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.
Although Antonio Vivaldi’s instrumental compositions were highly popular in his lifetime, and have been held in high regard throughout the centuries, most of his operas have been — until recently — relegated to obscurity.
This sad state of affairs is being rectified by the wonderful new series of opera recordings available through the Naïve label, part of its larger Vivaldi Edition project. Naïve’s most recent offering in this series is a concert production of La fida ninfa, a work which was premiered at the opening of Verona’s Teatro Filarmonico in January of 1732. One of the organizers of the event was the librettist, Francesco Scipione, Marquis di Maffei. Scipione was a Jesuit-educated aristocrat who specialized in Etruscology, dramatic theory, and classical philology — but still managed to find time to participate in the War of the Spanish Succession and, in his later years, write a famous theological tract attacking Jansenist doctrines. The poet’s most famous literary effort was undoubtedly his dramma, Merope, a work which served as one of the models for Voltaire’s tragedy of the same name. Unfortunately Scipione’s libretto for La fida Ninfa, an allegory on matrimonial love replete with love-struck nymphs, grumpy pirates, and multiple cases of mistaken identity, is less distinguished. While it is a credit to the composer that he was still able to create an impressive work from this clichéd literary material, the lack of a convincing plot line weakens the overall impact of the opera.
More significant for modern listeners, however, is the fact that La fida ninfa betrays the influences of the new musical style which manifested itself most powerfully a year later in the work of Pergolesi — La serva padrona. This new approach can be heard immediately in the overture of Vivaldi’s work, which features short, repeated melodic motifs, a decidedly homophonic texture, and the spare harmonic palette more typical of the mid-century style than the high baroque. This impression is only strengthened in the many beautiful solo arias and duets of the opera, where there is an unmistakable emphasis on simplicity and clarity of formal structures. Also indicative of this new style are the ensemble numbers which end each of the three acts: the remarkably beautiful trio finale of Act I (“S’egli è ver”), the quartet which concludes Act II (“Così fu gl’occhi miei?”), and the duet/choral conclusion of Act III (“Non temer”) sound much less like Vivaldi than they do Pergolesi or even Mozart.
Musical highlights of this recording include the restrained virtuosity of Verónica Cangemi as Morasto (her interpretation of the Act I aria “Dolce fiamma” is particularly fine), and the musicality of Topi Lehtipuu (Narete), who brings a relaxed and confident tone to all his solo arias. Vivaldi lovers will especially enjoy Narete’s beautiful lament (“Deh ti piega”) in Act II, where the very able conductor, Jean-Christophe Spinosi, creates an astonishingly sensitive interplay between the tenor and the orchestra. Lorenzo Regazzo is highly effective in his near-buffo role as Oralto, the spurned and highly irritable pirate, and Sandrine Piau portrays Licori, the faithful nymph, with great sensitivity and an impressive command baroque vocal technique. While there is no shortage of vocal fireworks in this recording (Cangemi’s virtuoso performance of “Destino avaro” in Act II verges on the unbelievable) the pastoral moments of La fida ninfa seem the most memorable: the haunting duets “Dimmi pastore” (Act I) between Philippe Jaroussky (Osmino) and Marie-Nicole Lemieux (Elpina) and “Pan, ch’ognun venera” between Lehtipuu and Jaroussky in Act III are spectacular. It is in these less hurried sections of the opera that Spinosi’s orchestra displays its wonderful musicality and attention to detail which are the hallmarks of the Vivaldi recordings of the Ensemble Matheus.
La fida ninfa is not one of Vivaldi’s better efforts. The music for the finale, which features a dialogue between Juno and Aeolus (competently sung by Sara Mingardo and Christian Senn), is artificial and uninspired. Even the Tempesta di mare which precedes the last scene is a disappointment (through no fault of the orchestra) and does not measure up to similar moments Vivaldi’s Seasons, for example. The fact that this opera was composed in great haste (Vivaldi was not even the first choice of the organizers of the theatre opening, having replaced their preferred composer, Giuseppe Maria Orlandini, at the last moment) is sadly apparent in some of the music. Even so, the Ensemble Matheus’ fine performance of this work is remarkable, and more than compensates for the occasional weaknesses of the composition and blandness of Scipione’s libretto.
Donald R. Boomgaarden
Dean, College of Music and Fine Arts
Loyola University New Orleans