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.
For many, the fine recordings of Richard Strauss’s tone poem Don Juan by the late Karl Böhm seem to have emerged full-spring from the baton of Karl Böhm and the playing of the various orchestras he led.
As effortless as those performances may see, Böhm worked to achieve the results, and as much as his legacy points to the work he would do in rehearsal, it is not easy to find visual documentation of it. Yet a fine DVD exists to call attention to this aspect of the conductor’s career. Recorded on 17 September (rehearsal) and 18 September 1970 (performance), this recording offers a welcome focus on the final preparations of a single piece from start to finish. While some recordings offer selections of rehearsal footage as a bonus or among the “extras” included with a video, the premise behind this release is the rehearsal. In doing so, it affords a glimpse at Böhm in rehearsal, where the formal face known from stills and several recordings gives way to the conductor’s involvement with the details of the score.
With the orchestra in shirtsleeves, the tone is set to show the conductor working out the details that make a difference in Strauss’s finely detailed score. While some of the stops may seem for minutiae, when taken together those refinements make the core come to live in performance. The subtleties of dynamics emerge in the first part of the rehearsal, and Böhm was good not only in attending to the mistakes, but also to call attention to places where the performances succeeded. In the reality of this rehearsal, Böhm is not merely running through the score for the sake of neither the camera nor positing an image of a tyrannical director. Rather, he reviews the details to his satisfaction, even when some of the players seem from their facial expressions to tire of the continual interruptions the conductor brings to the playing. After all, this is where the work needs such dissection, and the comments Böhm makes to the performers is crucial to the results he would bring to the performance.
Just as he would stop rehearsal to describe certain markings (like the “non espressivo” marking before rehearsal letter G), Böhm’s remarks over the music also help to show how he wanted to shape the interpretation. It is unusual to see this kind of detail used on a piece which some orchestras perform with less preparation, but the concepts he brought to this work would have a bearing on style Böhm brought to Strauss’s orchestral music. It is not difficult to imagine how he could shape the other tone poems, since the details in the released performances bear out such fine attention.
This video is an excellent opportunity to see Böhm working with his musicians in one of the more familiar pieces of orchestral repertoire. As much as the score is well known, he brings out details that not only address the color of the orchestration, and thus, the effects important to the tone poem, but also the articulations and other elements essential to punctuating phrases and placing emphases. Lengths of notes, pauses, and silence come into play as this score takes shape from the fine rendering the Vienna Philharmonic would be expected to give this or any work, to the distinctive way they present a reading under the leadership of Karl Böhm. It is interesting to see the rehearsal’s duration of forty-five minutes - about three times the length of the actual performance of the piece.
Those familiar with the conductor’s work should find this recording of interest for the insights it gives to the score of this familiar tone poem. Böhm emerges as demanding, but not obsessive, with the demands taken as a whole demonstrating the standards he would expect of his players. Just as studies of sketches and drafts should point to an increased appreciation for the finished works, this recording resembles such source studies in preserving the process that takes the orchestra into a polished execution. (The concert performance is offered in a single track, framed by a brief introductory trailer and the final credits.) While it is difficult to generalize from a single video like this one, Böhm’s rehearsal for this specific 1970 rehearsal of Don Juan serves to document the efforts of this highly respected conductor. Moreover, it offers a sense of the Vienna Philharmonic in the latter part of the twentieth century.
This DVD is in color, with crisp, clear images that suggest a documentary film rather than a televised broadcast. This makes it possible to observe accurately the gestures, body language, and demeanor of Böhm and his performers. More than that, the sound is clear and resonant, giving a good sense of the quality associated with Vienna’s Grosser Musikvereinssaal. Also, the navigation of this rehearsal documentary helps for those who would want to use the film in the classroom. Music students may gain an enhanced appreciation of this work when they see it in rehearsal and those unfamiliar with German benefit from the solid translations found in the subtitle track. All in all, the presentation and the content have much to recommend in this DVD, which documents the career of one of the outstanding conductors of the twentieth century. This is the first of several DVDs, which capture Böhm’s work, and we anticipate further releases under the label “Karl Böhm in Rehearsal and Performance.”
James Zychowicz