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.
Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt op 23 is rarely heard in full, though the Suites thereon are ubiquitous. At the Barbican Hall in London, Grieg's incidental music for Henrik Ibsen's play was heard complete, enhanced by incidental speech.
Edvard Grieg never did leave a definitive version of his incidental music for Ibsen’s play, Peer Gynt. The pity is that the power of the music cannot be quite appreciated out of context. Individual movements make fine concert pieces, but heard in dramatic context they make even more sense. For his concert of the complete incidental music with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Singers at the Barbican on Saturday 15 December, Mark Minkowski chose to present the music with a stripped down version of Ibsen’s play created by director Alain Perroux. Young actors from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama performed the play in English, whilst three distinguished Scandinavian singers (Miah Persson, Ann Hallenberg and Johannes Weisser) sang Grieg’s solo music for Anitra, Peer Gynt and Solveig in Norwegian, with singers from the BBC Singers taking smaller sung roles. The result could have been a bit of a muddle, but in fact it was magical and a dramatic revelation.
The version performed of the music was the edition by Finn Benestad from 1988, which keeps the order of the composer’s score from the premiere performance of 1876, omits the cuts and amendments from later performances, but does include corrections and uses Grieg’s fuller orchestration from the 1886 performances in Copenhagen.
Mark Minkowski is best known for his performances of French baroque music and Offenbach, though his recent Schumann symphony series has been gaining plaudits. In 2010 he conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a programme which paired Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater with Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. His performance of Grieg’s music had none of the stylisation which I associated with period performance specialists working with a modern orchestra. Instead he elicited from the orchestra a performance of freshness, vitality and clarity.
What Minkowski removed was the layer of Romantic gloop which can overlay this warhorse. In fact, Grieg’s music uses a variety of forces from a single violin solo emulating the traditional Hardanger fiddle through to moments with full orchestra and chorus, though the use of full orchestra was quite sparing. The composer had a very nice ear for orchestral timbres, and Minkowski brought this out. The orchestration was vivid and varied with great use made, in various ways, of the four horns.
Grieg wrote a series of small numbers, there are no really big extended musical pieces. But the small moments build into bigger dramatic structures when combined with the drama, and Grieg used thematic links too. The music that opened the Arabian scenes in act 4, the famous Morning Mood contains very distinct echoes of the music for the scene the girl in green in act 2, implying that wherever Peer Gynt is, he takes Norway with him.
Many of the small orchestral moments would get lost in a pure concert and they did contribute to the drama immensely. The way small musical elements could point up the text was a revelation. The well known movement, "Ase’s Death" was used both as a prelude to the scene of Peer’s mother’s death, but also repeated to underscore the dialogue between her and Peer in a way which rendered the drama even more poignant.
The way Grieg constructed large scale scenes is best seen in the scene in the hall of the King of the Trolls. The well known "In the Hall of the Mountain King", complete with a lively chorus part (of bad-tempered Trolls) led into a scene which mixed speech and music, including a grotesque dance for the King’s daughter. It ended with Peer Gynt fleeing, to music in which Grieg distorted the opening music, thus creating a larger and very satisfying musico-dramatic structure. Something similar is seen with the Arab scene, where a series of movements including the well known "Anitra’s Dance" and Peer’s serenade (the only time the character is required to sing) form another linked musico-dramatic whole.
The young actors were all miked, so that balance was always correct in the many melodramas. Patrick Walshe McBride was brilliantly charming as an Irish Peer Gynt, making a complete, entrancing character out of the fragments of the play allotted to him, holing us in the palm or his hand and being the focus of the drama for the whole piece. Grace Andrews played the women in Peer Gynt’s life, the Girl in Green (the daughter of the King of the Trolls), Solveig and Anitra , giving each a nicely differentiated shading. Cormac Brown was a lively King of the Trolls and other characters, Melanie Hislop had a nice nagging edge to her delivery as Ase, Peer Gynt’s mother. Tom Lincoln played all the strange characters; the Boyg (the obstacle Peer Gynt encounters), the passenger and the button moulder (the messenger of death). Apart from McBride, accents were a bit variable but all created a real feeling of drama, helped by the poised narrations of Evelyn Miller.
The smaller vocal roles were all taken by members of the BBC Singers. Micaela Haslam, Alison Smart and Olivia Robinson were cow girls calling for their Troll lovers in a beautiful little number. Andrew Rupp and Charles Gibbs were a fence and a thief in a tiny duet.
Soprano Ann Hallenberg sang the Arab maid Anitra, effectively a single solo, and tenor Johannes Weisser had a similar cameo appearance in Peer Gynt’s serenade. Frankly this was rather luxury casting and seemed an extravagance; though it was lovely to hear Weisser’s genuine Norwegian tones in the serenade. Where this luxury paid off was in the casting of Miah Persson as Solveig, singing Solveig’s Song and Solveig’s Cradle Song. Both dramatically necessary, and with Persson contributing singing that was extremely fine indeed. Her account of Solveig’s Song was profoundly beautiful, but when it was repeated, with hushed strings and with Persson off stage in a scene where Peer Gynt is hesitating outside her cottage, then the result was pure magic. The evening closed with Persson’s touching account of Solveig’s Cradle Song.
The entire performance was something of a revelation. Dramatically it worked with Grieg’s music and Ibsen’s words combining into a fascinating whole
This performance will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 iinternationally, online and on demand for seven days from Sunday 23 December 2012
Robert Hugill
The performance from Minkowski, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Singers had a freshness and a new minted quality which made you realise quite why Grieg’s score made such a big impression at its first performances.