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.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro has a libretto by Lorenzo daPonte based on the French play La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro (The Crazy Day or the Marriage of Figaro) by Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799).
For its world class Easter Festival, Baden-Baden mounted a Die Zauberflöte that owed more to the grey penitential doldrums of Lent than to the unbridled jubilance of re-birth.
![Eleonora Buratto as Susanna [Photo by Maurizio Montanari]](http://www.operatoday.com/I_Due_05.gif)
By 1825, as Rossini’s operatic vein was approaching exhaustion, the Neapolitan Saverio Mercadante ranked as a front-runner for his succession alongside Bellini and Donizetti; much more so, however, in the field of serious drama than in opera buffa.
His nine titles sparsely revived so far since the 1910s, starting from Il Giuramento through La Vestale and Il Bravo to Caritea regina di Spagna and Elena da Feltre (to quote only the most successful), seemed to confirm that old judgment. Mercadante, a learned composer and a pious man who atypically devoted a large share of his output to both church and purely instrumental music, was hitherto construed as unfit for the comic.
Thus I due Figaro, whose original manuscript was recently unearthed in Madrid’s Biblioteca Histórica Municipal by the young Italian researcher Paolo Cascio, may appear a big surprise. It certainly was to Riccardo Muti who, on recalling his first reading of a few samples from the critical edition (later published by the same discoverer in collaboration with Víctor Sánchez Sánchez), declared: “I was unaware of [Mercadante’s] knack for comedy. Those pages came to me like a bolt from the blue.” To the Maestro’s credit goes the decision of presenting such an unknown score both at the Whitsun Festival in Salzburg and at his proprietary Ravenna Festival, if only for a short run of two nights each time. Next comes Madrid’s Teatro Real in 2012, but one may comfortably guess that many an opera house is already queuing for joining in. Our TV-oriented culture is so much dependent on prequels and sequels that success cannot lack.
The same was true also for early 19th century Madrid, not a provincial backwater at all, rather a flourishing colony of Italian opera outside Italy as much as it was during Farinelli’s tenure of the court theatres a century before. Mercadante, appointed as resident composer-cum-conductor at the Teatro del Príncipe, wrote there his I due Figaro, on a libretto by the starring poet Felice Romani previously set to music in 1820 by Rossini’s pupil Michele Carafa. The completed score was signed by Mercadante on October 26, 1826, but under the reactionary rule of Fernando VII the local censorship was unhappy with the representation of empowered women and gullible husbands, so the premiere was cancelled. It was only in 1833 that the opera crept its way on the Spanish stage, although the exact whereabouts are unknown; then an equally obscure revival took place in 1836, then nothing more.
To put it in a nutshell, the ‘scandalous’ story is about how, twelve years after Figaro’s marriage with Susanna, life goes on in Almaviva’s castle. In competition with Beaumarchais’ own nondescript sequel as La mère coupable (1791), the actor Honoré-Antoine Richaud Martelly produced in 1795 his Les deux Figaros, where Cherubino, now a colonel in the Spanish army, is in love with Inez, the daughter of Count and Countess Almaviva. Figaro number one entices the Count into having the girl married with Torribio, a servant disguised as a nobleman, in order that both accomplices can share her dowry fifty-fifty. Yet Susanna, Inez and the Countess finally defeat their home tyrants as Cherubino, entering the Count’s service as a self-styled Figaro number two, outwits the original with a salvo of tricks and succeeds in exposing his schemes. Inez and Cherubino are allowed to marry, while Figaro barely escapes being fired.
Rosa Feola as Inez and Annalisa Stroppa as Cherubino [Photo by Silvia Lelli]
Despite a necessary suspension of disbelief, the French comedy (and the Italian libretto derived from it) is less a farce than a semi-serious drama, a study in characters where psychological depth is not missing. Both veteran couples, the masters and the servants, seem worn-out and complain about the ephemeral nature of romance; moreover, the Countess is aware that Almaviva is still attracted by Susanna, so that the general reconciliation in the finale seems highly perfunctory. Is there such a thing as a happy marriage in the long run, and will the brand-new couple escape what seems a general fate? A further sequel was perhaps in sight, but none has written it so far.
Mercadante’s music adheres to the subject matter with admirable cleverness, if not with a particularly idiomatic style. One tastes now and then Mozart’s subtle characterization of both vocal and instrumental color, but more often the model is provided by Rossini, up to quotations or paraphrases of individual themes. Intoxicating accelerandos and crescendos in the large-scale multisectional ensembles were rather commonplace at that time, as were extended cantabile arches or abrupt dramatic twists in the harmony. Summoning such names as (again) Rossini, or Bellini, or Donizetti would seem unnecessary, were it not to avow that in most instances Mercadante can well stand up to the paragon.
Eleonora Buratto as Susanna and Mario Cassi as Figaro [Photo by Silvia Lelli]
Everything as expected, except for a decided vein of local color: not only the fandango once so dear to Mozart, but a regular orgy of rhythms and forms from Andalusia (after all, the action takes place in the castle of Aguas Frescas near Seville). Bolero, cachucha, polo and tirana keep infiltrating over and over the principals’ cavatinas and even the overture, while the large Italian-style arias, studded with virtuosic coloratura, demand vocalist with considerable natural gifts, technical skills, and style awareness.
Eleonora Buratto, whom I recently heard in Modena as a model Cleopatra in Handel’s Giulio Cesare, towered here in the role of Susanna, with all the remaining ladies accompanying her in triumphal procession: witty Asude Karayavuz as the Countess, mellow Rosa Feola as Inez, and Annalisa Stroppa as a Cherubino already eligible for the toughest Colbran roles. Among the gentlemen, duels of both physical and vocal energy between Mario Cassi as Figaro number one and Omar Montanari as Plagio, the playwright in distress much in the mould of Prosdocimo in Rossini’s (and Romani’s) Il Turco in Italia. Passion and melancholy in store from the high tenor Antonio Poli as Almaviva; Anicio Zorzi Giustiniani, a promising Baroque specialist, seemed underutilized in the cameo role of Torribio. Incredible but true: within such a brilliant company, hand-picked by Riccardo Muti, none exceeds the age of thirty; the same is more or less true for the youth orchestra “Luigi Cherubini”, another brainchild of Muti’s.
Anicio Zorzi Giustiniani as Torribio, Mario
Cassi as Figaro and Omar Montanari as Plagio [Photo by Silvia Lelli]
Emilio Sagi’s stage direction kept the action revolving within and around a patio decorated with eight columns in white plaster and lots of flowers. Everything, including costumes, as Spanish, rural and historically informed as one could wish. To be sure, Ravenna Festival is not the proper place for Eurotrash. The audience, having to face a complex plot without any subtitles to help them, seemed to appreciate, but the loudest applause was as usual for the local darling Muti, the man who is bringing Ravenna back on the international map of opera.
Carlo Vitali
Eleonora Buratto as Susanna and country lasses [Photo by Maurizio Montanari]