Il maestro Fabio Luisi dirige correttamente e talora anche con qualche eleganza; ma sta così male sul podio!
La Cieca’s looking for a few good commenters to join the exalted ranks of parterre reviewers of new CD and DVD releases. Care to apply? Read on after the jump.
Critic Ann Binlot draws some perhaps rather obvious parallels between Satyagraha and the Occupy Wall Street movement in a brief feature on ARTINFO.
Though the headline seems to apply a whole series of epithets to a revered critic (“Stand-In Meets Sweet Snake, Shrieky Diva, Grumpy Dad: Manuela Hoelterhoff”), the actual review of the Met’s Siegfried on Bloomberg offers more than purely comic interest. While La Hoelterhoff is no better than usual as an opera reviewer, she does briefly…
The multi-slashed Manuela Hoelterhoff (Bloomberg editrix/spouse to disgruntled New York City Opera intendant manquée Francesca Zambello/grouch emeritus) dipped her goose quill in venom this morning once again to take on her favorite subject, i.e., how NYCO has gone to hell in a handbasket ever since they didn’t hire her girlfriend to run the place.
“Sophie Koch, a mezzo-soprano favoured by the current management over Brits Alice Coote and Sarah Connolly, sang Charlotte very intelligently and musically, without ever suggesting a woman on the brink of losing self-control.” [The Telegraph]
“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…
“It’s just that it seems rather perverse to have cast such opulent voices and then given them not much to sing…. the role of Anna Nicole would not stretch Danielle de Niese.” Loyal parterrian Jondrytay (not pictured) looked in on the Royal Opera’s Anna Nicole and shared this thoughts on his blog Not So Wunderbar.
“Sombre splendor there is frequently not.” Zachary Woolfe mulls Don Carlo. [New York Observer]
There is no peace for Verdi in Parma. As a second production of its Verdi Festival the Teatro Regio presented I vespri siciliani on October 10, starring Giacomo Prestia as Procida, Leo Nucci as Monforte, and the lovebirds Daniela Dessì and Fabio Armiliato as Elena and Arrigo.
Congratulations to Nicola Lischi, of the younger generation of critics the one with the best developed… knowledge of Italian opera, for his first review on Opera Brittania.
There have been about 2,000 reviews of the Met’s new Rheingold so far, but for now, anyway, this one is my favorite—and not only for “Sid and Marty“.
Every time La Cieca says she’s through once and for all reading Norman Lebrecht, that middlebrow minstrel of the maestro myth soars to new heights of noisomeness. This time (yet again) it’s about how utterly callous those silly opera singers are for canceling (imagine!) when they’re too sick to sing.
Martin Bernheimer, who was wise long before most of the rest of us were on solid food, writes what is likely to be remembered as the definitive essay on the Donald Rosenberg/Plain Dealer situation.
The premiere of a new production of Lohengrin at Bayreuth is obviously this week’s hot topic. La Cieca suggests we continue on this thread thd discussion that began elsewhere on parterre.com and is also raging over at opera-l. (La Cieca invites the cher public and visitors to post links from other sites as well where…
“Why is the needlessly naked executioner so coy about showing us his wobbly bits?” [The Telegraph]