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.
‘It’s a personal choice’ / ‘Of course he won - he was the only one who sang songs’ / ‘I’ll be happy if anyone but the first one wins’ (he won) / ‘There’s only one possible choice - the third one’ (he came second)
Thus various Wigmore regulars on the outcome of the Song competition - but what can you expect? Cardiff is the same - ‘Outrageous! The Counter-tenor should have won’ / ‘She only won because she was the most polished’ / ‘The tenor ought to have won / and so on. Perhaps the first statement above is the most useful, since any judgment is going to be, and in a way it’s amazing that a jury so diverse can come to any sort of agreement at all. What was not in doubt, however, was that all of the finalists (and, indeed, many of those who did not make it that far) are very likely to have great careers ahead of them.
Marcus Farnsworth has a lovely, very light, sweet baritone voice, not unlike that of Simon Keenlyside, and his programme was both daring and reassuring - daring because he began not with a lollipop but with a very serious slice of Schubert, and reassuring because it had enough variety to please everyone. ‘Nachtstück’ is the kind of thing with which you might expect Goerne to open a recital, so Marcus did well to produce such a lovely, flowing legato at ‘Du heil’ge Nacht.’ Strauss’ ‘Gefunden’ was almost as daring, showcasing the singer’s reserves of power at the end, so it was a welcome relief that he followed it with Loewe’s ‘Hinkende Jamben,’ which got some laughs from the audience. He was perhaps at his best in the English group, showing his tenorial top notes in Butterworth’s ‘Think no more, lad’ and a smooth legato line in Britten’s arrangement of ‘The last rose of summer.’ He was eloquently accompanied by the very confident, extremely sympathetic Elizabeth Burgess, whose playing I have previously enjoyed in Oxford. Marcus won the First Prize.
The soprano Erin Morley’s programme did not appeal to me very much - it felt like too much Russian and just a nod to the great Lieder composers (no Schubert) - but then that’s a very personal remark! There’s no doubt that she has a lovely voice, very bright, forward and well focused, perhaps at this time more suited to the operatic stage than the recital platform. Rossini’s ‘La fioraia fiorentina’ showed her at her confident best, and Schumann’s ‘Liebeslied’ gave a hint of how she might develop as a recitalist. She was placed third in the final.
For me, Benedict Nelson was the most promising of the finalists, and he also had the best accompanist I heard in Gary Matthewman. Of course, one is influenced by choice of programme, and theirs seemed to me to show an excellent balance of styles and moods. At the moment, Benedict’s French is a little heavy to really catch the atmosphere of Duparc’s ‘La vie antérieure’ but his Mahler and Schumann suggested a maturity beyond that expected of someone who is only 26. ‘Die zwei blauen Augen’ was a very ambitious choice, but he pulled it off well, showing a fine legato line at ‘Auf der Strasse steht ein Lindenbaum.’ Schumann’s ‘Die alten, bösen Lieder’ needed a little more colour and variety in the tone, but Gary’s nachspiel was finely done. Benedict came second in the final.
Sidney Outlaw has a real personality, and was probably the best communicator of the four. He was the audience favourite, but I felt he let himself down with some of his choices - ‘Erlkönig’ is simply too well known and it’s too easy to compare its performance to that of just about every great baritone, and the ‘American’ group felt like too much conforming to type. Kudos to him, though, for being the only one to actually sing something written in this millennium. I felt his baritone had not quite got the measure of the Fauré or the Duparc, but his Brahms showed much promise, especially in the darker parts of ‘Von ewiger Liebe.’ Sidney was placed fourth.
This was another testament to the power and position of the Wigmore Hall: an audience packed not only with the great and the good and the grey-haired, but with the volubly enthusiastic young, enjoyed four mini-recitals of exceptional promise, by singers chosen out of a vast pool of talent containing at least as many again who will surely go on to great things - I would single out the baritone Gerard Collett, the soprano Erica Eloff and the pianist James Bailleu, but I am sure that those who were present for all the stages will have their equally worthy choices. The Pianists’ prize was won by James Bailleu, and he and Gerard Collett won the Jean Meikle Prize for a Duo.
Melanie Eskenazi