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.
Much has been promised of London Lyric Opera. The newest company on the capital’s opera scene, it will collaborate with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to specialise in full-scale concert performances with high-profile soloists.
Plans are afoot for a Fidelio at Cadogan Hall in February 2009, and after that, Die Fledermaus and Der Freischütz.
It is unclear whether there might be an intention in the more distant future to broaden the company’s scope beyond the German language, but perhaps there shouldn’t be. Although LLO is selecting well-known operas, it is also actively seeking out unusual and historically-valid performance editions. The UK is virtually flooded with companies doing the same for Baroque opera, and for Italian bel canto rarities, but there hasn’t really been anybody around to take an equivalent interest in the core German repertoire — until now.
The company’s founder and mastermind is the Australian baritone James Hancock, and this inaugural concert was the fulfilment of his long-held desire to perform the title role. Hancock used to be a tenor, and his voice remains higher-lying than the role demands; more worryingly, his voice simply dried out as the evening went on, and by the end of Act 2 there was really no ‘juice’ left. Though it is the fashion these days to preserve the dramatic flow of the opera by going straight through without intervals (as Wagner had intended at the outset), the two breaks in this performance were a practical necessity. Karl Huml seemed somewhat too high for Daland, too, and I couldn't help wondering whether he would have fared better in the title role.
The performance’s unquestionable highlight was the British soprano, Gweneth-Ann Jeffers, making her role début as Senta. Lyrical and muscular of tone, with an assured stage presence and innate sense of drama, she captured the supreme emotional focus of Wagner’s early heroine in her desperation to break out of her downtrodden existence. This ‘authentic’ performance edition has the Ballad in its original A minor, a tone higher than the familiar key, and it fit Jeffers’s athletic soprano like a glove.
Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts is neither a natural Wagnerian nor a natural love interest, but his psychologically intense and highly-charged Erik was a fitting foil for Jeffers’s Senta. Their pairing was a highly intelligent piece of casting, and their scenes together were in a different league to the rest of the opera. If only there had been such chemistry between Senta and the Dutchman.
Tenor Richard Roberts’s dopey characterisation of the Steersman was engaging, though his opening song was something of a struggle; he was quite plainly suffering from a cold, though no announcement was made.
The soft lyrical passage at the end of Senta’s ballad defeated the ladies of the Philharmonia Chorus, but their male colleagues were a strong and lusty Norwegian crew; I’m sure there was nothing wrong with those who supplied the voices of the ghostly Dutch crew, but there was some nasty distortion on the amplification system which piped their rousing chorus through from offstage. Veteran conductor Lionel Friend — who was responsible for the research into the performing edition — made some strange tempo choices, but the RPO generally sounded full and energetic, a few cracked brass notes aside.
All in all, the performance would have benefited from better-balanced casting; Jeffers was just so good that she showed everybody else up. And better marketing would help ticket sales and thus financial viability; the Barbican Hall’s stalls were quite full, but there was plenty of space in the Circle and they didn’t even bother to open the Balcony. If they can sort these things out, London Lyric Opera could be an enduring success.
Ruth Elleson © 2008