The Opera Orchestra of New York opened its season last night at Carnegie Hall with superstars Angela Gheorghiu and Jonas Kaufmann in Cilea’s sentimental diva vehicle Adriana Lecouvreur.
Bio: James Jorden is happy to have a chance for a change to write about something besides opera, which is what he writes about on his blog parterre.com and in the New York Post. He lives in Sunnyside with an editor and two cats.
The Opera Orchestra of New York is returning to its star-driven roots, opening its season last night at Carnegie Hall with superstars Angela Gheorghiu and Jonas Kaufmann in Cilea’s sentimental diva vehicle Adriana Lecouvreur. The you have to be there quotient was boosted to the roof by the fact that this performance would be Gheorghiu’s only New York appearance of the season since she chose not to participate in the Met’s new production of Gounod’s Faust. (It’s in rehearsal now, with Kaufmann in the title role.)
Adriana is a sort of B-movie opera, with one of those plots that it’s more fun to retell than to sit through in the first place. More
Posted on November 9th, 2011 4:04pm
"Back when I used to read a ton of blogs, I was always really flattered when people were like: 'It's the future of classical music!' But that's just as bad as: This faggot is dead in the water already. So stopping reading blogs was a really key thing, not just because of haters, but also because then you start thinking, yeah, I am doing this amazing thing, when you're like no, I have to get from A to this B-flat by way of this E-flat. It really distracts you from the craft of the thing, when you focus on these gigantic brush strokes, to be constantly looking at like the flight map of your career, to be like: Well girl, we're over Greenland now, so I should probably take the Ambien." More
Posted on November 2nd, 2011 10:02am
The problem, I think, stems from a misunderstanding of genre, or, to be more specific, an inability of director Eric Schaeffer to approach the show as a concept musical. This style of show, briefly, is driven not by conventional linear narrative and not even by musical and lyrical style but rather by a large-scale, primarily visual idea. More
Posted on September 15th, 2011 9:16am
There is something central to the work that is false, a cheat. As the critic Julian Budden says about the gnarled revision of the libretto of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, “It is like one of those mathematical games where at one point the player takes away the number he first thought of.”
The game being played in Company is “why can’t Robert commit?” The central character is a symbolically 35-year-old (i.e., exactly in midlife) single man living in Manhattan about 1970. He dates various girls casually, but he spends most of his time with one or another of the married couples who all seem to welcome him as pleasant and useful third wheel. More
Posted on April 12th, 2011 11:39am
To see either Bernadette Peters or Elaine Strich would be worth braving Broadway in the broiling August heat; the two together in a musical theater masterpiece is something you'd be an idiot to miss. But, frankly, surrounding Stritch, Peters and Sondheim are equal parts cardboard and kazoos. More
Posted on August 8th, 2010 10:33pm
Today we inaugurate our partnership with thirteen.org and present James Jorden's interview with Charles Busch, the art-drag impresario and drag-history encyclopedia, at his home in Manhattan. Click "More" to watch! More
Posted on June 17th, 2010 11:54am
In this first fruit of the collaboration between thirteen.org and Capital, a video tour of art-drag impresario Charles Busch's Manhattan apartment with James Jorden, and a reflection on drag from its 20's heyday through the 60's and 70's art drag movement to today's obsession with 'realness.' More
Posted on June 17th, 2010 7:41am
