Chopard brand ambassador Anna Netrebko skipped town between Donna Anna replications at Festspielhaus Baden-Baden to tread the red carpet on day seven of Cannes.
She was invited to the showing of Soderbergh's Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra with other Chopard faces such as Petra Nemcova and Kylie Minogue. Above, she poses with Chopard briefcases Caroline Scheufele and Alexis Veller.
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? James Levine slayed the punchline and showed that nothing but iron will gets you onto that historic NYC stage.
Last night, the American conductor, in a motorized wheelchair, broke his 2+ year performance absence with a comeback concert of Wagner, Beethoven and Schubert accompanied by the inexhaustible Russian pianist Evgeny Kissin. Bernheimer for the FT here, Tommasini for the NYTimes here.
Mel Brooks, an icon of the great American experience, the Jewish immigrant raised in Williamsburg, branded in the Catskills, who grazed on Los Angeles' bounty with bff Carl Reiner. His defiant, cultish humor has netted him a Grammy, an Emmy, an Oscar and a Tony, anecdotes to be spun tomorrow night as the latest protagonist of PBS' American Masters (The New Yorker's Richard Brody uploaded a teaser).
That hilarious Jewish kid from Brooklyn who has a penchant for treif (bacon and shellfish, staples of his Manhattan clam chowder that he cooked for his late wife, Anne Bancroft, stunning, waify perfection in the late 1970s The Turning Point) shares his love of opera (and yogurt) with Bon Appetit Magazine:
What other food is always in your house?
Brooks: Yogurt. I use zero percent fat, Greek or Bulgarian. I like the little extra sour taste. An hour or so before I go to bed, I have yogurt and maybe some blueberries while I'm watching Arts, A-R-T-S. It's on my local Santa Monica station, KCET, out here. It's little videos--sometimes Pavarotti is singing "Nessun Dorma" from Turandot or Lenny Bernstein conducting his own piece of Candide. Someone singing or some little symphonic band. It's soothing. It comes on around midnight. I'm always up at midnight.
Fresh from last night's John Fulljames new production premiere of Donna del Lago at the Royal Opera House comes Rupert Christiansen's review, coined "bellissimo canto". Tackling the ostentatious vocal ornamentation of Rossini's Highlander-lite, happy ending opera was Juan Diego Flórez and Joyce DiDonato:
The sun shines out of Joyce DiDonato’s voice, and her ravishingly beautiful Elena caps the show with a sublime account of the lilting “Tanti affetti”. The technically impeccable Juan Diego Florez is all fire and ardour as Uberto, incandescent in runs and roulades, tireless in his production of rock-steady top Bs and Cs. The house went mad with joy for them both.
In his London house debut was thirty-three year old Italian conductor Michele Mariotti, who saddles with Flórez this August for a Graham Vick-directed Guillaume Tell at his family's Pesaro Rossini Opera Festival.
We're crushing on this intimate portrait of Michael Douglas penned by Lynn Hirschberg for New York Magazine. On the cusp of Douglas' role premiere as Liberace in Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra about the Las Vegas Mr. Showmanship and his five year relationship with Scott Thorson (Matt Damon) that airs on HBO on May 26, the American actor unsentimentally and elegantly addresses messy, personal adversity from his UWS apartment.
Pavarotti's the latest Italian icon to be immortalized by S.Pellegrino in its Live in Italy campaign, so like 2Pac poured a 40 oz. to his dead homies, OC tips the 33.8 oz. special edition bottle of S.Pellegrino to Big Pav's memory.
To further celebrate Pavarotti as a hero of Italian culture and style, the Italian beverage empire backs a Verona-based exhibition, Amo Pavarotti, featuring the tenor's personal effects that runs through September. The bottle's only available in restaurants, worldwide -- and at OC's dinner parties, among good friends, between rounds of crudité and bagna càuda.
The Sicilian theater has announced on its website that Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, scheduled for October and late November, respectively, are postponed until further notice, citing a severe fiscal deficit of over 3 million euros. Two June ballets have also been axed.
Until today's announcement, the current season was supposed to launch Teatro Massimo di Palermo's first complete Wagner Ring Cycle in its +116 year history. The Palermo opera house had tapped Graham Vick for a shoestring-budget Ring Cycle, which had premiered in January with Das Rheingold and followed in late February with Die Walküre, both exiting to positive reviews for Vick's dramatically-vicious cast and theatrical dexterity (Shirley Apthorp for the FT).
The last time Teatro Massimo organized a Ring Cycle, it was split between the 1970 and 1971 seasons, conducted by Lovro von Matacic in the Grand Théâtre de Genève production.
At the Milan press conference to introduce the Ring Cycle, the theater had announced, via then-Intendant Antonio Cognata, that the 2012-13 season would be functioning on the slimmest budget in its history, but intended to stage Wagner's Ring regardless. How disappointed we are, although nowhere near disappointed as the singers, stagehands and orchestra who had poured everything into pulling off the opera house's first Ring Cycle under such frugality and sacrifice. Read the whole announcement here.
While the New York City Ballet's season opening gala bashfully-bowed last week in a low key, celebrity-lean celebration, last night's opening gala at the American Ballet Theatre swanned with pomp & circumstance into the Metropolitan Opera House, led by its cultivated board and a handful of mismatched stars. The repertory-spanning buffet was watched by Uma Thurman (above), Bebe Neuwirth, Sigourney Weaver, Ashlee Simpson, Lucy Liu and Dior-clad models hoping to snare one of the many billionaires in attendance (such as Roman Abramovich). ABT principal Roberto Bolle was there (and woefully under-papped) for a Marcelo Gomes-choreographed piece, danced with Julie Kent.
Sigourney Weaver
Bebe Neuwirth
Ashlee Simpson
Lucy Liu
Rachel Roy
...and this festively-dressed hawt piece called ~Di Mondo~
Spanish opera director Calixto Bieito's name strikes fear into the hearts & minds of blissful opera traditionalists for his provocative stage productions littered (zing!) with filth & pewp, squalid toilets, rapists & gangbangers, gun fetishists and ambitious & garish whores fulfilling all kinds of (un)happy endings -- the kind of people that your parents warned you to stay away from. It's like he skipped over the illicit drugs and rock 'n' roll of wasted youth and went straight to the YOLO sex and its sloppy, dance-on-a-parked-car-at-4am-Jägermeister-fueled blackout, loss of bodily fluids included.
Offstage, never fear: Bieito looks like your middle-aged uncle in edgy black t-shirts who lives in the Barcelona suburbs with his wife and two kids. The FT profiled the "scatalogical child" (playwright David Hare's sobriquet, not ours) on an upcoming Britten’s War Requiem for Theater Basel and Fidelio (from Munich, 2010) for the ENO in September, and among the thin quotes and meaty padding is Bieito's impression from a recent trip to Dachau's memorial/concentration camp where he gnawed at the void left in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Despite his bleating provocations, Bieito usually gets it. Will Bieito 2.0 weave transcendent layers of historical trauma -- traces, footprints, shadows, falling spaces, etc. -- into his WYSIWYG productions? It's bound to be better than nipple mutilation and biofluid fetishes!
With talons snapping and incisors gnashing, Parma's Teatro Regio rolls out its 2013 month-long Verdi Festival during the best month of the year -- (R)october -- and turns Verdi's 200th birthday into a total rager. Forget Avicii, they've enlisted emcees of the first order: Carlo Bergonzi (October 2); Mirella Freni (October 10); Raina Kabaivanska (October 19) and Bruno Bartoletti (October 31) -- some of Verdi's coolest, living protagonists will speak about career-defining moments in generous round-tables.
Riccardo Chailly bows the festival on September 30 with an all-Verdi setlist played by Filarmonica della Scala in snatches of Oberto conte di san Bonifacio, Un giorno di regno, Jérusalem and I Vespri siciliani, and there are three operas that span Verdi's career -- Simon Boccanegra (Roberto Frontali in the title role and Carmela Remigio as Maria); Falstaff (Renato Bruson with the kids from the theater's academy) and I masnadieri (Mika Kares as Massimiliano and Roberto Aronica as Carlo).
Yuri Temirkanov will host an all-Verdi concert on October 10 at Busseto's petite Teatro Giuseppe with Macbeth, Otello, La forza del destino and Aida's second act in concert form.
Daniele Gatti holds two appointments: October 30 with the Orchestre National de France in an all-Wagner program (Die Götterdämmerung, Tannhäuser, Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal and Die Meistersinger) and he closes the festival on October 31 wtih Verdi's Requiem sung by Fiorenza Cedolins, Daniela Barcellona, Francesco Meli and Michele Pertusi.
Additional events span the festival, such as a special evening to toast Leo Nucci and Fiorenza Cossotto and free, open-to-the-public rehearsals. Music aside, we'll be there to sample Emilia-Romagna's delicious Fall harvest of wild
turkey, utilitarian Lambrusco, sweet pumpkin ravioli, un-bashful
mostarda and marbled culatello.
Attention Cumberbyotches: you can thank childhood trumpet lessons for Benedict Cumberbatch's florid smile, as explained to The Times' Caitlin Moran in a new profile sketched at the English actor's childhood home:
All up the stairs are pictures of him as a child. Benedict running, Benedict as a toddler. Benedict aged 10 – white-blond, skinny, in tiny swimming trunks, on a rocky beach in Greece. One of the pictures shows Wanda pulling his trunks down and kissing his bottom.
“That is a picture of my mother kissing my arse,” he confirms.
This was around the age he was learning to play the trumpet – the event he credits with shaping his much commented upon mouth.
“Playing a trumpet wounds you,” he explains, gleefully. “That’s how this happened.” He presses his finger into his generous lower lip. “I have trumpet mouth.”
(pssst!)
So the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Gala happened last night, a.k.a. Anna Wintour's Fashion Prom, where celebrities showed up to show-off straight from the runway looks for the ostentatious inauguration of the museum's “Punk: Chaos to Couture” costume exhibition, which predicated the night's punk-chic theme.
The gala would have been a total TRACK. WALL. CYA. if HBIC Austin Scarlett was among the predictable clique of Hollywood darlings, but there was Roberto Bolle, whose twitter feed popped with intimate photos of A-list celebs (like Madonna, below), sleek in weapon-of-choice Dolce & Gabbana tux. Rarely dateless, his +1 was fellow Dolce & Gabanna ambassador Giovanna Battaglia (above).
Zandra Rhodes keeps it real.
Throw your hands up if you want to read about "a womanizing, foul-mouthed, and illiterate impresario". *hands shoot up so quick that the Higgs boson spins and the universe collapses and oh no byeeeeee*
Hong Kong based briefcase and former opera singer Philip Eisenbeiss shares the story of a Simon Cowell-esque illusion spun by Milan-born opera impresario Domenico Barbaja in a new biography, Bel Canto Bully, which drops tomorrow. This past weekend Eisenbeiss stopped by BBC Radio 3's Music Matters to chat about Barbaja and the 19th century Italian opera scene with Tom Service.
Normally a ballet quartet of often-heard/choreographed Debussy(x2), Stravinsky and Ravel wouldn't create much of a buzz, unless you invited the creative director of a French couture house to design the costumes. So here we are. This weekend premiered the recent collaboration between Opéra Garnier and creative director of Givency Riccardo Tisci in his stage costume debut with Ravel's Boléro, choreographed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet.
Tisci dressed the lithe les Étoiles and le Corps de Ballet in transparent, unisex dresses layered over lace-woven skeleton bones embroidered onto catsuits. Tisci's bff Marina Abromivic was on set design, which she rendered soul-crushing black. Will Tisci cross over into opera? One can only hope, at least for the cool Instagrams we know he'll post.
(credit)
St. Petersburg's midway through the weekend inauguration of its brand new, 700$ million opera
house, funded by the Russian government, christened with a name like a luxury cruise ship
or a Hollywood blockbuster sequel -- 2 Fast 2 Furious, Mariinsky II, Electric
Boogaloo.
In 2011, OC straddled the spongy shores of the Baltic Sea and the broad River
Neva in Paul Smith kitten heels for Gergiev's 19th Stars of
the White Nights Festival during the disorienting, perpetual twilight of the
midnight sun. St. Petersburg, with its vast embankments and canals that rival
the waterways of Venice and Amsterdam (that's what our affable driver told us, anyway) has nurtured classical music's greatest artists and performers -- Balanchine, Rachmaninoff, Chaliapin, Mussorgsky, Nikolai
Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky -- and its original white and turquoise theater
(Mariinsky I?) raised Nureyev, Baryshnikov and Ulanova. And when you tire of Mariinsky II's cruise-ship hall, St. Petersburg's got fifty additional musical
theaters better equipped at handling intimate rep.
At the helm of this weekend's festivities is Mariinsky's artistic
director/general manager of 25 years, Valery Gergiev, on the theatre's timecard since 1998 (as principal conductor) to relive former intendant, our
beloved Yuri Temirkanov. With a spin of his influential rolodex, Gergiev fortified the VIP velvet ropers with bff President Vladimir Putin, Anna Netrebko (looking fine in a dress that screamed Eastern bloc dramz and hair that screamed Sunday spin with dad in the Porsche 911 convertible), Rene Pape
and Plácido Domingo.
Thursday's gala concert officialy opened the theater with ballet, symphony and opera teasers and included Trebs ambling into Verdi thorns with Vieni, t'affretta.
Thanks to Arte, you can watch the two-and-a-half-hour gala here:
Moscow-born maestro Gergiev has sweated buckets over the past decade (or two) trying to put St. Petersburg and the Mariinsky Theatre on the opera map with vastly-expanded repertoire and an ambitious summer festival to compete with Europe's established destinations -- Salzburg, Bayreuth, Bregenz, Lucerne, Zurich, Aix-en-Provence, etc. Will his Mariinsky II crown jewel complete the trifecta, adding the new, state-of-the-art house to longstanding international rep + an enticing summer festival?
Ummm...why you peepin us for the answer? (DMX voice) Better to close your eyes, point and thank the Magic 8 Ball:
● It is certain
● It is decidedly so
● Without a doubt
● Yes definitely
● You may rely on it
● As I see it yes
● Most likely
● Outlook good
● Yes
● Signs point to yes
● Reply hazy try again
● Ask again later
● Better not tell you now
● Cannot predict now
● Concentrate and ask again
● Don't count on it
● My reply is no
● My sources say no
● Outlook not so good
● Very doubtful
