In May of 2013, the Spire Series at the First Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, Maryland, observed the fiftieth anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy by presenting a work dealing with the 1963 assassination.
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.
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.
Dynamic offers devotees of classical era opera a rare and quite rewarding opportunity to hear I Giuochi d'Agrigento, a little-known opera by Giovanni Paisiello, best known as the man who composed a popular Barbiere di Siviglia before Rossini came along and eclipsed his predecessor.
Giovanni Battista Rigon leads the Orchestra Internazionale in a performance of Paisello’s music that has both refinement and energy to spare. Though not a memorable melodist — surely if he had been, his operas would be performed more frequently — Paisello orchestrates with flair and imagination. Timpani thwacks fire off the lively sinfonia. A moody harpsichord, instead of isolating itself in the recitatives, offers sparkling commentary in some of the arias. Fine choral writing makes the contributions of the Slovak Chamber Choir highlights of the set. The live recording from 2006 captures this all in decent sound, with little stage noise.
Unfortunately, the singing of the soloists ranges from the acceptable to the lame. In the latter category, Razek Francois Bitar encompasses many of the criticisms laid against countertenors. He either hoots or squeaks, frequently sings out of tune, and most often sounds like a superannuated soprano. As he is a lead, this severely hampers the recording’s success. His character, Clearco, wins an athletic contest but turns down the reward of the hand in marriage of the king’s daughter Egesta, as Clearco loves another — Aspasia, his own sister! But of course Aspasia is not really Clearco’s sister. In fact, he is Egesta’s brother, due to a plot twist straight out of the Oedipus story. And a happy revelation of that secret, very much unlike that of the Oedipus story, brings the opera to its close. In the other major male role, that of Eraclide the king, some wonderful music gets battered by the leathery lungs of tenor Marcello Nardis. The sopranos — Maria Laura Martorana as Aspasia and Mara Lanfranchi as Egesta — may not be exciting new signing discoveries, but at least they aren’t the tests of endurance that the men are.
However, it would be foolish to wait around for a better sung performance of I Giuochi d’Agrigento. If it happens, great. In the meanwhile, anyone who enjoys operas from this era should be willing to listen through some unsatisfactory vocalising in order to enjoy the riches of Paisiello’s score.
Chris Mullins