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| Weekly rentals of DVD's outpaced rentals of videos in the United States for the first time last week, according to a Reuters report in the Boston Metro of June 20-22, 2003. |
| Brett Somers, former regular panelist on the television show Match Game, will make her cabaret debut at Danny's Skylight Room, 346 West 46th Street, New York, on July 7, 2003, at 7 p.m. She will repeat the act on the three following Mondays in July. The telephone number is 212-265-8133. Report at playbill.com. |
| " . . . William Christie's concert performance [of Les Boréades] at the Barbican, with his ensemble Les Arts Florissants and a handpicked cast, created a complete dramatic experience, one that put the richness and imagination of Rameau's music centre stage," wrote Tom Service in a review dated 21 June 2003 at guardian.co.uk. |
| Plácido Domingo will be singing the 120th role of his career when he creates the part of Rasputin in the world premiere of the opera Nicholas and Alexandra for Los Angeles Opera in September 2003. |
| "There are two kinds of transcendent experience: sex with someone you love and a night at the opera," says Jeanette Winterson in an article at guardian.co.uk. |
| The music in the new opera Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm? at the Aldeburgh Festival failed "to generate much interest or continuity," wrote David Fanning in a review at telegraph.co.uk. |
| Opera singer Eva Urbanova "got her start singing with a heavy metal band in the disco halls of Prague," says an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer. |
| Tenor Juan Diego Flórez "started out singing pop and heavy metal with a band in his native Lima," says an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. |
| "Opera Theatre [of Saint Louis]'s new production [of Thaïs] makes a winning case for this French rarity," says a review dated June 20, 2003, in the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch. |
| June 24, 2003 "Top vocalists from around the world have gathered in Cardiff this week for the BBC Singer of World competition," reports personal.classical.com. |
| The Boston Herald reports: "Massachusetts librarians fear yesterday's [United States] Supreme Court ruling on Internet porn will cost their cash-strapped facilities thousands in compliance costs while inhibiting access to legitimate Web sites. * * * "By a 6-3 vote, the . . . court reversed a ruling by a three-judge panel that the Children's Internet Protection Act, signed into law in 2000, was unconstitutional. "The act requires that public libraries receiving federal aid for online services--more than 90 percent of U.S. libraries--install commercial filtering software on all terminals or forgo the funds." |
| "Though the last part of the book is the most frightening Rowling has ever written, it is not so frightening that a younger child would not be able to read it. As always, the horror is softened by the theme that no matter what evil lurks, good will prevail because love is the greatest weapon of all."--from a review by 14-year old Julia Hass of Newton, Massachusetts, in the Boston Herald of June 24, 2003, of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. |
| Truro and Provincetown, Massachusetts, are abuzz over the newly released book Invisible Eden: A Story of Love and Murder on Cape Cod by Maria Flook. The book is about the unsolved murder, in Truro, of writer Christa Worthington. According to the Boston Globe, the book "contains many of the details locals have been craving about Worthington's life and death. But it is wrapped in a first-person form that took many of its subjects by surprise." |
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| William Dart in the New Zealand Herald has given a favorable review to a new recording of Vivaldi's opera La Verità in cimento. He writes, "The sheer sound of this music, immaculately recorded in a Brittany church, makes the skin tingle . . .." The recording is to be available at amazon.co.uk as of 30 June 2003. |
| In conjunction with Strawberries Music & Video, Sony Music Entertainment Inc. has taken out a quarter-page ad in the Weekend Arts & Performance section of the Boston Globe, to promote the compact disc Duetto with tenors Marcelo Álvarez & Salvatore Licitra. I wish that they had chosen better material to record than the so-called Italian adult contemporary pop that makes up much of the album. |
| Dawn Upshaw, four other soloists, and the Tanglewood Music Center Vocal Fellows and Orchestra conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya are scheduled to perform the chamber opera Ainadamar at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Ocvtober 28, 30, and 31, 2003, at 7:30 p.m. and on November 2 at 3 p.m., in Spanish with English surtitles. With music by Osvaldo Golijov and book by David Henry Hwang, the work "revolves around the powerful women who populated" the work of Federico García Lorca, says the BAM brochure. |
| Andrew Clements, at guardian.co.uk, calls a performance of Previn's A Streetcar Named Desire at the Barbican, "[a] shockingly gruesome evening." "The libretto for Streetcar has been lifted straight from Tennessee Williams's play, filleted to fit the constraints of being sung or, more often, just declaimed. Previn's setting adds nothing, never conjuring up any musical images to enhance or complement the drama. Characterisation is minimal; the soundtrack to a Tom and Jerry cartoon has more emotional depth and far sharper dramatic pacing." I watched a television broadcast of the San Francisco production, and I couldn't agree more with that assessment of the opera. |
| Books about Maria Callas dominate the following category at amazon.com: Top Sellers > Books > Subjects > Entertainment > Music > Musical Genres > Opera > Performers |
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| mtv.com reports that MGM is filming De-Lovely, a new musical about legendary songwriter Cole Porter. "The film stars Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd and will include song and dance numbers by [Robbie] Williams, Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crow, Elvis Costello, Diana Krall and Vivian Green." |
| "After debuting to dismally low ratings, the new sitcom 'Charlie Lawrence' — featuring . . . Nathan Lane — has been pulled from the CBS schedule," reports playbill.com. |
| "Déjà titulaire du rôle [de Don Giovanni] lors de la reprise de 2001, Gerald Finley confirme tout le bien que l'on pense de lui : implication scénique complète (même pendant le repas, quel dévouement !), insolente santé vocale, timbre sombre et chaleureux, sans dureté, un grand Don Giovanni à l'évidence."--from a review by Philippe Herlin at concertonet.com of Don Giovanni at the Opéra Bastille, Paris. |
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| Tenor Thomas Rolf Truhitte is the son of Daniel Truhitte, who played Rolf Gruber in the movie The Sound of Music. Thomas Rolf Truhitte is currently singing Lohengrin in Spoleto , Italy, and is scheduled to sing Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly and Florestan in Fidelio with the Virginia Opera in its upcoming season. |