Hard Core

Apparently Elza van den Heever, who sings Elizabeth in the Met’s new Maria Stuarda, has shaved her head for the role. She explains being partly inspired by Demi Moore in G.I. Jane – not even a mention of Sigourney Weaver in Aliens 3! What has the world come to? However, taste in instances of female head shaving has no bearing on one’s ability to sing bel canto, so I’ll hold off comment until I actually hear the opera. (Lest you imagine they’ve updated Maria Stuarda to a cargo vessel in deep space, and get excited about the egg-planting and the guts and the flame throwers — recall that this is the Met, and compose yourself. But if you stop to think about it, the humans’ reaction to the aliens in the Aliens movies is not completely unlike the Elizabethan regime’s attitude to Mary Stuart by the 1580s. After all, what – in their view – were Catholics like Mary other than devious many-mouthed monsters who planted their slimy eggs of seductive theological error deep within the bosoms entrails of innocent Protestants?)

Leaving that question aside for the moment, the upside to having no mail delivery for a week and a half is that when the mail does come, it brings little piles of CDs – including a really nice recording of Mozart’s violin sonatas by Hilary Hahn and Natalie Zhu, which I am enjoying as I write – and my copy of the Met’s Rodelinda on DVD. Looking forward to that. One of these days I will have to break out of my current rut and watch something that was not staged at the Met. What is the opposite of the Metropolitan Opera?

However, I may hold off til the weekend on Rodelinda, since my faculties are clearly not all there at the moment: I tried to sign into my own blog this afternoon as 1) my university login, to which WordPress replied “pfffft” and 2) “eatwormopera” which, amusing as it may be, is nevertheless . . .incorrect. (Logins collide! It’s like a really meathead version of The Golden Notebook or something.)