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Anthony Minghella's visually-arresting staging, a co-production with New York's Metropolitan Opera and the Lithuanian National Opera, returned this month to its original home at the London Coliseum after a gap of two years.
While I eagerly seized upon an opportunity to hear Angelika Kirschlager live for the first time, having written in very recent weeks about not one but two of the star mezzo’s current CD releases, I ventured to Frankfurt’s Alte Oper feeling a little bit like her stalker.
When I worked in the Archives of the Met, I was custodian of several hundred costumes, many from the days when divas traveled with steamer trunks full of things run up just for them, by the finest designers, with the most glamorous materials, in the colors and styles that suited the ladies themselves.
There is nothing redeeming about Sir John Falstaff, one of Shakespeare’s most lively comic characters and the subject of Verdi’s final opera, and yet, inexplicably, we love him.
What constitutes an “international opera star” these days, anyway?
The Metropolitan Opera audience loves its Wagner, and the management for the last several decades has, alas, made sure we aren’t spoiled: it’s a rare season that gets more than two production revivals of Wagner, and some years there have been none.
With her performance of the “Four Last Songs,” ably partnered by Michael Tilson Thomas and his San Francisco Symphony, Deborah Voigt emphatically confirmed her place as one of the glories of the current roster of Strauss interpreters.
John Adams, whose opera Nixon in China set the bar for post-minimalism in the lyric theatre, has once again scored a success with his latest work.
Wagner’s all-conquering chic made apocalyptic music-dramas drawn from folklore the ideal of the nationalistic era; every serious opera composer of the time felt obliged to attempt something in that line.
In this country art and politics are rarely bedfellows — strange or otherwise; indeed, it’s seldom that the two meet under the same roof.
Regarded, until the modern vogue for earlier masters, as the senior surviving grand master of opera, Gluck never quite becomes fashionable and never quite vanishes.
There is no middle ground in War and Peace — or, rather, it’s all middle ground, like a battlefield, and you may feel as if every soldier in Russia (and in France) has marched over you.
Once upon a time, we used to only dream about a stellar pairing like Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu has fielded for their current offering on display: “La Cenerentola.”
Enough ink was spilled last year gushing over Valencia’s new Calatrava-designed opera house and Arts and Science park that I had been chomping at the bit for the opportunity to take in a performance there as soon as my availability and, more important, the availability of a still-very-hard-to-find ticket coincided.
Do we too easily take Richard Strauss for granted? The question is prompted by the superlative production of “Frau ohne Schatten” that was the highlight of the fall season at the Chicago Lyric Opera.
Watching The Queen of Spades staged by a Russian company is often an unforgettable experience.
If Belfast in Northern Ireland isn’t a city that immediately springs to mind as a centre of musical excellence then it’s not for want of talent, initiative and professionalism within its cultural community.
After the triumph of his fifth opera, Ernani, Verdi could have gone on writing howling melodramas and made a mint.
Not long ago, English National Opera declared an intention to capitalise on its name and history by placing greater emphasis on English works.
Despite 19th-century Russia’s reputation as an Italian opera haven, Verdi’s late masterpiece Otello found acceptance there only with great difficulty, even though in its 1889 premiere the title role acquired a great local interpreter in the Mariinsky Theater primo uomo, Nikolai Figner.
Monteverdi’s great work, “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” in a “semi-staged” format, has been chosen to showcase the talents of some exciting young singers and musicians in London recently as the first part of an ambitious project aimed at a more holistic approach to singing opera.
Known as “Il Corpo Cantante” or, less felicitous in English, “the Singing Body”, this project is the brainchild of Ashley Stafford who combines his experience as singer, teacher and osteopath to explore and give singers “a clearer insight into the specific ways in which the physical nature of singing relates to the whole body …. and to explore the links between our imaginative feel for music and the body’s way of transforming that desire …..into creative expressive reality.”
Today’s professional opera houses demand an ever-higher synthesis of both vocal and dramatic artistry - and young singers ignore this at their peril. So the project also aims to give young singers with ambitions as soloists a chance to experience and become better aware of the links between the physical, mental and emotional demands of singing at a professional level. This latter goal was much in evidence at the group’s “Poppea” where the demands of the small but elegant space at the Dutch Church, Austin Friars, London were obvious. The singers had to adapt to low stage just feet from the audience, with only a wooden pulpit structure behind them to be climbed to give occasional height when required by the drama. They also had to enter and exit down the sides in full view of the hall’s packed seats. Some of the singers coped better than others with this rather exposed situation. The excellent small ensemble of 8 musicians, led incisively and elegantly from the harpsichord by the experienced Marco Ozbic, musical director and fellow-creator of the project, were centred at the front of the main aisle - close enough to enable study of both their music and bowing technique by some patrons. Noticeable for his eloquent playing was cellist Simon Wallfisch, and first violin Emma Parker also impressed with a sympathetic ear for the idiosyncrasies of this music.
Marco Ozbic also approached the well-known problem of paucity of orchestration left to us by an ageing Monteverdi (or his assistants) in a positive way. The enigma of the sparse instrumental music in “Poppea” is one of the major difficulties that modern interpreters face as, apart from some unspecified ritornelli, nearly all solo vocal parts are accompanied only by continuo. Ozbic thinks this seems at odds with the colourful instrumentation found in Monteverdi’s earlier operas, and so has compromised very successfully by adding instrumental lines in suitable places that helped produce a most lively and dynamic support for the singers and dramatic action.
However, it became obvious very quickly that there was a significant variation in levels of opera performance experience among the singers; some like Helen Court (sop. Poppea) and Andrew Tortise (tenor, Lucano, soldier and Seneca’s friend) showed that experience by an easy confidence on stage coupled with expressive and technically assured singing. Court in particular was impressive in her characterisation of the conniving Poppea - just the right degree of knowing manipulation without undue over-emphasis.
Others, less experienced but seemingly with plenty of stage confidence already coupled with real vocal talent, such as Charlotte Tetley (mezzo-sop, Ottavia), Revital Raviv (sop.Virtu/Drusilla), James Armitage (ct, Arnalta) and Daniel Keating-Roberts (ct, Amor) seemed to relish the dramatic opportunities that Monteverdi offers. Tetley in particular has both a dramatic soprano voice and stage presence to match. Keating-Roberts has an unusually strong and characterful countertenor which, coupled with an eye for comedy, gave indications of a natural talent in the manner of a Visse or Robson.
Of the less experienced performers, Calvin Wells’ performance as Nerone caught the eye. It is rare for a countertenor, even a high one, to sing this role at pitch, as the composer wrote it; there is much above the staff and it imposes some quite tricky technical demands. It is in fact more of a “male soprano” role, but Wells certainly had the vocal resources to match it, and as he grew out of his understandable nerves and into the character of the emperor in the second and third Acts, one began to hear more clearly what a promising talent he is, given that he will absorb more stagecraft with experience.
More polished, if lacking a little in volume and “bite”, was countertenor Andrew Pickett’s noble and affecting Ottone, well drawn and sympathetic. Timothy Dickinson’s warm and rounded bass-baritone dealt with Seneca’s sonorous low passages with ease although like Wells, he was lacking somewhat in actorly technique at this stage of his career. Lucy Page, Thomas Herford, Gregory Hallam and Elizabeth Graham all acquitted themselves well in the smaller roles with Page switching roles very effectively between Fortuna and a page boy.
A full house gave warm applause to an ambitious production that achieved its goals on all levels.
© S.C. Loder 2006.
