“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.
The economics of the recording companies dictate much that is not ideal. Wagner’s operas were not composed as they were in order to permit the extraction of bleeding chunks, even on those occasions when strophic song forms do occur.
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.
Once Berkeley Opera, renamed West Edge Opera, this enterprising company offers the Bay Area’s only serious alternative to corporate opera, to wit Bonjour M. Gauguin.
In the first of pianist Julius Drake’s three-part series, ‘Perspectives’, our gaze was directed at Gustav Mahler’s eclectic musical responses to human experiences: from the trauma and distress of anguished love to the sweet contentment of true friendship, from the agonised introspection of the artist to the diverse dramas of human interaction.
The Los Angeles opera company marketed its spring production of Rossini's La Cenerentola as Cinderella though there is no opera by that name. The libretto of La Cenerentola is not the Cinderella story we know.
The Paris Opéra has not staged a full Ring Cycle since 1957, but its current season will conclude with a correction of this grand operatic gap.
The gifted Polish composer Karol Szymanowski wrote his three-act King Roger, in the 1920's. It is an allegorical tale of honor vs. pleasure set to quite beautiful music, especially in the orchestral writing, which Santa Fe chose to play in the same season as the Rossini in a wide tip of the hat to unknown but worthy repertory.
While King Roger is rarely heard, I happen to have experienced it in 1980 when the St. Louis Symphony presented two performances in concert form under the direction of Leonard Slatkin, who was an advocate for Szymanowski’s music. It made very little impression at that time, but heightened my appreciation of the Santa Fe production, whose theatrical qualities much enhanced the somewhat tepid tale of the Sicilian king, if one set within an unusually rich musical tapestry. A colorful and dramatic production of a static opera can make the effort seem worthwhile, and King Roger’s treatment by Santa Fe could hardly have been more beneficial. (Santa Fe played the opera in one 90-minute act that enhanced continuity.)
First of all the music: Wide swathes of Debussy-influenced tone painting abound, forming an impressionistic atmosphere, often punctuated and disputed by sharp polytonal accents and chromatic arguments in the full orchestra, illustrating Roger’s unhappy moods. The King is torn between his conventional church-approved duties as Monarch, versus the upsetting proposals of a charismatic Shepherd that appeared from nowhere, and much beguiled not only Roger’s subjects but also his wife, Roxana, with tempting ideas about sensual and erotic pleasures. Roger himself is tempted but also dismayed by the Shepherd whose call he hears all too well. In the end the King restores order, at least in his own mind, and assumes the royal robes of convention, but not without having been marked by life’s Dionysian distractions. With lots of talk, lots of posturing and agonizing and a rather ho-hum plot, King Roger is saved by the elegant and original music emanating from the orchestra. The vocal writing is mainly declamatory or conversational, with few if any memorable set pieces, aside from Roxanna’s song, a haunting vocalise that accompanies her fall to Dionysius.
Special appreciation must go to Evan Rogister, the young American conductor, who was a leading hand in making the show work. The singers were all competent, and sometimes more than that, but it is an ensemble opera without the need for star turns. As the King, young Polish lyric baritone Mariusz Kwiecien was authoritative and convincing, perhaps more in the King’s suffering than otherwise, but his is a lyric voice, so fine in Mozart, sometimes taxed in Szymanowski’s bigger moments. His Roxana was handsomely sung by the soprano Erin Morley who brought silvery beauty to her aria. The Shepherd is a hard role to cast and no doubt a difficult one to perform, but ingratiating tenor William Burden rose to the occasion, even if sometimes his top tones turned a bit pale and hard to hear. Raymond Aceto lent his distinguished baritone voice to the role of the Archbishop, with Dennis Peterson and Laura Wilde serving well in secondary parts.
The effectively played stage action was conceived by highly regarded director Stephen Wadsworth whose ideas were strong and clarifying, and were assisted by the ingenious if spare set designs of Thomas Lynch. The unusually fine costumes were by Ann Hould-Ward. Her designs, detailed and impressive, especially in Act I, immediately established a feeling of style and quality that set the right tone and engaged the viewer; strong input by Ms Hould-Ward who first worked at Santa Fe in 1992. I must particularly acknowledge the accomplishment of chorus master Susanne Sheston, whose Santa Fe Opera apprentice singers, augmented by twenty-four professional voices from the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, gave a superior account of Szymanowski’s sumptuous choral writing, one of the most noteworthy beauties of the score. I hope to meet King Roger again some day. His is an enchanting and musically rewarding illusion.
© J.A. Van Sant, 2012