richard53dog

I have actually been trying very hard to enjoy operas more. But I did listen to "V'adoro pupille", as you kindly recommended Paul Parish, and I do think that the singing and words are lovely. I wouldn't have said 'heart-breakingly beautiful', but then again, I probably don't enjoy opera as much as others do [unfortunately]. When I listened to only the instrumental parts, I found the same feeling I do when listening to Handel's other pieces. ? (I'm sorry-I'm sorry!!) But as for his operas, I will always be willing to listen! Another of Cleopatra's arias that you might "connect" with is Piangero, la Sorte Mia. Cleopatra is all alone and is mouring where life has taken her. It's a very slow aria but as a contrast the soprano line goes up and down. Very mournfull (Giulio Cesare is another of my favorite operas)

I'm glad for Hubbe too and hope it works out well for both him and the RDB

I just love Orfeo (and Alceste and Iphigenia T also) . So much of the music just seems to connect directly with my brain and in it's pure way it is intensely expressive. Gluck was a bridge between the Baroque era and the Classical one in music so his reform pieces are much simpler and direct than in Baroque. He wrote several versions of some of his late operas, the version of Orfeo I'd love to hear someday is the Paris version, Orphee, with a tenor in the title role. The opera sounds that much more elequent in French to me. But the Vienna one in Italian is the one usually done and then there are some "hybrid" versions. Gluck fan!

Thanks Ray. Not exactly a rave was it?

I find this scene just so beautiful; Fonteyn is magical and you really get the feeling that she is a water sprite , playing. To me this is by far the best scene in the ballet, some of which I find lumpy, dramatically. Still I think the video is well worth getting.

I see too that included is a release of "Natasha".

One of the selections that I really enjoy is the Reader's Digest(heavily cut) version of the Shades Scene from Bayadere with a younger Dundinskaya and Chabukiani. This is glossily filmed and dates from 1940 or so

Kathleen is right on the money here. Strauss wanted a very young male character which would be difficult to pull off by an actually male, whether tenor or countertenor. Musically either voice type would have a very difficult time with the music. Strauss wrote for a soprano even though today we usually hear a high mezzo. But tranposed down an octave, most tenors would find it unreasonable high, not the actual range but the lie of the music or tessitura. A counter tenor would sing at score pitch and again the part would lay very high. Plus the orchestration is very thick and countertenors, with their lighter voices would tend to have difficulty cutting through a huge Strauss orchestra.

Casting in opera seems on the one had ridiculous--large mature people playing emaciated consumptive 20-somethings--yet on the other hand it's rigourous, carefully delimited by vocal types: if you can sing Zerlina in Don Giovanni you won't sing Brunhilde in Die Walkure (there are other, less extreme examples too). This of course was not always the case; think of all the stuff Callas and others of her generation sung that really didn't "fit" their voices. As far as women singing breeches roles, the main concern is aural, not visual (unles of course a woman dressing as a man is part of a comic plot). An awful lot of opera casting requires suspension of disbelief, primarily centered around the physical attributes of the singers, but also their way of acting. Trouser parts, same thing. And Baroque opera requires even more, not only for the the casting but also for the plots which make 19th century plots seem almost realistic. More and more though opera is being cast with singers who look like their characters (although they may not sound like them

I think so too. I wonder just how the ticket sales went. If it sold out early, that might be a clear signal to mgnt about demand. However if sales for the one performance were only middling..........

I like reading history , bios as well, so I read a lot of historical biographies. I liked Weir's Eleanor, Mary S, and the Princes so I'll look out for Isabella. Right now I'm reading Mountains of the Pharaohs by Zahi Hawass

I wish they would stop PLAYING Carmina Burana!!!!!!!! I sat through a concert of it last fall. Ugh

And Ferri's farewell R&J at ABT will be the next night. A weekend for goodbyes..........

Yes, I have the DVD too. I love the soft, sad quality of her Odette. This is an Odette that knows that things will not turn out "happy ever after". Her Odile is a bit soft grained, but all in all I agree she's a lovely dancer.

This is pretty much my thinking. The momentum of the pdd is lost if the ballerina wobbles or grinds her way through the fouettes. And I don't think it's a valid conclusion to say that if the dancer can't do them she shouldn't do the role. I think they are a trick step and have been since they were first done. Done well they are very effective, done not so well a negative.

The Met Opera has announced it's plans for 2007-2008 Of course there is lots of production info, etc but aside from that it looks like they are considering the showings here and abroad of the HD theater telecasts of operas this past season a success. They are increasing the number from 6 to (at least)8 for next season. Since there were several threads here on a couple of the theater showings, and lots of comment, I thought I would post the link with the coverage of the season information from the NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/arts/music/27met.html

I would say it was one more victim of the massive cuts made for the film. Using a hatchet, the filmers got the running length of the film down to 90 minutes. So much of the ballet didn't make it to film. Possibly Act 3 suffered the most.

What Helene notes is apt. I didn't mention the individual emails, digests, etc because I forgot about them! I don't get the emails at all, I read from from list itself . That's my own preference so I don't have a huge amount of email coming it. So in that respect, except for the addressing options, it works for me a lot like Ballet Talk

A huge, "somewhat" moderated opera board is Opera-L It's sits on the CUNY server. It is pretty Met-centric Here's the URL to read posts (you can read without joing) But from the same archive page you can do searches and also join and post (2 posts per day) http://listserv.cuny.edu/archives/opera-l.html

This ticks me off too. Every school play, every live performance of any genre all seem to get automatic standing ovations (ASO). It's like a currency that is completely worthless. How do you honor the truly fine performance? Pretty difficult!

I'm away from my video of the 1976 Makarova/Nagy telecast but (without checking) I'm pretty sure the swan have long skirts in this performance.

Right. I remember seeing photos of ads from both Japan, and later, London. Maybe 1974 or so?

Speaking of Cranko's Jeu de Cartes............. I saw this on a mixed ABT bill last Summer. Bocca was the joker and I started to notice he was fussing A LOT with his cap. He kept pushing it forward and then back. I picked up that he was becoming irritated. Possibly, the elastic holding the cap on wasn't in the greatest shape. It never actually fell off but after fussing with it continually for the first two deals, he pitched it into the wings. So then he was bareheaded for the rest of the piece. Unlike the curly blond Joffrey wig Mel mentions, this was a curly red wig.

In the January 2006 run of Swan Lakes at NYCB, I caught the second performance of Sofiane Sylve as O/O. The buzz from the first performance was that her Odile was very showy and virtuostic (multiple turns, etc) When it came to the BS pdd coda, she seemed distracted. The fouette's slowed down. All of a sudden, about 3/4 way through the turns, part of her crown detacted from her head and went flying. I thought, maybe she had some inkling it was coming loose!

Actually, they were sweatpants and they were very loose and baggy. And they became more shapeless during the short scene. I wondered why that all came to pass. When McKenzie came out for his curtain call, he was wearing tights. So why could he make a quick costume change for the calls but not a little earlier for the last scene? You would think they could hold the curtain or at least keep the tomb scene dark until everyone was set , costume wise