Recently in Commentary
Oct. 25, 2007, Sala Cecilia Meireles
I met the young gaucho composer Dimitri Cervo at the 2003 Bienal of Contemporary Music, where his works for solo flute and strings, Pattapiana [named for Pattapio Silva, a great Brazilian flutist who died tragically
young at the beginning of the last century] made quite an impression.
There’s still a hint of jest in the comparison, but it’s not without reason that Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally are mentioned now and then in opera circles as “the Strauss and Hofmannsthal of the 21st century.”
Incoming general director of Santa Fe Opera, Charles MacKay, has made clear he is “in the tradition -- I will not be an agent for radical change,” at the celebrated New Mexico summer opera festival, MacKay says.
Composer Frederick Carrilho was born in 1971 in the state of Sao Paulo, and has studied guitar and composition, most recently at UNICAMP in Campinas. His music has been heard at the recent biennial festivals of contemporary music in Rio, with the Profusão V – Toccata making a strong impression at the Bienal of 2007. We spoke in Portuguese.
October 23, 2007, Sala Cecilia Meireles, Rio de Janeiro
What makes the first visit to Guanajuato’s Teatro Juárez breathtaking is the suddenness of the encounter.
Oct. 25, 2007, Rio de Janeiro.
José Orlando Alves is a young composer, originally from Minas Gerais, but who spent many years in Rio de Janeiro, where he has been active for a decade with the composers’ collaborative, Preludio XXI.
In the long ago, when the best source of music reproduction in the home was a handsome piece of furniture, fitted with hidden audio components, and usually called radio-phonographs, my family had one — from Avery Fisher I believe — that had among its controls a switch labeled ‘presence.’
Uncut with Canada’s Mistress of the trouser-role: the multifaceted Kimberly Barber.
Glimmerglass Opera is in a watershed year. With the departure of Paul Kellogg, who had considerable success developing that annual festival, General and Artistic Director Michael Macleod has chosen to begin his tenure with a variation on the usual four-opera-season, namely a thematic collection
of pieces based on the “Orpheus” legend. “Don’t look
back” is the marketing catch phrase.
Almost thirty years ago a century old tradition ended with the last performance of I Maestri Cantatori.
Santa Fe Opera’s announcement August 10 that English-born impresario, Richard Gaddes, General Director of the company since 2001, will retire at the end of season 2008, took the local opera community by surprise.
The week just ended was certainly of historic moment in the world of North American opera companies.
Perhaps it is a sign that, at last, the countertenor voice has come of age in the hearts and minds of both audiences and the opera establishment.
Back in the early 1980’s two good ideas came to fruition: the much-needed new concert hall for Cardiff, capital city of Wales, and plans to hold within it the first “Singer of the World” competition.
Charleston, S.C. — For over 20 years it was two operas a season here at Spoleto USA, the all-arts
festival brought to this cultural capital of the Old South by Gian Carlo Menotti in 1977.
It is every young opera singer’s dream.
On May 9th, when Santa Fe Opera finally announced that Alan Gilbert had left his post as Music
Director of that company, a long-standing rumor was made official.
Robert Gierlach wishes he could rewrite “Anna Karenina,” the Tolstoi whopper turned into an opera by librettist Colin Graham and composer David Carlson. It’s not that Gierlach, who sings Vronsky in the world premiere of the work at Florida Grand Opera on April 28, has misgivings
about the author’s artistry; he simply wishes that the story could have a happy ending.
Commentary
21 Jan 2005
So Much For Einstein's Theory
For many years Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s operatic work Zaide was regarded as a fragment. More than an hour of music was preserved but that was only the arias. Originally they were linked by spoken text, none of which survived. The German musicologist and conductor Andreas Kroeper, who now lives in the Czech Republic, says he has found the missing text and has proved it belonged to Zaide.
Mozart started to compose the two-act Singspiel, set in a Turkish harem — a popular setting at that time, some time around 1780 in Salzburg. The libretto, developing similar plots of the period, was written by the Salzburg court musician Johann Andreas Schachtner. But Mozart soon realised a serious piece like that would not go down well with the Viennese audience whose tastes had turned to comic operas.
Czech-based musicologist claims to have found missing libretto to Mozart’s Zaide
For many years Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s operatic work Zaide was regarded as a fragment. More than an hour of music was preserved but that was only the arias. Originally they were linked by spoken text, none of which survived. The German musicologist and conductor Andreas Kroeper, who now lives in the Czech Republic, says he has found the missing text and has proved it belonged to Zaide.
Mozart started to compose the two-act Singspiel, set in a Turkish harem — a popular setting at that time, some time around 1780 in Salzburg. The libretto, developing similar plots of the period, was written by the Salzburg court musician Johann Andreas Schachtner. But Mozart soon realised a serious piece like that would not go down well with the Viennese audience whose tastes had turned to comic operas.
Mozart abandoned the project, not finishing the overture and the final act. Zaide was not staged until 1866 in an adaptation. Further adaptations followed, often with a narrator filling the gaps between each musical number. The British Classical Opera Company recently decided to commission a contemporary poet to write new lyrics and to use other works by Mozart from the same period to complete the piece musically. In the Czech Republic, Zaide was adapted by the South Bohemian Theatre three years ago with actors outside the plot carrying the storyline from on sung piece to another.
In 1936 the Mozart expert Alfred Einstein found a libretto believed to have been the inspiration for Zaide. He compared it to the fragment, found the comparison unsatisfactory and abandoned this track. The Czech-based musicologist and conductor Andreas Kroeper says this was a mistake. He says that when examining the libretto thoroughly he found it had been used as a model for Zaide. He believes Mozart and Schachtner took liberties with the original version, left out some parts and changed the order of scenes.
Andreas Kroepner has now prepared a preview of the completed Zaide and hopes to stage it in Europe, the United States and Japan next year to mark the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth.
Pavla Horakova
Source: http://www.radio.cz/en/article/62518.
