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.
![Susan Graham [Photo by Dario Acosta courtesy of IMG Artists]](http://www.operatoday.com/Graham2_Credit_Dario_Acosta.gif)
Embodying a range of iconic female characters from history, literature and song — both the ‘good’ and the ‘not-so-good’ — Susan Graham delivered a wonderfully suave and entertaining performance before a delighted Wigmore Hall audience.
Much of the success, both musical and theatrical, was surely due to the finely-tuned partnership between Graham and her frequent collaborator, pianist Malcolm Martineau. The ease with which Martineau moved between idioms, the naturalness and fluency of the dialogue he shaped between piano and voice, and his sensitive gradation of dynamics and timbre all contributed immensely to the superb, sustained quality of the recital.
Graham did, however, take a little while to get into her stride. Beginning in ‘beatific’ mode, suitably attired in a white, floating frock, she appropriately restrained from unleashing the full warmth of her richly lyrical timbre in the opening song, Purcell’s ‘Tell me, some pitying angel’ (which presents Mary’s prayer upon finding the twelve-year-old Jesus missing, when he remains behind to talk to the elders in the temple). But, while elegant, with clarity of tone and line, the phrases felt a little constrained, the persona not so readily communicated, as if this particular ‘costume’ didn’t quite fit. This is a dramatic, recitative-like aria, almost operatic in intensity, the virtuosic vocal line reflecting Mary’s rapidly changing emotions, and Graham built up the tension effectively, her increasingly desperate questions underpinned by Martineau’s pointedly intense harmonies. After the meandering movement of Mary’s anxious “How shall my soul its motions guide?” and the dense chromaticism which conveys her “lab'ring thoughts”, at the song’s close, “but oh! I fear the child”, Graham demonstrated the whispered, but crystal-clear pianissimo which touched the heart-strings many times during the evening.
More comfortable ‘inhabiting’ Shakespeare’s Ophelia, and perfectly attuned to the French idiom and language, Graham gave a tender rendition of Hector Berlioz's song ‘La mort d'Ophélie’. Inspired by the young composer’s infatuation for Harriet Smithson, the Irish Shakespearean actress, this song is gently lyrical rather than agonisingly tragic, and the softly oscillating piano introduction perfectly established a fitting mood. Graham can control the smallest nuances equally well at both ends of her register, casting a womanly glow in the lower range, while floating ethereally at the top. Martineau beautifully shaped and sustained the narrative in the in-between-verse interludes, demonstrating the genuine empathy shared by the performers.
Next came Goethe: since her first manifestation in his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (“Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship”) countless composers have been fascinated and inspired by Mignon’s mystery and ambiguity. Graham presented German lieder by Schubert, Schumann and Wolf, as well as less well-known settings by Liszt, Tchaikovsky, and Henri Duparc. Schubert’s ‘Heiß mich nicht reden’ is a poignant poem for the enigmatic Mignon, contrasting her stoical suffering with more comforting hopes, a juxtaposition delicately reflected in the sensitive modulations between major and minor modes. Graham expertly shaped the emotional movement, using dynamics, harmonic colour and vocal timbre to express Mignon’s faith that “the hard rock opens up its bosom,/ does not begrudge earth its deeply hidden springs”. A brief piano postlude, cadencing in the tonic major, provided a quiet moment of consolation.
Schumann's ‘So laßt mich scheinen’ followed, in which Martineau created a more animated drama through the polyphonic energy of the accompaniment lines. Graham’s final cry, encompassing a dramatic vocal leap, ‘Too early I grew old with grief -/ make me forever young again!’ was affecting, but it was not until Liszt’s ‘Mignon Lied’ that she was able to settle securely into the lustrous Romantic idiom which allows her to demonstrate both the silky sheen and airy translucency for which she is renowned. Leaping melodic contours were handsomely crafted and together with the increasingly fragmented accompaniment drove the music forward with questioning urgency, culminating in a breath-taking final pianissimo which movingly, but without sentimentality, conveyed Mignon’s frailty.
An adept linguist, Graham now moved further eastwards, finding a dark beauty in Tchaikovsky’s sensuous melodies in ‘Nyet, tolko tot, kto, znal’ (‘None but the lonely heart’), in which Martineau’s pulsing syncopations reinforced the expressive power of the voice. Henri Duparc's ‘Romance de Mignon’ was radiant and sweet, culminating with a deep piano postlude suggestive of the lovers’ passion. And the mini-series rose to its heights with Wolf's ‘Kennst du das Land’; the most operatic of these Mignon settings, Wolf’s soaring lines allowed Graham to fully reveal the power, control and Straussian splendour of her instrument.
Swapping her virginal white for a slinky black number, Graham returned after the interval in a rather less sombre mood, beginning the second half with a rhetorical, highly dramatic performance of Joseph Horowitz’s scena, ‘Lady Macbeth’. The restless ambition of the ruthless queen’s spirit was perfectly captured by Graham as she moved seamlessly between parlando, recitative and arioso, supported by Martineau’s imposingly agitated accompaniment.
In Poulenc's song cycle ‘Fiancailles pour rire’ (‘Lighthearted Betrothal’) Graham demonstrated her eye/ear for subtle nuance and detail, and for story-telling. Ranging from an almost sacred purity (as at the opening of ‘Dans l’herbe’) to the informal knowingness of ‘La dame d’André’, from tender pathos (at the close of ‘Mon cadaver est doux comme un gant’) to the insouciant swagger of ‘Violon’, this was a superbly fashioned and assured performance, in which Graham was not afraid to take risks but never crossed the line into hyperbole or melodrama.
Things began to loosen up with a carefree rendering of Messager’s ‘J’ai deux amants’ and from here on Graham was in cabaret mode, exchanging relaxed, witty repartee with her pianist and audience, and treating us to some light numbers by Cole Porter and Vernon Duke, before rounding things off with Ben Moore’s ‘Sexy Lady’, a specially commissioned song which —with apt illustrative musical quotation —regales us with the ups and downs of the mezzo-soprano’s lot —a life spent en travesti fending off competition from the currently in-fashion crop of countertenors! Such satirical self-reflection engendered more than a little self-indulgence, but if Graham showed her diva credentials, the hamming-up felt just right and the humour was genuine and sharp.
The audience seemed reluctant to let Graham go, but fortunately she and Martineau were obviously having as much fun as we were, and were happy to oblige with three encores which, in microcosm, displayed the full range of Graham’s deeply impressive talents.
Claire Seymour
Programme:
Purcell: Tell me, some pitying angel (The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation)Berlioz: La mort d’OphélieSchubert: Heiß mich nicht redenSchumann: So laßt mich scheinenLiszt: Mignons Lied (Kennst du das Land)Tchaikovsky: None but the lonely heartDuparc: Romance de MignonWolf: Kennst du das LandHorovitz: Lady Macbeth - a ScenaPoulenc: Fiançailles pour rireMessager: J’ai deux amants from ‘L’amour masqué’Porter: The PhysicianVernon Duke: Ages Ago (arr. Roger Vignoles) Moore: Sexy Lady