“An eagerly awaited production of Mozart’s masterpiece Don Giovanni —staged by Tony winner Michael Grandage (Red)—limped into the Met Thursday dead on arrival.” [New York Post]
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“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)
“Her catfight with another princess over the emperor’s crown might have been an outtake from The Real Housewives of Babylon.” [New York Post] (Photo: Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera)
“Queen Anna is dead — long live Queen Anna! The late royal lady is Anna Bolena in Donizetti’s 1830 opera, based on the final days of Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII. The new monarch — ruling not over England but the Met — is Anna Netrebko, whose radiant performance at the company’s opening…
La Cieca is delighted to announce that after a long absence Our Own JJ (not pictured) has returned to the pages of Musical America with another entry in his “Rough and Regie” blog— this time comparing Atys with Follies.
Our Own JJ returns to the pages of Capital New York to reflect on the current Broadway revival of the Sondheim-Goldman musical Follies: “one gorgeous zombie.” (Photo: Joan Marcus)
La Cieca (left) is delighted to congratulate dear Alex Ross (right), whose little column The Rest is Noise has been named #1 among Classical Music blogs, according to blogrank. In other family news, Our Own JJ (not pictured) reviews Caramoor’s Guillaume Tell in today’s New York Post.
“Subtract the magic and the flute from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and you’d think there’d be nothing. But an adaptation of this opera at the Lincoln Center Festival on Wednesday conjured a quiet enchantment.” [New York Post]
“A singing crossbreed—a fox with human intelligence—stars in Leos Janacek’s opera, The Cunning Little Vixen. If only the New York Philharmonic’s semistaged performance Wednesday night were as successful a hybrid.” [New York Post]
“The critical reaction to the Robert Lepage’s new production of Die Walküre at the Met leaves this contrarian reviewer in something of a quandary. Not only was pretty much everybody underwhelmed, but there was a consensus about what (they thought) was wrong: the clunkiness of The Machine, the lack of poetry in the latter part of the…
“If, as rumor has it, conductor Fabio Luisi is poised to succeed the ailing James Levine as music director of the Met, Saturday afternoon’s elegant performance of Ariadne auf Naxos showed he’s the right man for the job.” [New York Post]
Morris dancing returns to the Met for a revival of Orfeo, and our own JJ is there to review it. [New York Post]
“It’s fortunate that Lulu at Den Norske Opera was the last stop on the ‘Regietournee,’ because honestly anything after that would have amounted to an anticlimax. If there is a more brilliant director working in opera today than Stefan Herheim, well, maybe I shouldn’t see any of his work, because it might be too much…
“Director Robert Lepage’s obsession with eye-popping visuals showed little concern for the work’s complex intellectual and moral dimensions.” [New York Post]
“First witches, now ghosts. But while Broadway’s Wicked proved golden for Stephen Schwartz, his Séance on a Wet Afternoon came up lifeless and damp Tuesday night at its City Opera premiere.” [New York Post] (Photo: Carol Rosegg)
Our Own JJ (not pictured) gets the Staatsoper Stuttgart experience off his chest, to the tune of about 4,000 words, in his new blog post at Musical America. Included is a massive and (one hopes) final deconstruction of the Calixto Bieito Parsifal.
“In New York… opera directors don’t matter so much. In Europe, it’s another story: There, the director’s curtain call provokes the wildest excitement of the night.” The long-awaited “Regie” piece by Our Own JJ appears in the New York Post.
“What prevents Company from being the greatest musical ever written (which, given the talents going into it, it certainly could have been) is that there is something central to the work that is false, a cheat.” Our Own JJ (not pictured) reveals his theater queen side in Capital New York.
Our own JJ (not pictured) has finally begun to unburden himself on the subject of the recent, much-discussed “Regietournee.” For reviews of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Rusalka and Cosi fan tutte in Berlin, please go to Musical America‘s Rough and Regie. (Photo: Monkia Rittershaus)
“Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, about a bullied soldier’s descent into madness, is one of the grimmer operas around. Yet it was cause for jubilation Wednesday night when Met music director James Levine finally returned to the podium.” [New York Post]
“Take a sexy comedy, add Rossini’s scrumptious melodies, then fold in world-class singers and a Tony-winning director. Now pray it doesn’t turn out like the sodden soufflé that is the Met’s new Le Comte Ory.” Our own JJ is in a severe mood in today’s New York Post.
“Esoteric music staged by an operatic outsider paid off for the New York City Opera on Friday night with Monodramas, a program of three single-character operas.” [New York Post]
Our own JJ reflects on a pair of French operas, Roméo et Juliette and L’africaine, neither of which you could exactly call “grand.” [New York Post]
Our own JJ “sits down” (figuratively speaking) with Robert Lepage to “talk” (also figuratively speaking) about his production of The Nightingale and Other Short Fables, opening tomorrow night at BAM. [New York Post]
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