Opera Chic

Fo, Chailly, Colombo Remember Menotti

In today's Corriere della Sera, Nobel Laureate Dario Fo and conductors Riccardo Chailly and Francesco Maria Colombo remember their friend (and in Colombo's case, mentor) Gian Carlo Menotti.

Dario Fo (who often performed in Spoleto):

"They called him the Duke of Spoleto and he was a duke indeed: he had intellectual elegance, honesty, style: a gentleman of infinte culture and refinement, truly a Renaissance man. And a brave man: he protected me from censorship. His all-ecompassing intellect, his friendship with the best artists in the world turned Spoleto into a world-class Festival. He deserved a monument; instead, administrators unfit to run a drugstore tried to diminish his role and tried to disturb his work".

Francesco Maria Colombo, young conductor (the first-ever US performance of Mercadante's Orazi e Curiazi in Minneapolis last year, a recent, acclaimed Trovatore in Cremona) and sometimes blogger and former music critic for Corriere della Sera who was convinced by Menotti to devote himself full-time to conducting: 

"He changed my life. He gave me Thomas Schippers's baton as a sign of his trust in my abilities. He was a fascinating man, he had rubbed shoulders with History for his entire life: a friend of Chaplin and Cocteau, he went sailing with Garbo and was Jacqueline Kennedy's dinner companion... He had the gift of simultaneous lightness and depth. A great composer, with a knack for tenderness that is unique in the 20th century. Too often Italy has forgotten his greatness".

Riccardo Chailly:

"There was nobody like Menotti: his unique ability to live between cultures, Italy and the USA, and create a common musical language. Il Telefono, a genius score that is still fresh, is an example of Menotti's greatness. A giant of the 20th century".

^^^update^^^

La Repubblica reports a great story: on Easter Day, 2001, Gian Carlo Menotti had dinner with Martin Scorsese, discussing a project that, sadly, never materialised but is boggling Opera Chic's Verdi-loving mind: a Scorsese-directed Trovatore in Spoleto.

Dario Fo vs. Stéphane Lissner: No Jacket Required

As Opera Chic reported on January 16, the latest step in Scala General Manager Stéphane Lissner SuperFlyTNT hardline against, well, everybody and everything, is his decision to enforce a dress code at la Scala for the gentlemen.

Today's Repubblica carries a story about the dress code where Milanese Nobel Laureate and Opera Fan, the awesome, naturally elegant Dario Fo, expresses his deep disappointment: "This is a bad omen: the man makes the clothes, not the other way around. I think La Scala's management would rather have the same type of people in the audience, all lookalikes, all the better if they belong to the upper class. It's discrimination".

Report from Milan: Forget You, La Scala! ::Rope Burn::

Since Milan is more than just opera (let's not forget soccer, food & fashion), Opera Chic is pleased to share other cultural events that go down in the city of la madonnina from time to time.

This past week when Opera Chic left Milan, her zona was quickly replenished by hoards of fashionisti clamoring for spots at the Autumn/Winter 2007-2008 Milan fashion shows, as well as invading her favorite boutiques, bars, and restaurants. Usually predictable, the conclusion of the shows leaves us only with new information about palettes and trends.

However, this week was a bit different: Nobel literature laureate Italian Dario Fo promised something quite extraordinary for designer Gentucca Bini's first foray into Milan fashion house Romeo Gigli; and as of last night, the duo definitely succeeded.

Complaining that the fashions shows were conformist and boring, Fo invented a revolutionary presentation that concluded menswear week of the Autumn/Winter 2007-2008 Milan shows with a bang.

Last night, while Fo gave a playful lecture on Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna's "The Triumphs of Caesar" (a series of nine tempera paintings from the end of the fifteenth century that depict soldiers carrying looted treasure, elephants, exotic animals, and Caesar on a triumphal chariot), male models worked the runway in beautiful and lush colors (the majority of designers this season revived the heavily-played black trend) taken directly from Mantegna's series of nine canvases, which hung at the venue as backdrops.

"They [the models] danced or ambled down the catwalk to Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" in oversize shoes and short wellingtons, taking delight in the paintings and the informal atmosphere. Jackets were buttoned up awry, ties were plaits of tie-ends, scarves were wrapped nonchalantly several times round the neck, and hats -- every model had a hat -- were pull-on casuals reminiscent of favourite hand-me-down trilbies."

Pretty kewl aside from that whole "Four Seasons" crap. Those violin concerti are so played, I'm surprised that Wu Tang hasn't remixed them with rhymes about chessboxing.