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.
With the trials and tribulations of a multicultural society currently at the forefront of the British media, Gavin Quinn’s production placed a light-hearted focus on the bizarreness of a group of foreigners being thrown together in an unfamiliar situation.
Often stereotypes were cleverly turned on their head, with the seraglio-dwellers proving more modern and progressive than their western guests; Selim’s many wives accessorised their (reasonably) traditional Muslim dress with snazzy sunglasses, while the main quartet of lovers were in full period costume.
Each singer was allowed to keep his or her real accent, so there was a very Welsh Osmin, a Mancunian Pedrillo, and Blonde was even written formally into the English translation as an Australian girl. The youth and freshness of the cast allowed for further jokey concessions to the modern world; Pedrillo’s instrument of choice for the serenade was a brightly coloured electric guitar.
The dialogue fell victim to excessive cuts, which meant that the characters (especially Konstanze) remained a little sketchily drawn – and the break for a single interval after “Martern alle Arten” was misplaced.
Musical values were notably high, with energetic and bright conducting from Gary Cooper. Hal Cazalet sang Belmonte with a free, easy tenor which was never under pressure; Joshua Ellicott’s slightly weightier voice was no less attractive and he displayed considerable comic talent as Pedrillo. Elizabeth Donovan found herself taxed by some of Konstanze’s very highest sustained tessitura, but played the role with assurance and serenity; Lorina Gore’s no-nonsense Blonde sang with complete vocal security. Sion Goronwy’s lumbering Osmin had some terrific low notes; physically he towered above the rest of the cast, giving rise to much visual comedy. The ensemble work was excellent.
Richard Jackson’s Selim was a puzzle; there didn’t seem to have been much directorial thought given to his place in the context of the drama, and he was somewhat lacking in stage presence. Otherwise, the dramatic and comic rapport between characters was strong and well-developed.
Mauricio Elloriaga’s set was simple, consisting of shifting panels – ideally designed for maximum versatility in a touring production; the background and costumes were in cheerful candy colours.
Ruth Elleson © 2007