In May of 2013, the Spire Series at the First Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, Maryland, observed the fiftieth anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy by presenting a work dealing with the 1963 assassination.
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.
![Matthias Goerne [Photo by Marco Borggreve for harmonia mundi]](http://www.operatoday.com/Goerne-Borggreve038.gif)
This programme of mostly solemn, elevated music based around songs on such themes as Evening, Death and Immutability was part of Matthias Goerne’s ‘Journey with Schubert’ during which he is recording the songs on eleven CDs and presenting the series in recitals all over the world. If the singing on this occasion is anything to go by, these recordings are set to become the standard to which other singers should aspire.
Goerne’s unwavering legato, at once intimate and yet redolent of grandeur, is, frankly, matchless - no other singer, recorded or currently active, can sustain the long, flowing lines of songs such as ‘Nacht und Träume’ and ‘Im Abendrot’ with his ease, intensity and phenomenal breath control: this recital displayed that unique ability to tremendous effect. He began with the former song - daring as an introduction, but a wonderful way to establish the atmosphere of this sombre, deeply philosophical evening. Of course he respects the marking of langsam as few other singers can, yet he still sustains the inner rhythm of the lines: it was a pity that Alexander Schmalcz’ playing was a little on the heavy side.
I must have heard ‘Im Abendrot’ at least a hundred times in recital, but never like this - sehr langsam is the instruction, and Goerne intones the spacious, expansive melody with such quiet fervour that you find yourself holding your breath: the silence in the hall after ‘In mein stilles fenster sinkt’ was like the lull before a huge storm, far away yet imminently expected. Superb.
Graham Johnson wrote of ‘Die Sterne’ (Schlegel) that the singer with the breath control needed to execute its phrases ‘seems synonymous with someone who has ‘seen the light’ and this most unusual of Schubert’s ‘star’ songs indeed presents lofty challenges, to each of which Goerne rises with great skill, his shimmering high notes displayed to as much advantage as his warm, bass-baritone depths.
‘Der liebliche Stern’ has been described as a ‘humdrum’ song, but not here - Goerne’s tender, earnest phrasing and Schmalcz’ wistful playing of the ostinato accompaniment made for an intense experience, ‘Es zittert von Frühlingswinden’ living up to Gerald Moore’s requirement for the singer to ‘love each phrase’ and to sing with ‘the smoothest calmest line.’
‘Totengräbers Heimweh’ is the song of which it was once said that Goerne’s interpretation of it was ‘incomparable - his singing comes from inside’ and this was amply illustrated by this evening’s performance of it. From the fervid questioning of the start - ‘Wohin? o wohin?’ through the anguished depths of ‘Ich stehe allein! - so ganz allein!’ to the spellbinding mezza-voce of ‘O Heimat des Friedens, Der Seligen Land!’ in which the long phrases were given in one seemingly effortless arch of sound, this truly was singing with which it is very difficult to find anything to compare. The single encore, ‘An den Mond’ (‘Fullest wieder Busch und Tal’) was a fitting conclusion to this evening of peerless singing.
Melanie Eskenazi