Rossini’s La donna del Lago at the Royal Opera House boasts a superstar cast. Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Flórez are perhaps the best in these roles in the business at this time. Yet the conductor Michele Mariotti is also hot news.
It would seem a logical step for the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey to take on the role of the Composer in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos.
“Aim for excellence”, says Douglas Boyd, new Artistic Director of Garsington Opera at Wormsley, “and the audience will follow you”.
When I spoke with Zandra Rhodes, she was in her large San Diego workspace, which she described as having walls decorated with her own huge black and white drawings.
Palm Beach audiences are famous for their glamour, but in recent years a special star has sparkled amid the jewels, sequins, feathers and furs (whatever the weather).
When the soprano Jessica Pratt first arrived in Italy, she had yet to learn the language or sing in a staged opera.
On Wednesday evening, February 20, Los Angeles Opera gave a press conference at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion featuring Music Director James Conlon.
It is another “What Could Have Been” moment. The debut of Brokeback Mountain by Charles Wuorinen is part of Madridʼs Teatro Real coming season.
Plans for July’s Aix-en-Provence Festival were announced and opera is, of course, at the center of the program with a particularly noteworthy Richard Strauss production.
Amsterdam enjoys a rare visit from Moscow’s Stanislavski Opera at the landmark Koninklijk Carre Theater, for three performances of Tchaikovski’s Eugene Onegin and a Sunday morning opera concert, on February 1st-3rd.
A new festival hall has been inaugurated in the small town of Erl in the Tyrolean mountains.
Yesterday, Conductor Riccardo Muti opened the Rome Opera, where he is “honorary conductor for life,” with a gala presentation of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra.
When tenor Michael Spyres takes the stage at Carnegie Hall on December 5th, he will be in heady company.
One of the most noteworthy and controversial productions in recent memory arrived in Belgium with hurricane force as Director Terry Gilliam’s inaugural opera, an inspired interpretation of Hector Berlioz’s Le Damnation de Faust, blasted into Ghent, followed by a run in Antwerp.
Florian Boesch is singing Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin at the Oxford Lieder Festival on Sunday 14th October. This won’t be routine. Radically challenging conventional interpretation, Boesch says “I don’t believe it ends in suicide”
Exciting developments at Glyndebourne ! Many new initiatives which could transform Glyndebourne from a summer festival to a truly international, year-round opera experience.
The recently released numbers for the past season at Barcelona’s opera Liceu gives some hope for the future.
A record 278,978 people attended events of the 2012 edition of the famed Salzburg Festival in Austria, the largest number since its founding 92 years ago.
Just after things were settling after the scandal of baritone Evgeny Nitikin supposed swastika tattoo at the Bayreuth Festival, another one seems likely to take its place.
Three quarters of the way through this discussion, a question that inhabits the mind of anyone putting any thought to the subject — but no one dare ask — was rhetoricised, “what is opera?”
Most opera-world publicity is accorded star singers, but we take another tack here to look at American tenor Keith Jameson who has made a specialty of character or comprimario parts, while at the same time building a solid reputation as sophisticated musician and actor, a performer who can seize the moment and elevate a role to first rank for the time he is on stage.
Appearing as the young Novice in Benjamin Britten’s shipboard tragedy, Billy Budd, in Santa Fe Opera’s 2008 season, Jameson proved what he can do most impressively. His young novice sailor first appears shirtless and scarred with lash marks, the victim of a sadistic master-at-arms (John Claggart), and the cruelty of life at sea; later, he must confront Claggart and plead for mercy at the hands of a sadist in a highly emotional scene. Sounds like a daunting assignment for a 40-year old singer who grew up in a small town in South Carolina. How does he do it, and how does he manage to look and sound a crazed lad of 25?
“I am at least as much actor as singer,” Jameson explained when I asked him. “The two arts cannot be separated.” He seems disarmingly mild off stage, modest of build with blue eyes and dark hair, an infectious grin and gentle mien, which can explode into unexpected fireworks onstage in the heat of performance.
“Ben Britten is my favorite kind of music and I hope to do a lot more of it,” Jameson said. Thus far he has sung Peter Quint in Turn of the Screw, and in Britten’s Curlew River, as well as some of the British master’s choral and sacred music, and has his eye on the ingénue role of Albert Herring, in that captivating comedy of village ‘types’ and coming-of-independence. “I almost want to live in England, and specialize in Britten and in Baroque music,” Jameson admits. He would doubtless be welcome, with musicianship grounded in far more education than most professional singers enjoy.
After music and vocal studies at college in South Carolina, Jameson joined the Eastman School at Rochester, N. Y., and earned a Master’s Degree in conducting and Doctorate of Musical Performance in voice. “I tried choral conducting and a bit of teaching, but my real love is singing. I most love to perform on stage and make acting and musical expression become one unified experience – for both performers and audience. I just live for it,” he beams. Jameson continues to refine his art and with good results. “For about a year now I’ve been working with a new teacher in New York, opening the voice, and that volume you heard in the high range in Billy Budd is a result. Vocal growth has opened a wider horizon for me.”
Keith Jameson as Peter Quint, with Lisa Houben as Miss Jessel, in The Turn of the Screw, Opera Royal de Wallonie in Liege, Belgium, April 2007 [Photo courtesy of ORW]
“ When the Novice is dragged before Claggart he is a terrified, humiliated boy, and he begs for mercy, virtually for his life. He’ll do anything to avoid further physical cruelty,” Jameson explains. In the face of the boy’s screaming agony, Peter Rose, the powerful English bass impersonating Claggart, maintained an almost eerie cool, his low-keyed response creating a tremendous tension in the scene. “It’s hard work to set up such extreme contrasts and takes stamina and real acting; that is why I loved doing it. And playing against Peter Rose is something special,” Jameson found. Few in his Santa Fe audience knew Jameson could sing with such passionate power, so his recent performance proved an exciting revelation.
Jameson sees plenty of years ahead as operatic tenor, but when I asked if he eventually planned to become a teacher, his reply was immediate: “No indeed, I want to run an opera company” (This guy is full of surprises!) “I’m serious,” he continued. “I have started a small chamber music festival, January each year a time that needs a seasonal pick-up – and I present at my Southern home town a musical stage performance, some sacred music and a program of pure chamber music, and I want to make that grow into a music festival in due time that specializes in presenting American opera.” He cites the example of another character tenor and former Santa Fe performer, Darren Keith Woods, who switched from performance to management and is now the successful general director of the Ft. Worth opera, which he converted from conventional company into an annual opera festival. “Darren has shown us how, so here is hoping,” Jameson said. “But I have many roles to play and many songs to sing before that happens.”
Dr. Jameson has earned an exciting professional future, whatever form it takes.
J. A. Van Sant © 2008
Keith Jameson as Nanki-Poo and Anna Christy as Yum-Yum in Jonathan Miller's production of The Mikada, New York City Opera and English National Opera [Photo courtesy of English National Opera]