Lobenthal.com

More correspondence:

“Say what you will about Caruso, Bjorling, Tucker, none of them is recorded as having made a backward leap from a standing position onto a table top which, it shall be noted, Ben Bliss did not once but twice at Rake’s Progress. That plus a deep yoga-worthy toe-touching curtain call bow. And all while also producing lovely head voice in the last pathos-filled scene to great emotional effect.

And when I ask where do all these singers come from, what of course I mean is where have I been not noticing these wonderful singers. Perhaps it is the Gelb publicity machine emphasizing a bit too much the staging and not enough the gifted singers. Perhaps the audience wants voices to adore as much as clever staging.”

I refer to the grotesque disfigurement of the landmarked Palace Theater at 47th Street and Broadway, humbled by developer and corporate greed, and a totally corrupt, feckless regulatory structure.

A new tourist-targeted behemoth is being allowed to engulf the Palace and literally hoist it 30 feet in the air, reducing it to a ignominious tenant in a vast retail complex. This continues the violation of the Palace begun when Landmarks allowed the low-rise office tower that was an original part of the 1913 construction to be razed.

It’s as if the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission has become an adjunct of the Buildings dept.

LPC Chair Sarah Carroll must resign.

Of course no one can match Pape’s brilliant combination of resonance and sharp attack, which hits one over the head like a kind of sharp-edged blunt instrument, a kind of shillaugh with razor teeth. But Van Horn comes close and what’s more his vowels are brilliant, and as a result his passagio as well.

As for Golda Schultz, who thoroughly unsettled the audience at Tuesday’s Rake’s Progress to the point of appreciative disruption, with her unexpected mid-first-act musicianship in Anne’s aria “No Word From Tom,” she seems to have mastered the art of a big, thrilling-sound that is not big at all, the kind of trick that Kathleen Battle used to play, the trick of making the audience come to her.

What delights.

The question is, why would any Jew vote for Trump?
Supporting Israel’s militarist right-wing policies is ruinous for Israel.

From an enthusiastic correspondent:

“These are great days and the cast of Tuesday night’s moody, funny, and gloomy Rake’s Progress deserves mention. One can envision the likes of Golda Schultz, Ben Bliss, and Christian Van Horn joining a kind of repertory company with the likes of Sasha Cooke, conquering the classics one by one. Schultz brought down the house with Trulove’s difficult aria, finding the music in the roulades. Bliss made some really beautiful tenor sounds and is to be commended for his stage athleticism. In a face-off between Van Horn and anyone you would care to mention including Rene Pape, I would put my money on Horn. These are incredibly talented young singers. Where do they come from? Bravo to the Met for finding them.

Let us also wonder at the entire season, brilliant new operas and all starting with Fire Shut Up In My Bones and Euridyce, and commend Peter Gelb for convincing Lise Davidsen to supplement her familiar (to European audiences) Ariadne with a ferociously difficult role debut as Chrysothemis. One wonders whether Gelb’s coup involved liberal doses of alcohol or wads of cash left in a tote bag somewhere, but well done!

Opera no more or less than other arts being a sort of cultural parallel to the rise and fall of money, we must shudder at the departure of the audience, which appears to have packed up and moved to the exurbs. We are looking at vast stretches of the auditorium unfilled. So much so that the Met has stopped selling standing room in an misguided belief that it can “steer” audiences to pay more. For whatever reason in the cultural currency of the realm, opera is not commanding prices commensurate with amplified Broadway hit artifices. The only solution in our free market of culture must be an across-the-board price cut — something dramatic and headline-grabbing like 50% — and it must stick for a season or two or three if demand is to rebalance with supply. If that requires cancelation of expensive new productions, so be it; opera cannot exist without an audience.”

When von Karajan recorded Aida in 1959, Tebaldi complained that his unwontedly early recording sessions were beginning at an hour when she was customarily still asleep–or at least her voice was.

A friend had given me his ticket for the Met Opera’s dress rehearsal of The Rake’s Progress, Friday morning a week ago at 10:30 a.m. Everyone must have been up for hours. Their voices had risen and shone and they were wearing full fig, etc. They ran through the entire opera without interruption.

It was the earliest performance I’ve ever been to, although I’ve attended matinees in Russia that began at 11:30 or even 11:00 a.m..

During Rake’s intermission, I ran over to the Pain Quotidian on 65th Street and had a muffin and coffee–to get with the real AM idea.

There are two performances of Rake left this season–they’re at civilized evening and afternoon hours:

June 7 & June 11.

Village Preservation has uncovered a smoking gun proving that the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission conspired with the administration of ex-Mayor Bill De Blasio to ensure the completely unnecessary demolition of the designated-landmarks row of nineteenth-century houses on Ninth Avenue.

Deferring to the famously corrupt DOB, Ccommission chair Sarah Carroll apparently allowed vital information about the houses’ structural viability to be withheld even from LPC commissioners. She must resign immediately.

The developer is, of course, a friend of De Blasio’s. And he thinks he’s going to win a seat in Congress?

Robert has been a radical operative since the get-go, albeit a more temperate jurist than the slovenly, lazy trio named by Trump and McConnell.

Jim Hightower reminds us that Roberts’ court has so disgraced itself that it is now really on the brink of no longer being obeyed.

The court’s authority to conduct judicial review does not, of course, exist; it is indeed one of those unenumerated rights that the court pretends to have problems with.

Judicial review by the politicized, corrupt GOP bench must be nullified.

If one flavor of gelato isn’t available, someone has a breakdown.

If stemming a pandemic means the minor inconvenience of wearing a mask, the country is enraged.

Imagine how grateful 1950s America would have been if wearing a mask could have curtailed polio?

OK, maybe not since Hitler’s jig —
have we seen any public kinetic exhibition as grotesque as Trump shaking his immense behind in triumph after exploiting the children’s massacre for which his gun policies and the GOP’s are responsible–at the cesspool of evil that is the NRA convention.

The GOP is the party of death.