“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.
Arizona Opera ended its 2006/07 season with a tightly-knit, well-tuned presentation of Carlisle Floyd's Susannah, his best known opera that has enjoyed numerous productions since its New York City Opera debut in 1956.
The work is based on the Biblical account of Susannah and her Elders from the Book of Daniel, as it appears in certain Bibles. From that account we learn the Elders, who steadfastly lust after Susannah, spy on her while she is bathing and soon realize that the young beauty will never give in to their lascivious advances, so they accuse her of fornicating with a young man. This charge is eventually proven false, and Susannah is saved from death. Floyd, using a librettist's poetic license, simplified the storyline by relocating the bathing Susannah to an isolated community called New Hope Valley in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee. There, she is observed by her own church Elders who are repelled by her audacity to bath in a small stream which is supposed to be used for baptism.
Obviously Floyd felt very comfortable with this regional setting which is reminiscent of his own upbringing as a minister's son and uses what he thought was a natural reaction by folks who live in such a stark rural setting to Susannah's spontaneous and frivolous behavior. Even in the 1950s, in the United States, with the McCarthy witchhunters combing the country looking for those with perhaps the slightest connection to the Communist Party, Floyd's characters might have appeared a tad too quick to condemn what was perceived as Susannah's immoral conduct and now, over 50 years later, with all the dramatic and diverse social changes that have occurred in American life, the pivotal situation of the plot does seem too pat.
Any opera company that wants to mount Floyd's opera has to get beyond this flaw so that it can present the work's many dramatic and musical moments in a coherent and forceful light. And Arizona Opera did just that.
Perhaps the outstanding contribution to the production was Paula Williams's direction. The director used Peter Dean Beck's spacious and accurate setting of rural life in Tennessee to great advantage. She moved the chorus about the stage with ease, whether they represented the townspeople at an evening gathering of song and square dancing or had them as church goers pleading to the Lord to save them from the wages of sin. She gave the audience the feeling that it was watching the entire New Hope Valley community acting as one against the sinner Susannah. The director also helped to transmit the same dramatic intent to the featured and principal players, allowing them to build their portrayals with vocal stamina and security.
Starting with the smaller roles, the mezzo, Korby Myrick gave her Mrs. McLean the appropriate disapproval of Susannah's public bathing. Glenn Alamilla's tenor rang out as Susannah's ambivalent suitor, never failing to express his fear of the unknown. Moving up to Robert Breault as Sam Polk, Susannah's brother, he filled his character with the right amounts of love and affection mixed with his anxiety for Susannah's future. He resolved his conflict by shooting the Reverend Olin Blitch, Susannah's seducer in the last scene. And most times, Gustav Andreassen as the Reverend Blitch forcefully conveyed his staunch alliance with the Lord. The bass was most impressive in his sorrowful and guilt-ridden monologue on having violated Susannah.
The role of Susannah was the only part that was double cast. Fortunately for Arizona Opera, it found two sopranos who could provide this difficult and challenging part with the right emotional impact when needed. Rhoslyn Jones, a physically stronger Susannah than Diane Alexander was a tad uneven vocally, but her forceful sound portrayed her commitment to the role. Alexander projected a softer emotional approach, but was more consistent in showing how Susannah's misery unfolded. It was a credit to both singers and to Williams how well the rest of the cast never missed a dramatic beat no matter what Susannah was on stage.
Conductor Joel Revzen kept his orchestra committed to Floyd's overriding musical idiom: that of using many parlando melodies underscored by Appalachian ballads, gospel tunes and square dance music. At times, he drove the orchestra too hard, allowing the musical climaxes that expressed Susannah's rage or Blitch's stabs at redemption-to take two examples- to eclipse the singers' vocal prowess that gave unerring testimony to their talents. This tendency, which made it difficult to catch all the nuances in the colloquial text the composer reveled in, kept the audience's eyes glued to the titles, causing it to graze by some of the opera's most intense dramatic moments. But overall, it didn't detract from the performance which was one of the company's most fruitful and fulfilling productions in recent memory.
Nick del Vecchio
[Reprinted from Living at the Opera with permission of the author.]