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.
Recorded four years apart, these two classic recordings of Leos Janáček's dramatic masterpieces now reappear in Decca's The Originals series, thankfully still with full librettos and excellent booklet essays.
Charles Mackerras continues to reign as the supreme conductor of Janáček’s music, and these sets provide further evidence of that, not least by filling up the second discs with other pieces. The Jenůfa set includes the final scene in the revised orchestration that introduced the opera to most of the world, before Mackerras led the return to Janáček’s original score, and the set concludes with an overture considered for the opera but never used. Janáček ‘s Concertino and Capriccio close the Kátya Kabanová set, both in witty performances conducted by David Atherton. The mood of those pieces is quite a bit different from that of the opera, it should be said.
Both sets feature informative essays by John Tyrrell, which give not only detailed background on Janáček’s compositions, including almost academic musical analysis, but also ample information on the original works behind the operas. In the Kabanová booklet Tyrrell’s essay is followed by a note from Mackerras, relating his first exposure to the composer who would become such a large part of his career.
The Kabanová set came in 1978, and its sound world is quite different from that of Jenůfa, composed many years before. The later work comes from the composer’s mature period, and it combines the exciting rhythms and naturalistic declamation found in the earlier work with a richer orchestral fabric, somewhat resembling the textures of his Taras Bulba. However, it seems to be the earlier opera that has established itself as the more performed of the two, undoubtedly due to the power of its story and characters. Both stories deal mainly in pain and distress, but Jenůfa ends with a gorgeous duet of redemptive love, whereas Kabanová’s heroine throws herself into a river, unable to find a way to live a new life or return to her old one. Nonetheless, as pure listening experience, your reviewer finds Kátya Kabanová a more entrancing score to listen to, with its greater variety of tone and mood. Jenůfa, on the other hand, works best on stage, where its characters come to full life, and can break the hearts of most any audience.
Elisabeth Soderstrom stars on both sets, her warm, womanly sound appropriate for both characters, and her command of the idiom as sound as her conductor’s. Peter Dvorsky gets to portray both the handsome but weak Steva of Jenůfa and the handsome but weak Boris in the Kabanová. He does so handsomely, with no weakness. Wieslaw Ochman earns his redemption as Laca with urgent, masculine passion. The Kostelnička, Eva Randova, has a full, secure voice, whereas on stage the role is often taken by a veteran singer whose voice may be worn but who can embody the character convincingly. The counterpart role in Kabanová, Kátya’s mother-in-law, is sung with fierce relish by Nadězda Kniplová.
For any opera lover who somehow never managed to acquire these sets in the long years when they were only available at full-price, now is the time to search them out and add them to your collection. Indispensable.
Chris Mullins