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.
Jérôme Savary, director of this December 2007 Semperoper Dresden production of Lehár's Die Lustige Witwe, expresses a view in the booklet essay that many others will probably share: "What I like most of all about The Merry Widow is its music, which is literally bursting with colours, gyrating movements and sensuality..."
Leading the Staatskapelle Dresden forces, conductor Manfred Honeck does his best to present just such a reading. Two factors, however, work to mitigate his success. The singers, able as they may be and willing to have fun, mostly lack the vocal charisma to really put the music across at its best. Ultimately director Savary has to stage the dialogue scenes between the musical numbers, and the forced humor and annoyingly hyper performance style he elicits suggests he doesn’t like much about The Merry Widow except the music. Rather than cutting the dialogue down to a minimum, however, Savary opts for Benny Hill-style comic action, gratuitous sexuality and manic over-acting. Crass over class.
Hanna Glawari’s appearance by helicopter indicates some updating of the action, but the costumes and Folies Bergére dance routines could be early 20th century, while the plot remains very much late-19th. The dialogue, as is typical of operetta productions, gets a “freshening” as well, so that we get supposedly comical references to IKEA. With a fairly silly story such as this, no harm is done, except that the “anything for a laugh” approach becomes wearying. Indeed, audience laughter is spare and modest. Ahmad Mesgarhia proves especially tiresome as Njegus, mincing and shouting mercilessly.
Any successful Merry Widow depends on the star power of its leads, and though both Bo Skovhus as Danilo and Petra-Maria Schnitzer as Hanna Glawari possess strong voices and good looks, neither ever relaxes into their roles, and they have no spark between them. Skovhus sounds fine when on his own, but his voice and Schnitzer’s do not blend well. Though she is attractive and looks the part in Michel Dussarrat’s appealing costumes, Schnitzer tends to oversing, and every high notes falls short.
At one point, a character sighs and declares, “An operetta can drag on.” Well, this one certainly does, so maybe that was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The best thing about this set is Medici Arts slim packaging, although the too-slim booklet could have used a synopsis of the action.
Chris Mullins