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.
![Jane Dutton as Santuzza [Photo by Robert Workman]](http://www.operatoday.com/Dutton_Santuzza_ENO.png)
For the opening of the 2008/09 season at ENO, Richard Jones has teamed up with two separate theatrical writers, Sean O'Brien and Lee Hall, to create unique new versions of the repertoire's most famous double bill.
Cavalleria rusticana, or 'Sicilian Revenge' in Sean O'Brien's translation, was psychologically insightful and dramatically compelling. The whole piece took place sometime in the 1940s inside a tiny village hall, with murky walls and an oppressive low ceiling, an uncomfortably intimate microcosm of a community in which everybody knows each other's business. All human life was here, from the illicit out-of-hours assignation between Turiddu (Peter Auty) and Lola (Fiona Murphy) to the village women preparing an Easter dinner. The importance of this central space was underlined by the centre-stage presentation of the Siciliana at the start and Turiddu's graphically brutal murder at the end, both of which Mascagni envisaged occuring in the distance. Only Jane Dutton's rejected Santuzza, fidgety and obsessive, remained on the periphery, coming into the central space for her pivotal scene with Roland Wood's threateningly masculine Alfio.
Ed Gardner's punchy conducting complemented Auty's red-blooded ardent tenor especially well, and brought out the opera's almost constant sense of raw heightened emotion which the piety of the Easter Hymn and the calm respite of the Intermezzo serve only to accentuate.
The addition of a mentally-disabled brother for Turiddu could so easily have come across as a cheap theatrical cliché, but his one line announcing Turiddu's murder, normally reserved for an offstage woman's voice, had devastating impact.
The English translation was somewhat hit-and-miss, but the only real problem — and it was a big one — was the incongruity of the drab indoor setting with Mascagni's lush Mediterranean score. Jones's production was a riveting piece of theatre in its own right, but the music seemed almost incidental to it.
After the interval, a surreal repeat of the 'Cav' curtain call heralded the descent of a new, bright orange curtain. We were thrown into the environs of a British provincial theatre sometime in the 1970s, about to welcome the stars of a TV sitcom for a week-long run of a cheesy bedroom farce.
This ingenious production was The Comedians, a genuine and coherent contemporary take on Leoncavallo's opera, a behind-the-scenes portrait of a clutch of outdated entertainers whose popularity is based on a façade of cheap laughs and in-jokes. With the exception of the bird aria, which didn't make a lot of sense out of its natural context, the whole affair worked extremely well and was in a completely different class from your average half-hearted opera 'modernisation' which tends to be riddled with inconsistencies. Lee Hall's English-language version was again more a reinvention than a translation, designed specifically in conjunction with this staging, renaming the characters to suit the context. These were recognisable characters, in equally recognisable sordid liaisons and public breakdowns against the backdrop of an impeccably-realised backstage environment by the set designer Ultz.
Peter Auty as Turiddu
Although the characterisation was uniformly excellent, the singing, it has to be said, was variable; Geraint Dodd's Kenny (Canio) had a softer-grained, less focused tenor than is ideal in this role, while Christopher Purves's Tony (Tonio) was put under some vocal strain in the Prologue. Mary Plazas's Nelly (Nedda) and Mark Stone's Woody (Silvio) were far more vocally consistent, with strong support from Christopher Turner as Brian (Beppe).
Trevor Goldstein as policeman, Mary Plazas as Nelly
In a stroke of genius the final scene was given on a split stage, as if the on-stage theatre had been spliced at the proscenium arch and opened out like a book. Thus we got to focus on the audience's reactions as much as the on-stage action. The sense of unease and horror was expertly ratcheted up, and when Kenny had killed Woody and Nelly and turned his gun towards the audience, the onstage audience's collective dive for cover kept much of the real audience laughing right up to the last moment, until Kenny delivered his devastating closing line and turned the gun on himself. Suddenly, nobody was laughing any more. Absolutely brilliant.
Ruth Elleson © 2008
Mary Plazas as Nelly, Christopher Purves as Tony