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.
A near-capacity audience, expectant and enthusiastic, streamed into the Dorothy Chandler for an old-fashioned evening of operatic glamour, as Angela Gheorghiu, with the Los Angeles Opera Orchestra in support, flew into town for a one night concert.
The soprano delivered on the glamour big-time, with three gowns, glittering jewelry, and a happy, even flirty manner. She sang beautifully too, if without the total captivation of her physical presence.
French music comprised the first half of the evening, with Eugene Kohn leading the orchestra in a bumptious “Rakoczy March” from Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust. The musicians seemed to need more warming up than the vocalist; the horns in particular struggled, possibly due to their recent exertions with the LAO’s run of Tannhäuser.
Gheorghiu swept on in flaming red, and the ovation that greeted her spoke to the impression she made with local audiences in her previous appearances with the company, as Nedda and Mimi. She launched into the so-called “Jewel song” from Faust, a number that spotlights her easy, bright top. Next was the program’s one rarity, “Pleurez, pleurez, mes Yeux,” from Massenet’s El Cid. Though not the composer’s most memorable tune, the piece has enough dramatic crescendos and darker passages to contrast well with the Gounod aria. After a gown change and the orchestra’s tepid run-through of the Béatrice et Bénédict overture, Ms. Gheorghiu reappeared and sang a tender “Adieu, notre petite table.” The first half ended with Ms. Gheoghiu’s somewhat controversial essay into Carmen, but for a recital, her “Habañera” succeeded wonderfully. She took a light-hearted approach, playful more than siren-ish, and the aria’s range seemed to suit her well.
The second half went to Italian composers, with Kohn choosing the Mascagni overture to Le Maschere, an unsubtle but fun piece. Gheorghiu’s Puccini Manon had a real poignance in “In quelle trine morbide.” Then she offered one of her specialities, “Chi il bel sogno di Doretta,” another opportunity to display her lovely top notes. She left for another gown change, and Kohn led the orchestra, finally sounding like the excellent group that has played for James Conlon recently, in Verdi’s overture to Les Vêpres Siciliennes. Now clad in glamorous black, with a sort of spider web motif, Gheorghiu sang Forza’s “Pace, pace, mio dio” and closed the second half with “Un bel di.”
These last two pointed up the relatively soft volume of Gheorghiu’s middle voice. She can be heard, even in a larger hall such as the Chandler, but it is not until the vocal line takes her higher that the voice has real force. Nevertheless, this listener would not trade the warm textures of her middle voice for a pushed sound.
So a rapturous audience called Ms. Gheorghiu back for several encores. Ironically, it was in the Lerner-Loewe “I Could have Danced All Night” that Ms Gheorghiu’s softer approach teased the ears a bit too much, but her irresistible delight in performing the song could not be denied. She treated the crowd as well to a Romanian song, to “Granada” and Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro,” and finally to “Non ti scordar di me.” She then grasped the first violinist by the hand, and led the musicians off the stage.
A delightful evening, but one that might have left some listeners eager for some heavier fare. Perhaps on her next visit, Ms. Gheorghiu will offer a program of more challenge. And one gown will do fine.
Chris Mullins