Look what Angela Gheorghiu got herself for Xmas.
After her husband (49) shared pictures of himself with Angela-lookalike Aleksandra Kurzak (35), Angela (47-51) has unearthed a mini-Alagna to share her Facebook page with.
The brave boy is 33 year old Spanish pop singer and former reality TV star David Bisbal.
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This time it's for real. Angela Gheorghiu announced today that her divorce from Roberto Alagna is "imminent" and "by mutual agreement."
But showbiz is showbiz, and "we do not rule out performing together as before."
No official comment from the soon-to-be-former Mr Gheorghiu yet, but he's clearly not wasted any time in moving on:
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This gently remodelled and reverentially paced revival of Laurent Pelly's 2007 production is not a vintage night at the opera. Slightly corked more like.
Pelly's cosy Cath Kidston faux-50s perspective is not a patch on Jonathan Miller's edgier ENO production for wit, warmth and vitality. And what Pelly hasn't sucked out, Bruno Campanella's connoisseurly savouring of every last note drained down to the dregs. Luckily, this is the best cast it's had so far, and the superb individual performances make it a show worth seeing.
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La bohème - Royal Opera House, 23 June 2012
The second of the two shows celebrating the 20th anniversary of Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu's first encounter was more musically accomplished than the first. And the curtains worked. But we were never allowed to forget why we were there. Like the first, the evening had the air of a football testimonial - two sides, singers and orchestra, battling it out for the greater glory of the stars.
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La bohème - Royal Opera House, 19 June 2012
Last night marked 20 years since Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna first clapped eyes on each other in some obscure crevice of the Royal Opera House.
To celebrate this momentous occasion, a fount of scurrilous gossip and hilarious candids ever since, Covent Garden have mounted two special performances of La bohème, the John Copley production that is even older than the famed couple's relationship. This was the first.
Continue reading "Now we are 20 - Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna 2gether 4eva" »
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One of a series of photos taken during rehearsals for this week's La bohème at the Royal Opera House - more on Angela's Facebook page.
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While we're on the subject of Roberto Alagna's improbable exploits, here he is with an aria from Berlioz's La damnation de Faust. But not the one you think. No, Roberto has chosen to tackle Méphisto's Serenade - yes, the one that's usually sung by a bass.
If that's whetted your appetite for more Roberto, how about Paris Opera's recent Gounod Faust, where he plays the title role?
Thank you Manou for finding this link where you can watch the whole opera for free.
Once again, the world's most skilled makeup artists were unable to etch the grooves of time upon Roberto's youthful complexion. So you will notice that the Act 1 part of the elderly Faust is played by an actor (with doubtful lip-synching skillz). Roberto himself appears from a giant Kinder egg twenty minutes in. You won't miss it. Just make sure you don't have a mouthful of coffee at the time.
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Check it out above! Roberto Alagna hits the big screen on 9 November in a new film by Jean-Louis Guillermou. Celles qui aimaient Wagner blends contemporary and historical narrative to recount episodes from Richard Wagner's life story through the eyes of a modern day fan.
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Goethe famously declared that the only composer able to do justice to his epic drama Faust was Mozart - by that point inconveniently deceased. So Gounod's effort to portray the masterpiece in music has always laboured under the mighty poet's curse.
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Angela Gheorghiu has just confirmed - in front of a live audience at a Royal Opera House promotional event - that she'll be sharing the stage with her husband in La Bohème next year.
(If they can find a conductor brave enough.)
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And we all thought Angela was the difficult one. With less than a week before the premiere of Gounod's Faust at the Opera Bastille, conductor Alain Lombard has walked out following 'differences' with the titular hero, Roberto Alagna.
The testy septuagenarian attacked the tenor for delaying rehearsals with his repeated late arrivals. Alagna, for his part, disagreed with Lombard's aesthetic demands, and refused to comply with them.
A conductor is easier to replace at short notice than a star tenor. So when the inevitable "it's him or me" moment arrived, Paris Opera boss Nicolas Joel was left with no choice.
Lombard's replacement is the rising French-Armenian conductor, Alain Altinoglu, who arrived in Paris this morning fresh from conducting in Vienna last night.
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Aida - Royal Opera House, 19 March 2011
I feel sorry for anyone who hoped to hear Luisi conduct Aida and now won't, because on Saturday night he did a superb job. He never achieved the blood-and-guts, life-and-death heights that Pappano can - but then how many conductors do? We're extravagantly spoilt in that respect.
On every other count it was hard to fault him. The orchestra played with spirit and refinement, the singers were wonderfully supported, and Luisi held enough back to make the big moments tell - the third act climax was a heart-racing eruption. He took the music at face value and invested it with a colour and delicacy that belied the work's reputation. It sounded fresh and new.
And all that despite the godawful fugliness of David McVicar's production assailing his delicate aesthetic sensibilities at every turn (incidentally, he was correctly dressed from spiffy shirtstud to polished pump, and emerged without a single crease). What a champ.
Continue reading "Fabio's fabulous Aida at the Royal Opera House" »
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Carmen - Royal Opera House, 6 October 2009
The sizzle may have fizzled from Roberto Alagna's marriage, but he can still hot it up on stage. The chemistry between his Don José and Elina Garanča's Carmen is the main thing going for this otherwise tepid revival of Francesca Zambello's wannabe-West End extravaganza. Despite all the fussy, overpopulated action and assorted live animals Zambello packs between the curvaceous terracotta walls of Tanya McCallin's sets, this Carmen only really takes off when the two of them are together.
Without resorting to the usual strutting heroics seen in this role, Roberto offers a rough-edged but remarkably subtle portrayal of a dutiful soldier flipped from upright to horizontal by his obsessive passion for the stunning Garanča. He's neither as hawt nor as thrilling as Jonas Kaufmann (can't wait to catch him in La Scala's prima live on the big screen) was a couple of years back but then who is?
Garanča is more problematical. Carmen needs a bit of dirt under her fingernails, and no, an elegant smudge of brown greasepaint is not the same thing. Her agile, honeyed voice is elegance personified; there's little to suggest an earthy gypsy heart beating beneath.
She squirmed awkwardly through the first act, dry-humping everything in Zambello's overstuffed Spanish square from the horse trough to the village idiot like a randy Yorkshire Terrier. Fortunately the matadors didn't turn up till the last act, or she'd have been picking sequins out of her ladybits for weeks. But by this time she's swapped her thigh rubbing and bosom heaving for a more refined life as Escamillo's escort. Her transformation was maybe too complete - I wanted to hear the coarse gypsy beneath the buttoned exterior - but the final showdown with Don José was compelling stuff.
The rest of the cast were underwhelming. Ildebrando D'Arcangelo's Escamillo was even less animated than the docile horse he made his entrance on. Liping Zhang's Micaëla was underplayed. Only Eri Nakamura's lively Frasquita made any impact. Bertrand de Billy held things together, no more, in the pit.
***** lots more photos over page ******
Continue reading "Elina Garanca clicks Alagna's castanets in Carmen" »
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On Friday Roberto Alagna revealed his finances to the world in an interview with Le Figaro. Now the paper goes one step further with a more general feature on opera stars' earnings.
They disclose the 15 or so stars at the very top, like Karita Mattila and Anna Netrebko, can expect 15,000 euros per show. For rising stars like Diana Damrau or Sophie Koch it's more like 2,000 to 12,000 euros a night. But even the small roles get 1,000 euros or more.
Out of the flat fee, the singers must pay their own transport and living expenses. There are no private jets in the world of opera - everyone flies commercial. Because she sings at the Met so often, Natalie Dessay has bought an apartment in Manhattan. Renée Fleming has one in Paris. She lends it out to other artists, and they reciprocate.
Fees are fixed by arrangement between the major opera houses like London, Paris and New York. The Met's Peter Gelb was quoted as saying that the directors are on the phone to each other all the time. Elisabeth Pezzino, director of programming at the Paris Opera, says that twice a year they all share a table listing what they've paid to each artist.
The fees the big houses can pay are limited by their income, which is often dependent on public aid. But Bilbao, with a massive government subvention, can afford to offer 20,000 euros a night. "'Before that, it was the Italians with their extra under the table payments,' complained Pierre Médecin, President of the Association of European Opera Directors.
The only way for singers to make big money is to release a CD and link that to a recital tour, says producer Jean-Pierre Le Pavec. These are privately financed, so the laws of supply and demand rule. Fees range from 30,000 to 200,000 euros per night - Angela Gheorghiu is one of the top earners. Only Cecilia Bartoli has given up the stage to concentrate on recitals [not strictly true - she still appears at Zurich for example]. However Peter Gelb claims that it is only the prestige of opera which helps these singers get the recital contracts, and that in the long term, public interest will wane.
The financial crisis has hit American opera hard. The American Guild of Musical Artists has agreed that their members won't get paid for cinema screenings. Coupled with the closure of some American opera houses and the pruning of schedules in others, Elisabeth Pezzino sees an exodus to Europe is on its way.
For comparison, in 2008, 'opera' 'singer' Katherine Jenkins signed a contract for $10m.
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Is nothing off limits for Roberto Alagna? He talks frankly about the precarious state of his marriage in today's Le Figaro (as revealed earlier by OperaChic).
And in the same interview, the Sicilian pintpot breaks omerta on opera's last taboo - that most fascinating subject - how much he earns (my translation):
"I’m well off but nothing like as rich as people think. I live in Switzerland but I pay my taxes in France. I don’t know exactly how much I’m worth because I’m not a businessman. For a gala concert, I'm paid 60,000 euros. If I need money, I go to Abu Dhabi or Japan, where I can get 100,000 euros. I get 25% (or 25c ?) on CDs, but nothing on DVDs or live cinema broadcasts. For opera, I get a flat 13,000 euros per night. But at the end there’s nothing left. Half goes in taxes. The rest pays my agent and my living costs. [For Carmen] the apartment I rent near Covent Garden costs £1,500 a week. My only luxury is somewhere comfortable to stay. At the Met, my whole fee goes in living costs."
"When I left EMI, I bought my back catalogue for £800,000. I paid for it with what I had in the bank and the advance on my Sicilian album. In classical music, you’re happy to sell 20,000 CDs worldwide."
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That's what Roberto Alagna said on today's Desert Island Discs.
He was discussing not his lovely wife, but his "best friend" - his voice. As for Angela, "She's all the time in my brain, all the time in my soul".
He wasn't asked specifically why Angela has pulled out of the Met Carmen she was scheduled to sing with him. But he did say that "for ten years we spend 24 hours together" and "after that, Angela chooses to sing without me". He made it clear it was her decision, not his.
He tries to have a normal family life. "Family is the most important thing in life, the only thing that never betray you". "When I am alone I am all the time nostalgic and sad."
The rest of the show winds through his long career and colourful family history. Roberto is perennially frank, and compensates for his shortage of humility with bags of charm.
His Desert Island picks were, unsurprisingly, nearly all operatic, with Giorgio Zancanaro the favourite. His choice of luxury? - a guitar. (Full list on the BBC website later).
The programme is repeated on Friday 21st at 9am on Radio 4 - and NOT available on the iPlayer.
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That was the message posted on Angela's own website earlier today.
Fascinatingly, the Don Jose for those first six performances is none other than Mr Gheorghiu.
And even more fascinatingly, he predicted the whole thing way back in April, in front of a small interview audience at Covent Garden. He said they were unlikely to perform together again in the near future because it's so much hard work for Angela being on stage with two people at once - meaning the character and the husband. You might think acting lessons would be a simpler answer, but then nothing's ever simple where these two are involved.
With Elina Garanca replacing Angela, lucky Met audiences will instead be able to catch the same pairing that the Royal Opera House will have showcased a couple of months beforehand.
For the April and May Met performances Angela will be joined by reluctant secksy-symbol Jonas Kaufmann. So no problems there.
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Natalie Dessay has said au revoir to JDF. Temporarily anyway. Her latest musical partner is the legendary composer and pianist Michel Legrand.
Last Tuesday they recorded some of Legrand's music together in a TV studio. The results will be broadcast in June on the occasional French TV show Tandem, the concept of which is to bring together two artists from different generations and backgrounds. Natalie isn't the first opera singer to appear - another recent pairing was Roberto Alagna and Jane Birkin (continue reading on the next page for the grisly video evidence).
Natalie's pop singing is a pleasant surprise. She doesn't make the mistake of applying a full-powered operatic soprano to Legrand's music (like certain nameless crossover catastrophes) - instead she sings in a sweet, unforced natural voice.
Check it out! - rehearsal videos over the page ..................
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Here first! - a full list of all the Royal Opera House's main stage productions for the 2009/10 season.
The 2009/10 Covent Garden season opens with neither bang nor whimper but with a credit-crunching concert performance on 7 September (repeated on 14 September). Makes a change from last year's Sun readers' special I suppose.
The opera in question is Donizetti's Linda di Chamounix, and the conductor is bel canto genius Mark Elder. The cast includes potential Next Big Things Stephen Costello, Eglise Gutierrez and Luciano Botelho, plus the incomparable Alessandro Corbelli, the first of several welcome appearances this season.
The first staged opera of the season is Nicholas Hytner's lego-loving Don Carlo, with - OMG!- Jonas Kaufmann !!! in the title role. John Tomlinson joins him as the Grand Inquisitor, and the rest of the cast is lifted straight from the first run - Marina Poplavskaya, Simon Keenlyside, fans' favourite Ferruccio Furlanetto, Sonia Ganassi and Pumeza Matshikiza.The conductor is Semyon Bychkov.
This season's contribution to the 2013 Wagnerversary is a new Christof Loy production of Tristan und Isolde. Antonio Pappano conducts Ben Heppner, Nina Stemme, Matti Salminen, Michael Volle and Sophie Koch.
Neigh! Francesco Zambello's ghastly Carmen returns in October, with the latest Covent Garden favourite Elina Garanca back for the title role, fighting off Roberto Alagna, Ildebrando d'Arcangelo, and a farmyard full of furry friends. Bertrand de Billy conducts. It's resuscitated again in June 2010 with a distinctly 'B' cast.
October also sees one of Richard Jones's more subtle and effective efforts back on stage - and attractively cast. The shouldn't-work-but-it-does double bill of Ravel's L'Heure Espagnole (Christine Rice, Yann Beuron, Christopher Maltman, Andrew Shore and Bonaventura Bottone) and Puccini's Gianni Schicchi (Thomas Allen, Maria Bengtsson and Stephen Costello) is conducted by Pappano.
Francesco Zambello steps into Tchaikovsky's The Slippers in November. The new production will be conducted by Alexander Polianichko and features some serious talent fresh from the Mariinsky - Olga Guryakova, Vsevolod Grivnov, Larissa Diadkova, Vladimir Matorin and Maxim Mikhailov.
John Schlesinger's elderly Der Rosenkavalier is dusted off in December. Kirill Petrenko conducts and the cast includes Soile Isokoski, Sophie Koch, Thomas Allen and Lucy Crowe.
Littering the December and January schedules is the inevitable La Bohème. This time Andris Nelsons conducts most of the double-cast performances, which begin with Piotr Beczala and Hibla Gerzmava and end with not a few tbc's.
Robert Lepage's intermittently effective Rake's Progress returns in January 2010. Ingo Metzmacher, Toby Spence (a Tom Rakewell tdf), Kate Royal, Kyle Ketelsen and Stephanie Blythe promise much on the musical side.
Female conductor alert! Top Lisboan Julia Jones wields the baton over Jonathan Miller's Cosi fan Tutte in January. The cast includes Charles Castronovo and Sally Matthews.
A new Richard Jones production of Prokofiev's The Gambler in February is conducted by Pappano, with a cast including Roberto Sacca, Angela Denoke, John Tomlinson and Jurgita Adamonyte.
Plácido Domingo's first appearance of the season is as a tenor. Graham Vick's acclaimed production of Handel's Tamerlano (recorded in Madrid and available on DVD con Plácido)
Bill Bryden's family-friendly The Cunning Little Vixen returns in March with Emma Matthews, Christopher Maltman and Emma Bell, though the presence of Charles Mackerras on the podium has to be the main draw.
Caurier and Leiser's lovely Il Turco in Italia is back in April, with Maurizio Benini conducting, and Aleksandra Kursak, Colin Lee, Alessandro Corbelli, Thomas Allen and Ildebrando d'Arcangelo in the cast.
Aida is subjected to the David McVicar magic in April. His new production is conducted by Nicola Luisotti and features Micaela Carosi, Marcelo Alvarez and Luciana D'Intino. Bare naked elephants?
The last of the Big Three, Richard Eyre's subtly intelligent La Traviata, makes its annual appearance in May and July. This time her name's in the programme - Our first Lady of the Camellias is the fabulous former Netrebko sub Ermonela Jaho. Joining her in her long-awaited return to Covent Garden in May are Saimir Pirgu and Dmitri Hvorostovsky. July's 'B' Violetta is Angela Gheorghiu, who makes do with James Valenti and Zeljko Lucic. Yves Abel conducts.
Laurent Pelly's now-legendary La Fille du Régiment returns in May with the unbeatable original cast of Juan Diego Flórez, Natalie Dessay, Alessandro Corbelli and Felicity Palmer back in place. Bruno Campanella conducts.
What would tempt Sir Colin Davis back into the pit? How about David McVicar's Le Nozze di Figaro? Erwin Schrott, Camilla Tilling, Maruisz Kwiecen. Annette Dasch, Soile Isokoski and Christine Schäfer head the strong cast.
Antonio Pappano conducts Laurent Pelly's new Manon, coming to Covent Garden in June with the announced cast including Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazón. Anyone fancy a bet?
In one of those rare operatic fairy stories, June sees a baritone with less than a year's experience thrust into a leading role at Covent Garden. Yes, it's Plácido Domingo again, and this time he's Simon Boccanegra. Antonio Pappano conducts a strong cast including Marina Poplavskaya, Ferruccio Furlanetto and Joseph Calleja. It's the 1991 Elijah Moshinsky production by the way, not the Ian Judge one seen last year.
The season ends in July 2010 with the first revival of David McVicar's controversial Salome. Angela Denoke takes the central role, with Johan Reuter as Jokanaan. Hartmut Haenchen conducts.
No link yet, but more details expected on the Royal Opera House website sometime next week.
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*******UPDATE 22/4*******
The Royal Opera House's press releases are now available on their website. Go here for the summary, here for the opera details and here for the ballet.
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