Opera Chic

Rattle's Aix Ring Concludes in Black & White

(Above: Ben Heppner and Emma Vetter)

Sir Simon Rattle is chilling in Aix-en-Provence for the July 3 premiere of Wagner's Götterdämmerung. The new, minimal Stéphane Braunschweig production is one of the offerings in this year's Festival d'Aix-en-Provence (festival #61), and is the final installment of Rattle's Aix Ring Cycle collaboration. The cast boasts Ben Heppner as Siegfried, Anne Sofie von Otter as Waltraute, Emma Vetter as Gutrune, and Katarina Dalayman as Brünnhilde.

Rattle (& the Berliner Philharmoniker) & Braunschweig will bid adieu to their Ring Cycle pact, which began in 2006 for the Festival's first Wagner cycle with Das Rheingold. It was followed by Die Walküre in 2007 (which was taped for DVD), Siegfried in 2008, and finishes with 2009's Götterdämmerung. Can Grand Théâtre de Provence contain all the Wagnerian hawtness? We will never know!

(Above: Katarina Dalayman and Anne Sofie von Otter)

More Rake's Progress Photos Than You Can Shake a Rake At!

Here are a few more images from tonight's la prima of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress @ Vienna's Theater an der Wien.

Too bad there are no previews of the alleged 18+ content from director Martin Kusej. We'll just have to use our ~imaginations~.

Anne Sofie von Otter shows the Wiener Symphoniker what's what with her sultry, divaesque mezzo, Baba the Turk.

In bocca al lupo ragazzi!

♥ ♥ Click on the link below for a whole mess of filthy pics...

Theater an der Wien's "The Rake's Progress" Gets a R-Rating

(Alastair Miles as Nick Shadow & Toby Spence as Tom Rakewell in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress @ Vienna's Theater an der Wien)

English tenor Toby Spence and English bass Alastair Miles are poised for tomorrow's opening night of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress in Vienna's Theater an der Wien. The production will be conducted by that hawter than hale, dewy-skinned, man-gawd Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who will sweat through the Martin Kusej production with the Wiener Symphoniker.

Theater an der Wien is promising such a spicy production, that it is carrying a warning for kids younger than eighteen years old, to shield their innocent eyes from an explicit naked brothel scene and some secksay stripping. If things get too hawt, we've got Anne Sofie von Otter playing the bearded wife to extinguish the flames.

Anne Sofie Von Otter @ La Scala Slaps That Bass, Drums'n'Bass, Shakes That A$$. Then Takes You Out To Dinner

Just back from krazy nite at la Scala where the 2007-08 voice recital season has ended on a deliciously wacky tone, with Anne Sofie Von Otter who thanks to a weirdikinz program dressed up as -- in this order -- scholar of Scandinavian music (not ABBA, mercifully but the slightly more obscure Wilhelm Peterson-Berger, Ture Rangström and Lars-Erik Larsson), Fauré and Schubert ragazza romantica, Richard Strauss fangirl, Reynaldo Hahn chanteuse (oh how we love Reynaldo, also thanks to OC point man, dashing young conductor Francesco Maria Colombo), Joseph Canteloube aka Joe Cantaloupe; and then she went all Cabaret on la Scala's collectively grey mousie conservative's consciousness: Kurt Weill and Ralph Benatzky, by0tches, then Ennio Morricone's heartbreaking "The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti", lyrics by Joan Baez, and we suspect this was the first time anything written by Joan Baez was ever played at la Scala; then George Gershwin -- Slap That Bass! -- and Richard Rodgers's "Bewitched" -- where we hoped against all hope that la Otter would wiggle her nose like Elizabeth Montgomery used to, but she didn't. 

This, by the way, was the conservative part of the night.

Then came the encores. But you'll have to wait until tomorrow to hear all about that.

Anne Sofie Von Otter's Resurrection

The hurried pencil drawings are eloquent. One is of a café, with smartly dressed people listening to a three-piece band. But there are no drinks on the tables, there's a soldier on duty outside, and everyone has dead eyes. There's more life in the portraits done by an opera librettist of his musical friends: they wear their clothes with rakish elegance, and are clearly in full creative flow. And there's one detail that these artists often include: a Star of David on the breast-pocket, bearing the word "Jude"

Anne Sofie Von Otter, to her everlasting credit, brings back to life the music written in Terezin. Via Jessicamusic.

La signora Von Otter also had personal reasons to do this project:

According to historians, Baron von Otter, secretary to the Swedish Legation in Berlin, had learned horrific details about the mass killing of Jews when he shared a compartment on a train in August 1942 with SS officer Kurt Gerstein. As head of the Technical Disinfection Department of the Waffen SS, Gerstein was charged with improving the efficiency of the gas chambers by using the toxic agent Zyklon-B.The Nazi officer unburdened his soul to von Otter during the night-long train ride to Berlin from Warsaw.

“This was news to my father. He didn’t know about the death camps, but at the (Swedish) Foreign Ministry they did, apparently,” Anne Sofie von Otter told Sveriges Radio, the national public radio channel. “Nothing came of it.”                

“I know that my father was troubled for the rest of his life, because no action was taken,” she said. “One can do this project for its own sake, but I am also doing it a little bit in memory of my papa.”