“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.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro has a libretto by Lorenzo daPonte based on the French play La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro (The Crazy Day or the Marriage of Figaro) by Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799).
For its world class Easter Festival, Baden-Baden mounted a Die Zauberflöte that owed more to the grey penitential doldrums of Lent than to the unbridled jubilance of re-birth.
Once Berkeley Opera, renamed West Edge Opera, this enterprising company offers the Bay Area’s only serious alternative to corporate opera, to wit Bonjour M. Gauguin.
In the first of pianist Julius Drake’s three-part series, ‘Perspectives’, our gaze was directed at Gustav Mahler’s eclectic musical responses to human experiences: from the trauma and distress of anguished love to the sweet contentment of true friendship, from the agonised introspection of the artist to the diverse dramas of human interaction.
The Los Angeles opera company marketed its spring production of Rossini's La Cenerentola as Cinderella though there is no opera by that name. The libretto of La Cenerentola is not the Cinderella story we know.
The Paris Opéra has not staged a full Ring Cycle since 1957, but its current season will conclude with a correction of this grand operatic gap.
![Alice Coote [Photo by Anne-Marie Le Blé]](http://www.operatoday.com/anne-marie-le-ble.gif)
The Proms reach people all over the world, bringing them together for a kind of international street party, celebrating a shared love of music. If the arts make us more human and humane, then the BBC Proms are a force for good.
The atmosphere at the First Night is electric, everyone’s in a party mood. Yet the high point of this Prom was Alice Coote’s stunning Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody, op. 53, heard for the first time at the Royal Albert Hall in 41 years.
The Prom began with Stravinsky’s Fireworks, op 4. It’s a bagatelle, but Diaghilev liked it so much he commissioned The Firebird and then The Rite of Spring. So from this acorn grew modern music. Not even the carnage of the First World War could stem the tide. This year’s Proms will feature all of Stravinsky’s ballets.
Chabrier’s Ode to Music followed. Ailish Tynan has been on many Young Artist programs, many of which were BBC funded and promoted. She’s proof that such sponsorship nurtures performers. It must be nerve wracking to sing before an audience of millions, so Jiřì Belohlàvek led the BBC Symphony Orchestra sensitively. Belohlàvek is proving a revelation in London music circles. He has no equal in Czech and Slavic repertoire. Recently his Dvořàk’s Rusalka at Glyndebourne won great acclaim. At last year’s Proms, he produced a superlative Janàček Osud. This year he’ll be conducting Smetana and Martinů.
Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no 3 is another acorn, but one which didn’t grow past its first movement. Yet it’s interesting because it shows how full of life the composer was just before he died. No “curse of the Pathétique”, then. This rarity was a surprising choice for something as high profile as the First Night of the Proms, when the audience is happy with flashy crowd pleasers. But in a quirky way, that’s why it worked. The Proms may appear safe, but there’s enough challenge for those prepared to venture.
Back to fireworks with Katia and Marielle Labèque. Poulenc’s Concerto in D minor for two pianos is a three part drama, an interplay between two different pianists and orchestra, with individual instruments playing smaller supporting roles. Moods swing between tender and jazzy, from elegant serenity to uninhibited joy. For an encore, the Labèques then played four hands on one keyboard, a lively polka by Berio - not Luciano but his grandfather. Another Proms surprise !
International as the Proms may be, they symbolize Britishness to many, so it was good to hear Elgar, in sunny mode, In the South played with élan.
The heart of this Prom, though, wasn’t the obvious cheerful pieces but Brahms’s devastating Rhapsody for Contralto, the Alto Rhapsody. Alice Coote’s performance was searing, white hot with intensity, without sacrificing the compassion and dignity that makes the piece so moving.
Goethe’s poem depicts an outcast who sets off away into the wilderness. From a brooding orchestral introduction, Coote’s voice projects into the vastness of the Royal Albert Hall. It’s important that she has such command, for the poem pits an individual against overwhelming forces. “Die Ode verschlingt ihn” goes the text, “the desert engulfs him”. Coote breathed into the “o” in “Ode” so it rang resonantly, yet hinted subtly of the hollowness within. Then she extended “verschlingt”, stretching it to evoke distance and then oblivion.
There’s something neurotic about this poem. The disappointed man “furtively feeds on his own worth in unfulfilling self-love”. (“zehrt er heimlich auf seinen eignen Wert in ung’nügender Selbstsucht”). Coote showed how the repeated sounds “seinen” and “eignen” elucidate meaning. The protagonist is going round in circles, grinding himself down. Maybe that’s why the poem appealed to Brahms? Ostensibly he was upset that he’d been jilted by Clara Schumann’s daughter but there’s no evidence that he had a real relationship with her, or indeed with any woman, Clara included.
Perhaps that’s why the resolution in this piece comes from the way Brahms integrates the soloist, chorus and orchestra. A characteristic Brahmsian flute melody appears, at first tentatively, then grows in power, joined in the final strophe with the choir of men’s voices : no longer is the mezzo really alone, for the Vater der Liebe (father of love, possibly God) has shown mercy, revealing the “thousand springs that can help the thirsty in the desert” (“die tausend Quellen neben dem Durstenden in der Wüste”) Coote rounds the vowel sounds in “Wüste” making the word grow with as if absorbing nourishment.
The Alto Rhapsody is a powerful work, Brahms’s Winterreise, if you will, heralding the even more profound Vier ernste Gesänge, op. 121. After a performance like this it was hard to take in anything else.
All Proms are available for listening online and on demand on the BBC Proms website. The First Night was televised so there’s also a video upload, Over the next few weeks, Opera Today will be covering Proms of opera and vocal interest, including a new Handel Partenope (with Andreas Scholl) and Purcell’s The Fairy Queen. a semi staging of the current Glyndebourne production reviewed in June.
Anne Ozorio
Click here to access the BBC Proms web site.