Under Construction, or, What's The Opposite Of A Yenta?

OK, folks, you just may have noticed that I haven't updated this blog since February. As a matter of fact, I got a very friendly comment on my last post to that effect (thanks, Paul!). So much for being a "yenta" who just talks and talks and talks, usually a nasty, incurable gossip (which I am not)... maybe when I get my Big Raise in October 2007 and can buy my own computer, I'll post every day or several times a day. Maybe I should rename this blog to whatever the opposite of a yenta is, but I can't figure out what that is. A commentator to Maury D'Annato's blog suggested baleboosteh, but that's not it either - you can easily be both (1). I have no idea what the Yiddish word is for some one who is shy, quiet, retiring, taciturn... uh, Leo Rosten, in der yenner welt (the other world), can you help?

So, what's my excuse for not being as much of a yenta as I claim? Basically, I don't have my own computer, so I have to pay for internet time, which tends to be expensive. And I either have time only to read my E-mail, or if I buy a whole day at an internet cafe (like I did today), I inevitably get distracted with other things. While in the future my first priority will be to report on things that just happened (my future Met and NYCO visits, that is), I will try to "cheat" and eventually "fill in" all the missing posts, properly backdated. There's a lot of stuff you guys missed...

Not the least of which was my trip to London. Of course, this was primarily for the Royal Opera's Tosca with Angela Gheorghiu, Bryn Terfel, Antonio Pappano, et. al. (unfortunately, not with Marcelo Alvarez, but with his probably equally indisposed understudy, Nicola Rossi Giordano(2)). As I expected, this was alone worth the $1,200 I spent on the trip, but I also got to see the British Theater Institution The Mousetrap, Chicago with former Doctor Who companion Bonnie Langford (herself almost a British Theater Institution!), and, as a last minute replacement for several other possibilities (namely Shakespeare's Globe, which I should have gotten tickets to before I left!), a double bill of Duke Bluebeard's Castle (with Albert Dohmen and Christine Rice) and Erwartung (with another Angela, Frau Denoke), also at the Royal Opera. I had a nice hotel in Russell Square between two beautiful parks, the weather was glorious (the sun sets after 1oPM!), and the food was pretty good too - London is a wonderful city to be a vegetarian in, even though there are almost no restaurants open after 11PM. The British Museum is one of the world's greatest treasures, which made me feel proud to be a human being. And I finally got to meet my good friend Lulu. Oh yeah, we got to meet Angela too (Lulu knows her). I was so overwhelmed by the performance I almost cried. She gave me a hug. Too bad no Tony or Bryn as well (3).

Actually, in the case of the London trip, I'd better organize my posts on that by topic, not by date!

The other big event of the summer was my trip to the Berkshire Choral Festival in Sheffield, Massachusetts, where, as I said I would back in February, I sang alto in the chorus for the Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem. In addition to rehearsing for 25 hours and performing this perfect piece for the alto voice, I explored the nearby towns of Great Barrington (lots of great art galleries and craft shops) and Lenox (where I sampled a fantabulous Grand Marnier truffle and almost bumped into James Levine - literally), went to the Berkshire Botanical Gardens (rain made the greenery even more beautiful) and saw Gurrelieder at Tanglewood with Levine conducting and Christine Brewer, Waltraud Meier, Johan Botha, and Matthew Polenzani as soloists. Oh, the BSO also played the Requiem's fourth movement ("Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen, Herr Zebaoth") in memory of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Oh yes, and the wonderful couple who drove me to Tanglewood reintroduced me to the wonders of Flanders and Swann.

I hope to give more details on these events, as well as:

1. The "Good Riddance Gala" for "Uncle Joe" Volpe, aka the Volpego, the Volpexit, and most creatively, Volpedämmerung (which, baruch Hashem, I didn't pay good money to attend, but experienced on WQXR). What a dispiriting experience, just like nearly the entire Volpe era! All right, Natalie Dessay (the highlight), Ramon Vargas, Juan Diego Florez, Dolora Zajick, Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Rene Pape were great or pretty close (and it was nice to have the preview of Don Carlo). Roberto Alagna would have been great if he had sung something other than Cyrano de Bergerac - it's a fine opera but not easily excerptible -and what the heck was he doing there, honoring a man who gained much of his recent fame by trashing him and his wife? Everything else was either dead average or unlistenable. The low came at the beginning, when Deborah Voigt sang a novelty song which trashed Kathleen Battle, Luciano Pavarotti (4), and of course shoved the whole weight loss thing down our throats. Renee Fleming's overdone, "bad jazz" audition for the Trovatore Leonora made me almost gag (and the latest rumor is that she got the part - and the far superior Sondra Radvanovsky was bought out). And Denyce Graves, who didn't produce one clear consonant, seemed to be auditioning for the Grand Inquisitor instead of any decent mezzo role.
2. Possibly the New York Philharmonic Memorial Concert at Saint John the Divine, where poor Maestra Xian Zhang had to spend so much effort compensating for the echoey acoustics it was virtually impossible to judge her conducting - and frankly, I think it might just be a better idea to give the free concert at Avery Fisher Hall! I still hope to hear the maestra in circumstances with decent acoustics.
3. The Anna Netrebko Show (aka Don Pasquale)
4. Fidelio in the company my best friend, Bradley Wilber of Met Futures Page fame. He knows Alan Held, the Pizzaro, and we got to go backstage and meet him. Unlike Pizzaro, Held is a doll. I guess it's true that actors who play villains tend to be especially nice, because they can work out their dark sides on stage. He's also very tall, and thanks to his high- pitched laugh, I have decided to cast him as Voldemort in my Harry Potter opera. Now all I have to do is to ask Brad to ask Alan if that's OK...
5. That long-promised Complete Report on Angela's Met Traviatas.
6. Some more interesting You Tube links I found but could not post several months ago.
7. Some even older, unfinished posts. Especially the one about Volpe's Blonde Fetish and Racism at the Met. Hopefully with Gelb in charge it will be long out-of-date.

When and if those are all, or mostly, done, I'll edit or delete this post. If I can't do them, then this post will serve as the "report" on these events. Actually I might not need to do some of them, since in true yenta fashion, this post wound up longer than I anticipated.

(1) Baleboosteh is the feminine of baleboss, which comes from the Hebrew baal habayit - "master of the house". Baleboss usually refers to a proprietor of a shop or other business, and a baleboosteh means a) the wife of a baleboss, b) a female business owner, or most commonly c) a really fabulous homemaker, one whose floor you can eat off of. So technically, any of these ladies can be a yenta as well.

(2) No relation, I am certain, to Marcello Giordani, Massimo Giordano, or Nicola Rossi-Lemeni.

(3) I have met Angela before, on at least 3 or 4 other occasions, and only once was she anything less than totally gracious, kind, and completely the antithesis of the monster that certain professional gossip columnists posing as music journalists portray her as. Even then, she was only a little reserved and wary - it was probably her first time dealing with the American public and her sister had just died. Oh, yes, Roberto is a sweetheart, too. Just very shy. Also, when I met him after his New York Philharmonic debut, Tony struck me as a very warm-hearted, loving person, and very modest. Bryn is very outgoing and a lot of fun.

(4) And as we now know, Pavarotti has pancreatic cancer, folks, and even then people knew he was genuinely ill, although they assumed it was the flu.