“Voglio essere giudicato per la musica e nient’altro che per la musica.” “I want to be judged for my music and nothing but my music.” This phrase, which Mascagni himself wrote to his publisher Sonzogno, is the key to understanding the very essence and existence of L’amico Fritz (1891). Cavalleria rusticana, Mascagni’s first performed opera,…
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Had I been living at the time Walter Felsenstein’s film of Verdi’s Otello was released in 1969, such then-innovative elements as the use of color on television and a vernacular translation might have given me new insights into this great opera. Maybe.
For those of us newly accustomed to watching The Met: Live in HD cinecasts and similar events in our neighborhood theaters, it is easy to forget that opera as cinema was once a very different experience. Ritter Blaubart, one in a series of seven films by Walter Felsenstein recently released on DVD, shows us the…
Poet of the podium Carlos Kleiber leads the final minutes of Tristan und Isolde from the mystic abyss of Bayreuth, circa 1975.
It’s no easy easy task to “re-review” one of the most discussed and scrutinized opera productions of the last few years. Mary Zimmerman’s mise-en-scène of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor has been extensively examined since it was chosen to inaugurate the 2007/08 season of the Metropolitan Opera, provoking very mixed reactions both from the professional critics…
They want it. The career. They want it really bad. So we learn from Susan Froemke’s Metropolitan Opera-commissioned documentary about the participants in the final round of the 2007 MetNational Council Auditions, which is out on DVD this month. Our own doyenne reviewed the film when it was screened as an HD theatrical event, and…
La Cieca knows the cher public will be intrigued to hear that tomorrow night (Monday, November 16), NYC’s downtown classical music venue Le Poisson Rouge will offer a screening of Cecilia Bartoli in a live concert, filmed September 10, 2009. Meanwhile, in honor of this cinematic event, your doyenne is launching a parterre competition for…
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“What the…?” was my first thought when I opened the small manila package last week, unmarked save the NY return address. Inside I found a Wagner compilation CD set from an unknown label- not the obscure Spanish opera I had ordered online the week before. Although I saw no accompanying invoice, I assumed an Amazon…
Squirrel is using his Parterre Pulpit to make a pitch. If the Met wants to produce a work that has never been seen in New York, they could do worse than a new production of Carl Nielsen‘s excellent comic opera Maskarade. It’s easy listening for sure, melodically akin to La boheme or Lehar, but marked…
The freshest imaginable gay hell in the December issue of Vogue: a fashion shoot based on the Richard Jones/Met production of Hansel and Gretel — with Lady Gaga in the Philip Langridge part! Plus… Annie Leibovitz! Grace Coddington! Marc Jacobs! Cate Blanchett! Oh, you know you want to know what’s after the jump!
La Cieca invites all you Deadheads to chat during tonight’s Met season premiere of From the House of the Dead. The chat begins at 7:45 pm. Sirius/XM RealNetworks from metopera.org
Siegfried Wagner ‘s 1903 opera Der Kobold (The Goblin) is a fascinating yet infuriating work. It often seems as if both music and libretto were written by a committee that couldn’t come to agreement. The plot structure careens wildly from realism to mysticism to symbolism; the music hops from style to style and influence to…
There are several reasons to purchase the new DVD of Die Meistersinger from Vienna (EuroArts EUA 2072488), but the main one is Christian Thielemann. This production will most likely come to be known as “Thielemann’s Meistersinger,” because his sense of the overall architecture of the work is, pardon the pun, masterful.
The ArtHaus Musik DVD of the Deutsches Nationaltheater/Staatskapelle Weimar production of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, stage directed by Michael Shulz, begins with a long still shot: That’s right, this interpretation of Wagner’s epic 19-hour cycle kicks off with a long static shot of… some dirty red boots. It’s gonna be a long Gesamtkunstwerk.
The life of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is almost as melodramatic as that of its heroine. Composed in the early 1930’s, the opera was well received at its 1934 Leningrad premiere, and was also a success in Moscow a couple of years later. Then one evening Stalin came to see it and…
Edgar has always been the odd man out in the Puccini canon, lying well outside the standard rep. The recent discovery of forty minutes of additional music is likely to do little to change that, but the find was momentous enough to merit a world premier of the newly restored Four Act version of Puccini’s…
Joyce Di Donato‘s latest release is a CD entirely devoted to music Rossini composed for his first wife, Isabella Colbran, one of the most celebrated divas of the early 19th century.
Among the “auditions” that have come flooding in from the cher public are reviews of three very different productions of Don Giovanni. Your doyenne has taken the liberty of combining the three critiques into a single posting, but she urges you to remember, remember well the names of the authors of this troika of treatises.
It is always a relief when one comes across a wonderful creation, a new existence, a rediscovery. One feels regret for not knowing it before, but alas, the joy overflows. The fear of unknown, the fear of leaving the comfort zone always ends up with enlightenment and embracing the new known. In this case, is…
“I love the way highlighters can minimize your worst features while enhancing others. Apply just above the eyes for a wide-awake look and use to contour around the cheeks. A makeup artist’s favorite is Yves Saint Laurent Touche Eclat concealer. Makeup artist Jo Strettel swears by this in Elle magazine because it’s easy to use:…
The joy on my face after opening the plain manila envelope that contained the ArtHaus Musik DVD of Walter Felsenstein‘s 1975-6 Die Hochzeit des Figaro is hard to describe. I wanted to love this DVD with all my heart, as I have with the three other Nozze DVDs I own. I did, and then some.…
I have to be honest, when I first got this CD from Cieca cara I thought, “What the fuck did I get myself into?” My assignment was to review the new Naxos recording of Leonard Bernstein‘s Mass. I did this show 10 years ago in school and it was not a happy experience. So, at…
The world needs a lot of things: health care, happiness, homo marriages, peace, prosperity and butterflies. What it doesn’t need is a mediocre “budget” recording of a contemporary opera already satisfactorily recorded with the original cast.
I need to state right off the bat that I have never been one to worship at the altar of Maria Callas. While I can acknowledge her greatness, there are many other singers whom I prefer in the Bel Canto repertoire. So I was skeptical when I began watching Callas Assoluta from ArtHaus Musik.
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