A gauntlet has been thrown at the Met by Michael Capasso, general director of the revived New York City Opera. He’s speaking to ZealNYC:

City Opera is the ‘people’s opera.’ By comparison, the Met I think of as the United Nations, it belongs to the world but it just happens to be in New York. The Met is a large, international, fantastic opera company. But it’s not uniquely a New York institution, it’s a world institution.

When I look at programming for City Opera, I think of our success in the past and in particular the way that Maestro Rudel would program. He would sell out performances of Carmen and Bohème on the weekends and put obscure repertoire like The Boy Who Grew Too Fast or Street Scene mid-week. He used warhorses to pay for his obscure opera habit.

So our City Opera can be much more of a New York institution and our programming, in keeping with the City Opera tradition, will be some standard repertoire and more contemporary and American opera.

We program Candide which has a great track record for the company and we follow it with a Respighi opera that hasn’t been performed in New York in eighty years. A very City Opera type piece of programming.

Angels in America comes in June and it’s no mistake that we’re doing it during Pride Month, a commitment to doing a gay themed opera in Pride Month going forward.

Read more here.

 

The death has been announced of Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher, daughter of the singer Eddie Fisher and actor Debbie Reynolds. She died at 60, several days after an in-flight heart attack while returning from a publicity trip to London.

She was the ex-wife of singer-songwriter Paul Simon.

Carrie was Hollywood royalty with singing pedigree. She was also a powerful role model to a generation of young women.

Nice to be reminded of an old fave that has dropped off the radar.

Fine performance this month in Cologne.

It has been announced in Moscow that the Mariinsky conductor will lead an extraordinary concert on December 29 in memory of those who died in the Tupolev crash on Christmas Day.

Among the 62 Red Army ensemble members who lost their lives were, a spokesman, said ‘colleagues and friends who were associated with creative projects of Valery Gergiev, the Mariinsky Theatre and the Moscow Easter Festival.’

 

Many of those who took part in this 2013 video died in the hideous Black Sea air crash on Christmas Day.

May their souls find eternal rest.

 

The authorities stepped in to stop the Iranian-Armenian cellist Melanie Awanessian from playing in a Tehran Christmas concert, despite previously granting her all necessary ermits.

The concert, starring the Iranian pop singer Benjamin, was to have taken place in Tehran’s Milad Tower.

‘We just wanted to give pleasure to our Christian fellow-citizens,’ said Benjamin’s spokesman.

The Russian-Israeli US-based virtuoso, in a candid video interview with Zsolt Bognar, confesses to constant attacks of nerves, accompanied by the need for approbation by other pianists.

‘I get very nervous… before a concert it’s a struggle to go on stage…. you have many fears,’ he confesses. ‘But then (you find that) everybody is in the same boat.’

‘I always wanted to have advice from others. I played a lot for Barenboim. I played for Radu Lupu, Murray Perahia… I always have the necessity to learn more.’

‘It’s a fascinating life, but achievement is not something I am proud of.’

Watch.


photo: Todd Rosenberg

from Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain, pp. 209-210:

Then Bronfman appears. Bronfman the brontosaur! Mr. Fortissimo! Enter Bronfman to play Prokofiev at such a pace and with such bravado as to knock my morbidity clear out of the ring. He is conspicuously massive through the upper torso, a force of nature camouflaged in a sweatshirt, somebody who has strolled into the music shed out of a circus where he is the strongman and who takes on the piano as a ridiculous challenge to the gargantuan strength he revels in. Yefim Bronfman looks less like the person who is going to play the piano than like the guy who should be moving it. I had never before seen anybody go at a piano like this sturdy little barrel of an unshaven Russian Jew. When he’s finished, I thought, They’ll have to throw the thing out. He crushes it. He doesn’t let that piano conceal a thing. Whatever’s in there is going to come out, and come out with its hands in the air. And when it does, everything there out in the open, the last of the last pulsation, he himself gets up and goes, leaving behind him our redemption. With a jaunty wave, he is suddenly gone, and though he takes all his fire off with him like no less a force than Prometheus, our own lives now seem inextinguishable. Nobody is dying, NOBODY — not if Bronfman has anything to say about it!

Our social affairs editor reports: Daniel Auner married Barbara de Menezes Galante, his violin partner in the Auner Quartet, in Vienna this summer, and very nice it was, too.

But Barbara is Brazilian and it doesn’t really count without a bossa nova.

So the couple, together with dozens of friends, are heading off for Sao Paolo to seal their vows on New Year’s Eve with a party that should run well into 2017.

Many congratulations.

 

A hyper-rare television interview, released today.

‘It goes okay?’ she asks the journalist.

‘Music is wonderful,’ she says, ‘but the profession is not.’

Click here if the video is blocked in your region.