“Brother, can you spare a dime?”
This scene above is perfect for the winter the ARTS are experiencing currently. What a cold, horrid world it would be without ballet, and symphony and opera. Everything and everyone runs to be hip, and modern and loses something big in their hurry; AUTHENTICITY.
Cultural Minister PLEASE!!!
I am secretly hoping for a miracle for the world of opera. That our new president with his Chief of Staff actually having been a ballet dancer, perhaps someone close might whisper, “Help!”
Who else LOVED seeing the moment of history at the inauguration ushered in with a violin, clarinet and cello and piano? Yes, classical musicians, albeit, canned classical music to protect the tuning on such a “winter’s day”- but decidedly a great nod to the world of real music. We need someone fighting for more than the measley 50 million currently being earmarked for the Arts. We need a cultural minister. For all the music not just Jazz and contempory, ALL.
My inner ” diavolo”, (don’t we all have one?) is so frustrated recently.
Go to the opera these days and you get wonderful voices singing every opera the same. Wagner melds with Puccini, Verdi sounds like Mozart. The style is lost. BIG stars arrive and know little of the words or use them really. Conductors cry about singers must “lose the old fashioned” portamenti and maintain for the good of the show the motto “singer last”, “must blend in”, “the director is important” is their best offering. Have yet to see anyone pay to hear a director sing.
These young pups USE the music to make a name for themselves because let’s face it, how many orchestra’s are open for a new head. Opera seems the easiest pickings. Step on stage to sing a debut in a role with a maestro, and more than likely, HE is just seeing the score for the first time. Who will learn from whom? Big loss and it is happening so quietly, drowned out in a sea of press releases and happy promoters.
If they get to the end of a show reasonably well, that is all they care about. My God, even a Callas was to be molded by a Visconti or a Zeffirelli. Inspired, challenged, guided, informed. She said thousands of times they made life more fascinating, and the work sprang from her, one genius to another.
Is anyone yet tired of the all the new ideas yet?
Men, pants down urinating or sitting on toilet seats to open Verdi’s great “Un Ballo in Maschera”? Bumble Bees in “Nabucco”? Iago masturbating while Desdemona and Otello sing the magnificent music of Otello? A young tenor working under a car to sing “Dei miei bollenti spiriti….” ? And people wonder why I don’t sing as much anymore. Who, serious about opera would take part in these “jokes” ?
News from the OONY organization. Postponed. Heartbreak. All this creation must be freeze dried now. Medea will be even madder a year from now. I can’t wait to sing her. It will surprise a lot of people. OONY is wise to regroup. Too important an organization to lose.
The old saying, brush yourself off and get right up. March 7 is the supposed new date for the concert to be filmed in Conn.
Fingers crossed they pull it together, and my diet, THE MOST BORING but necessary evil goes marching on.
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