Items of varying consequence

Night after Night points us to a very disconcerting article about LHL's health. Yes, I think we'd all been wondering (and we still are, but if the Times is doing a story on it, it can't be a good sign.) Think thoughts of health in her direction, for her sake and ours! On the selfish side of this, the Met Futures Page has for a long while had her in a new production next season of Gluck's Orfeo, choreographed by Mark Morris. Can you imagine anything better? So good health to her and good Gluck to us.

Trying to talk myself into going to "The Debbie and Ben Show." They're calling it that, not me. Surprisingly difficult, this. The Siegfried scene at the end is the only part I'm really sure will be good. Voigt was the reason for my first pilgrimage to New York when I was a budding opera whatever, and I have quasi-religious feelings about the sound of her voice, but when it comes down to plunking down the greenage for a ticket, I must remind myself she's fached herself out of stuff like Dich Teure Halle, hasn't she, a little? And Weber and Beethoven, alas, I find powerfully soporific. What I'm really revved up about is for some reason her run of Toscas in the Spring. [Edit: It occurs to me on further consideration that a not insubstantial part of the "eh..." factor is the ugliness of Avery Fisher Hall.]

I have linked trrill, to which I once contributed pseudonymously, ok even more pseudonymously, what I liked to flatter myself was a peppy little hatchet job on one of thoes OONY evenings when they let Millo's fans indoors long enough (as Margo Channing would say) to take in a Puccini opera. Trrill isn't usually about opera these days, but the author's sensibility is--oh, my dear, if you're reading you know I mean it in a nice way--inescapably operatic.