This past week, the Ides of March blew some throbbingly-awesome stories our way, which go perfect with ●bullet ●points *bang bang bang* so let's do this.
- At the ROH's new season announcement, Everyone Loves Anthony [Pappano] backhandedly criticised the work ethic of opera's new generation. A few took the bait, but Rupert Christiansen's piece in The Telegraph was pure class.
- Hugo Shirley roundtabled with rumoured-Milan-bound Alexander Pereira, Salzburg's current intendant for April's Opera Magazine on fund raising, festival projects and the death of shock-&-awe Regietheater: "In Germany we have seen all these people running on stage and making pissy in the corner. [ed: lol x lol x lol] I think this is over and we are demanding that the stage directors are telling the story -- in a modern or traditional way, I don't mind. At the end of the day, there's only a good production or a bad production."
- David Remnick omitted nothing in his The New Yorker piece on the Bolshoi Ballet scandal.
- In Naples, Neil Fisher broke mozzarella with Maestro Nicola Luisotti during his San Carlo Verdi Requiem about his upcoming ROH Nabucco for The Times. Said the maestro on live music vs. the distilled experience: “Music has to be live. You sit in the opera house with somebody else and you live an experience. It’s like love — you can’t make love by phone or internet. Well, you can, but in bed, with a person, is better.” Which reminds us of OC's 2009 interview with Matt Poland for Splice Today, when grilled about our insistence of live opera over HD simulcasts/CDs: "The unamplified voice -- nothing like it, ever. YouTube and HD simulcasts have created this impression that opera is best enjoyed from afar, it's not true, the true visceral experience is there in the opera house, and it always will be. It's the difference between having sex and watching a porno. It's sad that one has to point this out."