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.
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.
![Vsevolod Grivnov as Lensky and Ekaterina Semenchuk as Olga [Photo by Robert Millard for LA Opera]](http://www.operatoday.com/eon8075.png)
Kudos to the Los Angeles Opera Company for expanding its heretofore limited Russian repertoire and opening its 26th season with Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. The romantic work based on the novel in verse of the same name by Alexander Pushkin, is likely everyone’s favorite Tchaikovsky opera.
Kudos too, for having presenting the work in a production created by the late Stephen Pimlott for the Royal Opera House and the and the Finnish National Opera (more about this later) which, though it sparked discontent at its 2006 London premiere, introduces a new view of the tale.
Whereas Pushkin narrated his lengthy lyrical poem filled with wit, cynicism, and psychological insights, Tchaikovsky and his librettist Konstantin Shilovsky reduced the work to intimate scenes focused directly on their principal characters. In both versions, however, the story is set at a time when rank and status mattered, when women were essentially powerless. Eugene Onegin, the eponymous protagonist (one can’t call him a hero) of the work, is the wealthy neighbor of the widow Larina and her young daughters, Olga and Tatiana. Onegin, who has wandered the world, lives the dissolute life of a Byronic Don Juan, and carries himself with the aristocratic mien of Jane Austen’s Mr. D’Arcy, is introduced to the Larin household by the poet Lensky, in love with Olga. The three woman, attended by a nanny, live as did Elizabeth Bennett, a modest country life. But in this story, it takes only a glance for young Tatiana to fall in love with the elegant Onegin. The same night, unable to sleep, overflowing with passion and impetuosity, she writes a letter to Onegin offering him her heart.
When the two meet the next morning Onegin honorably, but coldly returns the humiliated girl’s letter and rejects her love. Later, bored at a local ball, he flirts with Olga and incenses Lensky to the point where the poet challenges him to a duel Lensky is killed and Onegin returns to his aimless wandering life. When, in Act 3 Onegin and Tatiana meet again, she is the wife of a prince. Now it is Onegin who will write a letter and plead for love. Tatiana first upbraids him for his past cruelty, then confesses that she still loves him. But refusing to renounce her vows, she leaves him alone to his despair. Is this a story of payback, as one reviewer described it? Is it about class and caste? Is it about a country girl’s solid values, set against the nihilism of a sybaritic life? Or does it reflect as many Pushkin scholars believe, the battles raging within Pushkin himself? It should not be surprising to find new interpretations of the work.
Though not a cast well-known to American opera goers, Los Angeles assembled four stellar principals with knowledge of the language and familiarity with their roles, which always brings a a sense of ease to a production. Baritone Dalibor Jenis was a full voiced, if somewhat stiffly mannered Onegin, until the last scene when rejected by Tatiana, jacketless and unkempt, he seemed to me a maddened Don Jose. Oksana Dyka’s role as Tatiana took her in an opposite emotional direction. In voice and manner she made the transition from love starved teen ager to mature woman convincingly. I loved tenor Vsevolod Grivnov’s ringing top voice as Lensky’s but sometimes I think I love every tenor as Lensky. Mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Semenchuk sang Olga, and Margaret Thompson, her mother, Larina with assurance and ease. There were three young American artists in the cast. Ronnita Nicole Miller as Filipievna, the nanny, has a rich voice wonderfully under control. James Cresswell sang Prince Gremin’s aria with magnificent sonority and hit the low notes, but still lacks that “innerness” that brings subtlety and shading. Keith Jameson was a silky voiced Trinquet.
Dalibor Jenis as Onegin and Oksana Dyka as Tatiana
In the emotion-filled dramatic scenes that Tchaikovsky set, not only the characters, but his music speak directly to our hearts. Conductor James Conlon led the orchestra in a pulsing, radiant performance.
Pimlott’s intelligent production deserves a review of its own despite some incomprehensible stagings: why Tatiana writes a letter bursting with passion while bent over on the floor, I’ll never know. And why the glittering third act “polonaise” is performed before a scrim depicting death, remains a mystery to me. Suffice it now to say that with this production Pimlott introduces us to Pushkin’s narrative viewpoint. Aided by Antony McDonald’s sometimes outlandish costumes and Peter Mumford’s always dramatic lighting, he gives us something of Pushkin’s distant view of his characters by staging the action as though painterly images set within a frame.
One last word about Tchaikovsky’s music. Tatiana, Lensky, Gremin and Onegin have the four great arias of this opera. Leaving the theater, I could recall snatches of the first three, all of which declare love, but not of Onegin’s. His is the one about rejection.
And one other last word to thank Placido Domingo and the Opera Company for including a touching tribute to Salvatore Licitra in its program.
Estelle Gilson