The Importance of Being Earnest , Gerald Barry’s fifth opera, was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and the Barbican, and was first performed in concert, Thomas Adès conducting the London premiere.
‘Beauty is the one form of spirituality that we experience through the senses.’ In Thomas Mann’s, Death in Venice, Plato’s axiom stirs the hopes of the aging, intellectually stale poet, Gustav von Aschenbach, that he may rekindle his creativity.
There is a sense in which it all began in London, Puccini having been seized in 1900 with the idea of an opera on this subject after watching David Belasco’s play here.
The tenor that the audience most wanted to hear, Plácido Domingo, opened the vocal program with “Junto al puente de la peña” (Next to the rock bridge) from La Canción del Olvido (The song of Oblivion) by José Serrano. He sounded rested and his voice soared majestically over the orchestra.
Tucked away somewhere in the San Francisco Opera warehouse was an old John Cox production of Così fan tutte from Monte Carlo. Well, not that old by current standards at San Francisco Opera.
Rossini's Maometto Secondo is a major coup for Garsington Opera at Wormsley, confirming its status as the leading specialist Rossini house in Britain. Maometto Secondo is a masterpiece, yet rarely performed because it's formidably difficult to sing. It's a saga with some of the most intense music Rossini ever wrote, expressing a drama so powerful that one can understand why early audiences needed "happy endings" to water down its impact
I suppose it was inevitable that, in this Britten Centenary year, the 66th Aldeburgh Festival would open with Peter Grimes.
Die Entführung aus dem Serail at Garsington Opera at Wormsley isn’t Mozart as you’d expect but it’s true to the spirit of Mozart who loved witty, madcap japes.
What a pity! On a glorious — well, by recent English standards — summer’s day, there can be few more beautiful English countryside settings than Glyndebourne, with the added bonus, as alas much of the audience appears to understand it, of an opera house attached.
Described by one critic as “cosmically gifted”, during her tragically short career, American mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson amazed and delighted audiences with the spellbinding beauty of her singing and the astonishing honesty of her performances.
“I wrote it almost without noticing.” So Verdi declared when reminded of his eighth — and perhaps least frequently performed, opera, Alzira. One might say that, since he composed the work, no-one else has much noticed either.
Just when you thought the protagonist was Hoffmann! Who, rather what stole the show?
When is verismo verily veristic? Or what is a virginal girl dressed in communion white doing in the two murderous acts of the Los Angeles Opera’s current production of Tosca? And why does she sing the shepherd's song?
Wagner’s Lohengrin is not an unfamiliar visitor to the UK thanks, in the main, to Elijah Moshinsky’s perennial production at Covent Garden.
Philip Glass's The Perfect American at the ENO in London is a visual treat, but the libretto is mind-numbingly anodyne.
Jonathan Dove's Mansfield Park, with libretto by his regular collaborator Alasdair Middleton, has the remarkable distinction of being the first completed operatic adaptation of any Jane Austen novel to be staged.
London’s two principal opera companies have offered a baffling near-silence as their response to Wagner’s two-hundredth anniversary.
If a recent trio of musically superlative performances at Canadian Opera Company is indicative of their norm, the casting director should get a hefty bonus.
Just when you imagine you’ve got the operatic time-line fixed in your mind in a clean sweep of what goes where and when and how, you hear another work from another forgotten corner of the repertory that upends one’s conclusions.
Nothing inspires fable quite like defeat. The great riddle of Spanish history is how the Christian Visigoths managed to lose the Iberian peninsula to the Moors in one small battle in 711 and took eight hundred years to get it back.
Although performances of Handel’s more obscure large-scale works are relatively common in London, it is far less common that they are given in a venue as large and high-profile as the Royal Albert Hall, with a line-up of conductor and soloists that will attract a full house for a lengthy and static work on a hot summer evening.
And yet it happened, and Handel’s 1744 oratorio Belshazzar with libretto by Charles Jennens was brought to vivid and entertaining life by the veteran Handelian maestro, Sir Charles Mackerras.
The real highlight was the singing of the Choir of the Enlightenment, which could hardly have been better. Unlike many of London’s high-profile professional choirs, they are selected on a concert-by-concert basis, allowing casting decisions to be made with regard to which singers will be right for the work in hand. The bright forwardness of the sound in their opening chorus, ‘Behold, by Persia’s hero made’, was refreshing indeed, setting the tone for the rest of the evening, and they performed with impeccable ensemble throughout, with clear dramatic definition between their various guises as the Babylonians, Persians or Jews. The chorus bass William Gaunt delivered a particularly fine solo recitative in the tiny role of Arioch. Only in the feast scene did the sound from the chorus sound too clean and English, rather short on Babylonian debauchery.
Paul Groves sang the title role with a pleasant enough tone, but it was rather monochromatic, and being primarily a Mozartian, he did not seem nearly as comfortable or well-versed in the Handel idiom as his fellow soloists. He was also the only one of the five soloists not to make any attempt at facial and physical acting to complement his vocal performance; Belshazzar is, after all, supposed to be a king, and a strong-willed one at that.
At the emotional heart of the oratorio is the struggle of Nitocris, Belshazzar’s mother, to oppose the son she loves and allow him to be conquered and killed by the invading Persians. Here we had the luxury of the lovely, unaffected sound, intelligent characterisation and expressive vocal colour of soprano Rosemary Joshua.
The countertenor Bejun Mehta was very strong but a touch strident as Cyrus, the leader of the Persian army, while fellow countertenor Iestyn Davies exuded calm and noble piety as Daniel, making a beautiful sound in the process. Although Gobrias is only a small role, it was given maximum value by the young bass Robert Gleadow, a graduate of the Royal Opera’s young artists’ programme, who delivered the almost pictorial falling scales of ‘Behold the monstrous human beast/Wallowing in excessive feast’ with dramatic relish.
King Belshazzar of Babylon by
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn
Mackerras conducted the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in an account of the score which was robust, energetic and taut. There were several cuts — some, evidenced by gaps in the numbering in the concert programme, scheduled well in advance; others seemingly trimmed later in the day as there were several numbers and parts of numbers printed in the programme but absent from the performed version. In any case, it wasn’t only Mackerras’s brisk tempi which made the concert fly by in a full half hour less than the scheduled running time.
Ruth Elleson © 2008