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Opera stars Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Rolando Villazon have been lined up to take part in a wide-ranging BBC opera season.
They join the likes of Stephen Fry, Rick Stein and Katie Derham for Opera On The BBC, which starts on TV and radio and launches online this week.
(...)
Tenor and Popstar To Operastar judge Villazon will look at what makes a great tenor for BBC Four, while Dame Kiri will find out what makes a superb soprano for BBC Two.
Our Katherine Jenkins was all smiles (and bad extensions) in Muenchen yesterday for a media event to promote her forthcoming German tour. It's her first tour in the country: the Mezzo-Soprano will open the German tour on October 12 in Duesseldorf (no opera houses are included in the venues). As for her dream to sing one day at la Scala, well, we've seen stranger things happen (AFP photo)
Amazing William Hurt interview from The Arts Desk:
There are some wonderful insights about acting, about Hollywood -- and the best (NSFW) description of an Oscar statue you've ever read.How did you get on with Franco Zeffirelli, director of Jane Eyre?
Well, he p*ssed me off at first, I have to tell you. But we got along after a while OK. He called me to thank him for helping him make a good movie. I haven’t seen him since. But we got along OK after a while after he stopped meddling. It was the English who knew how to make Jane Eyre, not him. When he came in he was a little anxious at first but mostly it’s best to choose good people and let them make the movie. Well, he had great people.
Next time you're in Qatar and feel like going out to eat some Mexican seafood, Placido Domingo will come to the rescue: earlier today, during a press conference in Doha, the tenor/ baritone/conductor/ administrator/gourmet has officially opened the first Middle East branch of his NYC restaurant, Pampano.
(AP Photo/Osama Faisal)
Juan Diego Florez + Barbiere + Scala = NOT sold out yet
And it's a big WTF moment.
Almost 15 hours after la Scala earlier today made available (in Milan starting at 9AM) tickets for their Barbiere di Siviglia starring Juan Diego Florez -- a big popular hit with a big popular star, probably the world's most gifted tenor, in the old-skool production by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle -- there are still tickets available (only the performance of July 12 has managed to sell all the available tickets).
JDF will sing on July 9, 12, 20 and 23 -- Lawrence Brownlee will do the rest of the run.
Again, it's wise to explain to how the complicated Scala box office works: if you see in the screen shots above and below that, say, 100 tickets are still available for a certain performance, it doesn't mean that they already sold every seat in the house except for the 100 still for sale. La Scala, following a probably random, certainly user-unfriendly and scalper-friendly system, only releases a few tickets at a time. They release a batch of a few hundred, and usually they get sold out quickly (at least for big productions). Then Scala will release a few more tickets in the following weeks, waiting to sell the second batch out, and so forth, up until a few days before the performance if sales are slow. Add to that the horrible phenomenon of travel agencies that get an unholy amount of tickets and try to sell at a monster premium to tourists -- whenever the travel agencies can't sell them all, they give the tickets back to la Scala. La Scala will then try to sell the leftover tickets via their official box office.
This season's other big hit, Placido Domingo's Simon Boccanegra, for example, sold out in three minutes after its initial offering to the public at the usual time (9AM). Tonight, on the other hand, there are still a lot of unsold Barbiere tickets. Even when Florez is singing the lead.
It's Whitsun time in Salzburg all over again:
The 2010 Salzburg Whitsun Festival takes place from May 21 to 24 and will present masterworks from the Neapolitan School as well as an azione sacra by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Betulia liberata, which will be performed by Riccardo Muti together with his Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini.
The stage director will be Marco Gandini. Riccardo Muti will juxtapose Mozart’s masterwork with the eponymous oratorio by Niccolò Jommelli, one of the most important representatives of the Neapolitan school.
The libretto for both settings of Betulia is by Pietro Metastasio.
(ph: set design model for Mozart´s "Betulia liberata", by Italo Grassi)
"Can't act, can't sing, balding, can dance a little" – that was the assessment of one studio executive after he had seen Fred Astaire's screen test - the understatement of the century.
Gilbert Adair explains why we're still so fascinated by Fred.
It might be too late, but The Times has endorsed a candidate:
I know he’s Peruvian, but is it too late to make him prime minister?
The Sunday Times did not particularly like the recent Rolando Villazon concert in London; the British paper thinks the Mexican tenor's voice is, well, gone:
All took him uncomfortably low — to the point of inaudibility from Row K of the stalls — and, even though this music never takes a tenor to the “money notes” that make big careers, the top of Villazon’s voice now sounds detached from its centre, nasal and pinched. He looked uncomfortable, and compensated with unnerving gestural quirks...
But this isn’t comedy. It’s a tragedy playing out before our ears and eyes. Clearly, the problems his recent operation was supposed to resolve remain. The technical issues are legion: the shortness of his range, the disparity of colour between his registers and the sagging pitch...
The review actually gets worse -- it's an epic takedown. If people still cared about critics, Villazon's career -- well, his career as an unamplified singer -- would be in trouble.
Continue reading "Cheery Sunday Times: "Villazon's Voice Has Broken"" »
Wonder bass-baritone and cheesy action hero, Baron Jose' Van Dam, after an extraordinary career bids farewell to opera live on Arte TV (and via the web) later tonight, via satellite from Brussels. Conducted by Marc Minkowski, directed by Laurent Pelly.
B there or B square.
Opera Chic has a new neighbor, according to an exclusive report in "Corriere della Sera": Samuel Eto'o, the genius striker for our beloved Internazionale FC soccer team, just bought himself a penthouse on via Turati, downtown Milan, for a cool 17 million euros -- it's actually three separate apartments on the top floor that will be joined together (the construction of a swimming pool is also in the works) for a total 1,000 square meters, ie about 10,750 square feet.
Opera Chic wrote in a post last year:
And by the way, Gustavo's back hurts when he's overworked. And he's almost always overworked. Let him rest a little, between microsites.
The Orange County Register's Tim Mangan reports that Gustavo Dudamel pulled a muscle last night during a concert in L.A.:
Gustavo Dudamel had pulled a muscle in his neck while conducting Dvorak’s Cello Concerto on the first half of the concert, and would be unable to continue on the second half. This with the tour coming up. Associate conductor Lionel Bringuier, 23 years old, stepped in to conduct Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” Symphony, as they say, on short notice.
...
UPDATE: A Philharmonic press release stated that Dudamel injured his neck during the third movement of the Dvorak Cello Concerto. “We hope to have Dudamel back tomorrow,” it added. Friday’s concert is at 11 a.m.
Get well soon Dudi -- and try to rest more.
Jessica Duchen interviewed Juan Diego Florez for The Independent:
"Alfredo Kraus I love for his elegance," says Flórez. "Pavarotti's a great example of the joy of singing, the joy of sound – his tone is as beautiful as the sun."
Liu Bolin is a young Chinese artist who meticulously paints himself into his own artwork -- literally, morphing into famous monuments.
The artist came to Milan and transformed himself into some of the city's most gorgeous [living] monuments, all in the name of art. OC's not even going to tell you what she's personally done in the name of art! Hint: It looked nothing like this.
For Italy, he posed on the roof of the Duomo, in La Scala's Palco Reale, the Rialto Bridge in Venice, and the sky terrace of Milan's record-breaking (for height, cost, and absurdity) skyscraper that went up in February for Regione Lombardia's President, Roberto Formigoni.
All of his work is done without the aid of Photoshop or digital manipulation, and takes up to 7 hours. He's helped by a team of two artists and his camera. It's like those Magic Eye puzzles for the aughts!
Yesterday, the Turin newspaper La Stampa published a pretty disheartening graphic re: the difference between Italian opera houses productivity and other opera houses around the world (including New York's Metropolitan Opera). La Stampa indicates how many operas are staged in a year, how many of these are new productions, and how many performances are staged in a full season (in Naples, at glorious San Carlo, probably the most stunning -- visually -- opera house in the world, the number is 50 performances a year).
Click on the image above to get the full size & weep.
Diego Milito scores, Internazionale FC wins the Italian Cup final vs. AS Roma, in Rome, 1-0
It's Opera Chic Editorial time! Are you sitting down? Sit down.
The wave of protests in Italy's opera houses (you know, the usual strikes and the occasional rallies -- like the one we had earlier today in Milan, etc.), which was all ignited by an executive order by Silvio Berlusconi's government has provoked a wave of random strikes throughout Italy. In Scala's case, the protest has just sunk one performance of Placido Domingo's Simon Boccanegra (giving the beloved tenor/baritone a well-deserved rest), and more notable, will sink the May 13th much-awaited (by Wagner fans anyway) premiere of Guy Cassiers' Rheingold and will also provoke the cancellation by Scala's management (management is against the executive order, too) of the May 21st big press event that was supposed to introduce the 2010/11 season. Instead, the Milan opera house will just post the program on their crash-tastic website.
Scala's unions said that they'll strike, but they'd like to open rehearsals of Rheingold to the public to compensate opera fans for the trouble. Lame? Thoughtful? You decide (For the record, Opera Chic says ~lame~)!!
The executive order (above, in an AP photo, a sign written by Scala workers earlier today before a protest rally in downtown Milan where they dragged a "culture's coffin" around in the non-stop, pouring rain) doesn't deserve a deep analysis, being more or less Italian government and business as usual: it pretends to be part of a plan to modernize, allegedly making the funding system more market-driven, while in reality, it would simply cut some funding and might -- might -- make it harder for Italian opera houses to keep burning money at the rate they usually burn it.
There's a meeting between the unions and the government planned for Thursday regardless: the harsher parts of the executive order written by Berlusconi's government -- and signed by the Italian President -- only after President Napolitano asked for, and obtained, some only apparently minor changes -- have already been toned down anyway.
It's the usual way of doing Italian government business because it's mostly empty threats, followed by strikes (therefore less revenue for opera houses already deep in the red for the most part), the occasional show of solidarity by a millionaire conductor, more negotiations, loads of posturing, the eventual creation of "special cases", and the occasional small repeal here and there. Lather, rinse, repeat. Parliament (let's not forget) will also have a chance to tinker with this "Decreto Bondi".
But in the end, it's a pointless debate. Because the economic model created back in the mid-1990s for Italy's very costly, not very productive opera houses has spectacularly failed. Making opera houses -- the notorious enti lirici -- bloated and inefficient by design (politicians will not allow private corporations to have a real say in how opera houses are to be run because they want to keep calling all the shots). Threats to cut government funding during a bad recession play quite obviously the populist card: most people, in Italy and abroad, never go to the opera house, period. Opera therefore remains, by-definition, an elitist field (and in Europe it's 100% of taxpayers who fund the pastime of the few opera-goers), so good luck getting good PR traction among the general population besides the general, vague "yeah, yeah, Italy's legacy, Verdi, Pavarotti, o mio babbino caro, blah blah etc."
Any executive order or legislative plan that does not seriously reform the intact structure of Italy's enti lirici is bound to fail. By design. Because it allows a center-right government to play the populist, pro-market card of "modernization" (not privatization, because this executive order has exactly nothing to do with "privatization"). At the same time it allows the unions to look like great defenders of The Average Joe, and it makes Berlusconi's opposition (basically impotent) look like the brave champions of the arts VS. the Berlusconi-led hordes (and it's true that TV billionaire Berlusconi couldn't care less about opera -- in fact, he makes a point of avoiding opera houses like the plague, even going to light comedy shows on the same night that la Scala opens its season just a few blocks away).
To boil this down for the uninitiated, and those generally bored by the situation (Opera Chic included): a few shows will be canceled, a lot of noise will be made by ruffians, opera houses will keep bleeding public money, but nobody -- right/center/left -- will make the painfully-necessary steps to go back to the drawing board and rebuild the system from scratch, creating a system that truly rewards quality and competence instead of rewarding political pull and sheer chutzpah.
Roberto Bolle takes a departure from his Ferragamo contract and steps out in Dolce & Gabbana (with Elettra Wiedemann) at the Costume Institute Gala Benefit to celebrate the opening of the "American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity" exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Roberto and Elettra -- who's, of course, Isabella Rossellini's daughter -- were sitting at Consuelo Castiglioni's table).
Other fierce Italians in the house? Donatella Versace & Margherita Missoni (both below).
Click for more Lagerfeld, Anna Wintour & Child, Sean Lennon (in Marni) & friends, Jeff & Justine Koons (both in Dolce & Gabbana) etc...
Continue reading "Roberto Bolle (And Others) Shine at NYC's Costume Institute Gala" »