This is Ring week here at parterre.com, cher public.
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.
“Norma, from Teatro Antico, Taormina, Italy.”
The New York Times sends cub reporter (Get it? Cub reporter! Oh, La Cieca is killing herself with the puns!) Zachary Woolfe to the movie palaces of the heartland.
You’ve heard what it sounded like; now you can see Saturday afternoon’s HD of La traviata, thanks to YouTube.
Here’s a taste of what’s in store for the Met’s HD audience on Saturday
Here’s a bit of good news for all you Traviata fans with tickets for tomorrow night’s Met performance or Saturday afternoon’s HD.
As suggested in Part I of this piece, to experience Glass’s Satyagraha as a purely aesthetic experience is unfortunately to succumb to a romantic ideology promoting detached reflection on art which is wholly inapplicable to such a politically-charged opera. The idea that Gandhi’s action-oriented philosophy would be packaged and sold for the sake of passive…
That Philip Glass’s opera about Gandhi’s nonviolent civil disobedience should be revived by the Metropolitan Opera in 2011—a year marked by nonviolent revolutions and uprisings around the globe—is timely, to say the least. The most recent production of his Satyagraha (1979) was first premiered by the Met in the spring of 2008 as America stood…
It is, as Noel Coward remarked, astonishing how potent cheap music is. According to Brockway and Weinstock’s World of Opera, Gounod’s Faust was performed, after a rather lackluster debut in 1859, a thousand times inParis at the Opera between 1869 and 1894—a gobsmacking average of once every nine days.
It was indeed a curious sensation making a late morning trek to East 59th Street, a block devoted to showro0ms for bizarre upscale furniture and lighting fixtures, and then to enter a boutique cinema specializing in Hindi films (the big coming attraction right now is Desi Boyz) — and all this before sitting down in…
La Cieca is just back from the HD of Don Giovanni from La Scala: excellent singing through the whole cast, strong conducting (if tending to the slow side) by Daniel Barenboim, and a smart, chic production from Robert Carsen that frankly makes Michael Grandage look like an utter bumpkin. The presentation will repeat here in…
I half-wanted to dislike it; my expectations were very low. Renée Fleming in the Baroque, after her very uncertain recent outings in bel canto! Let’s face it; this year, her Rossini (Armida) and Donizetti (Lucrezia Borgia) did not cover her in glory. How, at this HD relay on December 3, would she cope with Handel’s…
The annual Duke of York’s Picturehouse Eurovision Party, which is apparently a gay institution in Brighton, is pre-empted this year because of demand for tickets for the Met’s HD of Die Walküre. [BBC News] (Voigt photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera)
“In an April 9 story about tenor Juan Diego Florez helping deliver his baby minutes before singing in the Metropolitan Opera production of Le Comte Ory, The Associated Press erroneously reported that the soprano starring in the broadcast was Renee Fleming. The singer was Diana Damrau. Fleming was the host.” [AP]
A quick clip from today’s telecast of Anna Bolena; unfortunately the sound is slightly out of synch and the stage director is more than slightly “Kulturbanause.” But, still: Anna!
The Met’s general manager indulges in the sincerest form of flattery by opening today’s New York Times response to his critics with a blind item in the style of a certain low-rent gossipmonger. After you figure out the identity of the “star soprano, [who,] thinking she might have been poisoned, withdrew from the cast,” you…
La Cieca (not pictured) hopes to hear reactions from the cher public who attended this afternoon’s HD of Don Carlo, a preview of which follows the jump.
“Three-time Grammy winner Rene’e Fleming is beloved by classical and opera fans around the world [ça va sans dire], but the superstar soprano has also earned the admiration of a new generation of singers and songwriters …. “
Our sometime correspondent Seth Colter Walls sees in new PBS leadership a chance for a wider reach for “the splashiest happenings in America’s resurgent classical-music culture.” [Newsweek]
Further proof of the endemic menace of casting singers purely for appearance is this photograph of the dewy juvenile leads in Simon Boccanegra promoting tonight’s Channel 13 telecast of the opera.
La Cieca has obtained a snippet of the Met’s upcoming HD simulcast of Thomas’ Hamlet. Do not reveal to anyone the source of this clip!
It took the Metropolitan Opera decades to catch up with the rest of the world and finally stage La Cenerentola. Gioachino Rossini’s opera buffa, one of his most beloved and accomplished works, received its belated Met debut in 1997, amidst legitimate suspicions that the new production was less a genuine desire to add a belcanto…
Like Liza Minnelli at the Palace or Nomi Malone in Goddess, Renée Fleming‘s Thaïs is better understood as diva event than Gesamtkunstwerk. It’s an opportunity to watch a star lady do her voodoo in a work that exists largely to showcase her glamour and appeal.
1. Webcast technology has been refined enormously in the barely two years since the pioneering (and frustrating) effort at streaming a performance of Il Sant’Alessio. The embeddable (!) player didn’t skip once that I could see, and the sound was consistent. Neither, obviously, was exactly HD quality, but the experience felt quite seamless.
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.
