Sweet dream or a beautiful nightmare
Don’t cry for me, Birgit Nilsson
filth
Litter box office poison
Upon its commercial release three weeks ago, Tom Hooper’s film adaptation of Cats garnered instant, near-universal scorn from audiences and critics alike.
Dell’abisso
The news from New York has been rather dire these last few weeks, cher public; La Cieca is the first to admit that.
Mama’s talkin’ loud
Sleep soundly tonight, Kasper Holten: your Vêpres Siciliennes casting problem has just been solved!
And no bones!
Apparently, opera fans got the bright side of the bargain: say “Macbeth” in the theater and you court cataclysm; utter the name in the opera house and, as often as not, you merely predict disappointment.
And the Pubies go to…
At long last, the most closely guarded secret of 2011 (besides, you know, everything about what’s going to happen to City Opera) is about to be revealed. Ladies and public, the Second Annual Parterre Cher Public Choice Awards!
Blonde item
“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.
Vereint sind Liebe und Lens
The title of this site says it all: Fotografie orribili di cantanti.
There ought to be a new word for camp
“Tyler Perry‘s… For Colored Girls does feel like a ghoulish joke, a dated horror show bordering on parody. It’s both operatic and tone deaf, with explosions of hysteria that include a drunken Macy Gray performing a back-alley abortion and the conversion of a poem spoken by [Ntozake] Shange‘s Lady in Purple into an actual opera […]
Greetings from the Alcova Dorata!
What a concept, or La Cieca should say what a concept! This is Regie at its finest and most boldly satirical, genius that makes Graham Vick look like two-day-old steak frites. For this production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, the director (unnamed, alas in the YouTube clip below) utilizes the cinematic convention of the flash-forward in […]
Quel grido e quella morte
Maria Guleghina‘s Turandot on PBS right now, and, holy hell, I didn’t realize just how incredibly awful it sounded. How could anyone let such a thing be released — no, escape — on HD?
And the lorgnette goes to…
The results are in for the first annual Pubie Awards, nominated and voted upon by you, the Cher Public. Turnout this year was spectacular, with some categories racking up as many as 2,647 votes. A few of the races were close, and La Cieca thinks you’ll see an upset or two among the winners, after […]
An option that should be dropped
Dimitra Theodossiou “takes” a high E-flat at the end of Odabella’s cabaletta.
Wake me up before you catalog
You know, La Cieca lived through the 1980s, just barely, and then imagine her surprise when, midway through the 2000s, there was a revival of all that 80s stuff — shoulder pads, leggings, big hair, glitter. All of it. Well, no, not quite all of it. There was one trend of the 1980s whose revival […]
Turandon’t
La Cieca listened to Sirius for a while tonight, but then her ears began to bleed. When the best singing comes from Margaret Juntwait… but I gotta tell ya, folks.
The words “ao vivo” are thrown around a lot these days…
Long before there was Miranda, there was “La Perle Noire du Brésil,” Natalia De Andrade.
To boldly go where too many regies have gone before
Okay, La Cieca is finally ready to add another hard and fast “don’t” to her Rules for Stage Directors. To wit: Even if a scene calls for something fantastical, and even if the mezzo doesn’t actually walk out of the production when she first sees the costume… if your imagery immediately and inevitably screams “Star […]
Mara Zampieri: the Cabaret Years!
Or is La Cieca mistaken: could this rather be Alfred Deller‘s “after hours” show?
Dat woice which calls to me
Remember Dragana Jugovic del Monaco? Oh, come on, who could ever forget? Well, she’s back (or was back, anyway, as of 1999) for the following crossover effort with a pop singer who La Cieca supposes must be billed as something like “The Ozzy Osbourne of the Republic of Serbia.”
Chest nut
¡Mira! Mean, moody magnificent Manuela Trasobares!
Snow business
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 […]
First, do no Carmen
They should have overlooked the cell phone, but arrested her for this video.
Dance: Ten; Voice: Three
La Cieca realizes it’s not quite fair to judge an artist from a few minutes of video or from what is apparently a dress rehearsal. But it doesn’t seem to be going out on much of a limb to say: this Nadja Michael can’t sing.
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).
Win a Free Ticket to Opening Night at the Met!
Quinn Kelsey and Lise Davidsen star in the Met's new Macbeth. We're giving away one ticket, so screw your courage to the sticking place and enter now!
