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.
![Mark Padmore [Photo by Marco Borggreve]](http://www.operatoday.com/Padmore.gif)
Schubert’s first song-cycle is a perfect choice with which to open a new concert season, and the Wigmore Hall was packed on Friday evening in anticipation of this recital by tenor Mark Padmore, much admired for the focus and concentration of his ‘story-telling’, and Paul Lewis, one of the most expressive and poetic of pianists today.
In the event, this was a controlled and precise rendition of Die schöne Müllerin, thoughtfully conceived and executed with commitment and integrity. The contrasts and juxtapositions of the text — as the wanderer fluctuates between hope and desperation — were conveyed by skilfully controlled oppositions of dynamic, tonality and tempo. Thus, a perfectly paced and well-structured whole was enriched by carefully considered gestures: for example, small hesitations — before Padmore’s exquisite pianissimo of ‘Das Wasser’ in ‘Das Wandern’ (‘Journeying’), or preceding the piano’s shift to the minor key half-way through ‘Wohin?’ (‘Where to?’), to name but two of many such subtleties — enhanced the fluctuations between excitement and longing, between optimism and despair. Similarly, the energy of Lewis’s introduction to ‘Halt’ (‘Halt!’) captured the young man’s eager exhilaration; while, the final, weighty, assertive chords of ‘Ungeld’ (‘Impatience’) and ‘Mein!’ (‘Mine!’) conveyed the surety, and misguidedness, of his conviction that “Dein ist mein Herz, und sol les ewig bleiben” (“My heart is yours, and shall be forever!”). Moreover, a sudden accelerando at the concluding line of ‘Die böse farbe’ (‘The hateful colour’) communicated the agony felt at departure, underlying the impassioned cry, “Zum Abschied deine Hand!” (“give me your hand in parting!)
Indeed, in many ways the performers seemed to have exchanged their conventional roles: from the rich assertive gestures of the opening bars of ‘Das Wandern’, it was evident that it was Lewis’s accompaniment that would propel the musical and dramatic continuity. The piano was both scene-setter and protagonist: rippling with the recurring arpeggiac echoes of the brook, Lewis’s accompaniment both depicted the scenes and source of the tragedy and embodied the inner turmoil of the wanderer’s mind as he struggles with the fickle ‘murmuring friend’ which lulls him to his Fate - a fusion of inner and outer, of man and the natural environment which is truly Romantic.
In contrast, Padmore seemed less implicated, more objective, a teller of a tale. Making frequent use of a fragile, haunting head voice, he may have kept his distance from the young lover’s turmoil, but that is not to imply that sang inexpressively. The tenor’s restraint in the final lines of ‘Pause’ — “Ist es der Nachklang meiner Liebespein/Sol les das Vorspiel neuer Lieder sein?” (“Is this the echo of my love’s torment/Or the prelude to new songs?”) — evoked the bitter-sweet nature of the young man’s love, and his growing self-knowledge. The octave rise on “Leibesnot”, (“Anguish’), in ‘Die liebe Farbe’ (‘The beloved colour’), the touching intensification and colouring of “mein Herz” in ‘Ungeduld’, the guileless tenderness of the timorous, pained questions “Wie welk, wie blaβ? … Wovon so naβ?” (“Why faded, why pale? … What makes you wet?”) in ‘Trockne Blumen’ (‘Withered Flowers’) similarly demonstrated an impressive and coherent attention to detail.
Yet, one could not help feeling that Padmore’s delivery was rather limited in tonal range, and thus in emotional variety. Over-use of a withdrawn, plaintive timbre, together with a marked absence of vibrato throughout, resulted in a weakening of dramatic impact, as familiarity weakened the meaning and effect. Padmore’s diction, however, was excellent, even in the ‘busier’ numbers, such as ‘Der Jäger’ (‘The Hunter’) where the pace and energetic accompaniment were no hindrance to clarity. But, both performers seemed more at ease in the quieter, tranquil songs, and here the ensemble was outstanding. Lewis’s understated repeating rhythmic patterns in the closing two songs created an air of inevitability as the distant call of the brook itself lured the wanderer, and the audience, to its depths.
This was a genuinely unified conception and performance. One may like one’s Schubert more fervent, more wrought or more turbulent, but Padmore and Lewis offered a reading of clarity and cohesion, shaping and sustaining the emotional and narrative journey, and creating moments of great sadness, serenity and beauty along the way.
Claire Seymour