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.
Back for its fourth revival, David McVicar’s 2003 production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte has much charm, beauty and artistry.
The economics of the recording companies dictate much that is not ideal. Wagner’s operas were not composed as they were in order to permit the extraction of bleeding chunks, even on those occasions when strophic song forms do occur.
![William Purefoy as Xerxes [Photo courtesy of Iford Opera]](http://www.operatoday.com/Iford-William-Purefoy_-Xerx.gif)
Something rather extraordinary happened to opera seria in 1738. The acknowledged master of that time, London’s George Frideric Handel, presented two new operas at the King’s Theatre: Faramondo and Serse.
They were stylistically very different and with the latter the German-born composer threw caution to the winds both musically and dramatically.
It was a bad call at the time as Serse flopped completely. The trouble was that he dared to change a tried and tested formula: the wholly serious, or tragic, seria format was infiltrated by comic or buffo elements; he mixed characters of both high and low class within the drama, and he even tinkered with the classic A-B-A da capo form of the arias. In Serse much of the vocal music is in arioso form, which drives the action forward more than the traditional, more musically complex da capo format. All this was too much for London audiences at the time and Handel lost money and soon after abandoned opera for the oratorio form. Luckily for us, today we can appreciate his innovations and revel in them — as indeed did the audience at Iford Opera in Wiltshire last Friday night.
Andrew Radley as Arsamene [Photo courtesy of Iford Opera]
Once again, Iford Arts is to be congratulated for rising so magnificently
above the apparent limitations of its charming venue — one could indeed
argue that those very limitations of size and accessibility produce something
special time and again and last night was no exception. Iford encourages young
talent and in its regular offerings of Handel masterpieces in intimate
surroundings it also encourages the singers to concentrate on expression and
colour, as they do not need to worry about pushing their voices.
The usual convoluted Handel plot of misplaced affections, thwarted plans, ladies (and men) in disguise and the triumph of love and duty (in varying degrees) was efficiently translated into the tiny, greenery-draped colonnaded space that is the delightful Iford Cloister by director David Freeman. Although advertised as “Serse”, the opera was given in English and this “Xerxes” was a translation/edit by Andrew Jones which revived memories of the famous Hytner production of the 1980’s in its language, if not its staging. The lively score, regretfully drastically abridged, was offered in spicy miniature by the well-regarded players of La Nuova Musica directed from the harpsicord by David Bates who encouraged some really meaty, full-blooded playing from his 10 piece ensemble. In Acts I and II the cast were somewhat depressingly attired in budget-store casuals with a bit of sequin tat here and there to suggest royalty (one felt particularly for the female singers who suffered very unflattering wardrobes — surely at odds with the story?) but come Act III things improved a little. A few pyrotechnics, many tiny candles, and a clever exploding model bridge (to take King Xerxes across the Hellespont into Greece) made the most of the tiny stage area.
Kristin Finnigan [Photo by and courtesy of Ralph Ripley]
More importantly, there was much to admire vocally with some excellent
singing from the young cast, many of whom are at the beginning of their careers
yet showed remarkable histrionic as well as musical abilities in this most
demanding of genres. There was no one outstanding performer, but we left with
perhaps three strong memories: the exciting contralto voice of young Kristin
Finnigan (Amastre) which promises to help revive the great tradition of this
most English of voice types, the impressive comic timing and agile baritone of
William Townend (Elviro) and the expressive warm-toned countertenor of Andrew
Radley (Arsamene). Verity Parker impressed with some spot-on high coloratura as
Romilda whilst also singing with some nice supple tone. She was contrasted
effectively with Kristy Swift in the soubrette role of Atalanta who
brought out the foxiness of this character with some sparkling high notes and
agile phrasing. Rather unusually, this production gave the title role to a
countertenor, the more experienced William Purefoy. These days, it’s more
often a mezzo soprano role (although written by Handel for a soprano
castrato of great renown, Caffarelli) but here at Iford the tiny stage
and proximity of the audience enables the less powerful countertenor voice to
take it on. Purefoy coped well enough with the high tessitura of this
demanding role, if not convincing us dramatically. His was no dangerously
vindictive King but rather a placid, slightly academic, royal. This was
particularly so in the scenes with his stage brother Prince Arsamenes, when
Radley acted for both of them. Purefoy is certainly a good singer (his
“rage” aria, Crudie furie in Act III was efficiently
despatched despite its huge demands on the singer) but rather miscast here.
The role of the bluff, if dim, General Ariodate was robustly taken by baritone Jonathan Brown who made much of his limited role whilst contralto Kristin Finnigan was forced to do the same. How one longed to hear more of Amastre’s music and less of her creeping around the cloister, forever listening to the plotting of others’ loves. Finnigan might just be something special in the making — directors take note.
Cutting Handel is a fact of life — unpleasant but sometimes necessary — but for this writer there were just too many “cuts too far”. So many important, and lovely, arias went unheard. Everyone comes to Iford by car (there is no evening public transport in this idyllic rural location) so why not revel in more of Handel’s sublime music and get home half an hour later? After all, another thirty minutes in this beautiful place, with music of this quality, is hardly an imposition.
© Sue Loder 2010
Serse, by G.F. Handel continues on the 13th, 14th, 16th and 17th July at Iford, near Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire, U.K. More information: www.ifordarts.co.uk