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.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro has a libretto by Lorenzo daPonte based on the French play La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro (The Crazy Day or the Marriage of Figaro) by Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799).
For its world class Easter Festival, Baden-Baden mounted a Die Zauberflöte that owed more to the grey penitential doldrums of Lent than to the unbridled jubilance of re-birth.
How does it come about that "modern" productions date so quickly while "traditional" ones can go on for ages ? Probably, because ideas that once were fresh and innovative are immediately picked up by everybody in the business, copied (sometimes...
How does it come about that "modern" productions date so quickly while "traditional" ones can go on for ages ? Probably, because ideas that once were fresh and innovative are immediately picked up by everybody in the business, copied (sometimes ad nauseam) and seem stale when they reappear some years later.
For one moment I thought that the great recycler-of-the-one-idea-he-ever-had, Mr. Robert Wilson, had directed the Amsterdam Rigoletto. During the prelude the chorus slowly raised their arms in the well known tai-chi manner while the ugliness of their red unisex penguin costumes reminded me of the horrors during the second act of Aida at De Munt in Brussels (later spewed out at London's Covent Garden). A few whispered words told me that the director actually was the Dutch Monique Wagemakers, best known for her work as director of a regional company, and that the production had first been shown in 1996. Miss Wagemakers succeeded exceedingly well in rehashing all clichés of Das Regietheater. The chorus was not only a company of courtiers but of course were viewers as well from high on at the events in the last act. A normal floor is out of the question when one can use an inclined plane that is a comment on its own on what's happening. And to top it all (pun intended) Rigoletto's house is somewhat reduced to one very high steep and rather small flight of steps. There Gilda may sing her Caro nome and there she is kidnapped. One could almost sense the fear of soprano and chorus when they had to wrap her in and then lower her down after Zitti, ziti. And the poor baritone had to run up quite a few steps before able to launch his Ah ! La Maledizione and as could be expected, the voice had no air left and it was only a tiny curse. In short Miss Wagemakers only succeeded while trying to free us from old clichés in giving us new ones.
Mind you, I realize only too well that an old war-horse as Rigoletto is difficult to renovate; especially after Jonathan Miller's updating to Little Italy in the fifties at the English National Opera some 20 years ago. That was an example of a well thought out production that made the opera seem like new to me and I admit, made it difficult for this reviewer to accept the traditional court of Mantua. Still give me the court any day if the alternative is a box of clichés. The one positive aspect of this Rigoletto was the treatment of the singers. No impossible gestures and the face firm to the public.
Conductor Daniele Callegari is a man who knows his Verdi and I was somewhat surprised he chose the easy option to make an impression now and then: either too slow tempi (the prelude) or too fast ones (Cortiginani vil razza). But most of the time he kept a firm rein on the orchestra and was not above indulging his singers. Anthony Michaels-Moore was Rigoletto. I wonder if he could make the same excellent impression in a theatre a size bigger (say Covent Garden). Michaels-Moore is excellent in early Verdi and I liked his Doge in I due Foscari at De Munt very much. He is no roaring madman as Bastianini was and for a moment I wondered if Rigoletto is not a shade too heavy a role. But he succeeded admirably. The voice is smooth, well-rounded and used very stylishly. He often reminded me of Fischer-Dieskau's famous DG-recording in the way he treated words and phrases. But Michaels-Moore 's voice is not a short tenor manqué but a real baritone with a firm brown core and a strong secure top.
Young Italian soprano Cinzia Forte sang Gilda. She has a nice lirico with a firm coloratura technique; somewhat like Rosanna Carteri or young Moffo. The first act she remained a little too bland, too colourless. Just a nice but not too distinct voice. But this changed in the second act when the voice bloomed and took colour. She will probably go far. Roles like Sparafucile and Maddalena are sometimes not cast from strength but one realizes the importance of good voices in these roles as well when one has suffered the hollow ugly tones of both Mario Luperi and Graciela Araya.
And then there was tenor Joseph Calleja whom I had heard a few years back at De Munt in Don Pasquale. In the meantime his career is going fast, maybe even a little too fast. There is a first recital on Decca where he sings a lot of stuff that is simply unsuitable for the voice like Adriana Lecouvreur. So I wondered how much he had improved on his very fine Ernesto of a few years ago. First of all, the voice has gained in strength and volume without damaging the basic colour. Imagine a little bit of young Björling mixed with parts of young Pavarotti and add a healthy dose of young Tagliavini while the small fluttery vibrato is all Calleja's own. In short, a mellifluous and exciting lyric tenor sound in the very best Italian tradition. The voice is maybe not over big but carries extremely well in a difficult theatre like Amsterdam. The only weakness for the moment lies at the very top of the range and that is somewhat unlike Pavarotti and Björling but more than one tenore di grazia had a short top. Still that has improved too. The high B in La donna è mobile rang out freely, courtesy of Maestro Callegari who allowed his tenor a deep breath before attacking the note. Calleja (please pronounce his name as if he would be Spanish, thus Calle- ch- a) for the moment has not got a high C and he should refrain from taking the high option in Addio, addio which he sang in falsetto. There is one Pavarotti-feature he should better not emulate. He will be only 27 next January and already has got weight problems which make costume designers looking for solutions so as not to accentuate his girth. So, please Mr. Calleja, try to rein in your appetite after a performance and it will be better for your breath too.
Now having heard both Calleja and Villazon at Amsterdam in a few months time (and Florez at De Munt), how do they compare ? Villazon is definitely the better actor though as a singer he has his weaknesses too: not much of a piano and not a shameless top note hunter either as is Florez. Calleja definitely has the more beautiful voice, the most exciting rich timbre of all three. His is a golden sound that reminds us of the very best Italian lyric tenors. Villazon is an exciting performer and an impressive voice with his dark smooth sound sometimes quivering from emotion like the fine verismo tenors before the war. Florez lacks either the exquisite sound of Calleja or the big sound of Villazon but is nevertheless a miracle in his repertoire. Personally and this is personal indeed I'd place Calleja nr. 1, followed by Villazon and Florez on third place. But how lucky we are that after the dreary lean years of the late eighties and nineties we have once more such three fascinating tenor voices.
Jan Neckers