As La Cieca always so magnanimously says, “E vo gridando: pace! E vo gridando: chat!” The subject of today’s discussion is Simon Boccanegra, live from the Met at 1:00 pm.
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.
And now, cher public, let’s put today’s singers, the Contemporary Divas, under the microscope. How do they stack up?
La Cieca is delighted to announce a week-long series of investigative reports deciding once and for all the question “Who is the greatest opera diva of our generation?”
Tonight Lori Phillips will make her Met debut as Senta in Der Fliegende Holländer, replacing Deborah Voigt, who is ill.
La Cieca presents an open letter from a parterre box reader.
“…in Parsifal, instead of digging out the chapters from Metaphysics for Dummies (which is what basically everyone does, except Herheim!), [Calixto Bieito] made it a perfectly plausible story, close to us, to our lifestyles…
Well, the first thing La Cieca will say about the Met’s 125th Anniversary Gala is that for all its sprawling splendor it doesn’t look quite what you’d call entertaining. Or rather let’s say it looks as if it won’t sound very entertaining. The visual element — you know, computer-animated Marc Chagall murals and Waltraud Meier…
The New York Post‘s Clive Barnes is going to blush beet-red when he hears from the publicists (or the lawyers) who handle Placido Domingo. In a review of the Met’s Rigoletto, Barnes refers to PD as “the 72-year-old tenor.” Domingo admits to 65, though some gossips have long sniped that this figure doesn’t add up…
Vivaldi’s Motezuma, the opera that refuses to die, will grace the boards after all, says an article by Paul Moor at Musicalamerica.com. A court in Duesseldorf has held that the Altstadtherbst Festival in that city may stage the piece, regardless of a previous injunction against performances filed by the “copyright owner,” the Berliner Sing-Akademie. (The…
La Cieca has to say she is just plain appalled at the turn of events in the Opera Barga / Motezuma fracas. Not that she’s any particular fan of Vivaldi opera, but the behavior of the officials at the Berlin Sing-Akademie (who claim copyright ownership of this 270-year-old opera) strikes her as unartistic and just…
