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.
![Natalie Dessay as Amina [Photo by Ken Howard courtesy of The Metropolitan Opera]](http://www.operatoday.com/Dessay_Amina.gif)
In 1831, when Vincenzo Bellini composed this pastorale full of characters who never express any but sincere emotions (with the exception of Lisa, the calculating flirt), he certainly intended them, and their feelings, and therefore their story, to be taken seriously – or he would not have given them such seriously lovely music.
La Sonnambula is a story of true love thwarted by jealousy then joyously restored, among peasants so unsophisticated they believe ghost stories but have never heard of sleepwalking. The urbane Milanese observed this with the proper degree of condescension – it was quaint, but it wasn’t fluff; the feelings are real; Bellini makes them so; the rest is up to the singers. Peasant society as a place of seething, primal passions was the trope of later generations. Of course, urban audiences enjoyed feeling superior to that, too.
Pastoral fantasy is long out of fashion, and it’s evidently something Peter Gelb at the Met and director Mary Zimmerman are ashamed of – sufficiently ashamed for Gelb to dismiss the opera’s plot publicly, and for Zimmerman to ignore it in her staging, which is not so much post-modern as a bunch of casual goofs on Sonnambula – there is no coherent story line in it, because the characters must change personality drastically from one moment to the next, alternately following Zimmerman’s “concept” or singing Bellini’s opera – the two have little in common, and no one onstage can be in just one or the other – Zimmerman has seen to that.
She has set the piece in a rehearsal hall in Manhattan during the run up to a performance of La Sonnambula – okay – starring a self-important diva who chatters on a cell phone during her sortita and is betrothed to the star tenor – okay – and the diva’s jealous rival has become the sulky stage manager. But then real feelings leap out of the music, and real words (Zimmerman knows no Italian, but there are titles on the seat backs), and these modern figures cannot be using these 1831 words. They don’t make sense in 2009. Try to imagine an opera chorus in contemporary New York who refuse to believe in sleepwalking – have they never heard of Macbeth? Or a visiting star baritone (as Bellini’s Count has become) who, instead of taking a luxury hotel room for the night (hey, even during a blizzard, it’s a short cab or subway to the Pierre), is forced to sack out on a cot in the rehearsal hall just so the diva can turn up in his bed. (Why else would this happen?) Or any celebrity tenor who, on finding his celebrity soprano untrue, marries his ex the very next day. Move out and shack up, yes; but marry? Church bells and all?
It’s not just that all this is trivial or perverse – it’s that puzzling over whether a singer (or the chorus) is sincere or playing the play within the play at every single moment gets in the way of being able to hear, and appreciate, the music-making.
Juan Diego Flórez as Elvino and Natalie Dessay as Amina
I do understand why the chorus, at the end of Act I, rhythmically tear up their scores and toss them about like confetti, while spinning the heroine around on her bed: Mary Zimmerman does not know, understand, accept that music has a place in opera; she does not believe it is important or interesting; she wants to distract us with some activity or other so we won’t be bothered by all that stuff being played and sung – you know – the music? The reason the rest of us go to the opera, and wanted to revive this delicate piece in the first place? Yes, the woman who slew the sextet in Lucia is at it again. She doesn’t like opera, and it sure don’t like her.
Now you can see how this all came about, in a brain-storming session with much laughter and, perhaps, alcohol: Amina sleepwalks across a mill-race? How about a Manhattan ledge in a snowstorm? (laughter) And theater people are all superstitious, right? So they believe there’s a rehearsal hall ghost. (laughter) And turn jealous Lisa into an irritable stage manager. Brilliant! And Elvino into a star tenor (like Florez) whose romance with the diva is the talk of the tabloids (like Gheorghiu or Netrebko). Genius! But it’s not; it just makes us uncertain who is singing any phrase at any particular time. It takes away much and adds nothing. This is not updating – it’s frat house or SNL skit. (I’m surprised the Count isn’t in drag.)
Jennifer Black as Lisa
The thing is, this cast could have put the piece over as written. Whenever Juan Diego lets loose with his soaring high notes, he is not merely a joy to hear, he is expressing real feeling – not the feeling of whoever, whatever, he is supposed to be playing in this “concept,” but the feeling Bellini bestowed on the character of Elvino. And when Natalie Dessay, alone in a spotlight on a plank over the orchestra pit, sings the dreamy, endlessly unreeling melody of Amina’s climactic sleepwalk (the melody Chopin asked to have played to him while he was dying), she holds the house silent and breathless on the thread of her voice. In short – they could have played this thing straight, and it would have been great theater, and we’d have been able to enjoy the rest of it, too.
Yes, Sonnambula, relic of a forgotten genre, the pathetic opera semiseria, is a problem to present nowadays. But there are ways to present Sonnambula that do not oblige you to disbelieve in the characters, to doubt the meaning of every word they sing. The problem is not their words or actions, but our attitude, and a great director would realize we are the ones who must be transformed, brought into the proper frame of mind. When Luchino Visconti directed Maria Callas in La Sonnambula, he staged the piece in the manner of a “peasant” ballet like Giselle, costumes, gestures, movements stylized to lure the viewer into the acceptance of convention we bring to romantic dance. It was a triumph, for Visconti, for Callas’s virtuosic singing and acting, and for Bellini – whose operas no longer had to blush on the modern stage.
If you ignored the stage antics, if you were lucky enough to be stuck at home, you could derive a great deal of pleasure from listening to this Sonnambula. Florez’s voice has expanded to handle the exquisite bel canto phrases, and though he can be a trifle nasal, he shows no sign of strain as he inhabits the too-trusting, too-bitter, repentant Elvino. His brilliant B-flat fills the huge house. His leap to head voice (perfectly acceptable in Bellini’s time, deplored nowadays) is not only well executed, he maneuvers it into an expression of dramatic despair. Michele Pertusi makes a suavely supercilious Count – pity he doesn’t get to reprise his cabaletta, one of my favorite tunes. Jennifer Black, the flirty Lisa, acts vividly and sings her little arias with charm if perhaps too dark a sound – I suspect and hope there is Verdi in her future. Evelino Pidò is eminently the first thing one wants in a bel canto conductor: supportive of the singers. Bellini is not a man to cover a voice – on the contrary, he notoriously exposes it, often with only the lightest film of orchestral accompaniment. There’s no place to hide if you are singing Bellini.
Natalie Dessay sings the long and arduous role of Amina very prettily, aside from a few squally high notes, and phrases the great “Ah, non credea” languorously, as if, well, asleep and dreaming – but holding the whole house breathless to her every tone. Her sleepwalk on a ledge does not quite come over – she can never just do something; she has to futz with it, as she did with Lucia’s mad scene. This is a sleep walk, not a sleep mambo. I liked her acting as Amina and I was amused by her acting as a diva, but it was a pity she did both in the same performance – it was impossible to believe they were the same woman. One of them was just a performance, but which?
On March 11, even she seemed unsure – she blew her cue for the final cabaletta twice, though she managed to “work it into” the performance so that those attending for the first time thought she’d done it on purpose. Perhaps she did. There’s no earthly way to tell which of her jokes were to be laughed at and which not, and it was frustrating to have to spend so much time working that out. The last Sonnambula I saw, Ruth Ann Swenson’s in an unstaged concert by Opera Orchestra of New York at Carnegie Hall, was not only more beautifully sung, it was far closer to the dramatic truth of the piece.
John Yohalem