Milano impressions II

Today it's buildings and an amazing woman: Photos of churches, gallery, stations, castello, theater, statues, and Joyce DiDonato in Milano last October. The full photo album is available here. here or via the not-sooo-fancy slide show below. On youtube I found a recording of the Der Rosenkavalier production we went to see in La Scala. …

Mit der Axt

Schrati on Stage! Bodo Wartkes "Ja, Schatz!" bei der Langen Theaternacht. Das war - Dank Peter!! - mal ne richtig geile Sache!!

“Everyone knows that opera is about sex.”

The idea for this post came in April, and once again, it is based on a citation of my favorite article: „Ruggiero’s Deceptions, Cherubino’s Distractions” by Margaret Reynolds. In the beginning, Reynolds argues that opera is about sex. She writes “Everyone knows that opera is about sex. It is no accident that the opera house …

Ode to Joyce

In German, we can use the same word for tall and great – groß. I once sat at a table with a tall priest. There wasn’t a lot of space and when he tried to get up someone said “yeah, it’s a bit uncomfortable for someone who is groß”. He answered: “I am not a …

White shirts

A break cannot be caught. Yesterday, I had a look at my rss feed reader and in the first article displayed, a question was proposed: What's the No. 1 opera that allows a White Shirt mezzo to have their hands all over generally not just one, but two sopranos? The Giessen production of Figaro provides …

Between the ears

My blog post on Octavian and Susanna, written pretty much six months ago, came to my mind yesterday evening - it was the re-opening of Le Nozze di Figaro in Giessen. A whole (!) different experience than in March, I must say. A large part of the cast had changed, including Marcellina - her part …

Lord, how lovely are your apartments

Today was day six (rehearsal day five!) of EMSOC 2011. The European Medical Students Orchestra and Choir are in Giessen to perform Brahm’s A German Requiem and Mahler’s 10th Symphony. The newspaper reports about the project daily. They write about EMSOC visiting the brewery, the international dinner, the day trip to Cologne – and, by …

Unlimited joy and Joyce!

Vibre, mon âme, chante et proclame, chante ta joie! Yet again, I had the pleasure of spending an unforgettable opera evening. When we did Otello last season I wondered what would make someone go to see a concertante performance of opera. Well, there’s at least one answer I can give now: a most ravishing Joyce …

Couldn’t Octavian get Susanna?

April 2010 brought a lot of changes to my life and once in a while I am very curious to examine in which way I regard certain things different back then and now a year later. One of these things are pant roles. First of all - no fascination lost there! Last year I scraped together …

Intermezzo

This afternoon I was amused by a question stated in a blog post ("Intermezzo" - what a lovely pun!): What's the difference between Joyce DiDonato and Katherine Jenkins? Apart from obvious stuff like one can sing Una voce poco fa and one can't, that is? After seeing the videos, this was even obvious to me... (and …