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 this point in his career David Gockley has no need to prove himself. He did that with awesome success as general director of Houston Grand Opera for 33 years, during which he made that company a front runner both on the American and international opera scenes.
In Houston he set a record for world and American premieres and built a house - with both a 1000- and 2000-seat theater that bespeaks the commitment of that oil-rich town to the arts. Indeed, Gockley is the man who made opera grand in Houston and made the HGO a way of life in the city.
And when Pamela Rosenberg departed from the San Francisco Opera after six rather unfortunate seasons, it was widely agreed that Gockley was the only person who could put the company together again and restore it to the position of prominence that it had had for well over half a century. Gockley arrived as SFO general director just before the opening of the 2006-2007 season and during that year he was largely the executor of plans made and laid by Rosenberg. Thus it is in with the season that opened in September that Gockley’s presence is now clearly felt in the Bay Area, and it is clear that he is doing even more than might reasonably have expected of him in so short a time.
Gockley set out to make his mark with two productions: the world premiere of Philip Glass’ “Appomattox” and Richard Wagner’s “Tannhäuser, which opened on September 18 as his first all-new staging at the SFO. And in choosing “Tannhäuser” as his signature piece, he has gained the respect not only of his community, but of the larger opera world as well.
In an essay in the program book for the staging Gockley says that he chose Wagner’s “Italianate” work to “make a statement on how a company views itself and what it thinks opera ultimately is,” stressing further the necessity “to keep moving into the future just as we are rooted in tradition.” Thus the new “Tannhäuser” is more than just one more “go” at the opera; the production is something of a lab experiment that lets the public in on what Gockley has in mind for the SFO. And there is hardly another work in the established repertory that presents the challenge that Gockley sought - and found - in Wagner’s early and often revised work.
Despite those who would yoke the composer to his own 19th-century Bayreuth stagings, it was Wagner who commanded: “Kinder, macht Neues!” - “Do something new, guys!” That Gockley had those words in mind is obvious from the fact that 13 of 17 members of the cast made SFO debuts in this “Tannhäuser,” and the same is true of five of the production staff - including at the top director Graham Vick and designer Paul Brown.
Vick, Brown’s frequent co-worker in Europe, speaks of the opera as a mix of “site-specific Romanticism and open-ended symbolism,” a combination that sparks the creative imagination. The two men see no need to move visually out of the Middle Ages, as was rather cutely done in last season’s “Tannhäuser” at the Los Angeles Opera, where as the eponymous hero Peter Seiffert cast his mini-harp aside and - clad in black tie and tales - sat down at an on-stage Steinway to belt out his song of sensuous love.
That’s doesn’t make academic medievalists of Vick and Brown, for as the director explains, his mission was to define the point at which “the content of the opera interacts with the world today” in his quest for “a wilder, more mythic view.” And they found this by focusing upon the troubled man that Tannhäuser is. Or as Vick puts it: “Tannhäuser’s problem is Tannhäuser.” Thus the knightly minstrel is not torn between the sexual excesses of life on the Venusberg and a calmer existence with virginal Elisabeth; he is rather the helpless victim of conflicting desires raging within him.
Once the director opens the listener’s eye to this view, it is hardly surprising to realize that Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, those early explorers of the psyche, were born - respectively - in 1856 and 1875, well before Wagner composed “Parsifal,” his last work, and then died in 1882. Vick thus takes Tannhäuser on a turbulent stream-of-consciousness journey that brings unusual fascination to the opera.
“It’s the story of the married man who has left his wife and gone to live with the other woman,” says Vick. “But he can’t settle down with his mistress, so he returns to his wife, only to discover that he can’t live with her either. “He loses out on all fronts and has a nervous breakdown.” Thus Tannhäuser is not lured to destruction by woman, but by his own desire; he is struggling to find fulfillment and integration of his own personal life.
Even at the penultimate performance of the season on October 7, the production was of exuberant freshness. Peter Seiffert sang as if 20 years younger than he was in Los Angeles a year ago, and Petra Maria Schnitzer, the Los Angeles Elisabeth, gave an inspired performance of her “Prayer” aria. Petra Lang was an appropriately seductive Venus. Veteran bass Eric Halfvarson seemed rejuvenated as the Landgraf. The show-stealer, however, was youthful James Rutherford as Wolfram; his “Evening Star” will long shine in the memory. And Czech Stefan Margita — Walther — is clearly a tenor worth watching. Ian Robertson, long chorus master at the SFO, had his ensemble gloriously well prepared for both the arrival of the guests and “Pilgrims’” Chorus.
In Donald Runnicles the SFO has for 15 years had the services of one of the top Wagnerian conductors of the day. Runnicles opted for the Paris version of the score with its expanded ballet, which was choreographed by Ron Howell. While in this scene others today titillate the ageing opera audience with a bit of soft porn, Howell took “Bacchanal” at face value and unleashed his dancers upon the stage in a true state of Dionysian frenzy. It might not be ballet, but Howell’s concept was totally in keeping with Vick’s approach to the story. Completing the cast, by the way, was Alloy, a white quarter horse, who — handled by his owner Gary Sello — behaved impeccably on stage.
This “Tannhäuser” leaves no doubt about it: the San Francisco Opera and David Gockley has both made correct choices!
Wes Blomster