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.
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.
Some opera aficionados who take a look at the contents of this two-CD Fritz Wunderlich collection from Profil might shake their heads in bemused wonder: the German lyric tenor as Turridu, let alone Pinkerton and Rodolfo?
And if those fans don’t care for operetta, the second disc won’t persuade them to take a chance.
But they should. Profil provides scanty documentation, but the performances apparently derive from 1954-56. Wunderlich, in other words, sings in the freshest voice possible, but with the taste and elegance of his prime. And why not a tasteful, elegant Turridu sung in German (as are the Puccini selections)? Wunderlich traces a beautiful melodic line in the opening serenade, and when it comes to Turridu’s ode to wine (here called a “trinklied”), the tenor pours out that joyful richness heard in his famous versions of “Granada.” Unfortunately, that already brief number suffers a brutal cut, as does Turridu’s farewell to his mother. The duet with Santuzza whips and stings, but as Turridu’s mama has some lines, Profil should have identified the roles taken by the credited Marlies Siemeling and Ingeborg Wenglor. Theo Zilken takes Sharpless to Wunderlich’s Pinkerton, a portrayal that even en Deutsch rivals Pavarotti’s for tonal beauty with the appropriate hint of Yankee arrogance. It’s less of a surprise that Boheme’s Rodolfo fits Wunderlich like a glove, and again he has a good partner in the Marcello of Herbert Brauer, although Trude Eipperle’s Mimi can sound strained. Disc one ends with four selections from Mozart’s early Zaide, two with Maria Stader, and here Wunderlich reaffirms that he is without peer as a Mozart tenor.
Amusingly, Profil identifies the first two tracks of the 17 on disc two as being more Mascagni from Cavalleria Rusticana. “Komm in die Gondel” and “Treu sein, das liegt mir nicht” actually come from Johann Strauss II’s Eine Nacht in Venedig. The conventions of German operetta mean that for some ears, such as your reviewer’s, almost an hour of tenor numbers risks boredom, but such is Wunderlich’s grace and control that tedium never manifests itself. Surely Die Fledermaus has never heard a more attractively sung Alfred.
As mentioned above, Profil does itself and consumers no favors with the packaging. The only track listing, in painfully small font, appears on the back of the jewel box. The slim booklet merely provides only a generic biography, in German and English (of a sort).
Snap this up, Wunderlich fans who do not have the selections, and any other lovers of truly great tenor singing.