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.
The performance of lieder is a partnership between singer and pianist. In May I heard Julius Drake redeem an indifferent recital by the sheer beauty of his playing. I’ve been listening to him for more than 15 years. He’s a favorite. So I was completely taken by surprise by this recital
The program was promising, an intelligent mix of much-loved Schubert staples with relative rarities which the Wigmore Hall’s specialist audience eagerly anticipated. By its very nature Lieder is more extreme than ordinary song. Good Lieder recitals shouldn’t be tame. But the reckless pace at which Drake was playing seemed to stem from something quite outside the music. His “tempi” were so fast that all sense of phrasing was lost. Drake has the technical facility to play at breakneck speeds without losing notes, but this relentless pressure distorted line and meaning. And Lieder without meaning aren’t Lieder.
Since each song is individual, its character needs to be respected. Drake lurched from one song to the next without a break, sometimes almost before the resonant echoes of the last had faded. Switching from the contemplative “Freiwilliges Versinken” (D 700), with its images of a pale moon and resignation, to the stormy “Der zürnenden Diana” (D 707b) might in some circumstances be dramatic, but when every song and every traverse is treated the same hurried way, the songs tumble into a jumble.
The audience was disregarded, too. Pauses between songs allow listeners to reflect on what they’ve heard, for Lieder is about making listeners think. Now there wasn’t even time to turn a page, or to cough to break tension. Only after the performance ended, did Drake take an extended break, claiming he couldn’t find the score for the encore, laughing as if it were a joke. Since the encore was “Die Forellen” (D 550), and everyone knew there’d be an encore, this seemed contrived.
When Drake wasn’t aiming for an Olympic speed record, his touch was heavy and dominant. “An mein Klavier” (D 342) refers to a fortepiano. The melody lilts, for it’s a “sanftes Klavier”. This clavier, instead, gave extra force to the term “Hammer”-klavier.
To Ian Bostridge’s credit, he managed to match Drake’s pace for the most part. In the last few years, he’s developed much greater control and depth. Indeed, a friend of mine heard this concert a few weeks ago at Schwarzenberg and said that, if anything Bostridge’s voice was in even better form this evening. My friend, who hears 50 or more Lieder recitals a year, hasn’t in the past been a big Bostridge fan, but has become convinced by the singer’s increasing poise and confidence,. Now that’s tinged with respect for the way Bostridge handled the wayward dynamics.
“Der Wanderer” (D 489, von Lübeck) showed how Bostridge can float legato with the fluidity of a clarinet, yet imbue words with great meaning. Lieder aren’t a medium for bland purity: a singer has to care about the words. This is one of Bostridge’s great strengths. He’s clearly thought through less well known songs like “Die Perle” (D 466, Jacobi) where the poet knows he’ll never find the pearl he’s searching for. A pity that the marking “schrietend “(at a walking pace) was so rushed that it pushed the poet to his death before giving him a chance to savor his predicament with true Romantic pathos.
Ballads like “Lied des Gefangenen Jägers” (D 843) and “Normans Gesang,” (D 846) both to texts by Sir Walter Scott, need vivid expression to create interest, which Bostridge’s emphasis on meaning provided. Then, in a burst of impassioned energy, he threw himself into the Mayrhofer song “An die Freude” (D 654), giving it greater portent than I’ve ever heard before. Mayrhofer, a neurotic with whom Schubert later fell out, contemplates death, when friends will bring flowers to his grave. “Rejoice,” sings the poet, “Dies alles ist dem Toten gliech” (“all this means nothing to me now”). Despite the turbulent piano, Bostridge had perspective, and sang with grace.
Wonderful program notes by Richard Stokes. Most program notes are ephemera, geared to the most basic readership. Stokes’s notes combine insight into the music and poems with knowledge of wider cultural background. He gives details even the astute Wigmore Hall audience might miss. For example, “Das Zügenglöcklein” (D 871) isn’t just any bell but one traditionally rung in Austrian villagers when parishioners lay dying, to prepare them for the next world. In our frantic modern times, we don’t reflect on simple, quiet things like that. Stokes makes us realize just how relevant Schubert is to us today.
Anne Ozorio