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.
Few people who love opera in general and bel canto in particular have never heard the comment made by Lilli Lehmann, veteran of the inaugural Ring at Bayreuth in 1876, that singing all three of Wagner’s Brünnhildes—in Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung, respectively, all of which she sang to great acclaim—pales in comparison with singing the title rôle in Bellini’s Norma.
A massive female figure fills the whole stage at the ENO for Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre, in this amazing production from La Fura del Bas. (Alex Ollé). This production is so inherently dramatic that it brings Ligeti's "anti-opera" onto a new level as theatre.art. .
The giant woman is a miracle of motors and pulleys, engineering transfigured as art. She’s obviously not alive, but she moves, following the action. She takes on whatever is projected onto her, changing with light from woman to man, aging, decaying, turning into a skull. She’s solid enough to support actors crawling over her yet seems to disappear into starlight or clouds when the lighting’s right. Her body opens to reveal secret caverns. She’s so wonderful, you’re mesmerized.
“A dress rehearsal for the end of the world” wrote Michel de Ghelderode whose original play inspired Ligeti’s “anti-opera”. Le Grand Macabre is an apocalyptic vision after Heironymous Bosch, Theatre of the Absurd at its most picaresque. Nothing is supposed to make sense, all logic overturned. So lovers Amando and Amanda (Frances Bourne and Rebecca Bottone, both women) wear their muscles outside their skin. Nekrotzar, note the nameplay, (Pavlo Hunka) is the all powerful figure of Death, who rides a plastic bubble horse while wielding a scythe.
Rebecca Bottone (Amanda) and Frances Bourne (Amando)
There’s lots of action, for this is Breughelland, teeming with busy figures. Venus (Susanna Andersson) slides down from the ceiling, and later appears as singing stormtrooper. Lots of deliberately unerotic sexual shennanigans - Astramodars (Frode Olsen) and his wife Mescalina (Susan Bickley), she of the conical size ZZ bra cups. The Black Minister (Simon Butteries) and The White Minister (Daniel Norman) exchange playground obscenities in alphabetical order. Piet the Pot ((Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke) is a down to earth drunk. Prince Go-Go (Andrew Watts, the countertenor) portrays a sad Elvis impersonator, his naivety no match for the evil plotters around him. There’s even a recreation of Michael Jackson’s *Thriller *dance routine to keep the chorus and actors on their toes.
It’s wildly madcap, lots of fun if taken on its own terms. Judging by the laughter most of this audience got the right mood. But the difficulty with Le Grand Macabre, is that it’s not easy to marry humour with horror. Some of Ligeti’s jokes are pretty asinine anyway, without the saving grace of shock, but there’s a lot more darkness and despair in his music than this production dwells on. On the other hand, human nature being what it is chooses levity over grim surreality .
In the Second Act, where Ligeti writes longer musical passages without narrative, Baldur Brönimann got reasonably idiomatic playing from the orchestra. Nonetheless this isn’t Ligeti at his most subtle, and most of the audience were there for the show not the music. Since this production had so much going for it that its sheer inventive energy was compensation for the relative lack of musical bite. Nothing to scare away Those Who Fear New Music. This production was so impressive that it will stick in the memory . For once, it will be good to listen to a recording (ideally Salonen) allowing La Fura del Bas’s incredible images come to life again in your imagination. You can hear the music again, but you’ll never see another production quite like this !
Andrew Watts (Prince Go-Go), Wolfgang Ablinger - Sperrhacke (Piet the Pot), Pavlo Hunka (Nekrotzar) and Frode Olsen (Astradamors)
Yet ultimately, Le Grand Macabre isn’t all that macabre. Death is overturned. Prince Go-Go is arrested because he isn’t dead. Piet, Astromodars and Mescalina, return to life and carry on as before. Nekrotzar is defeated and doesn’t come back. Instead he’s replaced by a shrunken puppet, inside the giant woman’s stomach. Then the giant’s features bloom again, colour returning to her cheeks, and she smiles. She’s remarkably realistic now, so it’s quite frightening seeing her eyeball to eyeball if you’re sitting upstairs. The giant woman’s face came from a film at the very beginning, where a sad, lonely woman seemed to be dying of a heart attack. She doesn’t die, but such a shambles of an existence is hardly life. It was uncomfortable seeing her “dead” body subject to indignities, but seeing the real actress who plays her in the film taking applause later wasn’t reassuring. Which is perhaps the point - we can’t assume everything’s back to normal, whatever normal “is”.
Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre runs at the ENO until October 9th. www.eno.org