THIS SATURDAY, October 5, 2013, 12:55pm
Live in
HD
For
instructions on how to attend HD Simulcasts
and Encores, scroll down past the weekly listings to the FAQs.
EUGENE ONEGIN
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| ANNA NETREBKO as TATIANA |
See interview with the director Deborah Warner about Eugene Onegin:
http://www.metoperafamily.org/opera/eugene-onegin-tchaikovsky-tickets.aspx?src=stbuc
http://www.metoperafamily.org/opera/eugene-onegin-tchaikovsky-tickets.aspx?src=stbuc
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WSBE: (Comcast 294, Cox 808, Full Channel 109,
and Verizon 478)
LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR
Great Performances at the Met
 |
Saturday, October 5~ 8pm; Sunday, October 9 ~ 3am; Monday, October 7 ~ 12am
LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR
Natalie Dessay stars in Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" as the fragile title character, whose brother (Ludovic Tézier) forces her into an arranged marriage due to his hatred for the family of the man (Joseph Calleja) she loves. Host: Renée Fleming.
DURATION: 150 MIN.
DETAILS: [CC] [STEREO]
GENRE: PARENTS PICKS
New York City Opera Announces It Will Close
By MICHAEL COOPER
Updated, 10:22 a.m. | It is curtains for New York City Opera. The 70-year-old company, long a star in the city’s cultural firmament, announced on Tuesday morning that its emergency fund-raising appeal had fallen short, and that it would begin the process of dissolving itself and filing for bankruptcy.
“New York City Opera did not achieve the goal of its emergency appeal,” Risa B. Heller, a spokeswoman for the company, said in a statement. “Today, the board and management will begin the necessary financial and operational steps to wind down the company including initiating the Chapter 11 process.”
Earlier in September, City Opera had announced that it would need to raise $7 million by the end of the month to pay for the rest of its season. The drive fell short, though, so Saturday night’s performance of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera “Anna Nicole” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music stands to be the company’s last. Its first performance, of Puccini’s “Tosca,” was given in 1944.
The company, which has struggled to attract donations since it moved out of Lincoln Center in 2011 to save money, only managed to raise about $2 million of its $7 million goal, an official said.
The company, which has said that it hopes to be able to reimburse people who have bought tickets to the three productions that had been scheduled for the remainder of the season, sent an e-mail to subscribers Tuesday telling them of the decision to cancel the season and “wind down the company.”
George Steel, the company’s general manager and artistic director, who led the move away from Lincoln Center, said in the e-mail that “we thank you for your continued support over the years and for making New York City Opera truly ‘the people’s opera.’ ”
A Kickstarter campaign that the company had launched to try to raise $1 million of the $7 million it sought fell far short of its goal: when it shut down at midnight, it had gotten commitments for $301,019 from 2,108 backers.
The company was launched 70 yeas ago with the help of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, who wanted to provide what he called “cultural entertainment at popular prices.” On Monday, as it became clear that the fund-raising drive was falling short, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg — a billionaire who is a major patron of the arts, and who has supported the company in the past — told reporters that neither he nor the city would ride to the rescue of the opera. He said that the company’s “business model doesn’t seem to be working.’’
Tino Gagliardi, the president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, which represents the orchestra, noted that the “musicians made great sacrifices in wages and benefits to keep the City Opera afloat.” The musicians were once guaranteed a weekly salary of 29 weeks a year, but in recent years have been paid instead by the rehearsal and performance.
The musicians had protested the move from Lincoln Center and the decisions to cut back the number of performances each year, which the company said was essential to survive. In a statement, Mr. Gagliardi said that “management’s reckless decisions to move out of the opera’s newly renovated home at Lincoln Center, slash the season schedule and abandon an accessible repertoire have predictably resulted in financial disaster for the company.”
He said that the musicians would like to “continue working together as a cohesive ensemble should the opportunity arise.”
The company’s demise has saddened New Yorkers. Rosalind Nadell Scheer, 91, sang the role of Mercedes in the company’s production of Carmen during its first season, in 1944. (A review in The New York Times singled her out near the end, saying, “Of the lesser roles the most compellingly sung was the Mercedes of Rosalind Nadell, a youthful contralto with a rich, vibrant voice of fine promise.’’)
On Monday morning, after the company’s bankruptcy was announced, she said, “It hurts — it really hurts.”
Follow Michael Cooper on Twitter at @coopnytimes.
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Yes, Mayor Bloomberg is the main support of the Met Opera but surely, he can afford to support another one!
Bloomberg Says City Opera Is On Its Own
By MICHAEL COOPER and KATE TAYLOR
Updated, 6:48 p.m. | Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is not riding to the rescue of New York City Opera, which has said that it plans to file for bankruptcy and dissolve itself if it fails to raise $7 million by the end of Monday.
From its inception, City Opera has had a close relationship with City Hall. It was Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, after all, who helped get it off the ground 70 years ago as part of a drive to provide what he called “cultural entertainment at popular prices.” Mayor La Guardia was so closely associated with the company that he was the one to announce that its first music director would be Laszlo Halasz.
So it is an odd twist of fate that, seven decades later, City Opera stands on the brink of bankruptcy when the current occupant of City Hall, Mayor Bloomberg, happens to be a major patron of the arts in his private life. Mr. Bloomberg said Monday that it would be “sad” if the opera company closed, but that neither the city nor his private foundation would step in to save it.
Speaking at a news conference, Mr. Bloomberg said that as he understands it, the company has been unable to attract the kind of money it needs. And even if they did, he said, “the business model doesn’t seem to be working.”
But he added that “city government can’t go and support all of the arts institutions,” noting that while the city gives some grants, he has had to cut back on them to pay for other priorities, such as education.
“My foundation’s made up for some of it, but we have lots of other things to do, too, and we can’t just do it ourselves,’’ he said.
A spokesman for the mayor said later that Mr. Bloomberg had been a financial supporter of City Opera for about 15 years, and that his foundation had worked with other foundations this year to try to help them. But the spokesman declined to say how much the mayor had contributed. A City Opera program this week listed Bloomberg Philanthropies as a “benefactor,” which it said required a contribution of $500,000 or more this year, but not as a “great benefactor,” which required a contribution of more than $1 million.
The spokesman said that the mayor’s foundations had also paid for a consultant this month to help the struggling company develop a fundraising strategy.
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PERRY BRASS
Did AIDS Kill New York City Opera?
Posted: 09/30/2013 8:36 pm
When I think about the death of New York City Opera -- and
it will be dead soon, if it's not already -- I think about another death. His
name was Richard Gold, and he died of AIDS-related complications back in the
late 1980s. Richard was a good-looking, slightly portly young man who came from
a hyper-bourgeois Jewish family from Queens that did well in the health care
industry (in fact, they ran a group of nursing homes); he moved to the Upper
West Side in the early 1970s and worked for the family company, and back when
most of my friends were struggling artists, he had a coop, a car, and one of
those prosperous lifestyles that simply befuddled me. He was nuts about New
York City Opera. Actually he was nuts about Beverly Sills, or
"Bubbles," as she was known to her family and close friends.
"I'm an über-fan," he told me gleefully. (This was
back when "gleefully" meant "all aglitter," not "in
the manner of a fan of the FOX television series Glee.")
He saw Bev for the first time when he was still in high
school. His parents took him to New York City Opera, and he was smitten. It was
hard for him to keep it a secret like he did the fact that he was queer. (He
went through an obligatory engagement to a Nice Jewish Girl in Queens, then
panicked and got out of it.) He could not contain that he was crazy about Bev,
and even his family caught Bubbles fever. They all got repeating subscriptions
to New York City Opera season, and when Richard was able to leave Queens and
set up housekeeping (with a boyfriend who was a high-style interior decorator),
he volunteered at the opera selling opera tchotchkes in the
second-floor-promenade lobby at the New York State Theater.
He was around the opera so much that the miracle happened:
He met her. She became his friend. Maybe not a close friend, but definitely
someone Sills knew and, with her own sharp eye to New York City Opera's
survival, cultivated.
Richard Gold and his numerous peers represented the next
generation of New York City Opera supporters: young, aggressively crazy about
opera, and solvent enough to do something about it.
By the time I met Richard, in the mid 1970s, through a
mutual friend (OK, mutual once-boyfriend), he was awash in the opera, and
financially and socially in a place to bask in the reflected magical glamor
that opera is all about. (Richard got his parents to endow a scholarship for
young singers at New York City Opera; he became active on committees to raise
funds for it.) And magic was what it was all about in that period, before the
bean counters completely took over the arts. Life in New York was still cheap
enough and easy enough that you could exist as a total "culture vulture,"
someone who lived for art, and not drive yourself crazy over a job or money.
Many of my friends were culture vultures, and culture, high
culture, nosebleed high, was being made here. For an almost ridiculously small
sum you could go to New York City Ballet every night, and when it was off and
New York City Opera was in season (they both shared the same stage of the New
York State Theater, built to George Balanchine's dance specifications), you
could hyperventilate your way through their season.
The Metropolitan Opera, across Lincoln Center's plaza, was
stupid. It was stodgy. It was fat, old people with fat, old money. At the New
York State Theater you saw hot guys in full leather gabbing about Bev's
Violetta in La traviata, or Samuel Ramey's naked chest in Boito's Mefistofeles.
You met your friends there at intermission, sometimes a dozen of them. There
were no cellphones, so you talked to people. Opera was high art that sometimes
dickered with the dirt, but it had to remain high. It was where kings and the
common people mixed, under the eyes of Phoebus Apollo, god of light and music.
That was what made opera so spectacular: You completely forgot yourself in its
magic. It took you to that white-light-post-orgasmic place that bypassed most
of the brain but still, strangely enough, came through the intellect. New York
City Opera tried to expand it. Push it. Years before the Met went experimental,
they did a Traviata where Violetta, the courtesan with a heart of gold, dies of
AIDS.
People were horrified. Opera was not supposed to do this. It
was scary to the point of revolting. We were sure that we could see Apollo in
tears. But we were the ones in tears. A whole generation was dying -- the guys
who lived for New York City Opera -- and the question, never answered, was who
would take their place.
Beverly Sills went to Richard Gold's funeral. I sent his
mother a condolence card. She wrote me back that his whole life had been
devoted to music. I remembered earlier that he had broken up with his interior
decorator boyfriend because he simply did not love opera enough. Certainly New
York City Opera. The boyfriend was more of an occasional,
old-money-Metropolitan devotee. Richard started having symptoms early: losing
weight, diarrhea. He waved it off. He told me, "Perry, the difference
between us is that you are involved with the gay community, and I am involved
with the music community. My world is bigger than yours."
I replied, "Don't bet on it."
It's painful to think about it. Life changes. Regarding the
last seasons of New York City Opera, I felt that they were grabbing at straws,
trying to figure out how to get another generation interested in an art form
that is basically alien from "normal" life and yet is big enough to
contain it. We have gone back to a Louis XIV "Sun King" economy --
the top 0.01 percent owns most of us at this point -- without the genius to
capture art and use it as Louis did. Art, like opera, is revoltingly elitist,
and that is where its glamor and magic comes from. The big money is still at
the Met because the Metropolitan Opera has retained its role as an
international company. The amount of money necessary to save New York City
Opera -- about $7 million -- people like David Koch and his crowd could belch
out after dinner. But what is so heartbreaking to me is that a whole generation
that would have fought like mad to save it is now dust.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/perry-brass/did-aids-kill-new-york-city-opera_b_4003493.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false#sb=4117447,b=facebook
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Saturday, November 30, 2013, 7:30 PM, Cathedral of Saints Peter & Paul in Providence and Sunday, December 8, 2013, 3:00 PM, Saint Joseph's Church, Newport
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SAVE THE DATE! At the Jane Pickens Theater in Newport
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| La Scala, Milano |
LIVE SIMULCAST: LA SCALA OPENING NIGHT FROM MILAN :LA TRAVIATA ON DECEMBER 7TH AT 1:00PM
 |
| Diana Damrau |
OVERVIEW:
La Scala officially inaugurates its opera season with an opening night regarded as the European cultural event of the year. This year, La Scala presents Verdi’s beloved work La Traviata, broadcast live! Opening night in Milan is always December 7th. This year it is a Saturday. The opera will shown on our big screen as it is being performed in Milan.
Performed at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan
Sung in Italian with English subtitles
Starring Diana Damrau, Giuseppina Piunti, Mara Zampieri
Conducted by Daniele Gatti
Staging and sets by Dmitri Tcherniakov
New Teatro alla Scala production
December 7, 2013 1:00pm
Running Time: 2 hours 40 minutes intermission included
Sung in Italian with English subtitles
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OPERA ON THE INTERNET
WITH
DAVE D' AGUANNO
With
the 2013/2014 opera season gathering momentum, this is a particularly exciting
weekend for opera fans, especially when you consider the deluxe casting of
baritone Mariusz Kwiecin, soprano Anna Netrebko, and tenor Piotr Beczala in
this Saturday afternoon's HD-transmission from the Met of Tchaikovsky's
"Eugene Onegin" (shown at several area movie theatres, and the 1st
HD-transmission of the season).
In addition to the above Met performance,
there's a LIVE (FREE) audio-stream tonight at 7:25 pm of Mozart's "Cosi
fan Tutte" with a young cast of singers, including tenor Matthew Polenzani
with whom many of us are familiar, via last season's HD-transmissions of
Donizetti's "Elixir of Love" & "Maria Stuarda."
(www.metopera.org/)
"Cosi fan Tutte" is also featured in
a June 2013 performance from the San Francisco Opera, which comes to us via NPR
as part of its series of broadcasts from last season's S.F. offerings.
(www.wrti.org/)
Wagner enthusiasts also have reason to rejoice
as two of his operas can be heard this weekend as well. On French Radio,
there's a performance (from Paris) of "The Flying Dutchman." The
concert itself actually took place on September 18 of this year.
(http://sites.radiofrance.fr/francemusique/accueil/)
A LIVE performance of "Parsifal" is
on tap on Swedish Radio, with Katerina Dalayman singing the role of Kundry in
this Royal Swedish Opera performance, as she did in last season's
HD-transmission of this opera that the Met gave us.
(http://sverigesradio.se/p2/)
That particular performance of
"Parsifal" featured tenor Jonas Kaufmann in the title role, as many
of you may recall. Well, Kaufmann appears in TWO opera broadcasts during the
course of the following week. On Saturday afternoon, the Vienna State Opera has
him in a LIVE performance of Puccini's "La Fanciulla del West" which
is, as far as I know, a role debut for Kaufmann.
(http://oe1.orf.at/)
Then on Monday afternoon (October 7), BBC Radio
3 has him singing the title role in a May 18, 2013 performance of Verdi's
"Don Carlo" which also happens to feature baritone Mariusz Kwiecin as
Rodrigo. (Note: The BBC makes the broadcast available for your listening
pleasure for several days after the actual Monday afternoon broadcast.)
(www.bbc.co.uk/radop3/)
Enjoy!
DAVE
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BLO's 2013/2014 Season
opens on October 4
Single tickets are now on sale for Boston Lyric Opera's 2013/2014 Season of all-new productions, including the season opening world premiere new English adaptation of Mozart's The Magic Flute. This season BLO welcomes an international lineup featuring Sarah Coburn, John Tessier, Emily Hindrichs, Morris Robinson, Caroline Worra, Nadine Sierra, and Music Director David Angus.
Join us for a thrilling season by securing your seats today! Tickets may be purchased online at www.citicenter.org, by phone at 1-866-348-9738, or by visiting the Citi Center box office at the Wang Theatre located at 265 Tremont Street.
Interested in seeing more than one opera this season?
subscribe today and receive the best seats at the best prices!
To become a subscriber please call BLO Audience Services at 617-542-6772.
Boston Lyric Opera
11 Avenue de Lafayette
Boston, MA 02111
http://blo.org/this-season/?utm_source=wordfly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Singleticketsonsale&utm_content=version_A
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Sunday, October 6, at 8PM (11pm in Rhode Island)
click on http://www.kdfc.com and then on "Listen Live"
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Mark Adamo
She has long been condemned as a harlot, or dismissed as a
minor player in a well-known sacred narrative, but ancient manuscripts tell a
very different story, giving us a striking new viewpoint on Jesus' message to
humanity. Mary Magdalene is placed at the center of the story in this world
premiere by Mark Adamo. Kevin Newbury directs a cast that includes Sasha Cooke,
William Burden, Maria Kanyova and Nathan Gunn as Yeshua. Michael Christie, in
his San Francisco Opera debut, conducts. |
| Statue of Giuseppe Verdi in SF's Golden Gate Park |
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Just released by Decca MP3s!
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The Met radio broadcast season is
over for now...
check this space the first week
of December.
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NO OPERA ON WGBH TV
THIS WEEK!
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