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.
![Liudmyla Monastyrska as Aida [Photo by Bill Cooper courtesy of The Royal Opera House]](http://www.operatoday.com/BC20110311183A-MONASTYRSKA.gif)
Strict courtly hierarchies and the repressed formality of ritual juxtaposed with violent sexual jealousy and lurid erotic excess … a stage-world more suited to the Straussian insalubrity of Salomé than to the epic grandeur of Verdi’s Aida, perhaps?
David McVicar’s production, first seen in 2010 and here given its first revival, never wavers in its presentation of grotesque barbarism and sexual abandon — blood-thirsty gladiators run amok among nubile, naked maidens etc. — and while such goings-on may not be to everyone’s taste (indeed, some might argue that ‘taste’ doesn’t feature strongly in the proceedings), McVicar certainly injects freshness into Verdi’s old warhorse, thankfully avoiding the kitsch of cod-Egyptiana.
The first challenge for the audience is a visual one: for Jean-Marc Puissant's sets reject the beauty and exoticism of ancient Egypt in favour of dull modern industrialism: a huge wall of scaffolding, harshly illuminated by diagonal strip lights, dominates the stage. Not an elephant or sphinx in sight; but also little visual beauty to complement the tenderness of the delicate lines that open Verdi’s magical prelude. We are among a barbaric, theocratic society, one driven by human sacrifice: salacious human slaughter blesses Radamès’ departure for war, and the victims’ bloodied bodies are hoisted to form a canopy of carcasses to celebrate his return. Clearly McVicar wants to emphasise the soullessness of this brutal, compassionless community. But, at times he struggles to sustain consistency; for example, the eclectic, international selection of primitive tribal dress worn by the cast seems to have little to do with the gloomy dystopian landscape.
In the absence of a coherent mise-en-scène, it’s left to the singers themselves to provide dramatic logic and focus; and here the problems start, for the cast, while rich in musical talents, display a dearth of interest in communicating narrative or engaging emotionally with each other, preferring the stand-and-deliver approach, bellowing into the auditorium apparently impervious to the manic action occurring behind them.
There are two casts for this revival. Only one member of the original cast, Micaela Carosi, was expected to reprise her role, as the eponymous princess in the ‘Cast A’ performances; however, due to pregnancy (the official line goes …) she withdrew and was replaced at short notice by the Ukrainian soprano, Liudmyla Monastyrska. Making her house debut — she is to return in May as Lady Macbeth in Phyllida Lloyd’s production — Monastyrska revealed a powerful, opulent voice, firm and controlled in the lower register (in ‘Presago il core’, for example), and full in tone right to the top; in her great Nile scene aria, ‘O patria mia’, she floated the fiendish final phrases with ease, her breath control superb. At times, she made effective use of a dusky, exotic colouring, but it’s a shame that it was impossible to distinguish a single word of the text, and she didn’t quite have the confidence to risk the true pianissimos that the score demands.
Roberto Alagna as Radames and Priestesses
Roberto Alagna has an uneven history in the role of Radamès (audience displeasure with his ‘Celeste Aida’ led to his infamous walk-out at La Scala in 2006), and some have judged his voice too small for the part. However, here he showed that he now has the required vocal power; brimming with confidence, he never once lessened the ardour. Indeed, this was a puffed-up, machismo reading of Radamès, and again there was little in the way of what one might call acting. He opted out of the morendo on the high B♭ at the close of ‘Celeste Aida’, choosing instead the less risky alternative of repeating the final phrase slightly less loudly. A lack of nuance diminished the poignancy of the final duet (and the bare stage suggested that McVicar had run out of ideas by the later acts), but overall there was plenty of heroic strength and earnestness, which seemed to satisfy the crowd.
As Amneris, Russian mezzo soprano Olga Borodina was similarly impressive in vocal stature, and she achieved a true Verdian colour and warmth. She shared the theatrical weaknesses of the other principals, but her stunning, burnished tone was apt compensation. Dramatic credibility was restored by Michael Volle, a resonant and commanding Amonasro whose Act 3 duet with Aida was a rare and moving moment of engagement, interaction and insight; here, Volle truly communicated the father’s appreciation and regret that his own public actions and concerns will cause his daughter to suffer such deep private pain. In the smaller roles, Vitalij Kowaljow was underwhelming as Ramfis — perhaps his voice was muffled by his ridiculously over-sized headdress? — but Brindley Sherratt, an imperious King of Egypt, was in fine voice.
Olga Borodina as Amneris and The Royal Opera Chorus
Apart from one or two places where singers and orchestra momentary came adrift, Fabio Luisi did an excellent job in the pit, whipping up the players in the climactic moments, and demonstrating a strong sense of the shape and pace of the whole.
Overall, despite its musical strengths and potentially intriguing concept, this production remains unsatisfying. Part of the problem is that McVicar is absorbed primarily by the ‘love triangle’ but does not connect the protagonists’ experience with the wider context. In contrast to the dynamic dramatic swiftness of Verdi’s other political intrigues, Aida is unwieldy and often downright static. One can’t get away from the fact that Verdi’s opera is a big, bold beast; the challenge is to both juxtapose and integrate the moments of private intimacy with the grand ceremony and pageantry of public triumphal processions and dances. McVicar gives us only one half of the show; Radamès’ commanding entry at the commencement of the Grand March, stage-enveloping train majestically trailing in his wake, is a rare and arresting moment of grandeur. More usually, the crowd scenes are under-directed — why have extra chorus members if you don’t know what to do with them, or simply aren’t interested? And there’s just too much standing about and arm waving: ironically, in striving for the shock of the new, McVicar has lapsed into the clichés of old.
Claire Seymour