“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.
Handel’s Rodrigo, subtitled ‘Vincer se stesso è la maggior vittoria’ (Self-conquest is the greater victory) is one of the composer’s earliest operatic works, and rarely heard.
It was extensively revised between the completion of the autograph score and its 1707 première in Florence, and large sections of both versions were subsequently lost. It would appear that the revisions for the Florence production were to the detriment of the piece, and thanks to the discovery in 1983 of a substantial amount of lost material from the autograph (as well as a certain amount of editorial license to recreate missing recitatives, and the loan of a couple of numbers from Handel’s other operas) Alan Curtis’s performing edition — given here in London by a Florentine ensemble as part of the Lufthansa Baroque Festival — is based on Handel’s original intentions.
The story is loosely based on that of an actual 8th-century Spanish king and conqueror, whose political victories were complicated by his apparent inability to be faithful to his wife. In the libretto (by Silvani, and originally set a few years earlier by Marc’Antonio Ziani) Rodrigo has seduced the impressionable young Florinda with the promise of a throne, consequently fathered her a child, and then reneged on his offer. She is left furious, disgraced and bent on revenge, while Rodrigo goes back to his rightful queen, the saintly but childless Esilena, who understandably is deeply distressed by the whole situation. Esilena’s constancy in the face of marital wrongdoing is, in the end, the salvation of all concerned (along with a convenient eleventh-hour plot development whereby Florinda gets a better offer and gives Rodrigo up for good).
Acts 2 and 3 contain some interesting and original numbers — a lovely lute serenade for the soprano secondo uomo, Evanco, and a fragment of a tenor aria (for Giuliano, Florinda’s brother) with a quirky bassoon obbligato, which is cut off by an advance in the plot just as it reaches the B section. The same cannot be said for the first act, where nearly every aria is one of anger, vengeance or war — each individual aria certainly gives the singer scope to demonstrate mettlesome coloratura technique, but an entire act full of identical numbers is rather tiresome, especially when there’s little variety in tessitura (the lowest voice in the cast being a tenor) and when only a couple of the voices were really worth such extended display.
The finest vocal performer by a long way was the soprano Laura Cherici who sang Esilena; her soft-grained tone had a liquid beauty which portrayed the wronged queen ideally, and her one fast aria was sung with exceptional flare. In the title role, the mezzo Gloria Banditelli was disappointing — her singing was accurate and attractive, but it was not a heroic voice. Here in London we are so blessed with regular access to good heroic Handelian mezzos that I fear we take them for granted.
Other than that, not a great deal of the singing was to be recommended; Annamaria dell’Oste’s Florinda was impressive in her agility and force of delivery, but she had a tendency to go sharp. In fact, there were intonation problems from the majority, and the contralto Caterina Calvi (in the virtually unnecessary role of Fernando) sounded as though she should have been at home with laryngitis, though no announcement was made to this effect. There was some exceptionally fine instrumental playing, however — especially from the continuo cellist and lutenist. Federico Bardazzi was the conductor.
Though Luciano Alberti’s semi-staging — against a backdrop of projected line-drawings of the original 1707 production — was fairly rudimentary, a fair amount of (dare I say somewhat misplaced) effort had obviously been made with Enrico Coveri Maison’s costume designs, which attempted to replicate the styles and shapes shown in the projected images. They were a typically early-18th-century take on costumes for an opera set in the 8th century, but coloured in a lurid array of much more modern cerises, turquoises and oranges.
Ruth Elleson © 2008