Although the season is less than three weeks old, Metropolitan Opera audiences may hear nothing else this season as beautiful as Peter Mattei’s “Song to the Evening Star.”
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What gets me, La Cieca snaps, is not so much that Levine bit off more than he could chew, because that’s old news.
“Met Music Director James Levine has decided to lighten his workload by removing the new production of Berg’s Lulu from his schedule so that he may focus his energies completely on Wagner’s epic drama Tannhäuser.”
James Levine turns 72 this year. Even though his health has improved considerably in the past year and he may continue to conduct for a decade or more, it seems inevitable that he will step down as the Met’s Music Director sometime in the next few years to assume the role of Conductor Laureate.
The Metropolitan Opera desperately needed a new production of Le nozze di Figaro.
“So it’s twice as disappointing that Monday night’s performance of the Mozart masterpiece turned into a four-hour fizzle.”
Music Director James Levine (pictured, left) is obviously feeling well enough that he can get back to favorite pastime, i.e., making sure nobody else has a success except him.
SiriusXM is broadcasting right now a 1981 performance of Tristan und Isolde featuring Gwyneth Jones (pictured) and Spas Wenkoff, with James Levine conducting the work that season for the first time in his career.
Your Own La Cieca has emerged from semi-retirement to present the 2014 Pubie Awards.
“The finale of Sweeney Todd left the stage of Avery Fisher Hall littered with corpses, but the evening, for all its flaws, felt vibrantly alive.”
How, then, to explain the perplexing performance last Friday night of Falstaff, Mr. Levine’s first new production since his return?
Falstaff, Verdi’s final opera, is exuberantly inventive, bubbling and roiling with ideas the 79-year-old composer was too impatient to develop.
While James Levine’s name might not immediately spring to mind when pondering the great Mozart conductors, he does have a long and distinguished career leading operas by the Austrian master.
For those of you who might have overlooked the fact that James Levine is conducting tomorrow night at the Met, the New York Times will get you up to speed this morning with no fewer than four (4) features on the return of “somebody who may be the greatest opera conductor in history.”
The question on everyone’s lips at Carnegie Hall was, “Is Jimmy back in form?”
La Cieca thought it would be amusing to do a bit of speculation about what’s to come as we approach the middle of the decade.
La Cieca predicts you won’t be seeing any puritans at the Met next season, except of course for the ones who slouch around during intermission hissing, “You call that a trill?”
James Levine, the Metropolitan Opera’s Music Director, will return to conducting on May 19, 2013 with the MET Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.
La Cieca has been sniffing around her generally reliable (and fragrant) sources, and she thinks she has pieced together a list of the dozen operas to be featured in the 2013-2014 season of “The Met: Live in HD.”
Based on reliable reports about reshuffling of the Met’s repertoire for the 2013-14 season, the only reasonable conclusion is that James Levine will never return to conduct with the company.
James Levine received $2.1 million in compensation from the Met for the 2010-2011 season, during which time he conducted 31 performances.
The Met has finally released the contents of the James Levine 40th Anniversary box sets separately for those of us who didn’t have $500 lying around.
La Cieca has just heard some interesting and completely plausible gossip about 2013-14.
Says the Met press office (a propos of nothing much on a quiet Friday afternoon): “Principal Conductor Fabio Luisi will conduct the Met’s new production of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung which premieres January 27, 2012, and continues on January 31, February 3, 7, and 11 matinee. Luisi will also conduct the MET Orchestra concert at Carnegie Hall…
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