From a correspondent:

Just before the 5pm scheduled start of Die Frau Ohne Schatten the Staatsoper announced that Nina Stemme was unable to perform (fallen ill at short notice) as the Dyer’s wife.

They tracked down Miina-Liisa Värelä, a recent Isolde, and flew her in from Finland. She was due to arrive at Munich airport at 6.10pm. A police escort drove her into Munich. The start of the opera was rescheduled for 7pm.

The festival has acknowledged that a female extra was seriously injured when she fell off the top stage level during a rehearsal of Mozart’s Magic Flute.

The injured woman was rushed to hospital with a broken limb.

An official statement said: ‘There has been an accident at work, that has also been reported and is regrettable. In the Magic Flute, which is a very complex stage design, we made sure that all the artists and extras were instructed accordingly. Normally, a serious accident where negligence is suspected is investigated. That’s not the case. It was an unfortunate accident.’

The pianist Alexander Romanovsky, a professor at the Royal College of Music in London, has taken sides in the conflict by playing a street recital in a strategic Ukrainian city that was captured two months ago by the Russians.

He does so in the presence of Russian propaganda cameras and giving an interview to Russian media.

There may be consequences.

The violinist is Petr Lundstrem, a Moscow-based pro-Putin propagandist. He likes to visit occupied Ukraine and claims to have raised 2.6 million rubles to purchase equipment for ‘our’ Russian army.

A former Zahkhar Bron pupil, Lundstrem’s dream, he says, ‘is to buy an anti-drone rifle. The thing is expensive (under a million), but absolutely deadly.’

We learn with great distress of the death of Gérard Corneloup, a music critic and historian who reviewed for Le Figaro Lyon and was the author of several works of music.

He was found battered in the foyer of his apartment building in Lyon, France, and died some days later in hospital.

His empty wallet was found several streets away.

Gérard was 76.

The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce announced on Friday that the Italian tenor, who died in 2007, will receive a star on the city’s sidewalk.

The event will take place on August 24 in the presence of his daughter, Cristina Pavarotti and the conductor James Conlon.

Luciano will be the 2,730th star in this terrestial Hollywood galaxy.

Nessun dorma, you never know what’s coming next.

Maria Callas – Tosca 1964

Click here for tickets: subscription tv

Maria Callas was a Greek tragedy. Her enormous professional success, her determination to make herself over from the fat girl constantly shunned when young, into the greatest star opera had ever seen, her unparallelled musicality, her dramatic persona, all this was in counterbalance with a private life that was an almost unbroken disaster.

The Diva to end all Divas, yes, but what lies beneath could be heard in her voice, even when that miraclous instrument began to fray. Perhaps particularly when it began to let her down. No one did Diva like Maria Callas. As her career declined, her affair with the billionaire Onassis dominated the tabloids.

With her 1964 Royal Opera House comeback production of Tosca, she sought to set things right. Using the footage of  that performance as its primary focus, this film tells her story from today’s perspective with interviews from fans, like Rufus Wainwright, and opera experts like ROH director Antonio Pappano.

The outstanding dramatic soprano Laura De Souza has died, her agent reports.

A Brazilian, she was a member of the Staatstheater Kassel ensemble from 1991 to 1997 and of the Deutsches Nationalteather Weimar from 1997 to 1998 before embarking on an international career and becoming a public favourite in Rio de Janeiro.

She obtained a PhD with a thesis on ”Yoga and singing voice: application of Yoga techniques in vocal pedagogy’.

 

Rich Man’s Frug – Sweet Charity – Bob Fosse

 My friend and fellow critic Gerald Berkowitz finds wonderful things for you on YouTube. This amazing piece of dance video is a classic number made for the musical Sweet Charity. Choreography, Bob Fosse, of course. Stylistically, it’s a perfect encapsulation of its 1960s time and of his genius.

The lead dancer in this clip is Suzanne Charny but neither Jerry nor I know who the bald-headed mustachioed featured dancer is. This is the kind of thing that keep me up at night. Help, readers, please. 

Read more

The New York Times has discovered Santtu-Matias Rouvali and visited him on his farm.

He and his wife, Elina, live in the property’s main house but make use of all the surrounding buildings. They include a sauna, a guesthouse with music and pole-dancing studios, and a garage with a room for Rouvali to slaughter and skin the game he hunts, like ducks and deer. He fishes in the nearby lake, where he was having a beach built (along with a waterfront sauna). They eat everything he kills and fill the table with dishes made from other local ingredients, such as foraged chanterelles or new potatoes from a neighbor.

“I need this,” Rouvali said, “to kind of rest and have a mental break and not really think about music.”

Too much information?

His latest tweet shows he has run out of clean shirts and is sporting some nifty tats on his biceps.

Doesn’t affect the voice.

Or so it appears from his latest post.

From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:

I dithered for weeks over whether or not to review this release, for reasons that will soon become clear. In the course of my indecision I listened to it at least ten times, so much so that it became a signifier of the state of our world in the war-torn, climate-seared summer of 2022. It is now a candidate for record of the year….

Read on here.

And here.

En francais ici.