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.
What better way for Masonic brothers, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Emmanuel Shikaneder to disseminate Masonic virtues, than through the most popular musical entertainment of their age, a happy ending folktale that features a dragon, enchanting flutes and bells, mixed-up parentage, and a beautiful young princess in distress?
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.
Since its first performance at the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo during Venice’s 1643 Carnevale, Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea has been one of the most important milestones in the genesis of modern opera despite its 250 years of unmerited obscurity.
“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?
Though 2013 is the bicentennial of the births of Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner, the releases of Cecilia Bartoli’s recording of Bellini’s Norma on DECCA, a new studio recording of Donizetti’s Caterina Cornaro from Opera Rara, and this première recording of Saverio Mercadante’s forgotten I due Figaro, suggest that this is the start of a summer of bel canto.
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.
Recording Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen is for a record label equivalent to a climber reaching the summit of Mount Everest: it is the zenith from which a label surveys its position among its rivals and appreciates an achievement that can define its reputation for a generation.
Few people who love opera in general and bel canto in particular have never heard the comment made by Lilli Lehmann, veteran of the inaugural Ring at Bayreuth in 1876, that singing all three of Wagner’s Brünnhildes—in Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung, respectively, all of which she sang to great acclaim—pales in comparison with singing the title rôle in Bellini’s Norma.
![Scene from Wozzeck (Munich 2008) [Photo Wilfried Hoesl, courtesy Bayerische Staatsoper]](http://www.operatoday.com/rsys_26564_49180ae5e4158.png)
Wozzeck stands ankle deep in water on the flooded stage of the Bavarian State Opera, above him hovers a huge, movable box – the dingy apartment he shares with Marie and their adolescent bastard – and he is surrounded by a freak-show worthy of a George Groszian nightmare and worse.
Michael Volle portrays Georg Buechner’s and Alban Berg’s character with unparalleled intensity, such a beautiful baritonal sound even in the most harrowing moments, and such ease beneath the tortured surface, that it is almost too good. He did everything as one could hope for in a Wozzeck on stage, but he never elicited much pity and never seemed quite as helpless-hapless as Wozzeck probably should. In a way, his great musical and dramatic strengths came at the expense of the character.
Something similar could be said about Andreas Kriegenburg’s direction – or more specifically the phenomenal lighting of Stefan Bolliger and how it works with the continuously fascinating set of Harald B. Thor and Andrea Schraad costumes: It is so absorbing, so good and stimulating to look at, it might distract from the psychological development of the characters. On Monday night, it also distracted from some so-so singing (Jürgen Müller underpowered and underwhelming as Drum Major and Clive Bayley with an average night as the Doctor) and in doing so, it unleashed the drama unto the audience in a visceral way that even Wozzeck-lovers might not have expected.
Because with this would-be quibbles taken care of, the fact remains that this was a stunning premiere, a spectacular performance, and indeed a striking success for the Munich Opera’s second new production under the new general director Klaus Bachler. Kriegenburg, a theater director, had done only two operas before (which I have not seen), but here he hit a nerve in just the right way. Instead of exerting a willful personality, ideology, or aching modernization on Wozzeck, he gives us an internalized picture (set roughly in the time of the play’s premiere) where the world as Wozzeck sees it is how the audience sees it. Except for Marie and his son, the characters are distortions of their personalities, one more disturbing than the next. The crowds are hordes of unemployed, shadows in the world of Wozzeck’s steadily slipping sense of reality. When the apartment-within-the-stage begins to very subtly shift left and right, the visualization of this losing grasp on reality becomes so perceptible, it’s as if you could touch it. I felt like I needed a splash of cold water or a slap in the face myself.
Amid this Michaela Schuster’s Marie altered between pleasurable cantabile and appropriate crudeness, Wolfgang Schmidt earned merits with his cleanly sung, morbidly obese captain, and Munich’s tenor-for-everything Kevin Conners delivered a fine, sonorous Andres. Wozzeck was also a good night – to the hesitant surprise of the Munich critics – for music director Kent Nagano.
Speculations about his contract not being renewed are only slowly residing, discussions about a rift between the music- and general director are still indulged in with tabloid-like diligence by the feuilletons. But this performance was one for a mark in his supporter's good books. Nagano’s strengths emerge best in modern works where clarity is part of the musical success.
The orchestra, apparently well rehearsed, gave the music an elastic, clear treatment; the score sounded taut and diaphanous. Only very occasionally was the orchestra too loud; more often it was very sensitive. When Nagano waded onto stage, barefoot and his trousers rolled up, he received as warm a reception as I’ve heard him get in Munich. Only Kriegenburg and his team got more – wholly absent of boos, too, perhaps a novelty for a premiere of a modern production in Munich.
If any Wozzeck production can convince the hesitating masses to listen to this difficult 20th century masterpiece, it would have to be this one.
Jens F. Laurson