vilaine fille is an archive. If you would like more information on Marion Lignana Rosenberg’s current activities, please visit mondo-marion.com. Thanks!
vilaine fille is an archive. If you would like more information on Marion Lignana Rosenberg’s current activities, please visit mondo-marion.com. Thanks!
Posted on 24 November 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Gianmaria Testa, one of today’s finest singer-songwriters, makes a rare visit to New York on Sunday, May 25, when he plays Joe’s Pub. Here is my advance on the joint concert by Gianmaria and flugelhorn virtuoso Paolo Fresu from Time Out New York. At Gianmaria’s site, you’ll find part of my 2004 review of his album Altre latitudini.
My 2005 report on a Montréal concert by Gianmaria is one of vilaine fille’s most frequently visited posts. Listen to his music at goear.com—I especially love “Manacore,” “Extra-muros,” and “’Na stella”—and on YouTube.
For the past eleven years, my professional goal has been to land a full-time writing position at a magazine, newspaper, or other publication. Such a position has not materialized, so vilaine fille is closing up shop and moving on to new pursuits. Warmest thanks to all who have visited and supported this site.
vilaine fille will stay live through Labor Day—and “permanently,” if I can obtain free hosting beyond that. I am hanging on to the domain name.
I’m still blogging, but not in English, and only incidentally about music. If you would like to stay informed about my writing projects, please drop me an e-mail at vilaine [{d0t}] fille [{at}] gmail [{d0t}] com. I do plan to launch a new music-related blog in 2009.
To all, thanks and bon vent!
Posted on 22 May 2008 | Permalink
Posted on 19 May 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)
In his folk song “Farewell to the Gold,” Nic Jones tells the story of a failed gold prospector. After two years of finding no more than a few flecks of the precious metal, the unlucky man is giving up his search. “Farewell to the gold/that never I found,” he sings. “Goodbye to the nuggets/that somewhere abound./For it’s only when dreaming/that I see them gleaming/down in the dark deep underground.” If I’m reading the omens correctly, Sagittarius, it’s time for you, too, to say goodbye to a quest that hasn’t panned out. Yes, it’ll be sad. But here’s the happy ending: Within a month of the time you surrender, you’ll be led to a better quest with more chance of success.
—Rob Brezsny
Posted on 18 May 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted on 12 May 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
You know that the world has gone utterly to pot when Peggy Noonan starts making sense.
In a jaw-dropping interview in USA Today on Thursday, [Mrs. Clinton] said, “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.” As evidence she cited an Associated Press report that, she said, “found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”White Americans? Hard-working white Americans? “Even Richard Nixon didn't say white,” an Obama supporter said, “even with the Southern strategy.”
If John McCain said, “I got the white vote, baby!” his candidacy would be over. And rising in highest indignation against him would be the old Democratic Party.
To play the race card as Mrs. Clinton has, to highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical “the black guy can’t win but the white girl can” is—well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.
A resident of New York who twice pulled the lever for Senator Clinton, I will vote for anyone, even Gus Hall’s maggots, before casting another ballot for racist trash of her ilk.
She and all who still support her make me ill.
Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.
There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.
The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.
We coach Little League in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.
There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq.
We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?
—Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama (2004)
Posted on 11 May 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted on 05 May 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
You know, if our ancestors had thrown out their furniture every decade, as we do, where would we go for antiques? Let us give some thought to the well-being and enjoyment of our descendants, patch up our lares and penates, and hang on to them, so that the future will inherit at least some relics of our heedless and wasteful age. Working over something, and repairing it,—whether we re-finish furniture, fix over an old house, or put new cuffs on a sweater—not only gives things new life and makes them look cared-for, but embeds them still deeper in our affections.
—Elizabeth Zimmermann, Knitter’s Almanac
Posted on 04 May 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Posted on 27 April 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
—Walt Whitman
Posted on 27 April 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted on 21 April 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
vilaine fille wishes everyone blessings and miracles at Pesach!
Posted on 20 April 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted on 14 April 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Miss you, sweetie. Love you.
Posted on 13 April 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Posted on 07 April 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
I have learnt how to live… How to be in the world and of the world, and not just to stand aside and watch. And I will never, never again run away from life. Or from love, either…Merci !
—Billy Wilder, Sabrina
Posted on 06 April 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted on 31 March 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
D’una città non godi le sette o le settantasette meraviglie, ma la risposta che dà a una tua domanda.
—Italo Calvino
Posted on 30 March 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted on 24 March 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)
I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world, not only for its strength, but for its civilization as well. And I look forward to a world which will be safe not only for democracy and diversity, but also for personal distinction.
—John F. Kennedy
To all who keep the holiday, vilaine fille sends best wishes for a happy and blessèd Easter!
Posted on 23 March 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted on 17 March 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted on 16 March 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)
Posted on 11 March 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)
Posted on 09 March 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
vilaine fille sends greetings to her sisters all over the globe for International Women’s Day, La Festa della Donna.
In particular, she salutes those lucky enough to live in civilized countries, who enjoy abortion rights; state-funded healthcare, child care, and maternity leave; and explicit guarantees of equality under the law. (G-d willing, she’s gonna be joining you real soon.)
Read Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women.
Posted on 08 March 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Posted on 03 March 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Posted on 02 March 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Posted on 25 February 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Posted on 24 February 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted on 24 February 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
…e poi viene un giorno
che a guardarlo passare
sembra il giorno di un altro
e di un altro le cose da fare
e di un altro la voce
e anche l’ombra sui muri
e di un altro anche i fiori
che ho preso per te
e sono fiori d’inverno
ma per un’altra stagione
oppure un altro ricordo
che adesso non so
nient’altro che fiori
cosa vorranno mai dire
a guardarli di nuovo
non dicono più
perché viene un giorno…
—Gianmaria Testa, “Nient’altro che fiori”
And then there comes a day that, to watch it pass, seems the day of someone else, of someone else the things to do, of someone else the voice, even the shadows on the walls, and even these winter flowers that I gathered for you. And they’re winter flowers, but for some other season, or for some other memory, of what now I don’t know—nothing but flowers, whatever might they mean? As I look at them again, they say no more. Because there comes a day…
Great news, New Yorkers: Gianmaria Testa will make one of his rare visits to the United States on 25 May, playing Joe’s Pub with flugelhorn virtuoso Paolo Fresu.
Gianmaria’s 1999 CD Lampo, a masterpiece bathed in moonlight and haunted by time’s dizzying rush, has been reissued (including English-language texts this time around).
“Nient’altro che fiori,” from Altre latitudini, features, among others, the great trumpeter Enrico Rava, one of the sexiest men on the planet, who plays Birdland 20–23 February along with pianist Stefano Bollani and other crack musicians. Rava and Bollani have a new ECM CD, The Third Man.
Posted on 19 February 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
One of this opera season’s most eagerly anticipated events is just around the corner: the March return to the Met of tenor Giuseppe Filianoti as Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor, the role of his sensational 2005 company début.
Filianoti, who opened yesterday as Tom Rakewell in Palermo (his role début), has been to hell and back since his last local appearance, in OONY’s L’Arlesiana in February 2007—and I’m not referring only to the diabolical operas in which he has sung. On the heels of an acclaimed Rome run of Werther, Filianoti fell gravely ill with peritonitis following an appendectomy and was forced to withdraw from some six months of engagements.
His first performances after his illness—as Hoffmann in Hamburg and in Verdi’s Messa da Requiem in Torino—were popular and critical successes, though Il Corriere della Grisi’s Adolphe Nourrit expressed reservations about the Hoffmann. Opera Today’s critic, instead, praised Filianoti’s “balls-to-the-wall phrases,” of which vilaine fille says: Wow, that must hurt.
Last month’s Mefistofele in Palermo reportedly found the tenor in fine fettle. (Yes, that’s Mefistofele in the photo and not That ‘70s Show). And, as all the world knows, Filianoti will open the 2008-09 La Scala season in the title role of Verdi’s Don Carlo (Italian-language, four-act version) under Daniele Gatti. (vilaine fille’s birthday is the day after Sant’Ambrogio; she is SO there.)
Werther, Hoffmann, Faust, Don Carlo… That’s mighty heavy rep for a young singer. (Soon after his Met début, Filianoti opined that it was “too soon” for him to undertake Don Carlo.) And Edgardo’s tessitura is killing…
En tout cas, we wish Don Peppino a hearty in bocca al lupo and bentornato a New York! Alas, what with the silly set in the new Lucia, he probably will not be able to make his entrance running, with his cape swirling behind him—one of vilaine fille’s most cherished memories from thirty years of opera going. Filianoti also portrays Edgardo in San Francisco later this year. His upcoming performances include, as well, Werther in Genova, La clemenza di Tito in Torino, and Nicias in Thaïs (venue TBA).
Since Don Peppino is that rare tenor who reads Borges and Sgalambro, we thought it only fair to have him answer a version of the Proust questionnaire. (The Italian-language original will appear in print in coming weeks; if it makes its way to the web, I’ll post the link.)
Buona lettura!
Your most marked characteristic?
Determination.
The quality you most like in a man?
Courage.
The quality you most like in a woman?
Intelligence and intuition.
What do you most value in your friends?
Good faith.
What is your principal defect?
Being an introvert.
What is your favorite occupation?
Reading.
What is your dream of happiness?
Living in total serenity.
What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes?
Losing those I love.
What would you like to be?
Alight with wisdom.
In what country would you like to live?
Southern Italy.
What is your favorite color?
Brown.
What is your favorite flower?
All of them.
What is your favorite bird?
The phoenix.
Who are your favorite prose writers?
Too many, I couldn’t decide.
Who are your favorite poets?
Dante, Shakespeare, Leopardi, Montale.
Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
Edgardo, Achilles, Aeneas.
Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?
Desdemona, Anna Karenina, Dido.
Who are your favorite composers?
All those whose music I’ve sung along with Britten, Debussy, and Monteverdi.
Who are your favorite painters?
Mantegna, Leonardo, Raffaello, and Caravaggio.
Who are your heroes in real life?
I have none.
Who are your favorite heroines of history?
Joan of Arc, Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
What are your favorite names?
Arianna, Flavio.
What is it you most dislike?
The abuse of power.
What historical figure do you most despise?
Hitler.
What event in military history do you most admire?
None.
What natural gift would you most like to possess?
The ability to read my own soul.
How would you like to die?
I don’t think about it.
What is your present state of mind?
In progress (answered in English).
To what faults do you feel most indulgent?
Those belonging to the people dear to my heart.
What is your motto?
Don’t borrow trouble.
Update: La sor romana answers the ever-pressing question, How many tenors does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Posted on 18 February 2008 | Permalink | Comments (4)
Posted on 18 February 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
And until 20 January 2009, we say, with brother Nick: A ognuno puzza questo barbaro dominio (This barbarous regime stinks in all nostrils), De principatibus, XXVI.
A safe and relaxing holiday to my fellow Statunitensi!
Posted on 18 February 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
—My sister Fred
Posted on 17 February 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Whether your love be new or old, sad or glad, fleshly or of the spirit, or perhaps all of the above (why not?), vilaine fille sends you a baker’s dozen of musical roses and wishes you immense tenderness and joy.
L’amour… supporte tout, croit tout, espère tout, endure tout. L’amour ne périt jamais.
Posted on 14 February 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
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