Rossini’s La donna del Lago at the Royal Opera House boasts a superstar cast. Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Flórez are perhaps the best in these roles in the business at this time. Yet the conductor Michele Mariotti is also hot news.
It would seem a logical step for the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey to take on the role of the Composer in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos.
“Aim for excellence”, says Douglas Boyd, new Artistic Director of Garsington Opera at Wormsley, “and the audience will follow you”.
When I spoke with Zandra Rhodes, she was in her large San Diego workspace, which she described as having walls decorated with her own huge black and white drawings.
Palm Beach audiences are famous for their glamour, but in recent years a special star has sparkled amid the jewels, sequins, feathers and furs (whatever the weather).
When the soprano Jessica Pratt first arrived in Italy, she had yet to learn the language or sing in a staged opera.
When tenor Michael Spyres takes the stage at Carnegie Hall on December 5th, he will be in heady company.
One of the most noteworthy and controversial productions in recent memory arrived in Belgium with hurricane force as Director Terry Gilliam’s inaugural opera, an inspired interpretation of Hector Berlioz’s Le Damnation de Faust, blasted into Ghent, followed by a run in Antwerp.
Florian Boesch is singing Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin at the Oxford Lieder Festival on Sunday 14th October. This won’t be routine. Radically challenging conventional interpretation, Boesch says “I don’t believe it ends in suicide”
Three quarters of the way through this discussion, a question that inhabits the mind of anyone putting any thought to the subject — but no one dare ask — was rhetoricised, “what is opera?”
The Glyndebourne Festival highlight this year could be the Ravel double bill - L’heure espagnole and L'enfant et les sortilèges. Laurent Pelly directs. Anyone who saw his brilliant Humperdinck Hansel und Gretel at Glyndebourne in 2008 will know what to expect - a staging of great imagination and verve, true to the spirit of the composer.
Director David Freeman tells why this is an event worth experiencing in the Olympic year.
Irish composer Gerald Barry’s opera The Importance of Being Earnest premieres at the Barbican, London on April 26th. It is a joint commission between the Barbican and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
New Orleans native Bryan Hymel is singing the role of The Prince in Antonin Dvořák's Rusalka at the Royal Opera House, London.
Carmela Remigio is a Mozart specialist, having created Donna Elvira, Donna Anna, The Countess in Le nozze di Figaro, Susana, Ilia, Ellettra, Vitellia, Pamina and Fiordigli. She speaks to Mark Berry about her latest Donna Anna at the Royal Opera House.
Lise Lindstrom, who made a notable splash in the opera world (debuts at La Scala and at the Met) with her portrayals of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, has recently undertaken the still more demanding role of Salome.
I spoke with Vivica Genaux in December 2011, when she stopped in New York at the end of one of her concert tours.
Piotr Beczala, the Polish lyric tenor, stars in the current La Traviata at the Royal Opera House, London.
In Gounod’s Faust at the Royal Opera House in October 2011, Zhengzhong Zhou is alternating with Dmitri Hvorostovsky in the part of Valentin. Alternating, not covering or substituting. Since Zhou is very young, it’s quite a challenge.
Luca Pisaroni is one of one the more exciting young bass-baritones of his generation. In July 2011, he sings Argante in the first ever Handel Rinaldo at the Glyndebourne Festival.
![Christine Brewer [Photo by Christian Steiner]](http://www.operatoday.com/Christine_Brewer_Steiner.gif)
On 7 June 2010, I spoke with Christine Brewer who was enjoying a relatively free week at her home near St. Louis, Missouri, after long months of air travel between concerts, recitals and operatic performances.
A staunch believer in regular exercise, she has just returned from an early morning swim when I phoned her. We chatted about country living, her history, and the state of the art of singing.
MN: Where did you grow up?
CB: I grew up along the Mississippi River in southern Illinois. My brothers and I worked on local farms in summer when we were out of school. I finished high school early and was admitted to advanced placement at McKendree College, the oldest college in Illinois, which gave me a full scholarship. I graduated with a teaching degree when I was twenty. Ross Brewer and I married the following year and we both taught public school. During those years I never expected to earn my livelihood as a singer, but I did take voice lessons. I had a job singing in church and I was a section leader in the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Chorus. My voice was very small and light when I was young, but after I gave birth to my daughter at age twenty-eight, I noticed a big change in it. I was thirty-three when I won the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions so I definitely was a late bloomer!
MN: Do you have some tips for parents and teachers?
CB: These days music teachers are few and far between, but many classroom teachers are trying to include art and music in the curriculum as best they can. I suggest that those who want to help can do that by raising funds for a trip to a concert or by contacting people who can enable the kids to come for free. If you call your local symphony or opera company, you may find that they have an outreach program that will help. The St. Louis Symphony people tell me that some schools fail to take advantage of all the services available to them.
MN: How did “Echoes of Nightingales” come into being?
CB: Glenn Freiner, my voice teacher at McKendree, got me interested in doing songs once sung by artists like Kirsten Flagstad, Helen Traubel, Eileen Farrell and Eleanor Steber. Whenever he went to a recital he would note down the titles of the American songs he heard so he could buy the music. When he passed away, he left me this treasure trove of recital pieces. Roger Vignoles and I recorded more than twenty of them for Hyperion. The disc should come out in a few months. I’m already using some of the songs on my recital program.
MN: When did you start singing full time?
CB: I was the soprano soloist at The Church of St. Michael and St. George in St. Louis where several opera board members were in the congregation. Actually, General Director Richard Gaddes also attended when he was in town. I entered a young artist competition sponsored by the St. Louis Symphony and Gaddes was a judge. I did not win, but a few days after it was over I got a letter from him with a few hundred dollars in it. He wanted to make sure I would not give up because he thought I had potential, so he sent me what I would have gotten if I had won. He asked me to audition for the Opera Theatre of St. Louis Chorus and since they performed when school was not in session, I did. Eventually, I was asked to cover solo roles and conductors like Stephen Lord and John Nelson started giving me small parts. Then, Colin Graham asked me to do Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes. That was a true break-through for me
MN: Did you participate in any young artist programs?
CB: Yes, Colin Graham invited me to study for a summer in Banff, Canada. I sang the role of the Female Chorus in Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia and I understudied Lady Billows in his Albert Herring. It was one of my best early experiences because the study was so intense.
MN: Did you work with Birgit Nilsson?
CB: Yes, in 1988 I participated in a lieder master class with her in Washington, DC, and she invited me to a six-week program in Buekeburg, Germany. There were only six singers in the class and we had daily lessons. When the BBC recorded some of my concerts, I sent her the discs and she wrote back a critique.
I also sent her a disc of my first Isolde, which I did in London. Warner classics actually bought the recording and released it with no retakes, no patching at all. I did not hear from Birgit for a long time on that and I thought maybe she did not like it. Eventually, I got a letter that began: “Frau Isolde!!!” and went on to say how much she loved the recording. She said, “This is your role. You must sing it.” It really does fit me like a glove. I’ve already sung quite a few Isoldes and have a lot more coming up.
This summer I will spend two months in Santa Fe singing Lady Billows in Albert Herring. It’s one of my favorite roles. I love singing Britten’s music because of the way he captures true, honest humanity. That‘s why I love singing Ellen Orford so much. I think Peter Grimes is one of the best operas ever written by any composer. Albert Herring I love because it gives me a chance to show my comic side. I think I’m a very funny person because I always find the humor in things that happen to me. Comedy is difficult, however, because there is a very fine line between what is funny and what isn’t. In Santa Fe we have a fabulous director, Paul Curran. He directed the Peter Grimes there and the Die Frau ohne Schatten in Chicago. He’s a Scot and he understands Britten. Andrew Davis is conducting, so we really have the best in Santa Fe this summer. I know it’s going to be a fun production.
I love singing in my own language, English! Young singers need to learn to sing well in their native languages. So often I hear a young American singer singing in English and I can’t understand the words. To my mind, if you can’t sing in your own language there’s something wrong. I often sing entire recitals made up entirely of American and British songs because I think it’s important to sing well in our own language. People need to know that we have great music in English. There’s a lot of good music out there, actually, so it’s important to keep looking at new pieces, too.