While we’re waiting for further news on the final Tosca of the Met season, La Cieca suggests we consider the diva and the non-diva, on the other side of the jump.
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.
Wearing her own hair (in a Zeffirelli production!) and sounding fabulous: a snippet of Anna Netrebko‘s Micaëla from Vienna on May 3.
With barely a month (!) remaining before La Fleming’s Hope drops, your doyenne has determined that we (meaning you, the cher public) should do our (i.e., your) utmost to mark this turning point in the history of music.
Romanian tenor Stefan Pop, 23, is one of this year’s first-prize winners in the Operalia competition. There’s a glimpse of the budding hunkentenor in action after the jump.
This is post number 3,000 on parterre.com.
The very first clip was uploaded to the revolutionary video-sharing site only five years ago today!
The legendary mezzo-soprano is 75 today.
“La Ritalina” is 45 today!
The American soprano was born April 18, 1948.
The diva is 77 today!
Today, in 1848, one of the titans of Italian opera, Gaetano Donizetti, passed away in his native Bergamo at age 51. It would be perhaps more appropriate to say that his body died on this date, as his mind, ravaged by syphilis, had already abandoned him a few years earlier, so much that he had…
Good Friday means Parsifal.
This production, though obvious Regie fodder, looks far too interesting to wait for our regular Sunday night quiz! Video after the jump.
What ever would we do without YouTube?
A couple of glimpses of the last Ring cycle Wolfgang Wagner directed before turning over the Regie reins to Patrice Chéreau.
Dimitra Theodossiou “takes” a high E-flat at the end of Odabella’s cabaletta.
Three seasons of cancellations, a schlocky “reality” show, that haircut, and now… Rolando Villazón has gone full “Dr. Patch.” [Yahoo News]
You know, La Cieca lived through the 1980s, just barely, and then imagine her surprise when, midway through the 2000s, there was a revival of all that 80s stuff — shoulder pads, leggings, big hair, glitter. All of it. Well, no, not quite all of it. There was one trend of the 1980s whose revival…
It took the Metropolitan Opera decades to catch up with the rest of the world and finally stage La Cenerentola. Gioachino Rossini’s opera buffa, one of his most beloved and accomplished works, received its belated Met debut in 1997, amidst legitimate suspicions that the new production was less a genuine desire to add a belcanto…
She Who Has More Sobriquets Than Changes of Facial Expression continues her second half-century.
The legendary Russian mezzo-soprano has died after a brief illness. She was 85.
La Cieca’s old, old, old friend Dorothy Bishop has revived and revised her hilarious Sarah Palin show, now entitled “A Sarah Palin Presidents’ Day Spectacular,” Thursdays in February beginning the 11th at NYC’s Cafe Iguana.
The “Voice of an Angel” was born February 1, 1922.
La Cieca hears that Olga Borodina still has whatever it was she had on Wednesday, and so will have to cancel tonight’s Met performance of Carmen as well.
