Opera Chic

Sinfini Music & OC: Backstage Beauty with Glyndebourne Festival’s Bright Lights

Glyndebourne Festival’s Head of Make-up Sarah Piper invited Sinfini Music into her clean, bright workspace to show us, step-by-step, how Romanian-American soprano Laura Tatulescu transforms from a dark-haired, natural beauty into a highly-polished 1960s bold-eyed stunner as Susanna for Michael Grandage’s 2012 revival production of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro that runs through August 2 (and has been getting killer reviews). Even if you're the spit-as-eyebrow-gel type who's not into technique, there's a backstage privé slideshow, so check it out.

If You Liked it Then You Shoulda Put a Ring on It: Danielle De Niese Gets Married

 

Valley Girl (and opera singer) Danielle de Niese got hitched over the weekend in England to her fiance' of ten months, Gus Christie, the dude behind Glyndebourne. What better way to celebrate a May-December relationship with a December wedding? ~Mazel Tov~

 

Kate Winslet's Hirsute Husband Pulls Out Of Glyndebourne's Don Giovanni

Stage and film director Sam Mendes has pulled out of next summer's Don Giovanni in Glyndebourne, Charlotte Higgins reports.

Get Out UR Flip-Flops and Shorts: Summer Festivals Are Already Heating Up

USA Today (News Lite) is running an article on the "world's best opera festivals", focusing on Summer opera bashes both on native soil and abroad.

"[...] as any true opera aficionado will tell you, there's no better way to indulge the habit than by scoring a seat at one of the great outdoor music festivals. Sure, no one can deny the drama of attending an opera at, say, La Scala, even when a famous tenor like Roberto Alagna doesn't storm off the stage in the middle of a performance (as he did in 2006), or trembling in anticipation as soprano Renee Fleming infuses La Traviata with her singular velvet touch at the Paris Opera. But there's a world of sublime sounds out there, and it pays to plan ahead."

More like the *beginning* of the performance, Anthony. To save you precious reading time, here's who made the cut: Savonlinna Opera Festival, Santa Fe Opera, the Lucerne Festival, the Wexford Festival Opera, Tanglewood, Salzburger Festspiele, the Glyndebourne Festival, Chorégies d'Orange, Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, Bregenzer Festspiele, and the Arena di Verona Festival.

Snubbed this year (among many other worthies) was Glimmerglass and Pesaro's Rossini Opera Festival [edit: omg, how could I have forgotten the Fort Worth Opera Festival??] Also snubbed were my Carroll Gardens cousins who do the entire Gilbert & Sullivan repertoire in their backyard in August, on a stage made from a discarded wooden halfpipe some sk8r kids left rotting on their curb. They use my grandma's old mumu kaftan dresses for a curtain, and the ushers are the neighborhood dogs with flashlights taped to their paws. OC is serious. So, which are your favorites?