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.
Sunday 24th August at the Proms promised a day dedicated to the music of Bach, beginning with an organ recital in the afternoon by Simon Preston and ending with a late-night performance of the first three of the six Cello Suites by Chinese cellist Jian Wang by way of a palate-cleanser.
The centrepiece of the homage was a performance of the St John Passion, the shorter, tauter and more uplifting of Bach’s two extant Passion settings.
Sir John Eliot Gardiner was at the helm of this one, delivering a performance that was both exactingly schooled and dramatically compelling. Admittedly his firm-set ideas on historically-informed performance are a trifle predictable, and can be irritating after a while: the over-stressing of the first beat in every bar of the opening chorus was somewhat bothersome, as was the exaggerated running-through of the ends of phrases of the chorales wherever the text contains no comma.
The soloists were led by the experienced Evangelist of Mark Padmore, who always manages to convey a stark emotional connection with the music while still retaining a refined delivery. Other than Padmore, the singers were variable; Peter Harvey’s Christus was more than adequate, but the most interesting and dramatically compelling was the bass-baritone Matthew Brook as Pontius Pilate, whose role in John’s gospel is so much more prominent than in Matthew’s more detailed account.
Soprano Katharine Fuge sang with limpid tone, but her phrasing was short-breathed, and her voice is such a small sound that I wonder if she was audible at all in the further reaches of the Hall. I take issue with whoever came up with the idea for the ‘sobbing’ ornamentation in the B section of ‘Zerfließe, mein Herze’; it was the one really tasteless moment of the concert. Alto Robin Blaze was very uneven in his first aria, which is perhaps a little high-lying for him, but much more satisfying in his second, ‘Es ist vollbracht’ which comes at the moment of Christ’s death. Nicholas Mulroy and Jeremy Budd shared the tenor arias, Mulroy acquitting himself with more consistency.
The Monteverdi Choir, in which the soloists also participated, performed with vocal colouring and facial expression appropriate to each of the dramatic choruses. The choir were radiantly uplifting in the closing chorus and chorale, affirming Man’s confidence in the presence of a hitherto non-existent gateway to Paradise.
Ruth Elleson © 2008