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.
A note on the inside back cover of the booklets for these two releases announces that they are part of a new Supraphon series dedicated to “archive recordings of complete operas not yet available on CD.”
The set of The Bartered Bride comes from 1952; The Cunning Little Vixen was recorded in 1957. Many releases from those years offer fine sound, and in some cases (think the Mercury Living presence series), quite excellent audio — warm and yet detailed.
So the first thing to be said about these two sets must be that the recording quality ranges from poor (the Smetana) to just acceptable (the Janáček). The constricted mono sound of the 1952 Bride recording gives the impression of a microphone set up not in the same room as the musicians and singers, but possibly just around the corner. Aural claustrophobia sets in early and never really leaves, despite the thoroughly idiomatic performance. The Prague National Theater orchestra and chorus perform under the baton of Jaroslav Vogel, all sounding spirited enough to really make it all the more unfortunate that they can’t be heard better. The singers tend to be a little more up front in the mix, and though none come across as major talents, they all inhabit their roles naturally. Fans of this opera, which never seems to have caught on very well outside its home region, may want this set for its historic value. Others would probably do best to find the opera in German on EMI, with a first-rate chorus and clean, clear sound.
The sound quality of the Vixen dismays the ears initially, but this is a case where one soon adjusts and settles into the mood of the performance, putting side the qualified audio experience. That excellent conductor Václav Neumann leads the same ensemble as in the Smetana, and here their virtuosity and knowledge of the idiom shine through. Rudolf Asmus sings a masculine, wise Forester, and Hana Böhmová employs a boyish soprano to vivid effect as the Vixen.
In the slim-line cases of these lower-price editions, Supraphon provides a booklet with the usual credits and then a combination track listing and synopsis, in Czech and English. More information on the artists would be appreciated, though the lack of the usual essay retreading Wikipedia-style data on the composer and the opera prompts few regrets. The better-recorded Mackerras set of Janáček’s masterpiece remains essential, but this Supraphon edition deserves a listen as well.
Chris Mullins