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.
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.
![David Pomeroy as Hoffmann and Elizabeth Futral as Giulietta [Photo by Gaston de Cardenas courtesy of Florida Grand Opera]](http://www.operatoday.com/FGO_Hoffmann_01.gif)
If you are ever lucky enough to have the opportunity to catch a great exponent of just one of two major roles — the heroines or villains — in Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, you should secure a seat maintenant.
If both of those roles are taken up by such the rarified performer, it would behoove you to stage a sit-in at the box office. Florida Grand Opera can boast to the latter situation with its production of Hoffmann (seen opening night, January 22).
The detail in three of Bradley Garvin’s four villains, each with oodles of personal stamp, made it easy to forget that he has taken the roles up only 15 times, covering them at the Met last season. This was the bass-baritione’s FGO debut. Lindorf was a less developed, more ambiguous character for Garvin — a bother for certain, probably not evil incarnate. By turns, Garvin’s Dr. Miracle was cruelly insinuating and, knowing Antonia’s heart, ruthlessly played on her weaknesses. Garvin’s transformation included a more backward vocal placement and an eerie French brogue, adding a backward leaning stance and the creepy pointing of bony digits; this Dr. Miracle exorcised the living force within Antonia with quiet mayhem.
David Pomeroy as Hoffmann and Katherine Rohrer as The Muse/Nicklausse
In Elizabeth Futral’s first essaying of the four heroines, her
greatest challenge may well be making a believable woman-as-object out of
Olympia in a production that plays up the phantasmagorical in Offenbach’s
story. Olympia’s costume is a cumbersome cubed-patterned dress, with an
exaggerated petticoat that gives way to a box and keyhole — her cranking
mechanism. Futral darkened her voice, her word texturing the stuff of magic
itself, as she became a helpless and aimless Antonia, on breakneck course to
lose her soul.
Hoffmann was the role of David Pomeroy’s Metropolitan Opera debut in 2009 and the Canadian tenor did many things right in his opera debut with FGO. The tale of the dwarf Kleinzach was finished well, his singing in the duet with Antonia was impassioned, and by the epilogue, Pomeroy had plenty in reserve to return to the final revelation of the Kleinzach legend. His voice is a husky one that he covers or not at will below the passagio — this is Hoffmann as a bit of a brute.
In another company debut, Conductor Lucy Arner seemed at home in the French Romantic repertoire. Arner’s keen sense of tempi and firm hand made rhythmic timing with singers — one of Hoffmann’s musical moguls — look easy. The type of delicate instrument playing elicited for Nicklausse’s short solo in Antonia’s Act reminded that the conductor has extensive experience in chamber music. Katherine Rohrer (The Muse/Nicklausse) is a real sprite, most memorable in the latter song and in serially mocking Hoffmann’s attraction for Olympia. Matthew Dibattista took on Offenbach, Cochenille, Frantz and Pitchinaccio, carrying on especially heartily in Frantz’s aria. Phillip Skinner made both Luther and Crespel relevant. FGO was rewarded by entrusting the roles of Henri Meilhac, Wolframm, and Schlemil to Young Artist Craig Colclouch. Other Young Artists that acquitted themselves favorably were James Barbato (Wilhelm), Jonathan G.Michie (Hermann), Daniel Shirley (Nathanail); Young Artist Courtney McKeown’s assignment as Antonia’s mother is rather unorthodox here, from the inside of a huge male action figure, she moved the thing about as she sang.
Elizabeth Futral as Antonia, Bradley Garvin as Dr. Miracle and Courtney McKeown as Antonia’s mother
This joint production of Opera Colorado, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and Boston Lyric Opera emphasizes the “dreamlike” over the cerebral in Hoffmann’s tales. It was as if Andre Barbe (sets and costumes) and Guy Simard (lighting) heaved mixed chunks of Willy Wonka and Dr. Who on the Olympia and Giulietta Acts. A stage-sized screen with sliding doors opens to an Offenbach shrine in gold in the middle of Spalanzani’s workshop. Lime green lab coats and garbage-pail-inspired robots are the stuff at the workshop and serpentine seahorse headdresses, and rolling staircase gondolas, a nod to the ‘Barcarolle’ and Venice. If M.C. Escher etching look-a-likes behind the doors in each act seemed out of place, they did much to draw the eye downstage. Renaud Doucet’s meticulous consideration of blocking and movement — each person, down to the last super, had a place to be and executed some purposeful action — was total. Lastly, FGO’s ensemble singing overall was as good as it has been since 2005 and John Keene’s chorus put on a performance of all-around distinction.
Robert Carreras