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.
Because Turangâlìla is such a panorama, taking in Hollywood, Hindus and Peruvians, Wagner and Gurrelieder, it’s easy to assume it’s all surface Technicolor.
At its première a critic heard only “a tune for Dorothy Lamour in a sarong, a dance for Hindu hillbillies”. At this Prom, Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic proved conclusively how inventive it really is.
Rattle paired the Prelude from Tristan und Isolde with the Liebestod. Often that’s a risk as it can leave you longing for the singing, but Rattle had thought the two parts through in orchestral terms. He makes a case for hearing the opera as "music", on its own terms. Here, the surging waves of sound "are" the message, not background. He shows how fundamental the flute part is, weaving throughout, commenting without words. The transition was particularly well blended, one part fading gradually into the next, like a fade in film gradually coming back into full color focus. It is cinematic – how Wagner might have loved the movies !
Wagner is an appropriate curtain raiser for Messiaen's Turangâlìla. As a young boy, Messiaen studied Pelléas et Mélisande, and also inherited the long standing French fascination for the exotic and "oriental" - think Pierre Loti, Ravel, Maurice Delage and the Impressionists studying Japanese painting. Wagner was by no means the dominant influence on Messiaen, but his oceans swells and undercurrents live on in Turângalìla, as Rattle so clearly demonstrated, stretching the string lines with soaring, surging magnificence. Messiaen's "trajectory", to use a favorite Boulez expression, comes not from conventional symphonic development but from thematic ideas, so this oceanic surge is important.
For the first time, I really understood the sixth section, Le Jardin du sommeil d'amour. It's slow, almost a relief after the hectic, inventive fifth section, and has its longueurs. But maybe that's what Messiaen was getting at. The lovers are together when they're asleep, in dreams, when the moon pulls the tides that create the waves in the ocean. It's not as spectacular as the glorious Joie du Sang des étoiles, but as with so much Messiaen. he's at his most profound when he’s quiet.
The Tristan und Isolde concept had even more personal meaning for Messiaen. He had fallen in love with Yvonne Loriod, but he was married, and, as devout Catholics, they could not marry until released by his wife’s death. He "was" Tristan and she Isolde, and Turângalìla is their mystical union. Hence the significance of the “paganism” in Turângalìla. Messiaen was fascinated by non-western music, adopting ideas such as the Indian deçi-tâla rhythms which feature in this piece. Anyone who’s seen Hindu erotic sculptures can appreciate the concept of sex as a form of spiritual enhancement, that breaks past the restraint of western moral convention. So Turângalìla isn’t meant to be polite “Good Taste”. Those sassy brass passages and almost Gershwin-like punchiness are essential keys to the spirit of the work. The famous "statue" theme on brass and clarinet "Flower" themes are "male" and "female". No wonder Rattle placed such emphasis on how they intertwine, flirting with each other, so to speak. Pierre-Laurent Aimard's piano and Tristan Murail's ondes Martenot form a second pair of relationships within the whole, connecting to percussion and winds, picked up by harp and strings. Aimard's long solo passages are the unspoken "heart", rather like the flute in Tristan und Isolde.
The Berlin Philharmonic played with extraordinarily beautiful, transparent textures – how the brass fanfares shone ! This orchestra can be relied upon for superlative orchestral color, so what was even more impressive was how the Berliners took to Messiaen, whose music is so very different to their mainstream core repertoire. Somehow Rattle inspired them so they played with free spirited exuberance, capturing the exhilarating intoxication so crucial to this composer’s idiom. The “bad taste” of Turângalìla may shock, but it’s the exaltation of spirit that connects mortals to the divine.
Turângalìla was commissioned by Serge Koussevitsky and premiered by Leonard Bernstein who hated the piece and refused ever to conduct it again. Perhaps it’s fortunate as he probably didn’t understand its internal architecture. Nagano and Salonen have a firm grasp of the energetic muscularity that animates the piece, but Rattle and the Berlin Philarmonic exceeded all expectations, marrying technical perfection to electrifying verve. This performance truly expressed how original and radical Messiaen really can be.
Anne Ozorio