Opera Chic

Renée Fleming and Alec Baldwin do it for the Kids

Renée Fleming and Alec Baldwin shared Love Letters during a Thursday night performance of the work by American playwright A.R. Gurney to benefit the Carnegie Hall Notables membership/ticket program for young music enthusiasts at Zankel Hall.

(Renee and Alec with A.R. Gurney)

Alec Baldwin Narrates Lincoln Portrait: "Fellow Citizens, We Cannot Escape History. PUT THAT COFFEE DOWN, Thoughtless Little Pigs"

Classical music lover Alec Baldwin will join Charles Dutoit and the glorious Philadelphia Orchestra as narrator of Copland’s "Lincoln Portrait" for the 2009-10 season’s Opening Night Concert on September 26.

Opera Chic loves the angry, bloodcurling acting superpower of the hirsute Long Islander, who's undeniably one of our strongest actors who only needed three pages of Mamet dialogue to drill his way into the history of cinema (not to mention, that sweatily, Method-acted secks scene in the director's cut of Getaway is srsly srsly hawt).

The Lincoln of history -- as opposed to the Lincoln of hagiography -- had a taste, we know now, for a bawdy, salty brand of humor. Still, Baldwin's casting as Abraham Lincoln seems to OC to be at the very least counterintuitive.

Unless Philly asks Mamet to rewrite Lincoln's lines -- that would be so much fun.

Alec Baldwin, Classical Music Lover

Alec Baldwin, classical music lover:

Baldwin imagined himself as the restaurant critic of the Times; the proprietor of an inn near Syracuse; and the presenter of a classical-music show on public radio. “I could do that,” he said, and he wasn’t exactly joking. He cares about classical music; he began to take an interest in his twenties. (Perhaps not surprisingly, he adores Mahler and can’t quite see the point of Mozart.) “To sit there in the studio and just say”—a rich radio voice—“ ‘And now Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, with Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.’

OC is partial to Yuri Temirkanov's, but Dutoit's a very good choice! A-B-C!