This video recording of Il trovatore is sensational for all the right and wrong reasons simultaneously.
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At Friday night’s performance of La Bohème at the Met, the cast seemed to lean into (and gamble upon) the production’s enduring popularity.
Leave it to Opera News to whitewash the revolting reactionary politics of Franco Zeffirelli.
Tristan has been the season-launching opera three times before now, but good luck finding someone to provide a firsthand account of the last time.
“This throwback to the golden age of opera—superhuman singing greeted with frenzied ovations—was a function of a perfect storm of excitement.”
LA Opera opened their 30th season with a pairing of two of their most popular productions, both of which were initially staged by filmmakers not unfamiliar with the vagaries of our industry outpost here in Hollywoodland.
“Ogni Cura si doni al diletto / E s’accorra nel magico petto,” the joke went back in the late ’90s. What wags we were!
Also unimpressed was Franco Zeffirelli…
“Though Mr. Herheim’s work is rigorous, it is also fun, and this Rusalka is serious but the opposite of dour.”
At long last, Franco Zeffirelli opens up about his back-door route to the lap of luxury: “Ho dato il culo per fare carriera e mi è piaciuto.” [Attualisimo]
“Since Zeffirelli took his official leave from the Met in 2008, the company has experienced—some would say suffered—a backlash against glamour, or at least against those qualities that, thanks in part to Zeffirelli, are wrongly perceived as the synonyms of glamour: triviality and meretriciousness.” [Rough and Regie] (Photo: Ken Howard)
“Zeffirelli, who has been directing plays, films, and operas for more than 60 years, laments that the Met recently started phasing out some of his classic productions, including Traviata, Tosca, and Carmen, for ‘financial reasons,’ he says. And substituting them with ‘hippie crap’.” [Variety]
Lovely Marina Poplavskaya, arriving at the Mercedes T. Bass Grand Tier for dinner following the opening night of La traviata, demonstrates that the previous Franco Zeffirelli production has not gone to waste. The latter-day Scarlett O’Hara‘s motto: “Reduce Reuse Recycle!”
The answers of millions of supplicants worldwide (and thousands of Met-goers citywide) have been answered. “[Peter Gelb] said there were no plans to replace Mr. Zeffirelli’s productions of La Bohème and Turandot. [New York Times]
“The immitigable force of Italian melodrama and Mediterranean culture, which is loved throughout the world, today is worthy of a different fate and should become a means of new expressions, a national flag to be treasured. Instead, often great efforts are made to reject a culture, to massacre the work and stature of artists who…
This is a rather old story, but La Cieca heard it confirmed just recently. You all have heard, I trust, that this summer the Arena di Verona, for the first time in its nearly 100 year history of opera performances, is miking both singers and orchestra. Why? Because Franco Zeffirelli, director of all five of…
Okay, La Cieca has sifted all the evidence thus far, and she has done Pravda-style scrutiny of what was said and what was left unsaid (particularly by Peter Gelb) in the most recent New York Times analysis of the issue, and ignoring the most recent Jeremiads from Rome on account of the fact that pretty…
Wow! That Daniel J. Wakin story appearing in tomorrow’s Times has everything but the bloodhounds snappin’ at Luc Bondy‘s rear end!
Have you heard the most recent update on the Franco Zeffirelli outburst earlier this week at the Rome Opera?
The Zeffirelli saga continues. According to the Corriere della sera, yesterday “lo Zeffirelli furioso” held what could mildly be described as an “animated” press conference in Rome for the presentation of the new season.
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