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.
![Patrizia Ciofi as Isabelle and Bryan Hymel as Robert [Photo by Bill Cooper courtesy of the Royal Opera House]](http://www.operatoday.com/RobertLeDiable_109a.gif)
Well, so many don’t nowadays, it appears to me, judging by the critical reception of Robert le Diable at the ROH. Rum-ti-tum? We recall Macbeth, Rigoletto, Trov and even Trav being characterised thus, popular fare but risible or blush- making, yet those works now command the highest respect.
True, Meyerbeer lacks the high melodic genius of Verdi, whose every work is both obviously his yet paradoxically also has its own unique sound world; but I think the problem is not that. We are out of sympathy with the social world for which such works were conceived.
Marina Poplavskaya as Alice and John Relyea as Bertram
Long, leisurely five-acters? Plots elevated to the level of the hieratic? Above all comfortable plushness, with little apparent intellectual bite? All that suited opera audiences of the time, but something more is needed for survival, and you don’t have to listen very hard to discern it. Skill in the construction of a theatre piece, to start with: how different do the two long scenes between Bertram/Raimbaut and Bertram/Alice sound, for instance, reflecting Bertram’s manipulation of each of these victims and their differing reactions (no pushover, she); how each character is delineated through the music, their unfolding scenas certainly not generic as is the libretto; how atmospheric are the orchestral passages, even though perhaps some might long for Weber.
All this would go for naught, of course, without a fine performance. Do you ever have that feeling, when the lights dim and the first notes arise, that all will be well this evening, and there is nowhere else you would rather be? It was that way on Saturday last, softly bathed in pellucid sound (Daniel Oren conducting) perfectly judged for the auditorium, without that muddiness that often tells you you’re in for a sticky ride; above all the singers had the measure of the style: to my ear French display opera has a certain chic restraint, without the glitz of its Italian counterpart, and whilst Damrau would have been starrier, Ciofi (yes, an Italian) was most touching, every cadence perfectly placed. Poplavskaya excelled herself, with an unusual combination of staunchness and thrilling ease; Hymel paid Meyerbeer the compliment of taking him seriously, and was utterly believable in the role, which he made seem child’s play to sing; Relyea has been seriously undervalued, and Jean-Francois Borras was a delightful new discovery for me. And the Chorus excelled themselves.
A scene from Robert le Diable
Which brings me to Laurent Pelly’s production. When it comes to the chorus, modern directors seem to model themselves on Eisenstein. Here there is a difference: Pelly’s chorus is sometimes Greek, hovering en masse, but always in articulated geometrical forms — think Pina Bausch dance, where we see individuals impelled however to move in unison. So in Act 1 we see the knights tightly choreographed but moving like lava when the occasion demands; later they assume a diamond formation, as if grouped in a giant boardgame. Sounds odd, maybe, but it has the effect of throwing the main characters into individual relief, and aiding the flow of the plot.
The nuns’ music surprised me (I must have been confusing them with Casanova’s); it is hard to guess what the original movement must have been, but the costumes were closely modelled on lithographs of that time, the music perhaps self-indulgently long and unvaried, the dancers nicely distinguished even if all in the same plight. Only ten, on this big space? I thought; but then the whole chorus flooded on, swamping the stage, even more deshabilles, and equally frantic, in a splendid coup de théâtre. Costumes might well have been taken from contemporary miniatures; settings from prints of the time (the stage department excelled itself in their manipulation).
I came away elated, thinking that the composer had achieved an integrated piece of work on a high level, with that afterglow you get following a really good meal. I guess that’s what the original audiences felt too. Will Meyerbeer catch on? Don’t put money on it. Maybe you have to be a bourgeois Marxist to like it?!
Kenneth Brown