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.
![Angela Denoke as Salome [Photo © ROH 2012 / Clive Barda]](http://www.operatoday.com/SALOME%20120528_0369.png)
In David McVicar’s staging of Strauss’s disturbing opera, first seen at Covent Garden in 2008 and now enjoying its second revival, Salome’s descent down the Stygian staircase is a literal drop into a subterranean slaughterhouse and an ethical fall into the delights and depravity of her of burgeoning yet deadly sexuality.
This is a Salome who is less interested in the bodily pleasures offered by the pure masculinity of Jokanaan than in the narcissistic celebration of her own vicious carnality. And, Angela Denoke is just the singer-actress to convey the princess’s escalating self-awareness and indulgence in emotional extremities. Denoke, returning as Salome after her performance in the production’s 2010 revival, may not have had the requisite consistent sheen at the top, and indeed may have struggled at times to hit the uppermost notes truly and securely — who wouldn’t given the unalleviated high tessitura? — but she possesses an emotional sincerity, communicated through an infinite variety of colours, shades and shadows, which wins the hearts and minds of the audience. Slightly tense at the start, she went from strength to strength: the final statement of her insistent demand, “Give me the head of Jokanaan”, was truly chilling in its honest exposure of human egoism; and in the final scene, as she cradled the bloodied head of the prophet, at times tender, then terrifyingly solipsistic, she communicated powerfully the destructive yet vulnerable self-regard of the eponymous anti-heroine before her thankfully inevitable death.
Stig Andersen as Herod and Rosalind Plowright as Herodias
As the ill-fated prophet, subjected to incarceration in the unfathomable depths of Herod’s subterranean prison, Egils Silins’ bass has the necessary biblical profundity to lend sonorous weight and resonance to his visionary pronouncements, which rise through the black grid of internment like clarion calls to humanity in the face of the wickedness to which it has submitted. Unfortunately, his perhaps understandably self-absorbed characterisation resulted in absolutely no erotic tension between Silins and Denoke; nor a real sense of the prophetic power which might strike such fear in the heart of Herod. And, as Jokanaan strode back and forth across the stage, fleeing Salome’s flirtatious advances, one wondered why the guards melodramatically traced his movements with their rifles given Herod’s command that the prophet must not be harmed. Surely none would risk such suicidal recklessness?
Stig Anderson, as Herod, used his resonance and power intelligently. There was no doubting his stentorian dominance and brutality when he unleashed his full force, but elsewhere his weak hesitancy was effectively conveyed.
Rosalind Plowright was a persuasive, vocally secure Herodias, sufficiently sumptuous to make her a convincing object of Herod’s desire, but not afraid to add a touch of roughness or harsh extremity to convey the Queen’s desperation to maintain her husband’s admiring gaze and her delight in capitalising on his weakness. Her relationship with her daughter was appropriately ambiguous.
The minor roles were performed with uniform accomplishment. The beautiful warmth of tone of Will Hartman’s Narraboth poignantly conveyed the purity of his transfixion in the face of Salome’s beauty; indeed, the understated portrayal of his death seemed a dramatic injustice. As the First and Second Soldiers, Scott Wilde and Alan Ewing were resonant and clear; similarly, Peter Bronder, as the first Jew, and Andrew Greenan, as the first Nazarene, were vocally and dramatically compelling.
Egils Silins as Jokanaan and Angela Denoke as Salome
Andris Nelsons conducted the orchestra of the Royal Opera House in a thrilling, precise yet disquieting rendition of Strauss’s provocatively extrovert score. Solo lines emerged effortlessly from the luxuriant orchestral canvas. The seductive harmonies which foreshadow Rosenkavier — employed therein to depict exuberant sexual freedom, piquant desire and joyful satisfaction — were here bitterly destabilized by disconcerting instrumental colours textures and extremity of register, which Nelsons exploited to perfection. The conductor perfectly balanced measure and excess, liberation and control. His ability to restrain his naturally exuberant forces until precise moments of erotic release was nowhere more evident than in the Dance of the Seven Veils.
Oddly, here, McVicar eschews an erotic depiction of Salome’s growing appreciation of the power ordained by her beauty and nascent sexuality; rather we have a series of remarkably chaste, dream-like tableaux as Salome is relentlessly pursued through a series of chambers by Herod, her movements and gestures suggestive of an increasing interiority and introspection (à la Freud?). That is, until the final image portentous of imminent — or retrospective — rape.
There are many McVicarian clichés — gratuitous nudity, excessive blood-letting etc. etc. — but, while some have found some aspects of the production (the Nazi uniforms of the subterranean warders, for example) unduly specific and contradictory to Wilde’s somewhat stylised, even mythic, timelessness, to me they seemed true to the era in which Strauss composed his opera — when man’s appalling sadism was shortly to be revealed in its full horror. Es Devlin’s split-level designs — we are afforded glimpse of blasé banqueting diners loftily removed from the debasing debauchery below — effectively intimate the hypocrisy of the indifferent, and the shared culpability of all mankind. And, at the close, even the naked executioner Naaman (Duncan Meadows) is unable to overcome his disgust and turns his back upon the repellently orgasmic Salome, until required to fulfil Herod’s command to “Kill that woman!”; savagely breaking her neck, he conveniently relieves our own disgust and, thankfully, breaks our hypnotic absorption with Salome’s repulsive yet mesmerising self-glorification.
To some extent it is probably true that modern opera audiences, immune to the gore, nudity, depravity and gratuitous degeneracy regularly served up by directors, are largely unshockable. Yet, this listener for one experienced nauseating terror in the face of the dreadfulness of Wilde’s and Strauss’s disclosure of humanity’s inhumanity; a terror resulting less from the gruesome specificity of McVicar’s reading than from its suggestion of man’s ubiquitous amorality and cruelty — rendered supremely, and ironically, by Strauss’s painfully beautiful musical portrait.
Claire Seymour
Angela Denoke as Salome, Stig Andersen as Herod and Rosalind Plowright as Herodias