Or, who knows, maybe Pavarotti had stage fright for the first opera he ever sang on stage?
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.
Why, look: Norman Lebrecht has found yet another reactionary cause to embrace!
“Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Brain Tumor Gone and Cancer-Free, to Sing at Helikon Opera in November,” reads the headline.
“The soup is hot; the soup is cold; Norman Lebrecht got it wrong again.”
The leading lady of the Bayerische Staatsoper’s production of La Calisto has taken to the Twitters to respond to the recent discussion of her comments about Miley Cyrus.
It shouldn’t take you but a moment to find the great huge clunking error of fact in this Vanity Fair profile of Joyce DiDonato.
In breaking news today, Margaret Thatcher announces her resignation as British Prime Minister…
Cher public, La Cieca must inform you that the president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Michael Kaiser (right), is afraid of you (left). “This is a scary trend,” says he. [via Huffington Post, of all places to climb on your soapbox about “serious arts criticism.”]
Bloomberg’s Zinta Lundborg, best known for sharing a single eye and a single tooth with Manuela Hoelterhoff, overlooked the opera on Wednesday night and instead reviewed the PR for Dark Sisters. When a man writes like this, we call it “bitchy,” so when a woman does it, can’t we call her “dickish?”
The truth, at last: “By Manuela Hoelterhoff and Zinta Lundborg” [Bloomberg]
“As the flirtatious Musetta, American soprano Takesha Meshe Kizart won the audience’s hearts with the charm and flair of her personality and a potent upper register, including some formidable high C’s for her Waltz Song.” [AP]
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.
La Cieca must say that, for a chick, Katharina Wagner sure doesn’t talk much. But perhaps her reticence is something of a blessing, since it prevents her from spouting such facile generalizations as “…’Die Meistersinger,’ Hitler’s favorite Wagner opera.”
It may seem quixotic that La Cieca subscribes to Opera News, and the print version at that, but, after all, the dear people there were kind enough to interview Our Own JJ last summer on the subject of this very cum-blog, so, well, noblesse oblige and all that, you know. Since the mag is showing…
“Renée Fleming‘s thrilling new album ‘Dark Hope’ (Decca) debuts at #151 today on the Billboard Top 200 chart, with the highest first-week sales of the superstar soprano’s storied career…. The debut follows a performance by Fleming of Muse’s ‘Endlessly’ last week on Good Morning America, and major print and online coverage including two arts cover…
What is it about Natalie Dessay, La Cieca wonders, that provokes journalists to badmouth La sonnambula?
La Cieca thanks a particularly loyal member of the cher public for pointing out the most recent bit of hard-hitting arts coverage in the Wall Street Journal, as copied and pasted by that hardest of all arts hitters, Terry Teachout. La Cieca says “copied and pasted” because in this piece Teachout manages to blather on…
