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.
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.
Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s visit to the Proms has become a much anticipated annual event. This year on 28 August, they brought Michael Grandage’s new production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment conducted by Robin Ticciati, who takes over as musical director at Glyndebourne in 2014.
In Michael Grandage’s original production at Glyndebourne, there was a raised acting area behind the orchestra, with cast and chorus sitting in semi darkness behind this, whilst not performing. In theis BBC Proms performance (Prom 60), there was no set as such, just rudimentary door frames for entrances and exits.
There were no surprises about the version we heard, the traditional secondary arias were cut to ensure that the drama flowed. And flow it did. The dramatic and farcical elements move The opera was given in an abbreviated staging by Ian Rutherford based on efficiently and swiftly. Humorously too of course, though the boisterousness in act two got dangerously close to real farce. It was part of the way through act two that I thought, who are these people? And basically, the production didn’t really tell me.
Grandage and his designer Christopher Oram had move the action to the 1960’s. Oram’s costumes were all pitch-perfect with velvet suits, liberty print shirts, floaty dresses complete with awful period hairstyles. But this period does not necessarily give a secure dramatic basis for the piece, in fact by rather smudging the hierarchical relationships Grandage rather reduced the drama. In an era of free-love, the relationship of the Count (Audun Iversen) with Figaro (Vito Priante) and Susanna (Lydia Teuscher) was just too friendly. We need to believe that the count almost has the power of life and death over his servants. Without this, he is reduced to a hypocrite in a Whitehall farce.
Perhaps the situation could have been remedied by distinctive, strongly characterised individual performances. But Glyndebourne had assembled a young, enthusiastic cast who work well as an ensemble, conveying Grandage’s intentions, but failed to establish a personal stamp on the characters.
Audun Iversen as the count was personable and promising, but I defy anyone to be imperious when wearing a wig like that and a wine coloured velvet suit. Nor did he exude a particular sexual magnetism, which is surely a necessity. Iversen’s count seemed just too nice, there wasn’t the element of steel in the portrayal, the feeling that he has real power in his fief-dom and enjoys it.
Iversen was, I think, a little too matey with Vito Priante’s Figaro. Priante sang the role well enough but any hint at being revolutionary or subversive was rather nullified by the period. The Marriage of Figaro needs to be a dangerous piece, with real characters trapped in power relationships.
Sally Matthews as the countess was a Celia Birtwell sort of figure, elegant and slightly melancholy. She sang beautifully, "Dove Sono" was ravishing, but did not quite mine the vein of heartbreak at the aria’s heart. This was also noticeable at the end of the opera where the countess’s forgiveness of the count was lovely, but not yet heart-stopping.
Robert Hugill