Dulce Rosa, a brand new opera, had its world premiere Friday night, May 17, 2013 at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, California. It was produced by Los Angeles Opera, but staged in the smaller theater.
Richard Jones’ 2009 production of Verdi’s Falstaff translates the action from the first Elizabethan age to the start of the second.
Baritone Gareth John is rapidly accumulating a war-chest of honours. Winner of the 2013 Kathleen Ferrier Award, he recently won the Royal Academy of Music Patrons’ Award and was presented the Silver Medal by the Worshipful Company of Musicians.
This second revival of Jonathan Miller’s La bohème was the first time I had caught the production.
It’s Verdi’s bicentenary year and Rolando Villazón has two new CDs to plug — titled somewhat confusingly, ‘Villazón: Verdi’ and ‘Villazón’s Verdi’, the latter a ‘personal selection’ of favourite numbers performed by stars of the past and present.
Nicola Luisotti and the San Francisco Opera Orchestra climbed out of the War Memorial pit, braved the wind whipped bay and held spellbound an audience at Cal Performances’ Zellerbach Auditorium at UC Berkeley.
Utterly mad but absolutely right — Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos started the Glyndebourne 2013 season with an explosion. Strauss could hardly have made his intentions more clear. Ariadne auf Naxos is not “about” Greek myth so much as a satire on art and the way art is made.
“Man is an abyss. It makes one dizzy to look into it.” So utters Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, repeating what was also a recurring motif in the playwright’s own letters.
National Opera Company of the Rhine has marked this year’s Benjamin Britten celebration with a remarkably compelling, often gripping new production of the seldom-seen Owen Wingrave.
Once upon a time, Frankfurt Opera had the baddest ass reputation in Germany as “the” cutting edge producer of must-see opera.
Productions of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto can serve as a vehicle for individual singers to make a strong impression and become afterward associated with specific roles in the opera.
Just in case we were not aware that the evening’s programme was ‘themed’, the Britten Sinfonia designed a visual accompaniment to their musical exploration of night, sleep and dreams.
Poor Aida! She never seems to have anything go her way.
Is it possible to upstage Jonas Kaufmann? Kaufmann was brilliant in this Verdi Don Carlo at the Royal Opera House, London, but the rest of the cast was so good that he was but first among equals. Don Carlo is a vehicle for stars, but this time the stars were everyone on stage and in the pit. Even the solo arias, glorious as they are, grow organically out of perfect ensemble. This was a performance that brought out the true beauty of Verdi's music.
The big names were absent: Duparc, D’Indy, Debussy, Ravel … and while Fauré, Chausson, Roussel and several members of Les Six put in an appearance, in less than familiar guises, this survey of French song of the early 20th century and interwar years deliberately took us on a journey through infrequently travelled terrain.
Composed between 1718 and 1720, Handel’s Esther is sometimes described as the ‘first English Oratorio’, but is in fact a hybrid form, mixing elements of oratorio, masque, pastoral and opera.
Hector Berlioz's légende dramatique, La Damnation de Faust, exists somewhere between cantata and opera. Berlioz's flexible attitude to dramatic form made the piece unworkable on the stages of early 19th century Paris and his music is so vivid that you wonder whether the piece needs staging at all.
St. John’s Smith Square was the site of Elizabeth Connell’s final London concert, intended as a farewell to London on her moving to Australia. It was rendered ultimately final by her unexpected death.
With the building of the Suez Canal, Egypt became more interesting to Western Europeans. Khedive Ismail Pasha wanted a hymn by Verdi for the opening of a new opera house in Cairo, but the composer said he did not write occasional pieces.
Back for its fourth revival, David McVicar’s 2003 production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte has much charm, beauty and artistry.
I spent a spectacular three days in Walt Disney Concert Hall taking in the magnificent music of Richard Wagner in what has been entitled The Tristan Project. At first, when this three day event was announced as part of...
I spent a spectacular three days in Walt Disney Concert Hall taking in the magnificent music of Richard Wagner in what has been entitled The Tristan Project.
At first, when this three day event was announced as part of the season's schedule my reaction was, wow, somebody is listening. Finally a Wagner opera as a mini series. I could not have been farther from the truth. Yes, they did do it over three days, an act each day. But any relationship to a TV mini series is just not there other than the time frame.
The Philharmonic did not make seeing all the pieces of this project easy. The three segments were scattered on different subscriptions.....no two or three of them on any one series. So one had to figure out how to get the precious tickets needed to see all of this in some sort of order. It was a great marketing ploy....extra subscriptions were probably sold in order to get the right tickets. Friends and I have wondered why they did not package this as a separate series in of itself, as the Ring is frequently done. But scramble we did and tickets we did get, and it was worth all the effort.
And the next thing I have to say before I presume to write anything about the experience I have had this week-end that I am not a Wagner scholar and not imbued in his music. I like what I have heard and look forward to hearing more. So don't expect some great treatise on Tristan und Isolde (T & I) here. I cannot produce that!!
Wagner's masterpiece has been and continues to be a major influence on the opera world on many levels. Other composers have been influenced by the work and have been inspired to write their own pieces of music out of that influence. Singers yearn to sing the major roles and opera houses put together magnificent productions to great acclaim.
But the project in Los Angeles is not produced by the Los Angeles Opera. It is a project of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in collaboration with the Paris Opera and Lincoln Center. The director of the project is Peter Sellars, whose work most opera goers are very familiar with, and who's El Nino with the Phil and John Adams I dearly loved.
After Wagner's music the heart and soul of this production is the video artistry of Bill Viola, a world renowned visual artist who has worked with Peter Sellars in the past. His work is exhibited in major museums around the world and he is well published. I cannot fail to mention the third member of the triumvirate of influences in this piece....Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. He is conducting his first Tristan in this venture.
As Peter Sellars discussed in the pre performance lectures, Act one is about purification, Act 2 about light and love and Act 3 about returning to earth (death...dust to dust?). This is a VERY oversimplified statement and in no way describes the enormity of this musical experience.
I would have had a much less dramatic experience if I had not attended the lectures and heard Sellars and others passionate discussion of this work. At one point Sellars actually choked up as he described the death of Tristan and Isolde singing the Liebestod. Tribute to the quality of the pre-performance presentation was the presence of composer and conductor John Adams seated in the middle of the hall, unnoticed by most.
The staging is concert style with singers in front of the orchestra for the most part. But Disney Hall offers the opportunity to place singers and instrumentalists around the space for greatest effect. The production made use of all of the hall, aisle ways, unseen spaces and 360 degree placement of musicians.
There are very large video screens in the front and back of the hall for the visuals of Bill Viola and also the usual screens for the translated texts of the German language libretto.
The cast is top drawer....Christine Brewer as Isolde, Clifton Forbis as Tristan ( Why Wagner did not call this Isolde and Tristan is beyond me), Jill Grove as Bragane, Stephen Milling as King Marke, Alan Held as Kurwenal and Thomas Studebaker as Melot. The Sailor's voice and Shepard are sung by Michael Slattery and Los Angeles Opera young artist Jinyoung Jang did a nice job with the small part of the Steersman.
If you have an opportunity to hear Brewer singing anything don't hesitate. This is a major talent in our midst and a voice that should not be missed.
As the music of Wagner unfolds in Act 1 the visuals depict Tristan and Isolde stripping themselves of their earthly connections and becoming surreal characters and taking on the mythical dimension that I think the music supports. The visuals are silent and the music is totally from the "live" singers and orchestra. The timing and tempo's worked well and the three elements came together beautifully for me. I heard some audience members comment that they ignored the visuals and just concentrated on the music. That is ok and fine if you wanted to do that. But for me it was a total experience and the visuals were part of the total sensory experience.
My seat for the Act 1 segment was in the balcony and there were brass players and singers placed three rows behind me and unseen chorus members out of sight on the sides on that level. The effect of being "in the music" was monumental. As the story unfolds and leads Tristan and Isolde to the point of what they think is death and becomes ultimately love, the music unfolded from all corners of Disney Hall. It was an amazing experience to feel this music this way.
For Act 2 I was still in the balcony. The experience of visually entering the forest and having these musical characters feel and convey the love they have but don't really understand was amazing. I do think the visuals for Act 1 were far more spectacular and riveting than those of Act 2. But the music was stunning and the LA Phil has never sounded better.
I was not at all ready for Act 3 and its power. The anguish of Tristan as he waits for Isolde and the spectacular entrance of Isolde were spellbinding. Brewer sang the Liebestod with such power and magnificence that many in the audience were in tears, yours truly included. The visuals of the return to heaven or home or to ones maker (choose your own terminology here) were riveting and so integrated in the music. I could not take my eyes off them.
This is a powerful opera no matter when it is presented. Most of Wagner's work has a "more than meets the eye" component to it. The visuals and Sellars concepts (most of which will be fully realized in Paris when this is fully staged along with the visual presentations) seek to explore that underlying message that is there. The music tells the story very well and has stood the test of time without question. The libretto is clear and well done. The added component of allowing the audience member to go beyond that aspect and do some searching within for the added sense of what this music might mean to us today is a gift from Sellars and Viola, and is enabled by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Cheryl Dowden
[Click here for more information on The Tristan Project.]