In May of 2013, the Spire Series at the First Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, Maryland, observed the fiftieth anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy by presenting a work dealing with the 1963 assassination.
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.
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.
Graham Johnson chose the title "In the Shadow of the Opéra" for his recital at the Wigmore Hall, London, with Lucy Crowe and Christopher Maltman. Given the renaisaance in French opera, it's good that we should be thinking of the nature of French song and its relationship to French opera and culture.
This was an extremely ambitious programme. A friend, who has been going to the Wigmore Hall for 40 years, exclaimed "Some of this material we don't know!" There was so much to take in that it will take time to fully sink in.
Johnson divided his recital into four main themes : On Wings of Song (Love in flight), Mélodies and arias, Vers le sud (Exoticism) and Seascapes and Landscapes. The first two sections focussed on form, the last two on subject matter.
First, he focussed on lyrical mélodies like Charles Gounod's Tombez mes ailes! The image is of a butterfly in joyful flight, but to protect her offspring, she must tear off her own wings and die. It's a metaphor for the artist who must struggle and sacrifice in order that art might grow. The gravitas of the final line undercuts the flightiness that's gone before. Christopher Maltman sang the final line "Il faut vieller, et travailler" with great force. Just as Maltman's voice is dark, Lucy Crowe's voice is every light and sweet, good for a 19th century heroine. In this section she sang light-hearted uieces like Massenet's Le sais-tu? and Reynaldo Hahn's Si mes vers avaient des ailes. This made Maltman's songs have stronger impact : Georges Bizet's La Coccinelle (to a poem by Victor Hugo) gave Maltman a chance to show his skills as a character actor. The ladybird has such personality she could become a role in music theatre. Songs like Lucien Hillemacher's Villanelle lay too high for him, but the point was made : there's more to singing than getting the notes right.
Théodore Dubois (1837-1924) was one of the most successful composers of his day, but was despised by the young Gabriel Fauré, one of Pauline Viardot's inner circle. Johnson pertinently laced Dubois's Madrigal with Fauré's Fleur jetée. Dubois' delicate lyricism outclassed by Fauré's pounding rhythms. Ironically, Madrigal is more conventionally a piece for the theatre and Maltman dramatized it well. Dubois's poet, Henry Murger, inspired Puccini's La bohème. Fleur jetée, however, is by far the more distinctive piece in musical terms, which is why it's fairly well known and a favourite of many high sopranos. But it's not really a piece for big houses, and Lucy Crowe's voice was challenged by the loud crescendo in the final line. Johnson followed the song with Fauré's La chanson du pêcheur, which Maltman delivered in an almost conversational style. This you could imagine embedded in a larger work. Debussy's Apparition (Mallarmé), with its watery imagery and sparkling piano textures, suggested Pelléas et Mélisande, though it was written as early as 1884. It's even less sympathetic to voice, set extremely high in the style of the time. Massenet had the last laugh though, with a splendid duet Horace et Lydie (1886) to a poem by Albert de Musset. Mélodie or aria? The song describes Horace and Lydie's past romance, the voices deftly cutting across each other. At the end, they resolve their dilemma and sing in harmony.
One of the key themes in French culture is Orientalisme. It was a means of exploring "unknown territory" in many ways. Orientalism garbed ideas in strange, alien ways, so artists could express unusual thoughts in dramatic context. Strangely, there was no Délibes in this recital but we had Hector Berlioz Zaïde (1845) a florid narravtive song set in Granada and the palace of Aladdin "qui vaut Cordovie et Séville!" More Gounod, too. Maltman sang Maid of Athens (1872) partly in English because the text is Lord Byron, but the chorus is in Greek, reflecting Byron's passion for Greek independence. Two "exotic" languages in one song. Giacomo Meyerbeer's Mina (1837) is a jolly piece, fine for music theatre. Perhaps I'm the only person to have discovered Meyerbeer through his songs (excellent recording by Thomas Hampson) but at least that made me appreciate how interesting his work can be.
Xavier Leroux (1863-1919) was a new discovery for me, because Le Nil (1890) is a gorgeous song, intensely atmospheric. Lucy Crowe sang the mysterious introduction quietly, just above a whisper, so we could imagine we were floating along the Nile at night in a small boat. The poet, Armand Renaud, contrasts the bacarolle with the image of the Great Sphinx and the wide plain beyond the river. Thw lovers and their moment of happiness dwarfed by vast historic forces, A beautiful song I'd like to hear again. Two songs about guitars completed the section - Eduard Lalo's Guitare (1885) and Camille Saint-Saëns Guitarres et mandolines.
Operas on the grand scale can evoke huge panoramas of time and space. But so can song. Bizet's Douce mer (1867 )(Lamartine) and Fauré's Les Bercaux (1879) (Proudhomme), are charming mood pieces, the former embellished with an exotic cry which suggests that the Mediterranean setting might even be North Africa. Debussy's Nuit d'étoiles was perhaps the best known song in the recital, pleasantly done, if the phrasing and intensity wasn't quite up to the standards of, say, Véronique Gens or others who have made it a trademark. Massenet's Joie (1868) (Camille Distel) ended the evening on a cheerful note, but Johnson and his singers wisely chose to repeat Saint-Saëns Viens! (1855) (Victor Hugo) as an encore. It's an enjoyable duet where the voices intertwine rather like traditional rounds. So perhaps folk song got its way into this programme after all.
Anne Ozorio