The Importance of Being Earnest , Gerald Barry’s fifth opera, was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and the Barbican, and was first performed in concert, Thomas Adès conducting the London premiere.
‘Beauty is the one form of spirituality that we experience through the senses.’ In Thomas Mann’s, Death in Venice, Plato’s axiom stirs the hopes of the aging, intellectually stale poet, Gustav von Aschenbach, that he may rekindle his creativity.
There is a sense in which it all began in London, Puccini having been seized in 1900 with the idea of an opera on this subject after watching David Belasco’s play here.
The tenor that the audience most wanted to hear, Plácido Domingo, opened the vocal program with “Junto al puente de la peña” (Next to the rock bridge) from La Canción del Olvido (The song of Oblivion) by José Serrano. He sounded rested and his voice soared majestically over the orchestra.
Tucked away somewhere in the San Francisco Opera warehouse was an old John Cox production of Così fan tutte from Monte Carlo. Well, not that old by current standards at San Francisco Opera.
Rossini's Maometto Secondo is a major coup for Garsington Opera at Wormsley, confirming its status as the leading specialist Rossini house in Britain. Maometto Secondo is a masterpiece, yet rarely performed because it's formidably difficult to sing. It's a saga with some of the most intense music Rossini ever wrote, expressing a drama so powerful that one can understand why early audiences needed "happy endings" to water down its impact
I suppose it was inevitable that, in this Britten Centenary year, the 66th Aldeburgh Festival would open with Peter Grimes.
Die Entführung aus dem Serail at Garsington Opera at Wormsley isn’t Mozart as you’d expect but it’s true to the spirit of Mozart who loved witty, madcap japes.
What a pity! On a glorious — well, by recent English standards — summer’s day, there can be few more beautiful English countryside settings than Glyndebourne, with the added bonus, as alas much of the audience appears to understand it, of an opera house attached.
Described by one critic as “cosmically gifted”, during her tragically short career, American mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson amazed and delighted audiences with the spellbinding beauty of her singing and the astonishing honesty of her performances.
“I wrote it almost without noticing.” So Verdi declared when reminded of his eighth — and perhaps least frequently performed, opera, Alzira. One might say that, since he composed the work, no-one else has much noticed either.
Just when you thought the protagonist was Hoffmann! Who, rather what stole the show?
When is verismo verily veristic? Or what is a virginal girl dressed in communion white doing in the two murderous acts of the Los Angeles Opera’s current production of Tosca? And why does she sing the shepherd's song?
Wagner’s Lohengrin is not an unfamiliar visitor to the UK thanks, in the main, to Elijah Moshinsky’s perennial production at Covent Garden.
Philip Glass's The Perfect American at the ENO in London is a visual treat, but the libretto is mind-numbingly anodyne.
Jonathan Dove's Mansfield Park, with libretto by his regular collaborator Alasdair Middleton, has the remarkable distinction of being the first completed operatic adaptation of any Jane Austen novel to be staged.
London’s two principal opera companies have offered a baffling near-silence as their response to Wagner’s two-hundredth anniversary.
If a recent trio of musically superlative performances at Canadian Opera Company is indicative of their norm, the casting director should get a hefty bonus.
Just when you imagine you’ve got the operatic time-line fixed in your mind in a clean sweep of what goes where and when and how, you hear another work from another forgotten corner of the repertory that upends one’s conclusions.
Nothing inspires fable quite like defeat. The great riddle of Spanish history is how the Christian Visigoths managed to lose the Iberian peninsula to the Moors in one small battle in 711 and took eight hundred years to get it back.
![Exaudi [Photo courtesy of Exaudi]](http://www.operatoday.com/Exaudi.gif)
An intriguing blend of old and new marked the tenth anniversary of the British vocal group, Exaudi, juxtaposing the adventurous intricacies and affectations of the late-sixteenth century with the virtuosic refinements of today’s avant garde.
The concert included four new works, commissioned by the group as part of their enterprise to create a contemporary book of Italians madrigals in order, as Weeks declares in a programme note, to “discover what they idea of ‘the madrigal’ might offer the present day, either as a concrete historical phenomenon or as a set of more general principles: perhaps to do with the relationships between individual voices or the singers themselves, or to do with the idea of vocal expression, or simply to do with the humanist, secular impulses underlying the genre”.
The best of the modern were those compositions which drew direct inspiration from the past, spinning a thread to span the centuries and create a dialogue of continuing experimentation and creative expression. Michael Finnissy’s ‘Sesto Libro di Carlo Gesualdo I’ (AATTBB) exploited the sinuous false relations, suspensions and dissonances of the sixteenth-century idiom, dividing the singers into two trios and thereby explicitly intertwining elements of Gesualdo’s original with Finnissy’s own elaborations and developments. The resulting rhetorical gestures fused passionate intensity with tender melancholy, all the while retaining the sensuous undercurrents which typify the Renaissance masters.
Evan Johnson offered ‘Three in, ad abundantiam’, ‘three micro-madrigals’ for two sopranos and one alto, which the composer describes as “tentative supplements; insecure, mumbled marginalia … three denied attempts at entry”. Fragments from Petrarch’s ‘Solo e pensoso’ — articulating, with ironic paradox, the impossibility of communication — appear and dissolve, the sparse textures, frequent silences (here sadly shattered by an intruding mobile ’phone) and disrupted rhythms threatening the dissolution of form itself. The work relies on the technical skill, and courage, of the performers to establish coherence, however tentative, and here they exhibited a dazzling virtuosity.
Christian Wolff’s ‘Ashbery Madrigals’ present three enigmatic texts by poet John Ashbery — ‘Occurrence’, ‘A Penitence’ and ‘Perplexing Ways’; ‘gaps’ and disarming shifts in melody and harmony reflect the poetic ambiguity, the final madrigal diminishing from an energetic combination of eight voices to a plainsong-like unison. For the preceding ‘Sherpa Tensing stands up from the piano, says something quiet, and walks outside’ by Larry Goves, Weeks stepped aside and, as frequently in this recital, allowed the singers to establish their own intimate communication. While the combination of a complex blend of solo voices — the soprano in the stratosphere — and an occasional homophonic texture did recall the Renaissance idiom, the banal repetitions of Matthew Welton’s text seemed strangely at odds with the elevated expressive aspirations of the earliest madrigalists.
The piercing rhetoric of Morgan Hayes’ ‘E Vesuvio monte’ (2010) — with its dense, accumulating dissonances, representing Pliny the Younger’s account of the eruption of Vesuvius, contrasting with the delineated individual lines of the eight singers conveying the narrative — and Salvatore Sciarrino’s rarefied ‘Tre Madrigal’ (2008) completed the modern contributions to the programme. Sciarrino’s refined, exquisite settings of the Japanese poet, Bashō, conjured the mysterious glissandi, ululations and micro-tunings of an oriental flute, the singers creating a clear, pure tone which conveyed the poet’s passionate response to the natural world — the waves, the cicada, the red sun — culminating in the stirring ‘hum’ of the autumn wind.
Exaudi opened the concert with a mellifluous rendering of Andrea Gabrieli’s ‘Vieni, vieni Himeneo’ (‘Come, come Hymen’, à8), notable for its open, full tone and judicious use of vibrato, before exploring the bold, diverse experiments of Claudio Monteverdi and Carlo Gesualdo, beginning in the first half with three madrigals from Monteverdi’s early books.
Insouciant decorative motifs characterised ‘Sovra tenere erbette’ (‘On the soft grass’) from the Third Book of 1592, evoking the delicate charm of the pastoral setting; changes of tempi were well-managed, leading to the affecting, slow concluding line, laden with erotic resonance, “Che per desire sento morirmi anch’io” (“that I too am dying of desire”). ‘Vattene pur, crudel’ (‘Go, cruel, go!’) demonstrated the more theatrical mode of the stilo rappresentativo, the slightly dry, restrained timbre at the opening evolving to a more impassioned utterance as the independent voices became ever more florid, before diminishing to an ethereal pianissimo chromatic descent, depicting the lover “in a swoon on earth outstretch’d she lies,/ stiff were her frozen limbs,/ closed were her eyes”. Even within the quiet, delicate dynamic a rich counterpoint of vigour and elasticity conveyed the emotional energy of Tasso’s final verse.
Gesualdo’s ‘Mercè!, grido piangendo’ (‘Mercy! I cry weeping’) opened the second half of the concert, the five singers revealing a supreme confidence as they exploited the rhetorical idiosyncrasies of the idiom, declining to a startling pianissimo to whisper “Ma chi m’ascolta?” (“But who hears me?”). The low register and striking unprepared dissonances of the close revealed the profundity of the treasures of the poet’s heart which he longs to disclose before death. ‘Asciugate I begli occhi’ (‘Dry those lovely eyes’) was characterised by intelligent, delicate understatement, the homophonic texture, sensuous harmonies and slowly accumulating dissonances communicating the text’s poignant blend of grief and ecstasy.
‘Ardita zanzaretta’ (‘Presumptuous gnat’) contrasted a spirited, mocking liveliness with a more serious sobriety, twisting dissonant contortions depicting the gnat’s poison and cruel death, as well as the painful ache of the poet’s love. The singers showed their appreciation of Gesualdo’s expressive eloquence in ‘Languisce al fin’ (‘He who is parting’), coolly layering the voices and allowing the harmony to infer the bittersweet pain of the poet’s fate.
Monteverdi’s ‘Rimanti in pace’ (‘Stay here in peace’) brought the programme to a moving close, embracing both the pain of desire — as the sorrowful Phyllis “fixes her shining eyes” on her beloved Thyrsis and transfixes his heart — and the desolation of loss.
The juxtapositions of style did not always flow fluently; and, Weeks’ enthusiastic explanatory introductions were perhaps unnecessary, further impeding the progression between moods and idioms. However, the insight, sincerity and musical prowess of Exaudi was never in doubt, and the contrasting parts combined to form an impressive and touching whole.
Claire Seymour
Click here for information regarding the performers and programme.