One of the major complaints about the five year casting system (as well as the shared productions by different companies) is that operatic events are rarely surprises anymore.
Three nights, three concert halls, and three incredibly diverse programmes.
Once upon a time, a man and a woman met. He could sing, she could sing. They fell in love, got married, and became a power couple to rival Billary.
A new DVD of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess features an enjoyable live performance from the San Francisco Opera from June of 2009.
I am grateful to Sony for this new release
of the Metropolitan Opera’s latest production of Parsifal and I hope I’m not the only one who discovers what a rich experience this opera can be because of it.
Whenever I encounter Eric Owens, he’s plotting to conquer the universe.
There has never been a successful vampire musical—so they say. But that’s just not true.
Reflecting my new mantra — “and would have gone on longer, had he not died” – here is The Curate’s Egg edition of the Saturday breakdown.
When I first watched the DVD Hvorostovsky in Moscow with guest star Sondra Radvanosky, I was absolutely amazed at the superb quality of the singing.
It is, as Noel Coward remarked, astonishing how potent cheap music is. According to Brockway and Weinstock’s World of Opera, Gounod’s Faust was performed, after a rather lackluster debut in 1859, a thousand times inParis at the Opera between 1869 and 1894—a gobsmacking average of once every nine days.
I half-wanted to dislike it; my expectations were very low. Renée Fleming in the Baroque, after her very uncertain recent outings in bel canto! Let’s face it; this year, her Rossini (Armida) and Donizetti (Lucrezia Borgia) did not cover her in glory. How, at this HD relay on December 3, would she cope with Handel’s…
It would be a shame, I think, if EMI’s stunt video of Angela Gheorghiu “in duet” with Maria Callas backfired powerfully enough to prevent serious opera fans (well, okay, let’s say “enthusiastic opera fans,” that’s more like it) from listening to the Romanian diva’s new CD Homage to Maria Callas. There’s a lot on this…
With his new CD release for Decca, The Maltese Tenor, Joseph Calleja clearly declares his ascension to the top level of the world’s lyric tenors. The 15-selection program shows that his plaintive voice has matured and clarified, his emotional understanding of the music has deepened significantly, and his artistry has moved to a higher level. …
Ioan Holender was General Manager of the Wiener Staatsoper for nineteen years, the longest anyone has held this post, and the august institution honored him with the gala to end all galas in the final days of his administration. With the goal of commemorating each of the 40 new productions premiered at the Staatsoper during…
La Cieca has just heard that the legendary basso cantante, star of well over 400 performances at the Met, died earlier today in Atlanta.
Reviewing a CD of someone you have never heard live is always a dicey proposition. As we all know, a voice sounds very different in a big hall than it does up-close and personal. So if Marc Hervieux is your favorite new tenor, please don’t put me in the “crosshairs” just yet. I freely admit…
Packaged with a peek-a-boo cover exposing only Bryn Terfel’s lovely left eye (the effect of turning the page to reveal the Welsh bass-baritone’s head in its entirety brings to mind this Encyclopedia Dramatica entry) and an oddly hip-hop-flavored gray-on-black treatment of the album’s title, Terfel’s Bad Boys seems designed for those who like their divos…
Since I had already gotten my Hanukah gift this year (my Nikon D3000 DSLR), I was surprised to receive a box from my sister this past week. One of the gifts inside was Les Urnes de l’Opera, a collection of arias and scenes recorded shortly after the turn of the last century and buried in…
La Cieca muses at some length on the audience’s relationship with the audience, but then Diana Soviero demonstrates the point in only a few seconds of singing in the third act of Faust. (Neil Shicoff and Samuel Ramey aren’t exactly slouching either in this 1986 performance.) Faust (Gounod) Act 3
To begin with: everybody was there. People you haven’t seen in 20 years were there. People you were sure were dead were there. (They were alive, at least as of the third intermission.) The house was quite nearly full, and there were no significant defections as the long evening wore on. Miss M herself began…
You would think that La Cieca would climb on her very high horse about the elementary school music theater in Colorado who riled up parents by showing the “Who’s Afraid of Opera?” version of Gounod’s Faust to her students. And certainly some of those parents overreacted in the good old American way. (One mom called…
Two legendary artists are captured in the freshness of vocal youth in this week’s podcast. Richard Tucker and Victoria de los Angeles star in a production of Gounod’s Faust from the New Orleans Opera, February 26, 1953. Unnatural Acts of Opera
You could say last night at the Met was a typical Aprile Millo performance, if that expression were not essentially an oxymoron. “Typical” and “Millo” really don’t intersect in this dimension (maybe somewhere on a spiritual plane? But I digress.) Let’s just say that, what happens at a Millo night, happened last night, which is…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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