Opera Chic

Fort Worth Opera Downsizes 2015 Playbill and Budget

(Credit)

Like Lucchese cowboy boots and shotgun racks on Dodge Rams, what's Texas without the Fort Worth Opera?

Its general director Darren K. Woods -- who's been at the helm for 13 years and runs a tight ship that's solid on talent and loose on drama -- intends to keep it that way by shifting this year's 5.4 million budget to 4.5 million in 2015. The snip is in response to private donation downticks coupled with rising expenses.

Under the streamlined 2015 budget, the season playbill has been reduced to two operas. On the chopping black went the budget-busting 'A Wrinkle in Time', commissioned by the company and originally slated for a 2015 world premiere (after being dropped from the 2014 season). The opera, unable to lure a co-producer/partner to offset its 1.2 million dollar price-tag, has out-priced the FWO's wallet.

Orchestrated by Woods, the budget cut is intended to secure FWO's finances while sourcing new outlets of sustainable revenue (Texas oil?!) in the run-up to its 70th anniversary in 2016.

This year's season, which opens on April 19, includes the world premiere of Daniel Crozier's and Peter M. Krask’s With Blood, With Ink, costumes by Austin Scarlett (above), byotches!; Kevin Puts' and Mark Campbell’s Silent Night; The Pearl Fishers and Così fan tutte.

Hold onto your Binoculars: Met Opera's 2014-15 Season

 

Renée Fleming is Hanna and Nathan Gunn is Danilo in Lehár's The Merry Widow. Credit: Brigitte Lacombe/Metropolitan Opera

Live from New York, it's™ -- The Metropolitan Opera's 2014-15 season, announced yesterday. Sumptuous promo shots tease twenty-six operas, which includes three house premieres, six new productions and 18 revivals.

Gelb's hybridization of opera/broadway in NYC moves along with the outsourcing of Lehár's The Merry Widow to perennially-baseball-capped Broadway choreographer Susan Stroman (we obliterated our entertainment budget with The Producers tix, and Double Feature was good fun, but how much did Oklahoma suck?) starring Renée Fleming, sided by opera-outsider Kelli O'Hara as Valencienne, who's currently singing in The Bridges of Madison County on the Great White Way. 

Other highlights? Tchaikovsky's Iolanta gets a new production by Mariusz Treliński starring Anna Netrebko, who also sings the lady in Verdi's Macbeth. A new Donna del Lago by Paul Curran stars bel canto dream-team Joyce DiDonato & Juan Diego Flórez. Plácido Domingo goes baritone as Don Carlo in Ernani. Vittorio Grigolo goes Grieux in Manon and stars in Les Contes d’Hoffmann vs. Thomas Hampson's Four Villains. Jonas Kaufmann splits Don José with Roberto Alagna against Elīna Garanča's Carmen. Sondra Radvanovsky does Amelia in Ballo. Danielle de Niese brings her Susanna to Nozze (in a new production by Richard Eyre), and Angela Gheorghiu owes it all to Mimì.

MD James Levine will lead six productions (Mozart Nozze, Offenbach Contes, Stravinsky Rake, Verdi Ernani and Ballo and Wagner Die Meistersinger) and René Pape gives a recital of Dvořák, Beethoven, Ravel, and Mussorgsky.

 Anna Netrebko in Tchaikovsky's Iolanta. Credit: Baden-Baden Festival: Andrea Krempera

Renée Fleming is Hanna and Nathan Gunn is Danilo in Lehár's The Merry Widow. Credit: Brigitte Lacombe/Metropolitan Opera

Danni & Donna BFFs4E&E

From the front of the stage to front of the runway, Danielle de Niese (far right) was among the luminous guest list at the Donna Karan 30th-anniversary collection that showed in NYC on Monday night.

To celebrate 30 years in the fashion industry, Camp Karan organized a retrospective collection that ignited a VIP conflagration of Hugh Jackman, Katie Holmes, Trudie Styler and Bernadette Peters, all longtime friends of the brand.

Luxury partnerships have been elusive for opera singers, but de Niese has been collaborating with Karan since 2003, modeling bespoke Karan gowns on album covers and in galas. She even wore a custom-made Karan gown to her 2009 wedding to Gus Christie. De Niese also rotates Vivienne Westwood gowns into her performance wardrobe and scored a Van Cleef & Arples ambassadorship in 2009.

She's currently in NYC to sing Ariel in The Enchanted Island at The Metropolitan from February 26 to March 20.

On Bach, Polyphony and Nymphomania

Warning: NSFW

In case you didn't know, Lars von Trier really likes sex. Last night, the Dutch tasty Danish filmmaker's latest film, Nymphomaniac, bowed at the Berlin Film Festival, and guess what it's about?

In a jokey t-shirt that read 'Persona Non Grata' over a Cannes Film Festival logo (referencing a 2011 Cannes-wielded ban-hammer after cracking Nazi jokes and outing himself as a Hitler sympathizer while promoting his then-new film, Melancholia), Trier released an additional NSFW trailer, Chapter Five, in the eight-chapter movie about protagonist Charlotte Gainsbourg's self-diagnosed nymphomania. It's sex and Baroque for a coveted cast that includes Stellan Skarsgard, Uma Thurman, Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Christian Slater -- and Shia Labeouf.

Above is Chapter 5, The Little Organ School, described as: A chorale prelude by Bach: Three voices each with its own character, but in complete harmony. In other words: POLYPHONY. The nymphomaniac is easily inspired, and acts it out.

Baz Luhrmann on La Bohème: "Live the Work"

The Australian filmmaker behind Moulin Rouge and The Great Gatsby gives insight to the creative process behind his epic 2002 Broadway revival of “La Bohème”.

Before mounting an early production of “La Bohème,” for example, Luhrmann said, “Let’s go live the life of Puccini!” And they flew to Italy and set up in Torre del Lago, where Puccini wrote many of his operas.

They traveled to Milan and went over every inch of La Scala, the opera house. They lived “like total bohos,” Luhrmann said, content in the knowledge that “the work itself was only just as important as the adventure of actually living the work. Living the work has always been the thing that has enriched and sustained.”

Caveat: Don't die of tuberculosis.

Retired Mezzo's NYC 'Villa in the Sky' Price Slash

After months of late hours and strange cuisine in timezone chasms, what better blessing for an opera singer than returning home? For American mezzo Nedda Casei, home was a blush-pink Midtown East seven-room penthouse with East River/Queensboro Bridge views -- until she listed it on the market .

After sitting for over three months without a serious buyer, Casei -- who sang at The Met Opera for 21 years -- has slashed the price of her 16 Sutton Place co-op by 500k USD, down to five million (and carries a $6,600.00 maintenance fee).

The 1966 hi-rise apartment is manned by a doorman and an elevator operator, and features stained glass, wood paneling and soundproofed rooms (natch), a close second to Anna Netrebko's mega-deluxe UWS enclave.

Brokeback Mountains & (Web) Streams

Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam. Now close your eyes and just pretend that buffalo roam in Madrid, because Medici TV streams a live webcast on Friday, February 7 at 8pm (Madrid local time) of Brokeback Mountain, the two-act opera based on the book of the same name by Annie Proulx and composed by Charles Wuorinen, which recently world premiered at Teatro Real.

The webcast will be available, on demand, for 90 days and stars Daniel Okulitch and Tom Randle as the crossed-in-love Wyoming cowboys.

Star Spangled Awesome: Renée Fleming Does The 'Bowl

 

'Soprano Superstar' Renée belts it out for America. Elegant, nothing agressive, poise owes its merits to time.

Star Spangled Gown: Renée Fleming and Vera Wang

OC has an addiction. Calm down, it's terribly boring: American television in all of its super-caffeinated, overly-enthusiastic, hyper-preened slick.

On Thursday night's Entertainment Tonight, between daily celebrity breakdowns, we caught a teaser that revealed Renée Fleming will be stitched into a bespoke Vera Wang gown for her Sunday Super Bowl XLVIII premiere (rip above).

Wang -- coveted by fastidious brides for her neutral blush-tone, princess cut gowns swathed in layers of taffeta, crepe de chine, organza, satin and tulle -- has kept the dress under wraps, but we're guessing it'll be something like a recent scarlet gown (below) from the Spring 2013 collection worn by Chrissy Teigen at her wedding to John Legend this past Fall, probably in a dark jewel tone -- c’est Fleming.

To open the Broncos vs. the Seahawks brawl, Fleming's been rotated to the top of the list, stomping on pop idols who've opened the Super Bowl at half her age, have many times the celebrity perks, and three-times her metabolism, such as Alicia Keys (2013), Kelly Clarkson (2012), Christina Aguilera (2011), x infinity.

But this time, bulletproof Fleming, who's already performed for presidents and legends (and the 2003 World Series at Yankee Stadium), has to win the hearts and minds of the adorably opera-ignorant, like this dude here below (NSFW strong language warning, drops the F-bomb):

French Montana on Super Bowl Opera Singer -- 'F**k That Sh*t' -

Listen, we're not expecting miracles, like desperately-needed upticks in Met Opera attendance
(where Renée Fleming coincidentally sings Rusalka later this week in four replications, February 4 to 15, and not even opening night has yet sold out), when she grabs the mic this Sunday at the NJ MetLife Stadium to sing 'The Star Spangled Banner' to enchant hundreds of millions under the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra (which just announced its 2014-15 season) mixed with a choir. But we're going to hitch onto the prevailing theme of an event that comes down to binary terms (us vs. them, winners vs. losers, we are the champions) and say: Team Renée = Team Opera. 

The mega-billionaire Super Bowl machine, which plucked unthreatening, accessible Bruno Mars and the declawed-by-middle-age Red Hot Chili Peppers for its halftime show, could have foisted ratings gold crossover stars or Jackie Evancho (who the NFL past-anointed for its Packers vs. Lions Thanksgiving Day game) onto the opera-fearing public who shows no appetite for divas or voices unaltered by autotune and models opera singers on awesomely-outdated caricatures. But they tapped a seasoned opera singer who, you know, actually crawled her way through thorny industry ranks over decades, banked on a career-sustaining slow-burn, learned her craft and adores it, groomed to the last hair, diva-like, minus the hysterics. And in Vera Wang, she'll be dressed for a killing.