Lisette Oropesa has won first prize in the Gerda Lissner Foundation Competition. Lisette's performance of "Una vioce poco fa" from BARBIERE was the winning selection.
She is presently in rehearsal for the Met's upcoming new production of IL TRITTICO in which she appears in SUOR ANGELICA.
Lisette has put tracks from her recent recitals with pianist Vlad Iftinca at her website. Take a moment to check out her lovely Spanish songs, and her elegant performance of Schubert's 'Hirt auf dem Felsen' gets a five-star rating; Vlad and the fantastic clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein join Lisette for some top-class music- making.
Another soprano friend of mine, Erika Wueschner, will be singing the Vivaldi GLORIA at Carnegie Hall on April 17th. This photo of Erika on a California beach seems light-years away from this morning's frosty air here in NYC. But Spring is coming! Erika will soon be heading out to Seattle on a recital tour for the Piatagorsky Foundation.
We're having another cozy weekend at home. I talked to my sister yesterday; she had opened her golf course (near Oswego, NY) last week but had to close it again when they were hit with more snow and ice.
We watched two great movies, LORD OF WAR and THE DEPARTED. In the first, Nicholas Cage gives a tremendous performance as Yuri Orlov who rises from the dreary streets of Little Odessa, Brooklyn, to become a major international arms dealer. Yuri sells his soul as well as weapons, relentlessly dogged by Ethan Hawke as an Interpol agent. Yuri's dealings with the horrific Liberian dictator Andre Baptiste (played with cold-blooded cordiality by Eamonn Walker) show us that 'business as usual' prevails while death and devastation literally hang in the air. Even the murder of his brother (played by heart-throb Jared Leto as a coke-laced degenerate) and the loss of his wife and son can't intrude on Yuri's wheeling and dealing. Ian Holm has a featured role as a rival dealer in destruction who is removed from the scene with a single bullet. It's a bloody and upsetting story to watch, but all presented with detachment. The film has an almost documentary feeling at times as Cage speaks directly to the viewer. The brutal facts about international arms dealing which are presented at the end of the film are alarming, to say the least.
The Oscar-winning DEPARTED seemed very disjointed at first. In this story of mobsters and bad cops in South Boston, Martin Scorsese slowly draws the threads together as he draws the viewer into the situation. By the end the film is mesmerizing in its depiction of betrayal and deceit. There are no good guys, really. The stellar cast (Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Leo di Caprio, Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin and Martin Sheen) deliver one powerful scene after another. Sometimes it seems like the word 'fuck' is used every 5 seconds; and the off-hand detachment with which various people are shot or brutalized is chilling. As the only female of any significance, Vera Farmiga as the police department's shrink caught my imagination visually as I saw elements of Cate Blanchett, Donna Murphy and Teri Garr in her physical presence. As Madolyn, Farmiga's 'therapy' seems to include bedding her patients and so she adds a further knot to the story when she becomes pregnant. The question of paternity colours the final moments of the movie. The actors are uniformly perfect in their roles, with special kudos to Mark Wahlberg as maybe the coldest cop of them all. He's come a long way since his Marky Mark days.
We immediately added INFERNAL AFFAIRS, the Hong Kong films from which THE DEPARTED evolved, to our Netflix queue.
I tuned in to the Met broadcast of ANDREA CHENIER thinking to spot check it from time to time but I ended up listening to the whole thing mainly because Marco Armiliato was giving a very fine, sweeping rendition of the score. Of the singers, Ben Heppner sounded frequently like he might fall apart but managed to avert disaster til the final note; his coarse, aging timbre puts me in mind of a weathered character tenor from time to time. Mark Delavan has strong high notes but otherwise his sound is loutish and froggy; I recalled his powerful Dutchman and Jochanaan and regretted his current vocal state. I liked Violeta Urmana best of the principals though she could do a lot more with dynamics; her singing reminded me a little of Eva Marton's - strong but not very 'feminine' and lacking in colour. Irina Mishura was a very fine Madelon, and other successful contributions came from Michaela Martens (Contessa), David Cangelosi (L'Incredible), Maria Zifchak (Bersi) and Charles Taylor (Roucher - would that he had sung Gerard). The annoying new idea of interviewing the singers as they come offstage seemed especially off-putting today as we listened to Ben Heppner trying to be gracious while clearly winded from his vocal endeavors. I knew all the answers on the quiz and was surprised that the panelists stumbled.
On Friday I had lunch with Dmitry who showed me his nifty tattoo: the opening measures of Wagner's TRISTAN & ISOLDE were inked onto his right bicep.
I'm reading a really good book, THE LOST PAINTING by Jonathan Harr about the search for a missing Caravaggio. This story of sleuthing in the art world is written almost as a novel and is something of a page-turner.
Now we're waiting to watch the final round of the Master's to see if Tiger can get another title.
Comments