“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.
Once Berkeley Opera, renamed West Edge Opera, this enterprising company offers the Bay Area’s only serious alternative to corporate opera, to wit Bonjour M. Gauguin.
In the first of pianist Julius Drake’s three-part series, ‘Perspectives’, our gaze was directed at Gustav Mahler’s eclectic musical responses to human experiences: from the trauma and distress of anguished love to the sweet contentment of true friendship, from the agonised introspection of the artist to the diverse dramas of human interaction.
The Los Angeles opera company marketed its spring production of Rossini's La Cenerentola as Cinderella though there is no opera by that name. The libretto of La Cenerentola is not the Cinderella story we know.
The Paris Opéra has not staged a full Ring Cycle since 1957, but its current season will conclude with a correction of this grand operatic gap.
Washington National’s 2012-2013 season continues this spring with a production of Giacomo Puccini’s first successful opera.
The Kirov Opera and Orchestra concluded their annual residency at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC last week with a Sunday matinee concert performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1932 Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District.
Even unstaged, this powerful and disturbing work filled with scenes of rape, humiliation, corruption, and murder felt almost too overwhelming to sit through. Speculations of political pressure aside, it was not difficult to imagine, after being a member of the audience, why the middle-aged composer would have felt compelled to rewrite the work, curbing the raw violence of his X-rated early masterpiece down to at least a PG-13 rating (the new version, renamed Katerina Ismailova after the main character and premiered in 1963, was reportedly the composer’s favorite).
Conducted with savage intensity by maestro Gergiev, the Kirov Orchestra proved itself once again one of the premiere ensembles in the world today, operatic or otherwise. Even the premium-seat dwellers, well-schooled in the social etiquette that forbids applause until the end of the piece (or in this case, until the intermission), erupted spontaneously into an ovation after the breathtaking rendition of the 2nd tableau interlude. The conductor simply refused to hold his orchestra back to accommodate the singers, and the power of volume alone was truly earth-shattering – exactly the kind of effect Shostakovich’s uncompromising music demands. To their credit, both the excellent chorus and most of the soloists withstood the competition admirably. Unlike the previously reviewed Il Viaggio a Reims, which was a vehicle for the relative novices at the Mariinsky Academy of Young Singers, this production involved the premiere forces of the venerable Kirov stage. Larisa Gogolevskaya was spectacular as Katerina the kupchikha (merchant’s wife), the only character in a cartoonish parade of degenerates for whom, despite three murders in a space of four acts, the composer allows his listener to feel any sympathy. Her gut-wrenching rendition of the Act 4 arioso is worth a special mention, as are her confrontation scenes with her bully of a father-in-law Boris Timofeevich. Unfortunately, Alexei Tanovitski in the latter role was not perhaps the best partner for Gogolevskaya: despite an attractive sound and some good acting that won him approval of the audience, his voice lacked the sheer strength necessary to match (and often overpower) Katerina and, in this particular case, also to hold his own against the orchestra. Among secondary characters, Liubov Sokolova was a gorgeously trashy Sonyetka, while an operatic veteran Gennady Bezzubenkov deserved his applause as both a thoughtful Old Convict, and as a lecherous Priest whose profundo register drew gasps from the hall.
Indeed, quite a few characters created by the singers made one long to see the opera staged, but none more so than the two leading tenors of the production, Evgeny Akimov as Katerina’s husband, Zinovy Borisovich, and Viktor Lutsiuk as her lover, Sergei. At the beginning, it made little sense to me that Lutsiuk would be given the role of Sergei, who as a mock operatic lover does a lot of powerful singing throughout the opera, while Akimov, an obviously stronger singer, would be cast as Zinovy, a weakling who barely gets two scenes in before being dispatched into the next world (and down into the cellar) by his wife. As the production progressed, however, I came to appreciate this brilliant piece of operatic casting. Lutsiuk’s Sergei was deliciously disgusting; his voice, figure, gestures, and facial expressions virtually oozed slime. Meanwhile, having Akimov, a powerhouse tenor with a ringing metallic timbre, portray an insecure, impotent, pathetic little man brought forth an equally delicious irony of all style and no substance.
The performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District closed a rather unusual tour for the Kirov this year: the company eschewed heavy Russian drama for two Italian comedies, Rossini’s Il Viaggio a Reims and Verdi’s Falstaff. While the Shostakovich provided a taste of the former, the tour as a whole reminds us once again that the Kirov is capable of much more than the Philips Russian opera recordings, great as they are. Indeed, Gergiev’s troupe seems determined lately to defy any possibility of being viewed as an example of parochial exotica, and wants to be seen instead as the first-class European opera theater that it is. Whether or not one loves their Italian (or their German, for that matter – speaking of the Cardiff production of the Ring Cycle reviewed recently on this site), the Kirov is no longer just a “Russian theater.” As a new resident of the Washington DC area, I look forward to whatever the next five years of the company’s residency here bring. And of course, I will keep you posted!
Olga Haldey