The one and only Miss Kathleen Battle (currently on a recital tour climaxing in a return to Carnegie Hall) now has a state-of-the-art website!
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
Those A&R geniuses over at Sony BMG have done it again, signing 33 year old former shepherd and massage therapist/bricklayer Costel Busuioc to a recording contract after he placed first in the televised singing competiton “Hijos de Babel.” (The title of the show means “Children of Babel,” which La Cieca believes was also an episode…
Little Stevie reports on last night’s “danger carpet” incident during the Met’s Tristan:
“Marcello Giordani, in the title role, sounded at one moment like an important tenor and at others like an imperfect work in progress.” Bernard Holland, March 19, 2008. “The young tenor Brian Hymel, a very acceptable work in progress, sang ‘La donna è mobile” from Verdi’s ‘Rigoletto’.” Bernard Holland, March 8, 2008
The most official-looking word La Cieca can find on Saturday afternoon’s Tristan HD adventure is here — and so, it seems, she was half right: Robert Dean Smith will sing the one performance, but only the one. Now, this was just an instinct before the online evidence was presented to her, but your doyenne was…
It used to be that us li’l online scribblers tried our best to imitate big-time print writers like James McCourt or Ethan Mordden. But now it seems, everyone wants to be bloggy. And since you asked, yes, La Cieca does have an example. Here’s Justin Davidson doing his best impression of Opera Chic!
Director of the Met and ENO Madama Butterfly (and librettist of the Met’s Osvaldo Golijovcommission) is dead at 54. Further details are not available at this time.
Cher public, La Cieca hopes you will join her tonight for a live chat during the Sirius and RealNetworks transmission of the Metropolitan Opera’s Ernani. Since the opera begins at 8:00, the chat room will open at 7:45.
Though La Cieca must say she can’t quite figure out whether the critic liked Gary Lehman‘s performance or not… “. . . Lehman has navigated quite well to date through persistently volatile and challenging financial markets, the sharp market wide decline in valuations across numerous asset classes, tight global liquidity conditions, and the strong headwinds…
 Controversial soprano Tiziana Fabbricini sings her first Adriana Lecouvreur earlier this month. For some reason, the “Bajazet” monologue is given in . . . the original French? A French translation of the Italian librettese? No matter, once the singing begins, we get a glimpse of that utterly vital but increasingly rare quality — the sacro…
Edipo Re (Leoncavallo) Creon – Keith Lewis Oedipus – Alan Titus Jocasta – Yvonne Naef Messenger – Roland Bracht Shepherd – Johannes Chum Teiresias – Cheyne Davidson Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus; Dennis Russell Davies. 1998.
As we know, the “Wall of LGBT Role Models” has been deleted from John Doyle‘s staging of Peter Grimes at the Met. In fact, there were a number of other explicit gay references in the production that were omitted or toned down after the dress rehearsal. For example, here’s a rejected costume for Anthony Dean…
Okay, since when did Thomas Hampson turn into Sean Connery?
Our Own JJ was at the Met last night (and part of this morning) to review Tristan und Isolde for Gay City News. As such he witnessed the rather astonishing series of events that Atomic Wings told you about earlier. La Cieca cannot of course ask JJ to comment on the specifics of the performance…
The previous Regie photo (depicting Toby Spence with wiggy hookers) was from a production of The Rake’s Progress. Okay, so which opera might this be? (If you recognize the photo, cher public, DON’T blurt it out!)
As your doyenne predicted yesterday, tenor Gary Lehman will sing tomorrow night’s Met performance of Tristan und Isolde, making his company and role debuts! La Cieca hears from an authoritative source that Lehman will also Robert Dean Smith will be released from concerts in Milan and Luxembourg so he can sing the role opposite Deborah…
Cher public, you have striven valiantly but no one of you has managed to accomplish what was most likely an impossible task: the identification of 14 singers of Violetta in only a few notes. As a group mind, though, you came awfully close. And so, to put an end to this particular source of stress,…
parterre mascot Izzy Anderson returns with yet another bash at “La donna e mobile.” Video impresario Wenarto obviously is working his connections like mad since he has managed to film this scene on the Act 2 set from the Met’s Tristan.
La Cieca has heard that New York City Opera General Manager (Designate) Gerard Mortier is planning a new production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte for the 2012 season, directed by Austrian film director Michael Haneke.
La Cieca hears that the Met is skedding tenor (erstwhile baritone) Gary Lehman for a Tristan staging rehearsal tomorrow. As La Cieca understands it, Lehman is a formal cover for the role (after John Mac Master) and so . . . well, just about anything may happen on Friday night. And thereafter, actually.
Well, actually, yes, now you do. The New York Times is no longer the only major metropolitan daily whose music critic drools all over opera singers of the masculine persuasion. La Cieca is delighted to introduce the verbal stylings of David Mermelstein, who apparently is that gay man who has heretofore been trapped inside the…
The Met’s second season of “Live in HD†continues on Saturday, March 15 at 1:30 pm/est with the new production of Britten’s Peter Grimes. Tenor Anthony Dean Griffey sings the title role, Patricia Racette is the kindhearted Ellen Orford, and Anthony Michaels-Moore is Balstrode. Donald Runnicles conducts. Intermission features include live interviews hosted by star…
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A Baroque Valentine’s with Opera Lafayette | Feb | DC & NYC
Celebrate love in all its guises with tender ballads, amorous duets, cheeky verses, and bawdy drinking songs plus food, cocktails and wine.
STEMdiva status
Ahead of a special boozy, bawdy Valentine’s Day concert, artistic director of Opera Lafayette Patrick Quigley speaks with soprano Maya Kherani about her journey from MIT to rising American Baroque star.