Opera Chic

Frenching with Flórez (and a Side of Gossett)

(Photo: Decca/Josef Gallauer)

Bel canto bon-ton Juan Diego Flórez is about to roll-out his first album in four years. We're not mad -- he's been raising two precious babies in the interim.

The all-French tracklist of L’Amour is a romantic mix of rare and well-known arias penned by Donizetti, Gounod, Boiëldieu and Massenet, among others, under Roberto Abbado and the orchestra/chorus of Bologna's Teatro Comunale.

Forget his epic 'mes amis' high Cs from La fille du régiment -- here the Peruvian tenor flips-off high Ds in 'Mes amis, écoutez l’histoire' from Adolphe Adam’s Le Postillon de Lonjumeau.

You know you want the D.

By the way, we can't mention Flórez without mentioning Philip Gossett, who recently dropped knowledge at The New York Review of Books with a review of Evan Baker's new book on dramaturge and stage direction, which traces stagecraft from the seventeenth century to the present.

Now here's a teaser of Flórez's Massenet & Offenbach L'Amour bijoux.

Werther: Toute mon âme est là! Pourquoi me réveiller, ô soufflé de printemps

La belle Hélène: Au Mont Ida, trois déesses

Rossini Rarity at the ROH: Donna del Lago

Fresh from last night's John Fulljames new production premiere of Donna del Lago at the Royal Opera House comes Rupert Christiansen's review, coined "bellissimo canto". Tackling the ostentatious vocal ornamentation of Rossini's Highlander-lite, happy ending opera was Juan Diego Flórez and Joyce DiDonato:

The sun shines out of Joyce DiDonato’s voice, and her ravishingly beautiful Elena caps the show with a sublime account of the lilting “Tanti affetti”. The technically impeccable Juan Diego Florez is all fire and ardour as Uberto, incandescent in runs and roulades, tireless in his production of rock-steady top Bs and Cs. The house went mad with joy for them both.

In his London house debut was thirty-three year old Italian conductor Michele Mariotti, who saddles with Flórez this August for a Graham Vick-directed Guillaume Tell at his family's Pesaro Rossini Opera Festival.

Flórez Opens in Pesaro

Synchronicity tonight for Juan Diego Flórez who opens Matilde di Shabran as Corradino on the same stage that hosted his professional debut sixteen years ago. 

Juan Diego Flórez: The Hottest Man in Opera (Literally, Thanks to the Turtleneck)

Juan Diego Flórez makes Sunday relaxed knitwear look secksay during a press conference earlier today at the Hungarian State Opera House.

Tomorrow he makes his Hungarian debut in a recital of Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi and others. The opera house is very excited (!!) to have the Peruvian tenor live in its theater.

Opera Chic & Grazia.it: Juan Diego Flórez Conquers Teatro alla Scala (Again!)

Last Sunday, Juan Diego Flórez made his triumphant recital return to the Teatro alla Scala stage, absent as of almost four years, and OC of course was there.

Read the recap of the recital in her Grazia.it column, Stasera Esco, in Italian.

And if your Italian $kill$ are lacking,  you know the drill.

The Man, The Myth, The Baby

NY1 is running a video interview with Juan Diego Florez and his new baby.

"Me siento muy feliz”: Juan Diego Flórez 's Incoming Bebbe!

He referred to it a few months ago when he came to Milan and now he means business! Peruvian tenor (and single-handed saviour of bel canto) Juan Diego Flórez will soon be a daddy! He announced to El Comercio that his wife is more than three months pregnant with their first child, due in April 2011. He plans to scale back his commitments once Flórez Junior arrives to accommodate family time. Colleague Gustavo Dudamel is also expecting his first child with wife Eloisa in April 2011, both wives with close due dates.

 

One Night Only: Watch Juan Diego Do Naughty, Naughty Things As the Duke of Mantua

Remember the Dresden "Rigoletto" conducted in 2008 by Fabio Luisi where Juan Diego Florez rolled out -- after a brief Lima tryout -- his freaky Duke of Mantua? (OC caught it live on Arte TV)

It's a cool DVD, and since JDF has later decided not to appear in the part until later in his career, it's a good chance to catch his performance. Amazon UK is giving a nice discount on the the DVD, and the link is here

Celebración at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Opening Night Gala

While NYC was celebrating the opening of City Ballet with a Fall Gala (post below), the West Coast was simultaneously toasting the opening of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's new season with a banging party that brought out a colorful mix of celebrities, artists, and socialites to Walt Disney Concert Hall -- Michael Eisner, Neil Diamond, Frank Gehry, and Maggie Seaver (a.k.a Joanna Kerns).

Gustavo Dudamel, in his second opening night with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was accompanied by (pregnant) wife, Eloísa, who was in company of Juan Diego Flórez's wife, Julia. The two first ladies of classical music worked the red carpet while their husbands worked the stage.  

The first half was a melange of Rossini overatures (La Gazza Ladra and Semiramide) with soloist Juan Diego Flórez singing arias from two Rossini arias. Flórez worked the whole Latino pride thing after the break with Chabuca Granda's Peruvian classic La Flor de la Canela, followed by Mexican and Venezuelan songs. He encored with his show-stopping Ah Mes Amis from La Fille and La Donna è Mobile from Rigoletto.  

(Above: Eloísa and Julia)

Follow fierce byotches Ann Rutherford and Anne Jeffreys inside for more fabulousness from opening night!

Something Like a Phenomenon: Fenomenale Juan Diego!

 

Third time's a charm for Juan Diego Flórez (check out Opera Chic's exclusive interview with him here): After two* performances of Il Barbiere di Siviglia at La Scala (*#1 was obliterated due to a union strike and #2 was sung by most of the second cast), Flórez's opening night came on July 12 where he took the opera theater by storm with a triumphant Count Almaviva. Like we were expecting anything less?

Milan's newspaper, Corriere della Sera called Flórez "Fenomenale", opening the review: "Flórez is probably the only contemporary singer in the world where it's worth it to buy a ticket to his performances even if the conducting, company, or direction isn't worth the time."

La Scala used a forty-one-year old revival of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's sets, directions, and costumes to welcome the Peruvian tenor who hadn't been back on the Scala stage since a 2008 recital. Phenomenally phenomenal!

Opera Chic Exclusive Interview: Juan Diego Flórez Speaks to OC (About Everything!)

 

Last night -- after a cancelled opening night of Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia that was supposed to happen on July 9 -- Juan Diego Flórez stepped onto la Scala stage’s as Count Almaviva in the four-decade old Jean-Pierre Ponnelle production of Rossini’s opera buffa. OC had prized tickets to Flórez’s opening night, which was later sunk by a strike from labor unions to protest the new law, just passed by Italy’s parliament to regulate opera houses budgets and hiring practices.

We hadn’t seen the Peruvian tenor in Milan since his January 2008 recital (post #1, post #2). This time, Opera Chic met Juan Diego Flórez for an interview at a cafe steps away from Teatro alla Scala where he showed-up looking like he just exited from a fashion photo shoot: faded blue jeans, a crisp Ermenegildo Zegna long-sleeved white shirt, while carrying all accessories in Zegna's gorgeous black leather --  not surprising after featuring him as one of OC's five best-dressed opera singers for W Magazine's Editors' Blog.  

The half-prince, half-lamby king of the high Cs shared so much with Opera Chic, but you’ll have to click the link below to find out what he said in the interview!

The Situations's So Bad Not Even JDF Can Sell Out La Scala Doing Barbiere

Juan Diego Florez + Barbiere + Scala = NOT sold out yet

And it's a big WTF moment.

Almost 15 hours after la Scala earlier today made available (in Milan starting at 9AM) tickets for their Barbiere di Siviglia starring Juan Diego Florez -- a big popular hit with a big popular star, probably the world's most gifted tenor, in the old-skool production by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle -- there are still tickets available (only the performance of July 12 has managed to sell all the available tickets).

JDF will sing on July 9, 12, 20 and 23 -- Lawrence Brownlee will do the rest of the run.

Again, it's wise to explain to how the complicated Scala box office works: if you see in the screen shots above and below that, say, 100 tickets are still available for a certain performance, it doesn't mean that they already sold every seat in the house except for the 100 still for sale. La Scala, following a probably random, certainly user-unfriendly and scalper-friendly system, only releases a few tickets at a time. They release a batch of a few hundred, and usually they get sold out quickly (at least for big productions). Then Scala will release a few more tickets in the following weeks, waiting to sell the second batch out, and so forth, up until a few days before the performance if sales are slow. Add to that the horrible phenomenon of travel agencies that get an unholy amount of tickets and try to sell at a monster premium to tourists -- whenever the travel agencies can't sell them all, they give the tickets back to la Scala. La Scala will then try to sell the leftover tickets via their official box office.

This season's other big hit, Placido Domingo's Simon Boccanegra, for example, sold out in three minutes after its initial offering to the public at the usual time (9AM). Tonight, on the other hand, there are still a lot of unsold Barbiere tickets. Even when Florez is singing the lead.

"The Times" Endorses Juan Diego Florez For British Prime Minister

It might be too late, but The Times has endorsed a candidate:

I know he’s Peruvian, but is it too late to make him prime minister?

As Beautiful As The Sun: Juan Diego On Pavarotti, Kraus, Soccer, Peruvian Flags and Much More

 

Jessica Duchen interviewed Juan Diego Florez for The Independent:

 "Alfredo Kraus I love for his elegance," says Flórez. "Pavarotti's a great example of the joy of singing, the joy of sound – his tone is as beautiful as the sun."

Juan Diego Flórez Fix

It's been way too long since we've posted about JDF, so here's a nice photo of the Peruvian tenor with Jesus Lopez Cobos in Madrid. He's currently at Teatro Real singing Arturo in Bellini's I Puritani, which opens in a couple days.

 

Juan Diego Florez Busts Out Those High C's In Barcelona, Too

 

Awesome Liceu blogger GTL Torn T has lots of stuff about Juan Diego Florez's latest event in his whistlestop campaign: the Fille du Regiment nine-high-Cs extravaganza. With sound files.

Diana Damrau and Juan Diego Flórez Out Sick for Tonight's La Fille

 

(Photo credit: Mary Altaffer)

The Metropolitan Opera kills us softly with the news that tonight's La Fille du Régiment leads, Diana Damrau (sweetie down there) and Juan Diego Flórez (hottie up there), have pulled out of the production due to sickness.

Filling in are Lawrence "JDF" Brownlee and Leah Partridge.

 
(Photo credit: Mary Altaffer)

Juan Diego Florez, The Philadelphia Orchestra, And Sting: Eugene Ormandy's Ghost Is Very, Very Angry

It's hard to argue that Juan Diego Florez is not the greatest tenore di grazia, it's either him or Tito Schipa, and even Placido Domingo himself anointed JDF as "el màs grande tenor ligero de la historia"; and it's also quite difficult to argue that Sting is not the most annoying washed-up pop singer out there; so what's about to happen on the stage in Philly, this coming January 30, at the Academy of Music 153rd Anniversary Concert, is in a way a memorable showdown in the history of music -- a battle of giants.

It's not a duet, OK, but it's still pretty weird.

And the Award Goes to: Juan Diego Florez (via Placidone) for Hispanics for Los Angeles Opera

(Photo Credit: © Steve Cohn/ Steve Cohn Photography)

The California-based organization, Hispanics for Los Angeles Opera, celebrated their Twelfth Annual Plácido Domingo Awards this past Sunday, November 29. The event took place in the Grand Hall of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion after the opening night performance of Barbiere, and the sparkling (albeit exhausted) Barbiere cast also showed up to get their groove on and party with Placidone: Juan Diego Flórez's Count Almaviva, Joyce DiDonato's Rosina, and Nathan Gunn's Figaro.

Flórez had an extra-special reason to celebrate, as he was awarded by Honorary Chair, Plácido Domingo, for his contributions as a Hispanic artist who has done great things for opera. And OC's Yamamotos.

 
(Photo Credit: © Steve Cohn/ Steve Cohn Photography)

*~Under the cut --> photos of DiDonato & Gunn!~*

Juan Diego Flórez Rawks the Nehru

Flórez puts on his game face and graces the stage at Peru's Estadio Miguel Grau del Callao in a Saturday night concert.

 

Click the link below for a few more...

Key Kid: More Juan Diego Florez in Peru

After presenting the Pavarotti stamp, the Peruvian tenor posed with singer Magaly Solier and composer Pedro Suárez Vértiz at a press conference. The three will perform together on November 14 in a concert at Peru's Estadio Miguel Grau del Callao. Below, the mayor of Callao presented the tenor with the key to the city. More like the key to our heart!

JDF Introduces The Pavarotti Stamp

Juan Diego Florez, last seen singing (not too well) "Grenada" at an incredibly cheesy version of "Dancing With The Stars" on Peruvian TV, suddendly remembered his status of más grande tenor ligero de todos los tiempos, and gracefully introduced to the public the Peruvian postage stamp dedicated to the memory of Luciano Pavarotti. Video here.

(via)

Florez @ 'El Show de los Sueños'

Roberto Bolle, the man whose public image is by far the best-managed in classical music, refused several times a lot of money that had been offered to him to appear on a monstrously successful Italian reality TV show, "Amici", a sort of "American Idol" (said Bolle: "Their success makes me happy; it's a good way to expose the TV watching public to dance. But ballet is different, it needs a different kind of TV show, and that's why I would not appear there").

Juan Diego Florez, the man whose public image is the second-best-managed in classical music behind Bolle's (thanks to the always solid advice of our dear Maestro Palacio), chose instead to appear last night on the Peruvian "Dancing with the Stars", "El Show de los Sueños".

The results are here: click below to watch:

"Terra Amica", JDF, Pesaro

Because lo-fi, blurry, ghostly, almosty invisible, badly recorded, b00tleg Juan Diego is always better than no Juan Diego.

Zelmira, Backstage

Kudos to YouTube user lucavi58, who has kindly uploaded a couple of zany videos taken backstage during the Zelmira rehearsals in Pesaro: