Those of us of a certain age have fond memories of James Melton, who entertained our parents starting in the 1930s and the rest of us in the 1940s and beyond on recordings, the radio, and films.
The Importance of Being Earnest , Gerald Barry’s fifth opera, was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and the Barbican, and was first performed in concert, Thomas Adès conducting the London premiere.
‘Beauty is the one form of spirituality that we experience through the senses.’ In Thomas Mann’s, Death in Venice, Plato’s axiom stirs the hopes of the aging, intellectually stale poet, Gustav von Aschenbach, that he may rekindle his creativity.
What better way for Masonic brothers, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Emmanuel Shikaneder to disseminate Masonic virtues, than through the most popular musical entertainment of their age, a happy ending folktale that features a dragon, enchanting flutes and bells, mixed-up parentage, and a beautiful young princess in distress?
There is a sense in which it all began in London, Puccini having been seized in 1900 with the idea of an opera on this subject after watching David Belasco’s play here.
The tenor that the audience most wanted to hear, Plácido Domingo, opened the vocal program with “Junto al puente de la peña” (Next to the rock bridge) from La Canción del Olvido (The song of Oblivion) by José Serrano. He sounded rested and his voice soared majestically over the orchestra.
Tucked away somewhere in the San Francisco Opera warehouse was an old John Cox production of Così fan tutte from Monte Carlo. Well, not that old by current standards at San Francisco Opera.
Rossini's Maometto Secondo is a major coup for Garsington Opera at Wormsley, confirming its status as the leading specialist Rossini house in Britain. Maometto Secondo is a masterpiece, yet rarely performed because it's formidably difficult to sing. It's a saga with some of the most intense music Rossini ever wrote, expressing a drama so powerful that one can understand why early audiences needed "happy endings" to water down its impact
I suppose it was inevitable that, in this Britten Centenary year, the 66th Aldeburgh Festival would open with Peter Grimes.
Die Entführung aus dem Serail at Garsington Opera at Wormsley isn’t Mozart as you’d expect but it’s true to the spirit of Mozart who loved witty, madcap japes.
What a pity! On a glorious — well, by recent English standards — summer’s day, there can be few more beautiful English countryside settings than Glyndebourne, with the added bonus, as alas much of the audience appears to understand it, of an opera house attached.
Described by one critic as “cosmically gifted”, during her tragically short career, American mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson amazed and delighted audiences with the spellbinding beauty of her singing and the astonishing honesty of her performances.
Since its first performance at the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo during Venice’s 1643 Carnevale, Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea has been one of the most important milestones in the genesis of modern opera despite its 250 years of unmerited obscurity.
“I wrote it almost without noticing.” So Verdi declared when reminded of his eighth — and perhaps least frequently performed, opera, Alzira. One might say that, since he composed the work, no-one else has much noticed either.
Just when you thought the protagonist was Hoffmann! Who, rather what stole the show?
When is verismo verily veristic? Or what is a virginal girl dressed in communion white doing in the two murderous acts of the Los Angeles Opera’s current production of Tosca? And why does she sing the shepherd's song?
Though 2013 is the bicentennial of the births of Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner, the releases of Cecilia Bartoli’s recording of Bellini’s Norma on DECCA, a new studio recording of Donizetti’s Caterina Cornaro from Opera Rara, and this première recording of Saverio Mercadante’s forgotten I due Figaro, suggest that this is the start of a summer of bel canto.
Wagner’s Lohengrin is not an unfamiliar visitor to the UK thanks, in the main, to Elijah Moshinsky’s perennial production at Covent Garden.
Philip Glass's The Perfect American at the ENO in London is a visual treat, but the libretto is mind-numbingly anodyne.
Recording Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen is for a record label equivalent to a climber reaching the summit of Mount Everest: it is the zenith from which a label surveys its position among its rivals and appreciates an achievement that can define its reputation for a generation.
![Yvonne Howard [Photo courtesy of English Touring Opera]](http://www.operatoday.com/ETO_010408_163_7881.gif)
English Touring Opera continued its 30th anniversary celebrations with six concert performances of Norma, sung — unusually for ETO — in Italian, in a touring footprint which has some common ground with the ongoing staged tour of Katya Kabanova and The Magic Flute, but which is effectively an entirely separate tour.
The Norma was Yvonne Howard, a career mezzo whose recent forays into the soprano repertoire (notably, Leonore for Opera Holland Park and Lady Macbeth for Opera North) have been proving consistently successful. She undoubtedly sounds more soprano than mezzo these days, her voice brighter-hued than that of the Adalgisa, Alwyn Mellor, and her top notes easily produced and fully integrated with the rest of her voice. Though both women acquitted themselves admirably, it’s always difficult to ensure an adequate contrast between the two voices, and with this cast it didn’t come off; Mellor is a soprano, but a dark-toned, weighty one, and without knowing the plot it would have been impossible to tell which of the two women was meant to be the younger.
Under the baton of Michael Rosewell, Bellini’s score sounded classy, the four-square rhythms of the choruses crisp and poised, and the legato of the female-voice numbers elegant. The acoustic of Cadogan Hall has the benefit of making small forces sound full-bodied and substantial; I need not have worried about the volume limitations of an 18-strong chorus and an orchestra of fewer than 40. At the same time, solo voices can also carry well here, with Howard’s beautifully contained pianissimo in ‘Casta diva’ set off by the subtle orchestral texture. And the hall gives an immediacy to the opera’s more intimate dialogues, especially those between the two women; the soft opening section of ‘Mira, o Norma’ felt as though the audience were intruding upon a very private moment. One wonders whether the conversational style of the duets came across quite so powerfully at the tour’s larger venues, which included Exeter Cathedral.
Elsewhere the balance was more problematic, with the chorus tenors drowning out the women’s voices, and an excess of bassy orchestral sound threatening to overwhelm the tenor Justin Lavender in Pollione’s opening aria. Lavender was somewhat wooden and he failed to give the vocal line much shape; Piotr Lempa’s Oroveso was vocally adequate but rather stiff and characterless.
Considering the musical intimacy between the female voices, it was a shame that the opera was given in such strict ‘concert’ fashion. Though entrances and exits were made as necessary in a cursory step towards being semi-staged, the duetting singers always facing straight ahead and barely exchanging glances with one another.
Michael Rosewell [Photo courtesy of English Touring Opera]
The roles of Flavio and Clotilde were satisfactorily taken by Charne Rochford and Helen Johnson, who doubled as members of the chorus.
Onto the autumn, and ETO’s next project - in celebration both of its own anniversary and of Handel’s — will be the staging of five different Handel operas, in a tour which commences in October at the Britten Theatre at the Royal College of Music.
Ruth Elleson © 2009