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.
At Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu, a sold-out house marked, for two nights in a row, the weekend introducing la diada de Sant Jordi, the big fiesta celebrated on April 23 in honor of the city’s patron St George.
The Flying Dutchman is a frequent guest in this Mediterranean seaport since it premiered here in 1885 as L’Holandès errant; not very surprisingly, since Barcelona is also an early shrine of the Wagner cult in southern Europe. Sure, it’s a long way from Bayreuth: patrons start clapping right after the overture and occasional breaches of etiquette take place after favorite numbers, despite rebuking from connoisseurs. Yet the purest of Wagnerites had more serious grounds for concern this time. The operatic debut of Àlex Rigola, born 1969, since 2003 artistic manager at the trend-making Teatre Liure, made them fear for the worst, as from that seminary for avant-garde directors came both the talented innovator Lluís Pasqual and his former assistant Calíxto Bieito (a notorious champion of deconstruction whom less friendly commentators call “king of Eurotrash”).
However, those who were afraid of — or possibly hoped for — one more scandal found
themselves mystified. Rigola’s Dutchman is moderately postmodern, with a definite flavor of
cinema imagery from the 1970s-1990s, but without turning that into a shortcut to relevance. As
stipulated by Wagner the librettist, the action is set on the coast of Norway, where Captain
Daland NOW owns a small plant of canned fish. Thus chorus girls abstain from turning their spinning
wheels while waiting for their betrothed to come back from the sea with costly presents. Donning
aprons and plastic caps, they either sit in the firm canteen peeling bananas and digging into
yogurt tubs, or tarry on the verandah, smoking and flirting in front of an ever-impending seascape
much realistically displayed on laser projection. The Dutchman’s ship, no longer a clipper
mounting “blood-red sails and black masts”, towers as a rusty cargo of humongous dimensions.
Updating reaches a climax in Act 3, when happy preps with their navels fully exposed dance to
disco rhythms waving beer cans high in the air and cuddling a cute golden retriever. Nina was the
name of that blonde four-legged diva, embodying her (fortunately) dumb role with unshaken
dignity.
All in all, the time-machine gimmick worked smoothly enough. Gloomy thrill and rural romance,
hurricanes and country dances mingled in the visuals as they actually do in the amphibious score
produced by the then young Wagner, still hesitating between French opéra-comique and seeds of
his Wort-Ton-Drama to come. First-bill Dutchman Alan Titus, still suffering from a recent
ailment, was not fully up to his signature role, since his beefy bass emerged a bit muddy in the
lower register and feeble in the higher. Skimming the cream from both casts, special honor is due
to Tómas Tómasson, a Dutchman perhaps insufficiently sinister but technically faultless in
managing his baritone-sounding, flexible and alluring instrument, as well as to Susan Anthony.
Her Senta sported girlish innocence and exquisite mezza-voce, though not matched by volume
and resolution in the juiciest dramatic spots. As Daland, Eric Halfvarson impersonated a dapper
sea captain-cum-industrialist, with his noble Sarastro-like utterances unspoiled by the slight
shade of cynicism that the role imposed on him. Both tenors Kurt Streit (Erik) and Norbert Ernst
(the Helmsman) contributed clarion tones and romantic passion to their born losers’ characters
— yet with some bittersweet vibrancy in it. Under the newly appointed principal conductor
Sebastian Weigle, the house ensembles — supplemented by the chamber choir of the Palau de la
Música — offered a forceful, clear-cut rendering throughout the two-and-a-half hour stretch
without any intervals.
Carlo Vitali