Danielle De Niese Dubbed "Opera's Coolest Opera Singer"

Life Is A Stage: The soprano photographed by Sven Arnstein

"The world's coolest opera singer is headed our way which will delight Ireland's loyal circle of music fans and Danielle de Niese, has every excuse to bring lots of luggage and fab gowns. The trouble with YouTube is everything is filmed these days, so you really 'can't wear the same dress twice', explains the lyric soprano who has been described by the BBC as the 'most sought-after singer on the planet'. Indeed, the New York Times described her voice as 'seductive enough to woo gods as well as mortals.' Chatting to her over the holidays, I discovered that Danielle's diary is booked up five years in advance and she is excited about performing with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra at Dublin's National Concert Hall on January 15. Opera is such vibrant territory for great socialising in Ireland - just ask the legions who descend on Wexford - and you can expect lots of drinks' invitations to be going out this week, held to mark her return to Dublin. This lady has the best fashion connections. Donna Karan designed the gown for her fairytale wedding to Gus Christie who is the third-generation boss of the famous Glyndebourne Festival. Danielle wears Vivienne Westwood because she loves the designer's mix of modern and baroque and says the gowns 'feel as comfortable as pyjamas'. If the soprano is escorted on stage by security, it's because she's wearing her Van Cleef and Arpels jewels. Off stage, Danielle likes to walk Caesar, her Portuguese water dog who is actually related to the Obamas' dog, Bo." [Source] Watch a video of the singer's photo shoot after the jump.

Dame Kiri Te Kanawa Fears Restricting Visas Will Affect Quality Singers

Dame Kiri Te Kanawa as the Countess in the 1973
 production of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro
 at the Glyndebourne Festival.

"Soprano Dame Kiri Te Kanawa has warned of the restricting impact of visas for international singers hoping to work or study in the UK. The New Zealand-born singer told The Observer that the current model for obtaining visas for work and study in the UK are weighted against new talent, comparing her own experiences with those of students and singers today. 'When I came over there was an open door. But now a foreign singer can come into schools for a year or so, but then, more often than not, if they want to carry on they have to reapply. So what happens is they have to go back after their time runs out and sit there in New Zealand, for example, for almost a year. I talk to opera companies in London about it, and they don't like it when I say it. But these singers have got to get the visas or they will never learn.' Te Kanawa continued, saying that the solution was to remove hurdles from the visa process, and that not all international singers are likely to enjoy a long professional career: 'The thing is, they are not all going to make it, so what I want is just one place a year for a person who is really going to last.'" [Source] For those concerned about their current, or future, visas can find more information by clicking here.

Glyndebourne Opera Festival Celebrates Its Own Royal Couple

Love birds: Gus Christie and Danielle de Niese in the manor. (Photo: Dan Bum Forti/The Telegraph)

"They are stars in their own opera. A Donizetti, perhaps. Some sort of teasing pact seems to have been agreed between them: she won’t interrupt when he is trying to make a point. But expecting Danni de Niese to moderate her enthusiasm is like expecting water to run uphill. As a kittenish all-singing-all-dancing Cleopatra in Handel’s Giulio Cesare, she took Glyndebourne by storm in 2005. Then she laid siege to the affections of its owner as he watched her from the wings. After a courtship spanning several cities, wherever in the world she was singing, they married in 2009. Their love story has become as much a part of the Glyndebourne legend as that of his grandfather, John Christie, who built the first opera house in 1934 for his beautiful Canadian wife, the soprano Audrey Mildmay. England’s Taj Mahal, Danni calls it. The idea that another soprano might take up residence once seemed fanciful but 'history has repeated itself,' Danni says." [Source]

Tara Erraught Is Having Her Adele Dazeem Moment In Opera

A picture of Tara Erraught as Sesto in
Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito at
Bayerische Staatsoper
in February 2014 (Photo: Facebook)

Irish mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught has been in the news lately for British press fat-shaming her in a production of Der Rosenkavalier. Other opera singers, most notably Alice Coote's open letter lashing the critics, have voiced their opinions on the matter as well. Even the fashion magazine Elle is weighing in on the issue. Of course the greatest offense here is the critics NOT actually critiquing the singing of an opera, but trying to focus in on someone's appearance. Now, what universe do these men live in that they think Tara Erraught is overweight? It is with great hope that Ms. Erraught is quite aware of her vocal talents and takes pride in her gorgeous physical appearance. This might just be her succès de scandale. John Travolta famously butchered Idina Menzel's name into Adele Dazeem at the Academy Awards just before she sang "Let it go" from Disney's hit film Frozen. The Broadway star now says she was shaken for about 8 seconds before singing, but now in hindsight it was the greatest thing to happen in her career because now millions more people know her by name that may not otherwise have paid attention after her performance. Tara Erraught should soak up all the attention in this moment and ignore those silly men with their limp quills. Her exquisite figure and career will have the last laugh. A photo from the Glyndebourne Rosenkavalier production is after the jump.

Why Glyndebourne Heir Sir George Christie Cut His Own Hair

Sir George Christie with Swedish soprano Elisabeth Söderström (Photo: Getty)

"One curious fact about Sir George Christie, who died last week, aged 79, was that he always cut his own hair, a notoriously difficult thing to do. He did it with a three-way mirror and, according to his wife Mary, did it very badly. His reason, apparently, was a reluctance to waste money on a barber. For while George was very well-off (and the epitome of generosity when it came to others), he hated to spend anything on himself. For example, he never took a taxi — he would always travel in London by Tube or bus, even to such an event as the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee service in St Paul’s Cathedral — and he had his suits made by the wardrobe department of the Glyndebourne opera company rather than pay a London tailor. His thrift, however, didn’t extend to wine, which he loved as much as he hated water, and of which he possessed an excellent cellar. When he was weakened by his final illness, his main complaint was that he was no longer capable of walking off his hangover." [Source]

Danielle De Niese Gives Glyndebourne "Don Pasquale" Tour

Danielle de Niese stars in Donizetti's Don Pasquale at the Glyndebourne Festival this season. Watch a backstage video tour of the final rehearsal after the jump. Click here to read an article in The Guardian where Miss de Niese "...reveals how she became one of the world's most sought-after sopranos."

Harry Bicket To Spend More Time in the Summer Desert

(Photo: Richard Haughton)

"Harry Bicket, the British early music specialist, is to be the next chief conductor of Santa Fe Opera, starting in October. He succeeds conductor Frederic Chaslin, who resigned last August after just two seasons on the job, saying he wanted to focus on composing and his duties as music director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. Bicket's appointment, announced on Wednesday morning, is to some extent an indication of the inroads Baroque music has made in the traditional operatic establishment. He is currently manning the pit in Handel’s Giulio Cesare at the Metropolitan Opera. His opera resume also includes Handel performances at the Royal Opera House, the Glyndebourne Festival and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment." [Source]

Nothing To Do On Boxing Day? Watch "Hansël und Gretel"

"Hänsel und Gretel isn't just Engelbert Humperdinck's most successful opera. It is also one of the most successful operas of all time. Premiered in 1893, the work was instantly labelled a "masterpiece" by its conductor Richard Strauss, even though it is a somewhat sanitised version of the Brothers Grimm original. Instead of an evil stepmother, as the Grimms have it, the children have a loving but scatty mother and a caring but drunken father. The opera also adds a creepy chorus of echoes to the forest scenes and 14 ballet-dancing angels, who create one of its most spinetingling moments, as the cossetingly somnolent music envelopes the children and helps them through their scary night in the wood. In Laurent Pelly's witty 2008 production for Glyndebourne, to be streamed by the Guardian for a whole week starting on Boxing Day, the tale becomes a gleefully ghoulish satire on consumerism, in which the forest is a maze of dead trees, devoid of any verdant softness. In a touch that feels all too relevant, Hänsel and Gretel's family are forced to live in a cardboard house following economic collapse; the Witch's gingerbread residence is a free-for-all supermarket; and the children who are freed at the end, after the Witch is thrown into her own ovens, are obese, having gorged themselves on the supermarket's high-sugar, high-fat goodies. Usually, there's a strong panto element to the portrayal of the Witch, but here the emphasis is on horror: Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke plays her as a murderous matriarch, sharpening her knife, stripping down to her underwear, revealing wisps of mouldy hair under her wig and a ladder of bodyhair rising up her abdomen." [Source] Watch a preview by clicking here.

To the Manor Born: Danielle de Niese at Home in Glyndebourne

"The 32-year-old Australian-American soprano not only stars at Glyndebourne, the privately run opera house in southern England, where we are meeting, she lives there too. In December 2009, De Niese married Gus Christie, third-generation owner and executive chairman of Glyndebourne Festival Opera. They live in the 17th-century country house adjoining the auditorium, where this summer she will sing the role of the beautiful, unattainable Adina in a revival of a 2007 production of Donizetti's light-hearted L'elisir d'amore, of which all 16 performances have already sold out. Nestling in the Sussex Downs, Glyndebourne is a rural idyll. For much of the year the predominant sound is of sheep in the surrounding fields. But for four summer months it is an internationally renowned opera house, overrun by black-tie audiences, many of them bankers and city types who think nothing of spending £250 (Dh1,508) on an opera ticket. Today in the quiet pre-season period, De Niese could be forgiven for keeping her door shut. And yet she has agreed to have lunch with me in one of the in-house restaurants, today being used as the canteen for staff and performers. De Niese makes an unlikely lady of the manor. The daughter of Sri Lankans who emigrated to Australia, she spent her early years in Melbourne and, aged 9, was the youngest winner of Young Talent Time, a TV show. Shortly after, she moved with her family (she has a younger brother) to Los Angeles, where she became a guest host on a live show for teenagers called LA Kids. Given this precocity, it comes as no surprise to discover that De Niese was only 15 when she made her professional opera debut with the Los Angeles Opera. She later went to the Mannes College of Music in New York."

"What does De Niese make of Glyndebourne's dyed-in-the-wool English traditions of behaviour and dress? 'When I first came to England [six years ago], it was like coming back to something I knew,' she says, as we plunge into our food. 'I spent my first ten years in the Commonwealth. I come from cricket, crumpets, cucumber sandwiches, the Queen.' The alliterative picture she conjures up makes me laugh and I ask if that is what defines English culture for her. Not at all, says De Niese. 'That would be like saying French means eating escargots, Italian is pasta, American is cheeseburgers. It goes deeper. What I see as especially English is the charm — everyone is so polite. Being restrained is part of the charm. And I love the sense of humour — it takes me back to Australia. The English are great at making fun of themselves.'"

"'Why do the English use the word pants for underwear? I was in the gym, where I do boxing, so I had to take my wedding ring off. It wasn't till afterwards that I realised I'd forgotten to put it back on. I told Gus I'd left my ring in this guy's pants. They weren't his actual pants. The word ‘pants' comes from ‘pantaloon', doesn't it?' While De Niese is earnestly recalling the incident, I can't help wondering what a blast of fresh air this classless woman, a product of talent, not privilege, must have injected into the social milieu of the Christie clan. If Christie had consciously set out to update Glyndebourne's image, he could not have done better."

"Although De Niese has been doing most of the talking, she has finished eating far ahead of me. To help me catch up, I ask her about the dazzling earrings, bracelet and long gold necklace she is wearing, all with matching white-and-grey mother-of-pearl. She has, she explains, a 'relationship' with French luxury jeweller Van Cleef & Arpels, meaning she wears their most expensive products on public occasions. So what is the value of today's assemblage? For the only time in our conversation, De Niese falters. A mere £19,000, she says, 'but these are for keeps.' This distinguishes them from the jewels she wears for photo shoots and big social events. 'When I'm wearing millions of dollars to the theatre [on loan], they like to have bodyguards in my dressing room. In places where there is already high security, like when Gus and I were invited to Buckingham Palace, the guards don't need to be there. But they do have their uses. When I arrived at St James's Palace to see Prince Charles and Camilla, I put the heel of my shoe through my Donna Karan dress. It was so funny to see the guards trying to thread needles.'"

Read the whole interview here.

(Photos: Chris Dunlop/Decca)