At tonight’s Faust performance, two events of note: René Pape, upon his re-entrance after the Jewel Song, ad-libbed the spoken line “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.” The performance, a broadcast, was the basso’s final one of this production.) After this moment of comedy, drama followed at the curtain calls.
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After today’s Met dress rehearsal of The Enchanted Island, La Cieca’s spy (pictured) reports: “You would think that if they had the entire Baroque canon to mine, they would’ve chosen music that wasn’t slow, dull, and long. In Peter Gelb‘s opening remarks, he called it ‘the Met’s Baroque Coming Out party,’ which makes me think this entire endeavor was…
Guess who gets the showstopping “11 o’clock” spot? Why, none other than The Booty of the Baroque herself!
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…
La Cieca has just heard that 800 tickets for the public dress rehearsal of the Met’s new Enchanted Island production will be distributed starting at noon tomorrow. The rehearsal will be Wednesday, December 28 at 10:30am, and naturally your doyenne encourages spies, agents, operatives, sleuths, snoops, spooks and spotters to attend this sneak preview and to…
After a Monday that will go down in history as “the day nothing happened,” finally we may have a bit of excitement tonight as the Met broadcasts on Sirius and the web-based Listen Live. The occasion is the season premiere of La Fille du Régiment featuring Nino Machaidze and Lawrence Brownlee, with that lovely, litigious…
Now that the retirement of James Levine is basically just a matter of patiently waiting out 18 months of inaction, it’s about time you, the cher public, were heard on the subject of the appointment of a new music director for the Met. A couple of polls for you after the jump.
James Levine will not conduct this spring or in the entire 2012-2013 season, says a press release from the Met. The most apparent result of this decision is that Fabio Luisi is now officially on the podium for all three of this spring’s Ring cycles. The complete press release follows the jump.
“After putting off for a week trying to make some sense of the horrific mess that is the Met’s new Faust, I’m finally just going to give up. There are some disasters that bear writing about as what you might call teaching opportunities: this season’s Don Giovanni, for example, as a cautionary tale about the…
UPDATE: Blogger Out West Arts reflects on the “Occupy Wall Street” incident at the Met’s Faust last night, noting that the shouts (and various responses from members of the audience) did not interrupt the music.
David Daniels (left) headlines a special sneak preview of The Enchanted Island on Wednesday, December 7 at The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space. Also on hand will be Danielle de Niese, Lisette Oropesa and Luca Pisaroni, plus the pasticcio’s creative team, writer Jeremy Sams and director-designer team Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch. Midge Woolsey hosts.…
Yes, in this interview with Naomi Lewin, the word “fiasco” gets thrown around a lot.
Here’s a new idea La Cieca hopes will meeting with the approval of you, the cher public: a schedule of chats for the upcoming month, centered around the Met’s Saturday afternoon broadcasts and the “Listen Live” features during the week. Comments and addenda are, as always, welcome.
Leave it to those Torontonians to blow the lid off an opera story happening in New York! (Goodness knows the local journalists don’t bother.)
Even as sinister gossip hinted to the contrary, the Met successfully completed negotiations with the stagehands’ union last night, averting the possibility of a job action next week. According to a source close to the Met, Peter Gelb sent out an email confirming the contract sometime after 1:00 this morning:
“Now that it has become apparent that Robert Lepage‘s production of the Ring at the Met is a fiasco (too soon? Nah.)… well, anyway, since arguably the production is a dreary, unworkable, overpriced mess whose primary (perhaps only) virtue is that it actually hasn’t killed anyone yet, and since, let’s face it, the Machinecentric show turned out to be so mind-bogglingly…
From the Met press office: “Jay Hunter Morris will sing the role of Siegfried in Siegfried on April 21 matinee and April 30, 2012, and in Götterdämmerung on May 3, 2012. He replaces Gary Lehman who has withdrawn due to illness.”
The Handelian hilarity begins in just half an hour, cher public, so tune in to the Met’s Listen Live page and find your place in the parlor of La Casa della Cieca.
A “Machine” that’s been dished and hung out to dry, and a “Magasin” you hang dishes on to dry. Thanks to Zerbinetta for noticing the striking similaries (not to mention that fact that the object that actually does something costs less than half the one that does nothing; a lesson for us all?)
Last night, Jeopardy‘s Alex Trebek invaded the Met’s costume shop.
La Cieca (not pictured) was just leaked the information that the next planned revival of the Met’s Ring production (after next season) will be in the spring of 2017, i.e., about five years from now. That’s handy, because five years is the approximate lead time of casting big projects like these; the current crop of…
Open your eyes, sleepyheads! In the news this morning, our own JJ raves about Satyagraha at the Met (“a masterpiece of musical and visual art”); the ever-articulate Nico Muhly takes aim at the Met’s production values (“Mercedes Bass or Anne Ziff paid for the opera. What do you think is going to happen?”); and NYCO’s…
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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