirshnit joins the legions dazzled by the radiance that is Millo. In The Sun, Kirshnit writes People who love Aprile Millo really love Ms. Millo, and so interspersed among the nearly capacity crowd dressed in their finery as the National Italian American Foundation honored the soprano were the occasional young man or pair of…
Fifty parterre box livechatters agree: the first RealNetworks Met Opera streaming broadcast was a sensational success! Listeners compared notes last night during the performance of Rigoletto, a number of them doing an A/B comparison between the Real stream and the Sirius stream. The consensus was that the Real stream offered excellent fidelity and depth of…
Anna Caterina Antonacci is not, in fact, coming to the Met. Admittedly her scheduled debut was Donna Elvira and nothing definite after that, but still, she’s an interesting artist who isn’t heard enough in the U.S., and a few Elviras is better than no Antonacci at all. Apparently Antonacci was bumped in favor of Angela…
To begin with: everybody was there. People you haven’t seen in 20 years were there. People you were sure were dead were there. (They were alive, at least as of the third intermission.) The house was quite nearly full, and there were no significant defections as the long evening wore on. Miss M herself began…
That’s how one industry insider described today’s open dress rehearsal of Madama Butterfly at the Met. “More people than I’ve ever seen in the theater, some of them with tickets scalped from Ebay!” A more measured assessment comes from yet another of La Cieca’s network of operatives: “Well I am happy to say that today’s…
Having recovered from today’s five hour dress rehearsal at the Met, La Cieca’s spy Barnaba offers this report: There isn’t much point to doing La Gioconda in this day and age if you haven’t got a cast who can put it over. Wonder of wonders, the Met has dug its ancient (1967) staging out of…
After more than a quarter of a century, Renata Scotto gets the last word over that silly queen who made a career of disrupting her Met performances. The DVD of the “Live from the Met” telecast of Luisa Miller was released today, and is available at Amazon.com at a 30% discount off the list price.…
The first donnybrook of the Gelb era may well be the Revolt of the Standees. As most of you know, the Met’s Standing Room policy for the past 20 years or so has been to sell tickets for each week’s performances on Saturday morning. The queue that formed early in the a.m. has been under…
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf died this morning at her home in Switzerland. She was 90. The first report of the soprano’s passing was on Deutchlandradio Kultur: “Elisabeth Schwarzkopf ist tot. Wie der Deutschlandfunk erfuhr, starb die Sopranistin im Alter von 90 Jahren in ihrem Wohnort Zumikon in der Schweiz. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf besaß eine der schönsten Sopranstimmen ihrer…
The fascinating and unconventional artist Lorraine Hunt Lieberson died yesterday at her home in Santa Fe. We in New York heard her only infrequently in opera, most recently in Serse and La clemenza di Tito at the NYCO and Les Troyens at the Met. She was scheduled to sing Orfeo in a new production of…
Joseph Volpe‘s memoir The Toughest Show on Earth (see, La Cieca can get the title right when she wants too) is a book about a working-class kid from Queens who wanted to be Rudolf Bing when he grew up. Or, rather, it’s about a stage carpenter who was bright enough and ambitious enough to do…
11:40: Then Rene Pape matched Hvorostovsky, then Zajick matched (topped?) them both, then who the hell had the idiotic idea of doing the Easter Hymn with a mezzo who can’t sing it and the chorus apparently stoned or else in another city? (Oh, and did you notice the long, noisy scene change afterward? Vintage Volpe.)11:05:…
Like many of you, La Cieca was a little surprised at the blitz of publicity attendant upon the Met debut of Erika Sunnegardh last Saturday afternoon. A front-page feature in the New York Times, and then, a few days later, a followup article with photographs taken in the soprano’s dressing room. But did you notice…
UPDATED January 12: The legendary Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson died on December 25, it was announced yesterday. She was 87. La Cieca will present a special episode of “Unnatural Acts of Opera” tonight in salute to Mme. Nilsson. Birgit Nilsson as Isolde, Metropolitan Opera, 1971 Once Birgit Nilsson was negotiating a contract with Herbert von…
Peter Gelb‘s new broom continues to sweep at the Met. Perhaps to make room for the Gheorghiu/Netrebko/Damrau generation, the incoming General Manager is buying out contracts. Two Met artists in particular are targeted, and, oddly enough, these two ladies have quite a bit in common. Both are 40-something light lyric sopranos, and they have three…
Too late, I’m afraid, for a holiday gift, but what looks to be the must-have CD of the season has just become available. It’s a “new” Elektra, — actually a release of a live 1990 performance with the Valhalla-level pairing of Dame Gwyneth Jones and Leonie Rysanek as daughter and mother. (This is of course…
The upscale art book for opera lovers this holiday season is George Tsypin Opera Factory: Building in the Black Void (Princeton University Press). Tsypin is designer of choice to directors Julie Taymor, Peter Sellars and Francesca Zambello; his most familiar work to New Yorkers is perhaps his Met Zauberfloete in collaboration with Ms. Taymor. The…
Rolando Villazon not apparently in his very best form but La Cieca is very impressed with a) his willingness to sing out and take chances even when he is less than 100% and b) his well-supported legato that is the basis of even his most vehement singing. Anna Netrebko found a way to interpret Gilda…
Ever feel a pang of nostalgia for the good old days when people dressed for the opera? For a quick cure, here’s a link you should keep bookmarked. It’s the “Look Book” section of New York magazine, featuring photos of some of the attendees of the opening night at the Met. By the looks of…
Imagine a world where alarm clocks dictate when to go to sleep…. where ugliness is beautiful… where it is a crime to make anything perfect… and where the cheap seats at New York City Opera cost $45.00. Welcome to the Bizarro World, arriving this fall at the New York State Theater. NYCO has jacked up…
The decentralization of the music business is progressing so quickly La Cieca can hardly keep up. (Though it’s not like she’s completely in the loop; as you know, she only recently found out that Giulio Ricordi had died!) The very latest (as of this morning) is that Apple has launched a new build of iTunes…
You could say last night at the Met was a typical Aprile Millo performance, if that expression were not essentially an oxymoron. “Typical” and “Millo” really don’t intersect in this dimension (maybe somewhere on a spiritual plane? But I digress.) Let’s just say that, what happens at a Millo night, happened last night, which is…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
×
Sign up for Parterre’s free newsletter.
Exclusive opera reviews, commentary, and top reads
delivered to your email weekly…ish.