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.
Paul Dukas’ Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, first heard in 1907, once seemed important. Arturo Toscanini conducted the Met premiere in 1911 with Farrar and later arranged some of its music for a 1947 recording with his NBC Symphony.
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.
The economics of the recording companies dictate much that is not ideal. Wagner’s operas were not composed as they were in order to permit the extraction of bleeding chunks, even on those occasions when strophic song forms do occur.
What opera contains a terrific overture, a wedding sextet, two murderous magical potions, a mad scene for coloratura soprano, a magnificent a cappella aria for contralto, dozens of glorious melodies and lots of nifty choral writing?
If you read the heading of this review, you already know the answer: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tsar’s Bride – one of the most popular operas throughout Russia, but downright obscure in the West – it has never been staged in New York (to my knowledge), despite a huge Russian community who would eat it up and a dozen visits over the years from three or four of Russia’s leading opera companies wasting our time with Mlada or Macbeth or far too many Onegins.
Rimsky-Korsakov was in an Italianate mood when he composed Tsar’s Bride, with its feast of plot complications and consequent musical situations: licentious boyar Grisha Gryaznoi (heroic baritone) lusts for Marfa (coloratura soprano), though she is about to wed her truelove Lykov (romantic tenor). Grisha persuades the tsar’s sinister German alchemist, Bomelii (character tenor), to concoct a potion that will make Marfa fall for best man Grisha instead. Complication one: Grisha’s jealous mistress Lyubasha (dynamite Slavic mezzo) switches the potion with another one, intended to destroy Marfa’s good looks – never mind how Lyubasha got the sleazy alchemist to run it up for her (think: Tosca). Complication two: Just as Marfa drinks the potion on her wedding day, news arrives that the tsar, Ivan the Terrible no less (sinister offstage presence), has chosen Marfa as his bride! Too, the potion – what was in it? – turns out to be poison that drives her lyrically insane. At curtain’s fall, everyone is either miserable or dead except the tsar, who remains off stage, singing (we may imagine), “Next!” (Ivan married more wives than Henry VIII. He once proposed to Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth.)
Bride is, thus, one of those operas (like Don Carlos or Don Giovanni or L’Africaine) where no single character grabs our attention all night; we are involved with the dilemmas and desires of many, and follow them through to a general catastrophe. One reason the opera may be rare over here may be the sheer number of great voices who are required to sing beautiful arias and ensembles in the true, flavorful Russian manner. Lyubasha calls for a grand low-voiced lady, with a voice from the vaults of the earth; it has long been a signature role for Borodina, and she graciously returned to sing it with Queler a second time. Marfa’s father, Sobakin, is a Russian bass from the old church-trained tradition, like Boris or Prince Igor or Prince Gremin. Marfa herself is an all-stops-out coloratura, whose lovely final scene is one of Rimsky’s handsomest tunes. And first and last there is the devilish Grisha Gryaznoi, whose outward brashness conceals inner torment, selfishness, crime and, finally, a (very Russian) orgy of guilt. Half a dozen minor roles have major parts to sing in solos and ensembles.
The problem is that it’s hard to bring in a worthy performance (and O.O.N.Y.’s was a very worthy performance) unless you have dozens of great Russian singers at your disposal – but that doesn’t prevent anyone in the West from staging Boris Godunov or even the far less theatrically promising Khovanshchina or Prince Igor – all three of which, by the way, might never have captured the stage at all had it not been for Rimsky-Korsakov’s now discredited editing.
Happily, Eve Queler and her Opera Orchestra of New York threw caution to the winds and brought this wonderful piece back to Carnegie Hall for the first New York hearing in twenty years. Olga Borodina, new in town at that previous performance, is now a grande dame and local favorite, but she retains the plummy low notes that make Lyubasha appealing, her disastrous passions touching. Borodina is one of the rare Russian singers (her husband, Ildar Abdrazakov, is another) who has no trouble singing Italian music idiomatically, without the voiced vowels and Slavic curlicues that make so many Russian opera singers a little risible in western song, but back in her native element there seem to be depths of tragic character lurking in the rounded shadows of her singing.
Alexey Markov made an exciting impression chewing up the stage as the narcissistic Grisha. He is a fine singing actor, with a plush, endearing baritone – and it is necessary that this character make himself a lovable scamp in the great narrations of the first act or his hideous behavior for the rest of the evening will only depress you. Yeghishe Manucharyan sang ardently and deft phrasing as Marfa’s hapless true love, but John Easterlin nearly stole the tenor honors with a Bomelii at once forceful and melodramatically harsh. You did not need a libretto to know which of these men was the lover and which the villain, and Easterlin made a villain it was a delight to hiss. Christophoros Stamboglis, as Marfa’s understandably confused father, had a good time with one of those stirring, from-the-depths-of-the-Russian-earth bass arias – only the last, very lowest note eluded him. There were many excellent young singers in minor but important roles (housekeeper, sister, mother – impossible to tell them apart as the electric titles often broke down and there was no printed libretto), and such poignant bits of music-making as the lovely wedding sextet (the last happy moment before the potion is drunk and Tsar Ivan’s messenger arrives) were revels in the bosom of vocal art.
John Yohalem