Opera Chic

Daniele Gatti on Scala Traviata: Looking for Salvation

Not Gatti. Violetta. Although up against La Scala's grizzly loggionisti, only the foolhardy (or arrogant) would shun redemption. Think buoyant. Calm & confident, 007 in Brioni, a martini in one hand and a baton in the other.

As the Milanese maestro dusts off his Traviata white tie for his second Sant'Ambrogio Teatro alla Scala season opener, let's take a moment to remember that spectacular 2008 Don Carlos meltdown when Filianoti was replaced overnight and Gatti was turned into a piñata. Want to kill/time/travel? Linkage here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Gatti knows what he's up against and he's seen firsthand an opera house soured and bitter as Campari. Yesterday he spoke to Il Giornale and said that he was up to the challenge of Traviata, notoriously sacred to the loggionisti: "Lots of people have asked me, why the hell would you do something like this? My morality makes me do it. It seems like it's impossible to pull off, but instead I consider it a gift from the heavens [...] I'm going to conduct it like 'Mr.Gatti' would, end-of-story. It'll be an intimate Traviata, both in setting and in the numbers of onstage characters."

On Violetta (to be sung by Damrau), he sees her as someone who's suffered an injustice and is looking for salvation. Although she chooses to frequent a certain type of environment, she still wants to save herself and has aspirations to have a husband and kids. He thinks that Alfredo (to be sung by Beczala) is honest, sincere, a bit naive, provincial and doesn't know how to keep his promises.

Meanwhile, deep in the heart of Italy, Riccardo Muti's had his hands full as Teatro dell'Opera di Roma peacekeeper. Strikes and grumbles was last week's news, but tomorrow his Ernani will bow the new season, as originally scheduled, in a Hugo de Ana production with Francesco Meli in the title role.

R. Kelly Plays Cello (But Also Not Really)

When R&B singer R. Kelly [NSFW] released the cover art for his [NSFW] upcoming CD late last week, we lol'd. Between the Moonwalker fedora, the Phantom of the Opera mask and the Yeezus leather pants, he's all over the place.

OC slapped some strings over the image above, but the real version's not safe for work.

[NSFW] version below the cut.

So Many Rubber Jokes, So Little Time: Grigolo for Pirelli

(All photos copyright Catalano Alfonso/Erba Marco/Guindani Stefano/SGP 2013)

In the great crossover tradition of showboating Italian tenors who've come before him -- Pavarotti, Caruso, Gigli -- Vittorio Grigolo continues to break from the opera stage and enchant high society with a twinkle in his eye and microphone in his hand, replete with the de Grigueur Xmas album.

First he sang for Condé Nast/Vogue Italia at La Scala, then off to Dubai with Armani, finishing with a Los Angeles Ferragamo/Annenberg fête.

Last night -- in a tuxedo, white t-shirt and Lacoste kicks -- he was back in Milan to celebrate Italian rubber/tire king Pirelli's iconic calendar at HangarBicocca, a former hanger converted into an exhibition space.

In wayfareresque shades (an affectation picked up from raffish Lapo Elkann), Grigolo sang for 800 guests anchored by a handful of celebs (Kevin Spacy), models, Italian dynasty offspring and fashion industry gatekeepers.

Pirelli celebrated the 50th edition of its calendar by launching heretofore unpublished b&w shots taken in 1985 by Helmut Newton in Monte Carlo and Tuscany. Newton had abandoned the original commission for personal reasons and the images lay dormant in the Pirelli archives, sharing shelf space with former Pirelli calendar photographers such as Avdeon, Ritts, Lindbergh, Leibovitz, Testino and Demarchelier. 

Grigolo returns to the opera stage in a couple weeks paired with Gheorghiu in a Vienna Boheme.

Everything's Ducky for Nicole Cabell

Currently in Detroit for a role-premiere Violetta at the Detroit Opera House, Nicole Cabell's shunned the handful of big-brand hotels for waterfowl. Her Motor City base is the Duck ‘N’ Roll Inn, part of a duck farm (with mixed reviews). The Californian soprano sings Traviata -- how endearing is it that the Michigan Opera Theatre allows users to post reviews? -- through November 24. A+ would quack again.

Renée's Reddit IAmA

The Scene: Reddit interwebz
The Cast: Renée Fleming and millions of curious Redditors

It's a dichotomy: Young opera singers look to the most successful industry icons to give stellar career advice, but most of those trailblazers have been so high up in Ivory Towers that their advice is out-dated.

Not Renée! At yesterday's IAmA session, she handed out tips to young singers with some personal details: she cherishes her Gianfranco Ferré gowns and anonymously donates her older frocks to young singers. Also, her childhood nickname was 'Nay-Nay' :3 This weekend, she's on MC duties at the inaugural American Voices Festival at The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to host a three-day event on American song.

Vintage Callas Gives Side-eye to 2014 Callas

Callas shoots a wicked side-eye at impostors. December's Tatler, covered by Princess Grace of Monaco on her thirtieth death anniversary year, delves into the Grace of Monaco movie slated for a March 2014 roll-out.

Grace Kelly -- that icily-cool, Hollywood-icon-turned-princess in the great American Cinderella story -- had a prince in her pocket and legendary friends, including la Divina, who will be played by Paz Vega.

Grace of Monaco, with Nicole Kidman in the title role, Tim Roth as Rainier, Robert Lindsay as Aristotle Onassis, Paz Vega as his mistress Maria Callas and Parker Posey as Madge Tivey-Faucon, Grace’s lady-in-waiting.

Callas has been previously resurected by Faye Dunaway in (the mysteriously shelved) Master Class and by Fanny Ardant in Callas Forever. Upcoming films include Callas (last rumored to be played by either Anne Hathaway or Penélope Cruz) and Greek Fire (last rumored to be played by Eva Mendes). Now it's Vega's turn. Judging by the first (and only) photos of Vega-as-Callas that leaked online a year ago (below), we hope she can do impressions. Like Onassis' "mistress". She had an opera-minded experience with Carmen, at least.

OC & Opera Now Magazine, November & December Highlights

Bring the dazzle, bring the bling. For November's Opera Now magazine, OC wrote a piece on opera's  longstanding tradition with haute joaillerie and watchmaking dynasties: Swarovski and Maria Callas; Van Cleef & Arpels and Danielle de Niese; Chopard and Anna Netrebko/Erwin Schrott/José Carreras; and Ann Ziff for Tamsen Z and Renée Fleming, among many others. You can download the piece in three parts: Opera Now Jewels 01 Opera Now Jewels 02 Opera Now Jewels 03

In December's issue for Opera Now magazine, we rounded-up our favorite opera and symphony themed gifts, such as the Rolex Oyster Perpetual Datejust timepieces awarded to winners of this year's Operalia 2013 Audience Award, downloadable here.

 

We also commented on the recent La Scala/Barenboim music director shakeup, available here.

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OC & Auditorium Magazine: Nicolas Altstaedt & Dichterliebe

How thrilled were we to interview young cellist Nicolas Altstaedt for October's austere Black & White issue of Auditorium Magazine? Pretty dang thrilled. Onstage, the soft-spoken, Berlin-based soloist delights with his two cellos, young and old -- a 1789 Giulio Cesare Gigli and a 2012 Robert König -- turned out in scruffy-lux Issey Miyake gear. Offstage, he's a dream boss as the artistic director of the Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival. Download some black & white swoon right here.

We also reviewed the Jan Vogler & Hélène Grimaud Schumann Fantasiestücke & Dichterliebe CD, a super-friend dialogue between two artists, Vogler's cello ripping through Heine's poems. Novel and unexpected, this one's not for the Lieder purists.

The latest issue (which is sadly OC-free) switches back to color.

 

In Which Lenny's Radical Chic Legacy is Relagated to Hors d’oeuvre

Famous among Lennie fetishists but too obscure to be go-to content for Esquire USA, we're not sure what magic googling led magazine editors to it, but here it is in December's USA Esquire.

In a fingerfood 101 guide, Tom Wolfe's famous 1970 New York Magazine essay "Radical Chic: Live from Lenny's" about Bernstein's Park Avenue penthouse party for the Black Panthers, is randomly referenced for a stuffed mushrooms recipe. Stuffing, indeed.

Also found -- an ad for Chopin potato vodka -- ad nor slogan references Chopin's legacy.

The Diva in Trainers, Lisette Oropesa

American soprano Lisette Oropesa is this month's protagonist of Runner's World's "I'm a Runner" column. 

The vegan fitness ace whittled herself down to a US size 2 over a long-term wellness plan, cardio as its star, which is probably why she looked so slaming in the Austin Scarlett gown that she wore to last year's Met Opera opening night (photo above). For the fitness glossy, she discusses body image in the opera industry, her NYC fitness regiment and the synchronicity she finds between running and singing.

Idomeneo Soiled & Signed by Michieletto for Theater an der Wien

(Scenes from the dress rehearsal)

Somewhere between pissing-off La Scala's loggionisti (Un Ballo) and sending billets-doux to Milan's Casa di riposo per musicisti Giuseppe Verdi (Falstaff) comes Damiano Michieletto's production of Mozart's Idomeneo for Theater an der Wien. When it premieres on November 13 in Vienna, Michieletto hints at a return to basic archetypes (stripped of mythology) and the classical elements (namely, dirt) for his new production of Mozart's father vs. son strife opera.

The central theme of my studies was the father-son rapport and the passage towards maturity, which brings fatigue and pain. Idamante has to free himself of the paternal oppression, from the sense of guilt, he has to discover and live out his independence and his love for Ilia. It deals with a passage that every son has to carry out: "to kill" his own father. And in this case, there's also a monster to kill, which represents the weight of the father figure. The sacrifice in which Idamante is put under coincides with his redemption, the end of childhood and the beginning of a new life. And in the final ten minutes, we see him become a father himself, while Idomeneo definitively exits the scene.

The circularity of life is recreated also in the stage parameters: the stage is covered in soil, the soil that embraces the cadavers and from that which new life can be born. The whole show takes advantage of a very simple aesthetic, with only a few objects, really to remain in that crevasse of an epic approach to this incident, that however is stripped of mythological references and correlated to a humanity which everyone, in today's world, can identify with.

Under René Jacobs with the Freiburger Barockorchester and the Arnold Schoenberg Choir, Richard Croft sings the title role, Gaëlle Arquez is his son Idamante, Sophie Karthäuser is Ilia, Marlis Petersen is Elettra and Julien Behr sings Arbace.

Renée's Nose, Ann Gottlieb, In Pursuit of Vanilla

Fragrance maestra Ann Gottleib must have a passport the size of a Die Meistersinger manuscript, because when she's not consulting/signing her name to famous perfumes (such as Calvin Klein’s Obsession and Eternity, Marc Jacobs’ Lola and Dior's J’adore), she's following the fragrance chain from plants to labs to flacons. After the search for vetiver in Haiti, patchouli in Borneo, sandalwood in India and roses in Morocco, her latest adventure brought her to Madagascar and Uganda for vanilla.   

A good friend of Renée Fleming, the NYC-based scent diva was one of the talented noses behind Fleming's Coty Inc. fragrance, La Voce, a "floriental" juice that launched in 2008.

On Listening to Elliott Carter

On the first anniversary of Elliott Carter's death, we've just finished reading Tim Page's excellent piece "Listening to Elliott Carter" for The New York Review of Books.

Esa-Pekka Salonen, Powered by...

You can listen to all of his Dutilleux and Lutosławski that you'd like, but you don't know Esa-Pekka until you know what powers him. From Boulud to Ikea, the Finnish maestro pens his mealtime rhythms for Grub Street.