![Sian Pendry (Dorabella) and Luke Gabbedy (Guglielmo) [Photo by Jeff Busby courtesy of Opera Australia]](http://www.operatoday.com/Cosi_OA_01.gif)
24 Nov 2009
Così fan tutte, Opera Australia
Like most opera companies, the Mozart/da Ponte trifecta of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte are central to Opera Australia’s repertoire.
The quick rise to prominence and thin catalog of recordings by Russian conductor Kirill Petrenko, outgoing General Music Director of the Bayerische Staatsoper and incoming chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, renders each of his forays into the classic repertoire significant. Last Sunday morning, the Bayerisches Staatsorchester gave the first of three performances of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis under his direction.
After D’Oustrac’s striking success as Cassandre in Berlioz Les Troyens, this will reach audiences less familiar with her core repertoire in the baroque and grand opéra. Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été and La mort d’Ophélie, Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder and the Lieder of Franz Liszt are very well known, but the finesse of D’Oustrac’s timbre lends a lucid gloss which makes them feel fresh and pure.
We sat, bewildered, all of us, watching (enduring) Gounod’s sweet little tear jerker as a nasty drug trip. Except for the Australian Marguerite it was an all French cast and they all gamely played along, the sophisticated verse of Offenbach’s librettists Jules Barbier and Michel Carré clearly sailing out over an abrasive pit.
Hector Berlioz’s Les Troyens with Philippe Jordan conducting the Opéra National de Paris. Since Les Troyens headlined the inauguration of Opéra Bastille 30 years ago, we might have expected something special of this new production. It should have been a triumph, with such a good conductor and some of the best singers in the business. But it wasn't.
Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No.3 with François-Xavier Roth and the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, now at last on CD, released by Harmonia Mundi, after the highly acclaimed live performance streamed a few months ago.
A weekend commemorating the 150th anniversary of the death of Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) entitled Berlioz: The Ultimate Romantic was launched in style from Cardiff’s Hoddinott Hall with a magnificent account of L’enfance du Christ (Childhood of Christ). The emotional impact of this ‘sacred trilogy’ seemed to gain further weight for its performance midway between Christmas and Easter, neatly encapsulating Christ’s journey from birth to death.
In contrast to the ‘single-shaming’ advertisement - “To the 12,750 people who ordered a single takeaway on Valentine’s Day. You ok, hun?” - for which the financial services company, Revolut, were taken to task, this Temple Music recital programme on 14th February put the emphasis firmly on partnerships: intimate, impassioned and impetuous.
There is a famous story that when Philip Glass first met Nadia Boulanger she pointed to a single bar of one of his early pieces and said: “There, that was written by a real composer”. Glass recalls that it was the only positive thing she ever said about him
Cardboard buds flaming into magic orchids. The frenzied whizz of a Catherine Wheel as it pushes forth its fiery petals. A harvest sky threshed and glittering with golden grain.
This famed murderess worked her magic on Toulouse’s Théâtre du Capitole stage, six dead including her beloved long lost son. It was Victor Hugo’s carefully crafted 1833 thriller recrafted by Italian librettist Felice Romano that became Donizetti’s fragile Lucrezia Borgia.
How important is ‘context’, in opera? Or, ‘symbol’? How does one balance the realism of a broad social milieu with the expressionistic intensity of an individual’s psychological torment and fracture?
The Cardinall’s Musick invited us for a second time to join them in ‘the company of heaven’ at Wigmore Hall, in a recital that was framed by musical devotions to St Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary.
Listening to these two concerts - largely devoted to the music of Richard Strauss, and given by the soprano Diana Damrau, and the superlative Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in the second - I was reminded of Wilhelm Furtwängler’s observation that German music would be unthinkable without him.
The obsessive Russian Dostoevsky’s novel cruelly objectified into music by Czech composer Leos Janacek brutalized into action by Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski beatified by Argentine conductor Alejo Pérez.
The composer Benjamin Godard (1849–95) is today largely unknown to most music lovers. Specialist collectors, though, have been enjoying his songs (described as “imaginative and delightful” by Robert Moore in American Record Guide), his Concerto Romantique for violin (either in its entirety or just the dancelike Canzonetta, which David Oistrakh recorded winningly decades ago), and some substantial chamber and orchestral works that have received first recordings in recent years.
There was a full house at St John’s Smith Square for La Nuova Musica’s presentation of Handel’s Alcina.
Perhaps it was the ‘Blue Monday’ effect, but the first Act of this revival of Richard Eyre’s 1994 production of La Traviata seemed strangely ‘consumptive’, its energy dissipating, its ‘breathing’ rather laboured.
“Why should I spend good money on tables when I have men standing idle?” asks a Regency country squire in the British sitcom Blackadder the Third. The Marquise de Merteuil in OPERA2DAY’s Dangerous Liaisons would agree with him. Her servants support her dinner table, groaning with gateaux, on their backs.
Max Bruch Die Loreley recorded live in the Prinzregenstheater, Munich, in 2014, broadcast by BR Klassik and now released in a 3-CD set by CPO. Stefan Blunier conducts the Münchner Rundfunkorchester with Michaela Kaune, Magdalena Hinterdobler, Thomas Mohr and Jan-Hendrick Rootering heading the cast, with the Prager Philharmonischer Chor..
Thanks to the phenomenon of international co-productions, Dutch National Opera’s first-ever Porgy and Bess is an energizing, heart-stirring show with a wow-factor cast. Last year in London, co-producer English National Opera hosted it to glowing reviews. Its third parent, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, will present it at a later date. In the meantime, in Amsterdam the singers are the crowing glory in George Gershwin’s 1935 masterpiece.
Like most opera companies, the Mozart/da Ponte trifecta of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte are central to Opera Australia’s repertoire.
Like his production of Don Giovanni, the staging of Così fan tutte by the late Göran Järvefelt served the company well for decades before being replaced in September by this new take on the story by Jim Sharman. Sharman is one of Australia’s most invigorating stage directors whose earliest work was with Opera Australia (then called The Australian Opera) when, in 1967, as a twenty-one year old, he produced Don Giovanni, setting it on a huge chess board and calculating the Don’s progress to Hell like chess strategies. Sharman’s biggest claim to worldwide fame, however, is as director of the original The Rocky Horror Show and it’s subsequent film adaptation. In Australia he now counted among the country’s foremost directors with laudable stagings of classic and contemporary plays, musicals and occasionally operas. His staging of Britten’s Death in Venice was mounted for the 1980 Adelaide Festival, barely five after it’s premiere where it garnered favourable comments from local and international critics before being taken into Opera Australia’s repertoire where it still holds sway nearly thirty years later.
Like than early Don Giovanni, Sharman’s Così fan tutte sadly seems to be trying too hard. But by most accounts Così is a difficult opera to pull off. The partner swapping shenanigans and misogynist sentiment have stranded it as a kind of antiquated boulevard farce like Georges Feydeau set to music!
Henry Choo (Ferrando) and Hye Seoung Kwon (Fiordiligi)
Using a contemporary setting, Sharman reveals during the overture a wedding
party, the couple, a Japanese Bride and Groom, arriving at the reception before
freezing the action and transporting the Bride and Groom to either side of the
stage where they watch the opera unfold before being transported back at the
end of the opera to their nuptials as the cast sing the opera’s moral.
Don Alfonso’s (José Carbó) bet appears to be a the result of a locker
room brag as Ferrando (Henry Choo) and Guglielmo (Luke Gabbedy), under stylised
showers, compare their respective fiancée’s virtue (rather, as one would
imagine in a locker room situation, their physical or sexual attributes). The
action unfolds in a white walled set, designed by Ralph Myers, with an arched
floor where the stranded wedding organisers and guests act as chorus and
occasional prop movers. Occasionally the wedding photographer appears with a
live video camera to zoom in on characters during their principal arias and
relay their image to a huge curtain interminably pulled back and forth
throughout the long opera.
While the concept may be puzzling it works well enough until the second act where these directorial high jinks gloss over the searing bitterness as Fiordiligi (Hye Seoung Kwon) agonises over her situation and the two men agonise over the swiftness of their lovers infidelity. Unlike Brad and Janet in Sharman’s notorious The Rocky Horror Show, the partner swapping and sexual humiliation is far from funny. In fairness the fault lies with the opera itself it’s sexual attitudes are as infuriating to modern audiences as those of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and even the best directors have a tough job with either.
Sian Pendry (Dorabella), José Carbó (Don Alfonso) and Hye Seoung Kwon (Fiordiligi)
The opera is also sung in a modern English translation by Jeremy Sams that almost matches the famous, mid-twentieth century, Ruth and Thomas Martin translation for its lumpiness. While getting plenty of laughs for its up to date casualness (“I might forget myself or even wet myself” sing the men after Guglielmo’s ‘mustacchi’ serenade sends the ladies packing), Sams’s choice of words robs the open-vowelled flow of da Ponte’s Italian text. Nor does Sams even try to be literal about translating the original words, let along consider their singability “I have sinned my best beloved” is his substitution for Fiordiligi’s “per pieta, ben mio perdona”. Sams even suggests that the opera's ‘motif’’ “Così fan tutte”, when sung by Don Alfonso should be “That’s how God made them”. If an opera company must perform a work in translation (and spend good money on royalties for it) it should at least be better than this.
To their credit, the young cast sing even the most difficult passages clearly; nearly every word of the unfortunate text is audible. Henry Choo is a most stylish tenor; his voice has the heft to carry into the big auditorium without apparent force. He establishes a beautiful and limpid line through ‘Un’aura amorosa’ and is spot-on in the difficult runs in the act one finale. As Guglielmo, Luke Gabbedy’s light baritone could almost be mistaken for a tenor and a darker colour might be wished for in the duet with Dorabella (Sian Pendry) and the act two aria. The same applies to José Carbó’s as Alfonso, the voice seeming lighter than one would expect for the role. Of the ladies the most accomplished is Tiffany Speight as Despina. Speight is one of the company’s best Mozartians, her voice is silvery, carries effortlessly and her charming stage presence carries with the same clarity. Hye Seong Kwon handled Fiordiligi’s big moments with breathtaking ease, long phrases, octave jumps and embellishments all perfectly judged despite the impositions the English words placed on her. Sian Pendry handled Dorabella’s music with similar ease; hers is a high, light mezzo, rather like Gabbedy’s high, light baritone. Kwon and Pendry also make their first appearance in swim suits and spend the rest of the opera equally revealing costumes and both have catwalk figures.
Henry Choo (Ferrando) and Luke Gabbedy (Guglielmo)
Ollivier-Philippe Cunéo coaxed a period sounding performance from the orchestra, the strings occasionally emphasising that wiry sound that passes for authentic. Cunéo also adopts that peculiar practice of breathlessly playing the two opening chords of the overture (as evidenced in Arnold Östman's 1986 recording of the opera) and generally rushing things where a little restraint might have been better. The woodwind were often given a difficult time and the big moment when Fiordiligi finally succumbs (Mozart’s delectably sudden change from lurching chords to gorgeous runs on the strings) passed without the attention it deserves.
With chick costumes and attractive singers to wear them, this Così will certainly appeal to younger audiences. Sharman is obviously at his best when dealing amorous absurdities but the deeper musical and emotional content that is so unique in the Mozart/da Ponte operas are left buried.
Michael Magnusson