Opera Chic

Sinfini Music & OC: Backstage Beauty with the ENO's Gods and Heroes

London Coliseum in St. Martin's Lane. Because you can buy your way into the front of the house but not the back, OC said "how high?" when the English National Opera asked her to jump into its buzzing backstage as Sinfini Music ambassador during a recent London visit (more on that later). 

OC watched steady, brush-wielding hands transform flesh & bone singers into transcendent divas as wigs were fitted and faces were sculpted across the exuberant cast of the ENO's new La bohème. Johnathan Miller's 2009 production in its third revival opened on Monday night and the raucous curtain call was followed by solid reviews, like Richard Fairman's for the FT.

The ENO's skilled beauty team of rogue, classically-trained make-up and hair stylists kindly showed us how they pulled the rabbit from the top hat, holstering arsenals of spirit gum, bobby pins and makeup brushes tipped with MAC Cosmetics.

Beauty looks, meticulously sourced by the ENO's wigs and makeup supervisor Vanessa Davis, heavily borrowed from the strong graphic photography of George Brassaï -- 1930s with a playful pop of 1970s color, like the bold blue cateye rocked by American soprano Angel Blue's Musetta, and sculptural wigs. 

Read OC's backstage reportage for Sinfini Music to discover the laborious (but rewarding) backstage beauty process that turns singers into gods and heroes.

Villazón Sketches La bohème for Sinfini Music

In its 200+ year history, La bohème has been retold, like, a million times, which is why the latest narrative by Rolando Villazón gets the gold. In a new series, Villazón Toons, the Mexican tenor sketches & Sinfini Music animates Puccini's timeless love story. 

Opera Chic & Sinfini Music: From Couture to Costume to Couture

"I cannot clothe them! I need models!" --> Miuccia Prada's famous battle cry aimed at The Metropolitan Opera's supernumeraries in the run up to a starry Verdi Attila that bowed in February, 2010. In her opera costumier debut, the Italian fashion designer was (apparently) horrified at the discrepancy between the teenage Amazon models, lithe & light as air, who she sends down the runway twice a year (excluding resort collections) and opera professionals who frankly can't subsist on a model's diet of Starbucks & Marlboros & Veuve Clicquot & fruit salad to crank out four hours of unmic'd (we hope) Strauss.

Although Prada's outburst could have been taken straight from the pages of a modern rom-com -- the eccentric, Ivory-towered fashion designer scandalized by seam-sabotaging curves of real women -- it doesn't mean that opera singers are banned from couture. Performers have been upping their games (since Maria Callas and Biki/YSL) through relationships with couture designers who understand the physique of classical music artists -- Lacroix, Viktor & Rolf, Zandra Rhodes and the late greats Gianni Versace and Gianfranco Ferrè.

Young (hawt) performers like Charlie Siem, Ray Chen and Vittorio Grigolo play dress-up with Giorgio Armani, whose been cultivating classical music stars well before he premiered as opera costumier at the ROH in 1995 for a modern-day Jonathan Miller production of Cosi. But what about the girls? DiDonato goes with Westwood and Renee's a couture cowgirl. Italian soprano Carmen Giannattasio relies on Alberta Ferretti -- although Ferretti's never designed for opera, she creates for real-world, independent women and Giannattasio perfectly fits the bill, like in the photo above.

For classical music artists, there's no better time than now -- along with the rapidly-changing landscape of 21st century opera that increasingly assumes sartorial savvy, the fashion world's changing, too, with an egalitarian shift, a new power paradigm that invites bloggers as first row ambassadors shoulder to shoulder with the great taste-makers of the industry. Fashion is accessible, but when anyone can get backstage without credentials, it's no longer aspirational/exotic/elite (choose one), so OC predicts that fashion will bolster & buttress with arts and culture. And we've always needed fashion for its raw swerve. So what do you say we go get our symbiotic swerve on? Start here with OC's latest piece for Sinini Music on the Giannattasio/Ferretti partnership (including a little lesson from Leyla Gencer).

Opera Chic's Latest for Sinfini Music, Grazia.it & Opera Now Magazine

A great man once said, or he didn't, or whatever -- the point is that we tend to criticize those who we love the most. Which is why we've been wondering what's up with the soggy pity-party that Italy's thrown for its most famous opera hero, Giuseppe Verdi, in his bicentennial birth year? Read about it here for Sinfini Music, cutting throught classical. It's like, yeah, the country that churned out geniuses like Dante & Brunelleschi & Da Vinci & Fellini is holding the elevator for that bearded opera dude? COME ON!

Then head over to Grazia.it for OC's review of the new, minimalist Teatro alla Scala Daniele Abbado Nabucco (co-production of the ROH, LOC & the Liceu) with the stellar Verdi baritone Leo Nucci and the rock-solid musicianship of Nicola Luisotti.

Then grab March's Opera Now (with Montserrat Caballé on the cover) to read reviews of the December 2012 season opening La Traviata starring Carmen Giannattasio at Naples' Teatro di San Carlo and the January 2013 season opening Lohengrin at Dresden's Semperoper with Christian Thielemann on the podium.