BREAKING NEWS: Opera & Ballet

Change my mind about Parsifal

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 10:00:26 +0000

Parsifal just gives me the creeps – a muddy maundery concoction that wallows in faux religiosity, a creepy view of sin, and naïve redemption.

Offenbach - Les Brigands, at the Paris Opera's Palais Garnier

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 07:09:00 +0000

ONP Garnier, Thursday June 26 2025

Conductor: Michele Spotti. Production: Barrie Kosky. Sets: Rufus Didwiszus. Costumes: Victoria Behr. Lighting: Ulrich Eh. Choreography: Otto Pichler. Falsacappa: Marcel Beekman. Fiorella: Marie Perbost. Fragoletto: Antoinette Dennefeld. Le Baron de Campo-Tasso: Yann Beuron. Le Chef des carabiniers: Laurent Naouri. Le Duc de Mantoue: Mathias Vidal. Le Comte de Gloria-Cassis: Philippe Talbot. La Princesse de Grenade: Eugénie Joneau. Carmagnola: Leonardo Cortellazzi. Domino: Éric Huchet. Barbavano: Franck Leguérinel. Pietro: Rodolphe Briand. Zerlina: Héloïse Poulet. Fiametta: Clara Guillon. Bianca: Maria Warenberg. La Marquise: Doris Lamprecht. La Duchesse: Helene Schneiderman. Le Précepteur: Luis-Felipe Sousa. Cicinella: Marine Chagnon. Adolphe de Valladolid: Seray Pinar. Antonio: Sandrine Sarroche. Sangrietta/Pipa: Manon Barthélémy. Tortilla: Francesca Lo Bue. Burratina: Cécile L’Heureux. Castagnetta/Pipetta: Corinne Martin. Pizzaiolo: Victorien Bonnet. Flamenco: Nicolas Jean-Brianchon. Zucchini / Pipo: Jules Robin. Siestasubito: Hédi Tarkani. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

Photos: © Agathe Poupeney/ONP

I seem to be constitutionally incapable of keeping these posts short. I thought I’d manage it this time, but I was wrong. However, during the first run of Les Brigands, at the start of the season, someone on the French forum ODB Opéra published a beautifully brief report in French, so I’ll sum that up in English and post it at the end of this article. If you don’t want to waste time on my rambling version, just jump straight to the end and read theirs.

*****

The Paris Opera’s 2024-2025 season opened and now closes, for me at least, with Offenbach’s Les Brigands. As I was still in Greece last September and October, I bought tickets for the reprise, in June.

Since the 80s, Offenbach hasn’t been well represented at the OnP, with one exception: Les Contes d’Hoffmann, in productions by Chéreau, Ponnelle, Polanski (scandalously, in my view) and - in nine seasons so far since the year 2000 - Carsen. The only other work of Offenbach’s presented, already more than 30 years ago, was… Les Brigands, in a production from Amsterdam by Jérôme Deschamps and Macha Makeieff, at the Bastille of all places. As Offenbach composed his opéras bouffes, with their spoken dialogues, for houses with 600 to 800 seats, it’s probably not such a bad thing if the Opéra National, where even Garnier seats over 1,900, sticks mainly to Les Contes. Paris has other houses, of various sizes, for the bouffe repertoire. Come to think of it, Laurent Pelly’s famous Offenbach series, with Minkowski in the pit, might have been better still at the Opéra Comique, not the Châtelet, where, though we were all having a whale of a time, some of the voices struggled to make themselves heard.

When Barrie Kosky was asked to direct one of Offenbach’s works here, it seemed a pity he should set his sights on another version of Les Brigands. But he’d already staged Orphée aux Enfers in Salzburg and La Belle Hélène at the Komische Oper; and while we might have liked a Grande Duchesse (two decades have now elapsed since Pelly’s with Dame Felicity Lott), Les Brigands is what we got. My own experience of Kosky’s work is minimal. I saw his production of Les Boréades - in Dijon’s dreadful Auditorium - in 2019, and liked it: ‘... a simple, intelligent, respectful but wholly contemporary production, one of the best Rameau stagings I’ve seen.’ I was delighted by his Covent Garden staging of The Nose, which I watched on video during lockdown. So I was looking forward to seeing how he dealt with the Offenbach.

In the event, I struggled to persuade my companions to stay on even after the first act, so we could at least see the Spanish delegation’s spectacular entrance, of which I'd seen enticing pictures: read on…

There’s a certain kind of production tradition for Offenbach in France (no doubt elsewhere, too, but I don’t get out much) that leaves me stonily unamused. We had a famous director here, called Jérôme Savary, a larger-than-life, cigar-chomping character committed to accessible, ‘people’s’ theatre. He even ended up in charge of the Opéra Comique for a while, dubbing it, improbably, a ‘Théâtre Populaire.’ (I remember him, one night, teasing the Minister of Culture, in an unexpected speech from the stage, for being the only person in the house not to have paid for his seat.) He admired what Dario Fo, in his Nobel speech, called the ‘multitude of mummers, jesters, clowns, tumblers and storytellers’ of theatrical tradition, found in street theatre, circus, the music hall, cabaret, and so on. Savary directed quite a lot of Offenbach, and you could be fairly sure that there would be topless showgirls, bare-chested young men, naughty nuns, drag queens and leather-men, lots of agitation, lots of shouting, and lots of corny choreography. It never worked for me (though it worked very well for thousands of others), because the fun remained stubbornly fabricated. It was well managed, but somehow lacked the cheeky charm, the wink of complicity, across the pit, with the audience, that brings this kind of business to life. It felt too stagy, too strenuous, too much like hard work. Which I don’t doubt it was, but ars est…

Savary, a provocative figure himself, might well have applauded Kosky’s stated intention - fine by me too, for what that’s worth - to put the subversiveness back into opéra bouffe. But what Kosky actually delivered, at Garnier, was basically warmed-up Savary, thirty years on, with a much bigger budget, on the Paris Opera’s lavish scale, and directed in greater detail.

As nearly everyone has probably already seen, Kosky’s Falsacappa is Dutch tenor Marcel Beekman (Platée in Carsen’s ‘Chanel’ production at the Opéra Comique) disguised as Divine, initially in the famous red dress from Pink Flamingos, complete with pistol, then in a variety of bulging, sequinned numbers. His henchman, Pietro, is a middle-aged, pot-bellied leather-man in black military cap, string vest and harness. They and their brigands - that theatrical multitude of mummers, jesters and clowns, a variegated, gender-fluid crowd in dyed wigs and, if dressed at all, a rainbow assortment of tacky, tinselly hand-me-downs - appear to have squatted a vast, once-grand Second Empire saloon with elaborately panelled but blackened, and tagged, walls.

I wondered if this was a nod to Peter Brook’s dilapidated Bouffes du Nord house, and its history as café-concert and music hall. Kosky’s production certainly deals with all the themes raised by Les Brigands: theatrical representation v. the actual; real and assumed identities, not limited to gender, with all the disguises and (cross-)dressing up involved; the staging of social hierarchies; Second-Empire money-grabbing and the hypocrisies entailed (all the world’s a thief); the honesty and efficiency (or not) of government and its forces of order, and so on… It is also expertly managed. There are huge numbers of people swarming about on stage - soloists, chorus, dancers, extras - but everyone, at every moment, has something specific to do, even if it’s only wiggling his or her scantily-clad bum at the audience, and all those frantic, swarming crowd movements, back and forth, while pulling on new disguises are minutely choreographed in their feigned raggedness.

The overall result was cleverly summed up in two words by an expert on a well-known opera blog as ‘Manic and camp’. Too manic at times, noisy and repetitive: how many times was the deafening crowd chatter silenced by a shout and a fist on the table, or a pistol shot? The inn scenes in act two work relatively well, in a bon-enfant way. Perhaps the exaggerated contrast between the august grandeur of the sets and props, the beautifully painted still-life and landscape canvases supplied by the Paris Opera workshops, and the humble action they house is a deliberate comment on the public opulence and private squalor of the age - then and now. Other scenes just fall flat. The arrival of the carabiniers, for example, a highlight of other productions, here just a handful of doltish gendarmes in képis and sunglasses, stuffed into ill-fitting uniforms. A ballet of nuns and priests: old hat (or old beretta and old wimple). A long, supposedly comic, monologue by the undeniably charismatic actress playing Antonio - here, budget minister - mocking contemporary French politicians: tedious.

The great, wow-factor success of the evening, visually at least, is the arrival of the Spanish. Here, Kosky pulls out all the Paris Opera’s stops to put on a spectacular pageant, one worthy of a particularly lavish production of, say, Don Carlos, in which members of the Spanish court, as portrayed by Velazquez, front a Holy Week procession. The princess heads the cortège, in a wide, stiff gown almost certainly inspired by the painter’s Infanta Maria-Theresa in Vienna, only here in fifty shades of gold. Her ladies-in waiting all have individually-designed, couture costumes. The men, including Gloria-Cassis, arrive on wheeled hobby-horses in gold doublets, ruffs and pantaloons. The dancers wear toreadors’ gold-embroidered trajes de luces. Everybody has vivid orange hair (can anyone tell me why?). At the rear, swaying slowly, Semana Santa style, a larger-than-life Christ in majesty, near-naked and fresh from the gym, is flanked by two virgins of sorrows in black, on gold pedestals, one surrounded by candles, the other by lilies. The whole tableau is, while not original in conception, stunning in its realisation. Probably one of the Paris Opera’s most expensive jokes ever, but, overacted to death, not actually funny.

Les Brigands isn’t really a work designed to show off particular voices, even if various characters have big comic numbers. Some of the most familiar singers in the cast, veterans of those old Pelly/Minkowski productions, though still charismatic, have precious little to do. Of course, Yann Beuron brought his usual verve and charm and elegant phrasing and diction to Le Baron de Campo-Tasso, Laurent Naouri blustered his way through the part of the police chief with gusto, Franck Leguérinel let off a few gruff notes that signalled he was still Franck Leguérinel - a great bouffe performer, as is Eric Huchet, who was his usual, reliable character-tenor self. Luxury casting for tiny parts. Rodolphe Briand (Pietro) is another solid Offenbach trouper, though I’ve also seen him around in supporting roles in Puccini and Berlioz.

Among the more substantial roles, Marcel Beekman combined audibility with baroque-trained agility and good diction. If that sounds like meagre praise, it’s because I couldn’t come to terms with his strange, adenoidal sound, the chesty buzz, it seemed to me, of a high tenor singing a bit too low.

Marie Perbost’s voice, as Fiorella, took a while to settle. It is round and liquid, but somehow patchy and blowzy - perhaps the frantic staging contributed to this - though with strong, columnar high notes. I preferred the more straightforward, firmer line, as Fragoletto, of Antoinette Dennefeld, someone whose glamour, vivacity and vocal suppleness I’ve already admired in productions of Cavalleria Rusticana, La Périchole (in which she starred), and Carmen.

As Le Comte de Gloria-Cassis, Philippe Talbot threw himself unsparingly into Kosky’s exasperatingly corny parody of Spanish swagger, which sinks as low as to use supposedly comical but potentially insulting cod Spanish, but sounded tired and stretched. Vocally, the star of the evening was, to me, Matthias Vidal as Le Duc de Mantou, near-equal in style and charisma to the ever-excellent Beuron.

The orchestra was in sprightly form under Michele Spotti, who incidentally conducted Laurent Pelly’s lovely production of Offenbach’s Barbe-Bleue from Lyon, starring Beuron, one I’ve sadly only seen on video. The chorus was also in fine fettle, though understandably with all the madcap kerfuffle on stage, there were times when it was all hard to keep together. Wearied by much of this relentlessly unfunny action - ‘Ça ne marche pas’ (it isn’t working) was my neighbour’s comment, more than once, while I tried to persuade him to stay on - there were times, too, I must admit, when I just focused on the music and ignored the kerfuffle.

*****

From 'raph13' on ODB Opéra:

'Barrie Kosky's madcap production, with its wild costumes, is a kind of gigantic, wacky, juvenile farce. However, the almost constant hysteria becomes tiresome, as does the screaming and shouting at every turn. The rewriting of the dialogues gives the opportunity for a few jabs at the government, but at times it feels like the Théâtre des Deux Ânes* (particularly during the cashier's long monologue, which is also badly amplified) (...) Above all, I wonder what this work is doing at Garnier, given that the vast majority of the cast have a vocal make-up more suited to the Opéra-Comique; you often have to strain your ears. However, the energy displayed and the lively choreography are a hit with the young audience, who give the artists a warm standing ovation.’

*A 300-seat theatre on the boulevard de Clichy where the old Montmartre tradition of satirical cabaret lives on.

Note: an edited version of this post may be published on Parterre.com.

An old-fashioned girl

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 13:00:33 +0000

Perhaps it was the heatwave or the contentment of just having been able to hear her live again, but I went a bit overboard for this week’s Chris’s Cache in assembling an extravagant bouquet of Emőke Baráth, a favorite baroque diva.

Prêtre a manger

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 13:00:23 +0000

parterre box serves up an amuse-bouche of Natalie Dessay as Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd in Strasbourg!

Change my mind about Mario Lanza

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 10:00:18 +0000

I just don’t get why anyone takes Mario Lanza seriously as “the tenor of the century” and so forth.

The turning point

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 13:00:34 +0000

The Comet/Poppea at this summer’s Running AMOC* festival at Lincoln Center is a thrilling, startling, deeply moving experience

Closing Time appears on youTube

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 11:02:00 +0000

In November 2023, I posted about a fascinating, touching project that grew out of the personal experiences of London-based writer and performer Karin de Novellis, who looked after her husband, a dementia-sufferer, until his death.

During lockdown, Karin wrote a collection of poems, called Closing Time at the Kings Head, reflecting on everyday situations and some of the feelings she and her husband experienced while living with dementia. Australian composer Ross Fides transformed the poems into a staged song cycle for soprano, baritone, narrator and piano, which premiered in September 2023 at Christ Church Cathedral, Newcastle, New South Wales.

According to the programme notes, the staged performance aims to show 'how, in spite of the challenges, a care-partnership can embrace understanding, compassion and love, making the journey easier and better for all concerned. Fiddes’ music inhabits the words in such a way that the listener cannot help but be drawn into this moving and powerful piece.'

This newspaper article tells the story:

The first UK performance was in November 2023, at The Study Society in London.

The reason for this new post is that there is now an 'official' video of Closing Time on YouTube, in a performance directed by Ghillian Sullivan, with soprano Jane Ede, baritone Christopher Allan, Eliane Morel as narrator, and composer Ross Fiddes himself at the piano.

In addition to the poems used in the song cycle, Karin de Novellis has written a series of shanties, to well-known shanty tunes, that take a gently humorous look at the tribulations of the unpaid home carer, looking single-handedly after a loved-one suffering from dementia. Karin runs lively sing-along sessions for these carers, offering them a chance to share their own woes without collapsing into tragedy.

This is a project well worth supporting. Anyone interested in getting in touch with Karin can reach me by leaving a comment below.

This summer I’m reading The Reign of Patti

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 10:00:14 +0000

The ultimate in Diva worship – where she can do no wrong.

Micah Schroeder in recital at the Tranzac

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 16:44:49 +0000

Baritone Micah Schroeder and pianist Stéphane Mayer gave a recital on Saturday night at the Tranzac called Everlastingness. It was a carefully curated mix of song recital classics, works by contemporary Canadian composers and some Armenian influences. The balance was such that a two hour plus recital seemed to fly by. I rather like the Tranzac for this kind of event. The acoustics are fine and the comparative intimacy of it gives a vibe somewhere between a concert hall and, say, Opera Pub. It’s certainly difficult to imagine anyone (furries aside) wearing tails there.

And so to the music… Matters kicked off with Danika Lorèn’s setting of Edna St.Vincent Millais’ Recuerdo no. 7 – A Few Figs From The Thistle. It’s a gentle setting of an appealing text and was a good atmosphere setter. Next was a foray into Ich bin ein ernsthafter deutscher Bariton territory with Schumann’s Lieder und Gesänge aus Wilhelm Meister. This was very nicely done with excellent diction, measured singing; balancing the dramatic and the sensitive aptly, and was beautifully accompanied. Proper Lieder singing in fact.

Jocelyn Mortlock’s settings of rather ambiguous texts by Alan Ashton; Involuntary Love Songs came next. The “stream of consciousness” text got treatment ranging from the subtle to the extremely emphatic while Stéphane navigated the rather sparse piano part skilfully. The first half closed with Mary Kouyoumdjian’s setting of a Royce Vavrek text about Arshiel Gorky; Everlastingness. Stéphane and Micah were joined by Brenna Hardy-Kavanagh on viola for this one. It’s complex, combining piano arpeggios, a declamatory vocal line and a sort of folk-dancy viola part (amongst other things). The music ebbs and flows in mood to match the allusive, indirect and sometimes rather dark text. It’s a really good example of modern art song.

The second half got going with a suitably playful account of Poulenc’s Banalités; a setting of texts by Apollinaire which definitely show influences of surrealism. It was very playful and my cold, dark Pennine soul utterly related to “Fagnes de Wallonie”. We were back to Armenia next for three folk songs collected and arranged by Komitas. If you have heard Armenian folksong you know what to expect and we got it. And finally to Stéphane Mayer’s setting of Poe’s Annabel Lee; apparently written for Lauren Margison. “Part sea shanty, part crashing waves on the piano” quoth the composer which turned out to be about right.

The encore was the near ubiquitous Love Went a Riding by Frank Bridge (somebody surely must have made the Pegasus Bridge connection at some point). As good a way as any to round out a really rather satisfying evening.

Merola's A Grand Night for Singing - An American Songfest

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 17:32:15 +0000

* Notes*A number of young artists from the Merola Opera Program gave a recital of American songs curated by pianist Ronny Michael Greenberg (pictured, photograph by Kristen Loken) last Thursday evening. Six singer/pianist duos were featured for a very cute performance to kick off the summer's Merola festivities. It was fun to hear the pianists, each made the same instrument sound so different. The singers, of course, are all distinct and ran the gambit as far as vocal type. The song selections ranged from Charles Ives and Irving Berlin to music from contemporary films and musicals. Elio Bucky did the stage direction and it was all pretty adorable. Some of the performers can really dance. The performance began and ended with Ronny Michael Greenberg playing the piano and all the others singing, which is a very nice way of pulling it all together. I could hear soprano Charlotte Siegel quite clearly in the first number, so when she sang her set with a microphone, I was surprised. Her "Fly Me To The Moon" stuck with me, I am curious to hear her again. Bass John Mburu gave a rousing rendition of "Some Enchanted Evening" accompanied by Deven Shah. I also liked hearing Mburu sing the traditional spiritual "Joshua Fought The Battle" arranged by baritone Lester Lynch. Mburu has an interestingly reedy sound for a bass. Tenor Tristan Tournaud and pianist Brian Cho were certainly a charismatic pair. Tournaud's voice is perhaps not as powerful as some of the other singing we heard, but his voice is pretty and pleasing. His "Black Max" was particularly compelling, he's a good actor. We heard two songs by Leslie Adams sung by bass-baritone Justice Yates and accompanied by Dain Yule Yoon, which were lovely. Yates was even more moving in "I'm Here" from The Color Purple, really emotionally nuanced and effective. Both baritone Joeavian Rivera and mezzo-soprano Ruby Dibble have strong voices. Rivera did well with "Pure Imagination" from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Dibble is a fine actress, her songs showed contrasting views rather brilliantly. *Tattling * The performance was only 75 minutes long without an intermission. I did not notice any electronic noise or talking.

Cavalleria Rusticana & Pagliacci

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 13:00:45 +0000

Daniele Rustioni leads a verismo double bill recorded in Munich last month

Stiffelio

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 13:00:12 +0000

A performance recorded earlier this month in Dortmund with Angelo Villari and Pretty Yende

This summer I’m reading I promessi sposi

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 10:00:59 +0000

Nothing helped me understand Verdi better than Alessandro Manzoni‘s I promessi sposi.

Don Giovanni

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 13:00:55 +0000

Konstantin Krimmel plays the title role in a live broadcast from Munich

Konstantin companion

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 13:00:49 +0000

parterre box highlights the livestreamed opening of this year’s Munich Opera Festival with a bit of tonight’s Don Giovanni, Konstantin Krimmel, in another Mozart opera

Turkish sound bath

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 13:00:30 +0000

A brilliant L’italiana in Algeri in Rome has Larry Wolff once again thinking about “singing Turks”

The Queen of Spades

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 13:00:09 +0000

A live video broadcast from Vienna starring Anna Netrebko and Yusif Eyvazov

Norma

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 13:00:05 +0000

A live broadcast from Milan starring Marina Rebeka

700

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 11:03:57 +0000

It’s taken from late July 2022 to move from 600 video disk reviews in the archive to 700 (though how many of the 700 are actually still available is anyone’s guess!). That’s almost exactly 3 recordings per month which sounds about right. So it’s picked up again after a slowdown during/after the pandemic.

Most of the statistics remain essentially unchanged. For example, “language of performance” hasn’t changed much at 38% Italian, 25% German, 16% French and 11% English. Even “century of composition” hasn’t shifted though there are now 30 21st century works in the list. The same is true of “location of performance”. The leaders are still Salzburg (55), Royal Opera House (54), Glyndeboune (51) and Paris (46) withy no-one else topping 40. As far as I can see the only major impact of (subscription) streaming services is that the Met is pretty much out of the disk market.

The only real changes are in date of recording and technology. 381/700 recordings were made in 2010 or more recently (95 since 2020 even though earlier recordings are still trickling out). 92 out of the last 100 recordings are Blu-ray. Pretty much the only time DVD figures is when the only source is Toronto Public Library. There’s no sign of 4K UHD making inroads.

The top works are all by Mozart with 15 Don Giovannis, 13 Marriage of Figaro, 12 Magic Flutes of assorted flavours and 11 Così. Nothing else manages more than 9 (Carmen) with 7 each for Wozzeck, Peter Grimes, Elektra, Ariadne auf Naxos and The Coronation of Poppea. Unsurprisingly this makes Mozart top composer with 73 followed by Wagner (47), Verdi (40), Rossini (36) and Strauss (34).

So despite the rise of free streaming services like Operavision and subscription ones like Met on Demand the video disk; basically Blu-ray now, is still an important vehicle for major opera houses and festivals.

This summer I’m reading Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 10:00:40 +0000

I first read Edith Hamilton‘s classic book on Greek mythology about sixty years ago.

A Tancredi for our times?

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 14:42:20 +0000

Rossini’s early opera seria Tancredi is set in Syracuse in the early 11th century and turns on two rival families coming together in the face a threat from both Byzantines and Saracens. The hero is the knight Tancredi, secretly in love with the daughter of one of rival families. Jan Philipp Gloger’s production filmed at Bregenz in 2024 updates it to the present with the families being rival drug gangs and the “threat” the police. There’s a further twist. Tancredi is a mezzo role and always sung by a woman. Here Tancredi is played as a woman pretending to be a man; at least to everyone except her lover Amenaide.

The complication is that Amenaide’s father Argirio has promised her to his rival Orbazzano as part of the peace deal. Amenaide sends a letter to Tancredi suggesting he take over the gangs but there’s no addressee so when it’s intercepted everyone, including Tancredi, assumes they’ve been shopped to the cops. Amenaide is sentenced to death but Tancredi decides to defend her in a duel with her accuser Orbazzano. He wins, so Armenaide is safe, but he still thinks she’s a traitor and so gets himself killed in a shoot out with the cops; albeit after a farewll with Amenaide that takes about 35 minutes. (for Rossini experts this is the Ferrara ending where Tancredi dies, not the happy Venice version)

The atmosphere is patriarchal, mysogynistic, brutal and Catholic. Early on we see the gory killing of a gay man and it’s pretty clear why Tancredi and Amenaide are keeping the nature of their relationship secret. Only right at the end does Tancredi reveal herself as a woman but immediately thereafter she goes down in a hail of bullets. All the other characters are taken away by the cops leaving Tancredi to die alone and hallucinating about what might have been. This is a very simple summary. The production has a number of interesting dramatic and visual twists which keep the interest up.

Musically it’s pretty classic early Rossini. It has lots of good tunes with some well crafted arias and duets. The ones for the two girls are especially lovely. The male chorus gets quite a work out too. My only real caveat is that it’s sometimes rather too bouncy (the chorus “Regna il terror” is a prime example) for the rather serious subject matter but then I could say that about many bel canto operas. I’m also not sure the plot really is up to two and a half hours of music but see previous remark about bel canto!

The real strength of this recording though is the singing and acting of Mélissa Petit as Amenaide and Anna Goryachova as Tancredi. Petit’s coloratura is exquisite and she has beautiful tone. It’s a lovely contrast with Goryachova’s darker, heavier but still very agile voice. They are also very touching together. They are well backed up by solid performances by tenor Antonino Sitagusa as Argirio and bass-baritone Andreas Wolf as Orbazzano. There’s a useful contribution too from Laura Polverelli as Amenaide’s mother Isaura. The gentlemen of the Prague Philharmonic choir throw themselves into some crazy action while singing very competently. The Wiener Symphoniker play idiomatically and conductor Yi-Chen Lin makes judicious pacing choices and keeps it all together nicely. It’s really quite satisfying.

The “multi-cell” set gets judicious film treatment from Davide and Tiziano Mancini backed up by an excellent picture and first class sound (LPCM and DTS-HD-MA) on Blu-ray. The booklet has a full track listing and short but useful notes. Subtitle options are Italian, English, German, Korean and Japanese.

This is the only video recording of this opera currently availableand it makes a pretty good case for it. It’s certainly worth watching for the performances by Goryachova and Petit. FWIW there was a version recorded at Schwetzingen in 1992 but that’s long gone from the catalogue.

Catalogue information: C Major Blu-ray 769304 (due for release 4th July 2025)

… and this is the 700th video disk review on Operaramblings…

Up an Octavia

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 13:00:00 +0000

The operatic offerings of Boston Early Music Festival — Keiser‘s Octavia and Telemann‘s Pimpinone and Ino — are delectable discoveries

This summer I’m reading a juicy diva autobiography

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 10:00:11 +0000

What better beach read than a juicy diva autobiography?

I, Claudio

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 13:00:03 +0000

Claudio Abbado made his Met debut on 7 October 1968 conducting Verdi’s Don Carlo, led five more performances through 14 November, and then never returned. Chris’s Cache offers the only complete recording I’ve run across from that run.

This summer I’m reading The Music Goes Round

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 10:00:57 +0000

The earliest days of recording told by F.W. Gaisberg, the man who recorded Patti, Melba, Moreschi, and Tamagno among many others.

Lash, Deutsche Oper, 20 June 2025

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 17:27:58 +0000

Images: © Marcus Lieberenz

A – Anna Prohaska
S - Sarah Maria Sun
N – Noa Frenkel
K – Katja Kolm
Live Camera – Nadja Krüger
Synthesiser, Piano – Christoph Grund, Ernst Surberg
Electric Guitar – Adrian Pereyra
Stage percussion – Thomas Döringer, Florian Glotz, Konstantin Tiersch, Laslo Vierk
Box operators – Nana Ajei Boateng, Zé de Pavia, Lennie Fanslau, Victor Naumov, Paula Schumm

Director – Dead Centre (Bush Moukarzel)
Designs – Nina Wetzel
Lighting – Jörg Schuchardt
Sound design – Arne Vierck
Video – Sébastien Dupouey
Dramaturgy – Sebastian Hanusa

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin

Enno Poppe (conductor)

Having been an avid follower of Rebecca Saunders’s music since my first encounter at the Wigmore Hall in 2012, mostly in Germany (Berlin and Munich in particular) but also in London, I was excited to learn her first opera would be given at the Deutsche Oper—and still more excited to be able to visit for the premiere. Equally interesting and exploratory in vocal and non-vocal music and with an excellent track record in choice of verbal texts, Saunders seemed in many ways an ideal candidate for operatic composition. It would at the very least be interesting to see what that development entailed—and so it was.

Lash—Acts of Love, to give it its full title, is not a conventional opera. No surprises there, one might say. Yet if it has elements of something more installation-like, more in Ed Atkins’s libretto (if one can call it that, Saunders also credited for conversion of the initial text) and general dramaturgy than in Saunders’s score, it certainly qualifies as an opera. The Deutsche Oper did it proud, with Bush Moukarzel of Dead Centre; video work by Sébastien Dupouey; a cast of three truly outstanding singers, Anna Prohaska, Sarah Maria Sun, and Noa Frankel, plus the equally excellent actor Katja Kolm, all clearly working together and filmed live by Nadja Krüger; and the house orchestra on fine form indeed, conducted by Enno Poppe. Each of the female voices, indeed their bodies more generally, is intended as the foundation of what we hear and largely succeeds in conveying that sense: four parts of the same woman, not only mirroring, often explicitly, but forming—themselves or rather herself, and the images around them.

What a welcome change, moreover, it was to have so little of the male standpoint (and gaze). Indeed, if that could have been excluded more tightly still – one of many reasons, I fear, to have wished for a different libretto – the work might well have been enhanced. Not that there was any reason to be ungrateful for Enno Poppe’s unfailingly alert, comprehending, dramatically alive conducting, nor for the excellence of the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, male musicians included—and first among equals, those musicians onstage during the third act. Perhaps, though, less might have been more. The excellence of performance, the excellence of the composition also served, perhaps ironically, to point to a lack in Atkins’s text (or whatever we want to call it).

Sex and death are and always have been inextricably interlinked. This presentation of ‘a woman … suspended in the immediate aftermath of a death,’ recounting ‘fantasies and memories of love and loss and fucking and sickness, kissing, eyeballs, genitals, fingertips, lips, and lashes—each scoured for consoling significance to hold back death’s meaninglessness,’ has a stated idea: ‘through the imminence of her own body, her own mortality, she rediscovers loss as the precondition of experience—of love.’ It is not experienced as a narrative; nor would one expect it to be. But Saunders’s writing, through three acts spanning almost two hours, draws it together, like a great symphonic poem with voices. It grows in intensity – judged, I think, by whatever parameter(s) – and gives the strong impression of binding the work together. It also becomes more instrumental/orchestral, both onstage and around the auditorium, but also in the proportion of writing—or so it seemed to me. ‘Organic’ is doubtless an epithet outdated by at least two centuries for such writing, but perhaps I might be indulged here, if only in the Hegelian sense of a musical owl of Minerva spreading its wings at the performance’s dusk.

That said – and with all the caveats concerning a single hearing/viewing – my expectations were only partly fulfilled. This is owed in no part to the difficulty and particularity of writing opera, even for otherwise excellent composers. With the best will in the world, Schubert, generally recognised to be one of the supreme vocal and instrumental composers in the Western tradition, was not a significant composer of opera, though his operas are far from without interest. I could not help but wonder whether Saunders’s musical and dramatic gifts were not so readily operatic, whether a large-scale concert-work such as YES were more her thing. My problems, though, did not really lie there. At the post-show reception, Intendant Dietmar Schwarz described Atkins’s text as ‘postdramatic’. I suppose so, if, as Hans-Thies Lehmann more or less intended the term, we look at what is held to fall under that umbrella rather than using it to define. Whether it works well, in this context or any other, is another matter.

Ambiguity is often a good thing. That as to whose the ‘lash’ is – the woman’s, the creator’s (i.e. Atkins’s own private-public monologue), or anything else – has much to be said for it, though it does not really seem to lead anywhere, without that failure to lead anywhere making an evident point. Ultimately, the music and the performances seem to shoulder all the work, hamstrung by a stream of consciousness that is hardly Joyce or Beckett. Constant repetition of ‘fucking’ and so on may not be intended to shock, yet comes across as thinking itself edgier than it really is; hand on heart, I found it more than a little tedious, more akin to a little boy shouting ‘look at me’ than anything that might have been claimed for it (and doubtless will be).

I felt ambivalent, then, and not a little saddened to do so. The Blue Woman, seen at London’s Linbury Theatre in 2022, struck me as an ultimately more successful example of what postdramatic, feminist opera (as opposed to postdramatic and/or feminist productions of operatic repertoire) might be—at least restricted to words, their dramaturgy, and to a certain extent their further implications, as opposed to musical quality (or performance). By the same token, I certainly felt a desire to revisit the work, to continue, like the woman at its centre, to piece together my experience, although perhaps not immediately. I shall only too happily find myself ashamed concerning initial lack of understanding. In the meantime, a handful of boos (grow up!) and a houseful of rapturous applause told a more straightforward story.

Skelton as Grimes

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 15:10:41 +0000

Continuing the theme of all Grimes, all the time… The only commercially available recording of Britten’s Peter Grimes with Stuart Skelton in the title role is a Chandos SACD recorded in Bergen in 2019 with Edward Gardner conducting and it’s really good. These two though had been captured on video in 2015 in a David Alden production at ENO. That had formed part of the ENO Live series of cinema transmissions but it was rebroadcast in August last year on Sky Arts in the UK. That version (at least my copy) is 720p video and AAC 2 channel 48kHz audio; so not quite Blu-ray standard but very tolerable.

Alden’s production appears to be set in the late 1940s and it’s quite abstract; mostly just trestle tables and a capstan arranged in various ways. It’s also a bit weird. Ned Keene (Leigh Melrose) seems to be some sort of drug addict (which I suppose makes sense) but it’s really Auntie and her nieces who scoop the weirdness pot. Auntie is Rebecca de Pont Davies who is quite striking looking to begin with but in a loud striped trouser suit and fur coat and carrying a riding crop she’s something else. In the “dance” scene she’s also wearing a boar’s head! The nieces; Rhian Lois and Mary Bevan, are played almost as automata; whether it’s in school uniforms carrying weird dolls or in a sailor suit or battle dress they dance together in a weirdly jerky fashion. The apprentice too is played as if he’s seriously autistic, or scared out of his wits, or both. The Act 3 dance is also a bit odd. Not just Auntie and the nieces but Swallow in a pink skirt!

To be honest though those are the weird elements and otherwise it’s mostly quite conventional. Skelton is on the dreamy end of the Grimes spectrum which suits his rather beautiful voice but he’s big and burly enough to convince in the nastier moments. The big lyrical moments; :What harbour shelters peace” and “Now the Great Bear and Pleiades” are gorgeous. There’s a fine, rather intellectual Balstrode, in Iain Paterson and Elza van den Heever acts brilliantly as Ellen Orford. I don’t think I’ve seen an Ellen bring out that “kindness” is just another form of non-conformity that the Borough deprecates as well as she. Her singing is excellent too. One might ask for a slightly sweeter tone in some of the very high passages but I’d say that about almost everyone who has sung the role.

Felicity Palmer is rather good as the laudanum addled “sleuth” Mrs. Sedley. Timothy Robinson, as Horace Adams, and Matthew Best, as Swallow, are convincing oldsters and Michael Colvin is an excellent Bob Boles; drunk or sober. Matthew Treviño is a more personable Carter Hobson than most. As in many ENO productions the chorus plays a key role. Here they are truly menacing, especially in Act 3 where they turn into a Union Flag waving lynch mob. Gardner conducts with drama and flair especially in the Sea Interludes which are played “bare”; no visual interest injected here. It’s really a very fine ensemble performance built around one of the best interpreters of the title role.

Andy Morahan directed for video. It’s mostly OK but I don’t really get the point of shots from behind the action pointing to the audience, which one can’t actually see because the auditorium is dark. Is it meant to imply “We are all the Borough”? That apart it’s OK and the picture and sound are very acceptable. My copy has hard coded English sub-titles.

I have no idea how one might get hold of a copy of this. I do not believe it’s ever had a commercial video disk release but if you do have a way to get a copy I’d recommend it for some fine performances and a production which, if sometimes weird, is never boring.

Ah! Bella a me ritorna

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 13:00:57 +0000

Norma returns La Scala this week for the first time in nearly 40 years and parterre box marks the occasion with titular druidess Marina Rebeka singing a bit of Verdi

This summer I’m reading Mawrdew Czgowchwz

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 10:00:09 +0000

(What else?)

July 2025

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 14:15:58 +0000

July in Toronto is really all about two festivals; the Toronto Fringe Festival and Toronto Summer Music.

The Fringe runs July 2nd to July 13th and there are more than 100 shows on 20+ stages. There’s a huge range of performance styles; drama, comedy, clowning, musicals, stand up etc. Most shows run an hour or less and the standard ticket price is $18.75 though there are plenty of discounts plus multi show passes as well as free events at the Fringe Hub which this year is at Soulpepper with events also across the street at Old Flame brewery. Quality varies a lot. Some shows are excellent; Monks last year would be a case in point, but others a re a bit meh. But that’s the point really. You can see what looks interesting to you. All the details are here.

Toronto Summer Music runs July 10th to August 2nd and features a range of fully professional concerts, performances by their interns and mentors, community stuff and more. From an opera/vocal music point of view there are three obvious shows to catch. Opening night sees the Capella Mediterranea give a concert performance of Monteverdi’s surprisingly modern and dead sexy Il coronazione di Poppea at Koerner Hall. On the 14th soprano Mary Bevan appears in recital with pianist Roger Vignoles at Walter Hall (she’s also doing a free master class on the 11th). Last, but most certainly not least, on July 24th there’s a concert version (with projections) of Brian Current and Marie Clements’ MISSING; an opera about murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. It sounds like a bit of a downer but it’s actually a very well crafted and ultimately hopeful piece. On a lighter note, Schmaltz and Pepper have two concerts in Walter Hall on the 16th; little kids at 11am and big kids at 7.30pm. Also on the 31st in Koerner Hall Simone McIntosh, soloists and orchestra have a sort of Vienna pops concert with both Strausses, Lehar etc. All the details are available here.

New world charm

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 14:00:08 +0000

The Met Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin surges into summer with a mixed program at Carnegie Hall

They call me the wanderer

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 13:00:43 +0000

Kent Nagano‘s and the Richard-Wagner-Akademie‘s historically informed Ring Cycle takes on Siegfried in Dresden

This summer I’m reading Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 10:00:33 +0000

Not really an opera book but, c’mon, it’s Bach.

Langridge’s Grimes revisited

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 13:31:27 +0000

Almost fourteen years ago I reviewed the DVD of the 1994 ENO production of Britten’s Peter Grimes. The DVD was so bad technically that it was quite hard to decide much about the merits of the performance although it was obvious that Philip Langridge’s Grimes was something special. On June 1st this year the BBC rebroadcast the recording in HD on BBC4. I have a copy of that broadcast and it’s way better than the North American DVD release and so I wanted to clarify and, where appropriate, correct what I said in that earlier review.

The broadcast was made in 1080p with 48kHz AAC sound which is pretty standard for HD television. As far as the video goes it’s overkill. The picture isn’t that good. It’s 1990s DVD standard and no better. Detail gets lost in what is quite a dark production. The audio though is way better than the old DVD release. DVD quality certainly but not quite as good as modern HD recordings. Some of the orchestral playing, and certainly the chorus, sounds a bit muddy but that’s being very picky.

There are indications too that this was not a performance of the production exactly as seen by the Coliseum audience of the time. The credits list a TV make up designer and a TV lighting designer which suggests to me that it was a special performance for the cameras. Nonetheless it’s clearly based on Tim Albery’s staging but has a 1990s “made for TV” feel about it; especially the extensive use of close ups (the Act 3 mad scene is almost entirely head shots) and weird camera angles. TV director Barrie Gavin seems especially fond of filming from directly overhead. I’m still not entirely sure how the extensive use of video (mostly during the Sea Interludes) played out for the live audience. As a device in a film it’s effective enough if a bit obsessed with the dead apprentice.

So what would I change from my earlier review? Mostly I’d give a much higher rating to orchestra, chorus and conductor. Any shortcomings noted in the earlier review were almost entirely down to the sound quality on that release. The thing I would emphasise is just how good Philip Langridge and Alan Opie are. I don’t think anyone has sung this role better than Langridge; distinguished though some of the competition is. The same is true of Opie. He’s superb. So, although this record does show it’s age a bit it’s worth seeing if you can get hold of a copy. I’m not sure how one does that though. There’s a region coded DVD (not North America) on the Arthaus label though how good it is and whether it’s even available I can’t say. This would be a good candidate for remastering to Blu-ray but I doubt there’s enough of a market to justify it.

SF Opera's La Bohème (2nd Cast)

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 12:50:35 +0000

* Notes * The production of La Bohème at this season closed yesterday evening at San Francisco Opera with a competent second cast (pictured, photograph by Matthew Washburn) for three of the main singers. The orchestra sounded clear and lovely. The final performance was consistent with the prima, though conductor Ramón Tebar and the orchestra were even more refined. Again, I really loved the string and woodwind soli. The chorus did well in Act II, everything seemed together and strong. I had a better appreciation for bass Bogdan Talos (Colline) from the balcony, his voice has a nice weight and ping. when needed but also very amusing when called for. As Marcello, Baritone Lucas Meachem is an incredible singing actor, he is nothing if not reliable. He fits right in as a young person despite the fact he's been singing at San Francisco Opera for around two decades. Soprano Brittany Renee (Musetta) is full but has an icy quality that works well for "Quando me'n vo'." Soprano Nicole Car looks delicate as Mimì, but her sound is, at times, rather too robust. She was able to color and shade her notes to sound more frail, but she was occasionally shrill and gasping. Tenor Evan LeRoy Johnson is earnest as Rodolfo with a bright voice. He wasn't completely secure for every note, but there is something very appealing about his brassy timbre. Car and Johnson's duet in Act III was a highlight of the performance, they sang nicely together. * Tattling * I noticed quite a bit of rustling of food wrappers and dropping of objects from laps, but no electronic noise in the back of the balcony.

Peter Grimes

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 13:00:39 +0000

Nicky Spence sings the title role in a performance recorded earlier this spring in Cardiff

Carmen

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 13:00:27 +0000

Gäelle Arquez sings the title role in a live broadcast from Rome

Un Ballo in Maschera in the dark

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 10:59:30 +0000

Vincent Boussard’s production of Vedi’s Un Ballo in Maschera staged and filmed at Barcelona’s Liceu in 2017 is dark. Basically there’s a light box in which the characters at front of stage can be seen while others lurk in the darkness. According to the notes Broussard is using light and shadow to bring out the themes of illusion and truth, duty and betrayal. That sounds to me like cleverness masquerading as a production concept and bar a few striking visuals this is hardly a production at all.

The light box is “enlivened” a bit by a hanging convict in Act 2 and a chandelier like object in the final scene. It isn’t helped much by Christian Lacroix’ costumes which jump around in period for no discernible reason. Mostly the characters (chorus included) are dressed in modern black though for some reason in the scene in Ulrica’s cave they wear big white ruffs (particularly odd since the libretto says Riccardo is disguised as a fisherman). At the beginning and end of the opera Riccardo is dressed as Prince Charming for some reason while at the ball Oscar sports a pouffy skirt and a bouffant hairdo and the chorus appear to be dressed in Mylar space blankets. I don’t see how this clarifies the production concept; if there is one.

The singing though is really rather good. Piotr Beczala, as Riccard, is everything one could want from a Verdi tenor with power to burn and ringing high notes. Carlos Álvarez as Renato is equally good with fine legato, power and beauty of tone. Katerina Treyakova, as Oscar, has really good coloratura and great agility. Keri Alkema’s Amelia is actually quite fine but a bit outshone by the guys. Dolores Zajick does her witchy thing as Ulrica and there’s some very good work too from Roman Ialcic and Antonio di Matteo as Samuel and Tom. The Liceu’s chorus sounds fine and there is some very nice orchestral playing. Renato Palumbo goes for grand where it makes sense but generally keeps things moving along pretty briskly. All in all, musically this recording is top notch.

Sound (DTS-HD-MA and LPCM stereo) is fine on Blu-ray and thew picture is decent but, understandably given how dark everything is, Fabrice Castanier uses a lot of close ups. I think what there is to be seen can be seen though. There are no extras and the booklet has a synopsis and track listing and quite unhelpful short notes. Subtitle options are Italian, English, French, German, Spanish, Catalan, Japanese and Korean.

There are already two other Blu-rays of this piece with Piotr Beczala on the same label. I wonder what prompted them to release this one eight years after it was recorded!

Catalogue information: C Major Blu-ray 768804

This summer I’m reading A Time to Sing

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 10:00:41 +0000

I did not expect Dorothy Kirsten‘s autobiography to be so rewarding a read: I did so twice.

Hey now, hear what I say now

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 10:00:19 +0000

A reminder to relax and refresh this summer by sharing your innermost operatic thoughts for The Talk of the Town

The Two Deaths of Ophelia

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 18:02:12 +0000

The latest Happenstancers gig, which took place at 918 Bathurst on Thursday evening, was an exploration of the death of Ophelia and related ideas with works for assorted chamber ensembles plus/minus voices. Ten composers; all of whom could at a stretch be considered “contemporary”, were featured in a programme that, with interval, lasted two and three quarter hours. That’s a feat of stamina for performers and audience alike as none of the music performed was “easy” and no notes or introductions were provided.

Each half of the programme started off with a piece by Linda Catlin Smith, who was in the audience. Stare at the River for piano, string bass, trumpet, clarinet, violin and percussion was quite sparse and open textured while The River was more obviously lyrical with guitar, cello and Danika Lorèn replacing piano, trumpet and bass.

The first half continued with Shawn Jaeger’s Love Is for two sopranos (Danika plus Reilly Nelson) and two baritones (Dion Mazerolle and Jesse Blumberg) and it’s quite dark and weird in its exploration of what exactly love is. Two new pieces by Ryan Chase to texts by Chaucer; Now Wonder Nyce and Straunge featured Reilly with small ensemble. This was spiky, shimmery kind of music and an interesting contrast with Luis Ramirez’ more tonal/lyrical piece Drawn which almost evokes bird song.

Ophelia got a look in with Wolfgang Rihm’s Ophelia Sings for piano and soprano (Reilly). For Rihm, it’s a surprisingly straightforward setting of text from Hamlet which quotes from anon or Walter Raleigh depending who you believe. Penderecki’s ethereal Abschied for strings and clarinet finished off the first half.

The second part of the programme seemed less dense, at least to start with. Following the Smith we heard Thomas Adès’ minimalist and fragmentary Arcadiana (selections from) plus selections from Ann Southam’s piano suite Rivers. Then it got a whole lot heavier with Knussen’s Ophelia Dances; a heavily chromatic piece for large chamber ensemble, and finally Vivier’s Bouchara for soprano (Danika) and large ensemble. This was really complex, heavily textured and very loud! Brilliantly sung too.

Conceptually we had heard two possible ways of depicting Ophelia’s fate in music over the course of nearly three hours. That’s pretty ambitious and I would suggest that however well done, and it was well done, would overtax most any audience without at least some explanation of what was going on.

For the record the Happenstancers were the afore-mentioned singers lus Luri Lee and Sienna Cho on violins, Hee-Soo Yoon on violin/viola, Hez Leung on viola, Peter Eom on cello, Travis Harrison on bass, Lenny Ranallo on guitar, Jonnghun Cho on keyboards, Wesley Shen on celeste, Chris James on flute, Aleh Remezeau on oboe, Brad Cherwin on clarinets, Nicolas Richard on bassoon, Ryan Garbett on horn, Declan Scott on trumpet , Nikki Huang and Thomas Li on percussion with Simon Rivard conducting when things got past critical mass. Also a massive shout for heroic work by Hoi Tong Keung as production/stage manager.

All about her stepmother

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 13:00:58 +0000

A new recording by the London Symphony Orchestra is the latest landmark in a spring full of Janácek‘s Jenufa

Dialogues des Carmélites

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 13:00:34 +0000

A live broadcast from Venice featuring Anna Caterina Antonacci as Madame de Croissy

Dido and Aeneas, Guildhall, 9 June 2025

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 09:03:41 +0000

Milton Court Theatre

Images: David Monteith Hodge
Dido (Karima El Demerdasch)

Dido – Karima El Demerdasch
Aeneas – Joshua Saunders
Belinda – Manon Ogwen Parry
Sorceress – Julia Merino
Attendant, Second Woman – Hannah McKay
Witches – Seohyun Go, Julia Solomon
Spirit – Gabriella Noble
Sailor – Tobias Campos Santiñaque

Director – Oliver Platt
Designs – Alisa Kalyanova
Movement – Caroline Lofthouse
Lighting – Eli Hunt

Video – Mabel Nash

Chorus (chorus master: Henry Reavey) and Orchestra of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama James Henshaw (conductor)

This new Guildhall Dido and Aeneas, directed by Oliver Platt and designed by Alisa Kalyanova, was not the Dido of your expectations. I can be reasonably sure of that. Doors opened to reveal a club scene onstage, electronic music of a decidedly non-Stockhausen variety blasting through the small theatre. Dido eventually joined, dancing as if her life depended on it; perhaps, in retrospect, it did. Belinda too (if indeed these were there names). And then, suddenly everything changed. Purcell’s music was to be heard. In an unanticipated Dr Who-like shift – will the Queen of Carthage turn out to be the new Doctor heralded by Billie Piper? – we found ourselves in a very different world indeed. Its denizens took what they wanted from Dido’s handbag, re-clothed her, and left her generally shocked and bemused, apparently having no more idea what was going on than I did.

Sailor (Tobias Campos Santiñaque) and Chorus

We now appeared to be in a rural English community, with straw figures, a maypole, and enforced country dancing, clothes suggestive more of the early twentieth century than Purcell’s time, let alone that of Dido and Aeneas. When Aeneas arrived, seemingly similarly abducted, he had no more idea what was going on. So far as I could discern, neither of them did throughout, brought together by the strange villagers, though again, neither did I. Punk-triffid witches did their thing. Aeneas eventually resolved to stay, Dido by then rejecting him, physically berating him, until he turned on her and seemed on the verge (at least) of sexual assault, until she stabbed him, after which she was led to the Maypole to be hanged. It was quite absorbing in its way and very well blocked and choreographed, but I really could not tell you what it was about or how it cohered. Was that the point? It may have been, given liberties taken – nothing wrong with that – for the missing music, but I suspect I was missing something. Was it perhaps all an unfortunate dream, arising from nightclub hallucination? I fear I shall simply have to admit defeat.

Dido and Chorus

All in the cast, the excellent chorus included, threw themselves into this oddly compelling vision in wholehearted, committed fashion. Karima El Demerdasch’s Dido was first-rate, from wild abandon – difficult to imagine Janet Baker or Jessye Norman in this production – through fear and unease to final tragedy. Accomplished through the synthesis of words, music, and gesture that, put crudely, is operatic performance, this signalled not only great promise but great achievement. I am sure we shall see and hear more from her. Aeneas is, especially by comparison, a bit of a thankless role, but Joshua Saunders made a good deal of this bemused conception. Manon Ogwen Parry’s Belinda and Julia Merino’s Sorceress were both very well taken, as indeed were the other, smaller roles, Tobias Campos Santiñaque’s Sailor a winning ‘boozy’ moment in the spotlight. James Henshaw’s conducting complemented the punk-folk conception of the staging, more City Waites than Les Arts Florissants, let alone English Chamber Orchestra. It may not be how I hear it, but it is hardly how I see it either, and performance should always extend beyond ritual. There was, then, much to enjoy—and to puzzle over.

Saul, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 8 June 2025

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 19:05:13 +0000

Saul – Christopher Purves
David – Iestyn Davies
Merab – Sarah Brady
Michal – Soraya Mafi
Jonathan – Linard Vrielink
Abner, High Priest, Doeg, Amalekite – Liam Bonthrone
Witch of Endor – Ru Charlesworth
Dancers – Lucy Alderman, Robin Gladwin, Lukas Hunt, Dominic Rocca, Nathan Ryles, Daisy West

Director – Barrie Kosky
Revival director – Donna Stirrup
Designs – Katrin Lea Tag
Choreography – Otto Pichler
Revival choreography – Merry Holden
Lighting – Joachim Klein

The Glyndebourne Chorus (chorus director: Aidan Oliver)
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Jonathan Cohen (conductor)

Saul (Christopher Purves)

I found myself listening at home to Saul a few months ago (Charles Mackerras’s outstanding Leeds Festival recording with Donald McIntyre, James Bowman, Margaret Price, et al.). It made for often uncomfortable listening, the ever-problematical identification of Handel’s Protestant England with the ‘children of Israel’ all the more when daily we see the Philistines’ successors mercilessly slain in the name of a latter-day ‘Eretz Israel’, itself the product of the imperialism on which the new, fiscal-military state of Great Britain had been founded. Culminating in news from the Amalekite – David’s ‘Impious wretch, of race accursed!’ – that Saul has been slain and Israelite exortation to ‘Gird on thy sword, thou man of might’, it seemed both a work both for now and absolutely not. At least it was not Joshua or Judas Maccabeus, I thought; and indeed its central dramatic concerns are not necessarily those, however glaring they may stand out now. The work’s political dimension is important, but is one of several and arguably not the most important. In any case, it extends beyond war and empire to broader questions of kingship—not least given the precedent of the Whig establishment’s treasonous support for the Dutch invasion that had removed ‘the Lord’s anointed’ within living memory, and without which George II would stand nowhere near the throne.

Barrie Kosky’s Glyndebourne production of Saul was first seen in 2015: what may now seem a very different world, prior to Britain’s fateful referendum, Trump’s election, Covid, the invasion of Ukraine, and of course genocide in Gaza. None of those things came out of nowhere, of course, but the world was different. He was – and is – perfectly entitled to explore other aspects of the drama, and it is neither his nor revival director Donna Stirrup’s fault that events have overtaken us. Kosky offers a typically pugnacious, persuasive defence of staging such works at all and of his particular aesthetic in the programme. ‘But when you put Handel’s oratorios on stage you know that there will be a flood of opera reviewers who’ll say these pieces were not written for the stage, so why are we staging them? Get real! Opera is not about rules and regulations. Handel’s oratorios are sometimes more dramatic than his operas. We know that because we can hear it. Their musical landscapes are often more radical than those of the operas.’ I agree with every word. Why, then, beyond the inevitable unease concerning aspects of the drama, did I have my doubts—as someone who has long thought it cried out for the stage?

There are problems intrinsic to the work, of course, as there always have been, lying beyond the cul-de-sac of alleged intention. The chorus’s role is one: how to deal with it onstage? Kosky certainly makes the most (as, for instance, in his Komische Oper Hercules) of his opportunities in this respect. An opening festal tableau, gestures arrestingly frozen, draws one in, Kosky’s detailed direction of each member of a crowd that also combines with excellence en masse dovetailing with Katrin Lee Tag’s painterly vision.An eighteenth-century audience, so it seems, participates, mirroring the dual function of the chorus itself, roots in Greek tragedy apparent and brimming with dramatic potential.

David (Iestyn Davies)

The problem for me comes with elements of the conception of the protagonists. Not all of it: much shows great insight. A brazenly opportunist David is the trump card: charisma born of body and battle, seemingly willing to do anything – or anyone – to further his clear yet unstated lust for power. Why bother to spell it out, when the crowd will for him? ‘Saul, who hast thy thousands slain, welcome to thy friends again! David his ten thousands slew, ten thousand praises are his due!’ There is, moreover, a creditable effort to make more of Saul’s daughters and their roles, though that also leads us to more difficult territory. In that programme interview, Kosky states his dislike of realism, but that seems to refer to aesthetics rather than to psychology. (I actually would not have minded more on the former side and less dance, however finely accomplished; but that is a matter of taste, no more.) It is a particular form of psychological realism that, though I can see the temptation, also leads the drama to become less interesting and arguably less coherent. If one portrays calculation in such realistic way, there is nothing ‘mad’ about Saul’s reaction. Michal and still more Jonathan must simply be in love with David, which is obviously part of what is going on but surely not the only or overriding dramaturgical concern. And the decision to present Saul for much of the time as if already in Bedlam – perhaps even as if a flashback – is ultimately reductive, again crowding out other concerns.

Set against that, the darker turn following the interval makes an undeniably strong impression. There is a splendid star-turn (literally) from the revolving solo organist onstage. When Saul visits the Witch of Endor, Kosky offers a nice sense of Tiresias in Beckettland, to the weird, disconcerting extent that Saul feeds from one of the Witch’s breasts. The doomed monarch also voices Samuel’s words himself: possessed or merely delusional? If Kosky and Tag’s Beckettland looks surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) close to that seen for their Castor et Pollux (ENO and elsewhere) and Don Giovanni (Vienna), most production teams have recognisable correspondences over time. Richard Jones & Co. anyone? The important question is what one does with them.

Jonathan Cohen’s conducting I found more difficult to get on with: not only aggressively ‘period’, but of a variety that too often skated over Handel’s strengths as a musical dramatist. There was little grandeur, if often much rasping noise. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment strings might surely have been permitted fuller tone at times. Excellent woodwind fared better: characterful and dramatically telling. Handel’s writing for bassoon – not only in the Witch of Endor scene – is worth an essay alone from someone. It certainly sounded so here. Greater variety of tempo was achieved as time went on, if there were still cases, especially in choral numbers, when breakneck speed disrupted ensemble.

Merab (Sarah Brady), Michal (Soraya Malfi), and Jonathan (Linard Vrielink)

Christopher Purves’s Saul was superbly acted, if sometimes a little close to Sprechgesang (leaving aside purely spoken interjections further to enhance the impression of insanity). There was often, though, a thinness of tone to his delivery that complemented Cohen’s way with the orchestra, but which on ‘purely’ musical terms left me at least missing something more bass-like. Iestyn Davies’s David was outstanding in every respect: word, tone, and gesture a model of characterisation. Sarah Brady and Soraya Mafi offered a haughty Merab and an attractive, calculating Michal, in fine dramatic contrast both with one another and with the honeyed, imploring sincerity of Linard Vrielink’s Jonathan. Kosky’s amalgamation of Abner, High Priest, and Doeg, into a single Fool-like character elicited sinister ambiguity from Liam Bonthrone, who also took on the ‘cursed’ role of the Amalekite, mysteriously hooded in the auditorium. Ru Charlesworth offered a darkly vivid portrayal for Kosky and Handel’s strange conception of the Witch of Endor. The Glyndebourne Chorus likewise responded to a varied set of challenges – Handel’s, Kosky’s, and Cohen’s – with fine musical and dramatic dedication.

My reservations, then, were relatively minor. Audience enthusiasm suggested they were little shared. This was a highly enjoyable occasion, though might it have offered more dramatically? To my dismay, I could not help but wonder whether a concert performance, albeit differently conducted, might have come closer in that respect.

Strauss - Der Rosenkavalier (Le Chevalier à la Rose) at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 16:26:00 +0000

Théâtre des Champs Elysées, Paris, Monday June 2 2025

Conductor: Henrik Nánási. Production: Krzysztof Warlikowski. Sets and costumes: Małgorzata Szczęśniak. Choreography: Claude Bardouil. Lighting: Felice Ross. Video: Kamil Polak. Feldmarschallin von Werdenberg: Véronique Gens. Octavian: Niamh O'Sullivan. Sophie: Regula Mühlemann. Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau: Peter Rose. Faninal: Jean-Sébastien Bou. Annina: Eléonore Pancrazi. Valzacchi: Krešimir Špicer. Sänger: Francesco Demuro. Leitmetzerin: Laurène Paternò. Polizeikommissar, Notar: Florent Karrer. Haushofmeister: François Piolino. Wirt: Yoann Le Lan. Orchestre National de France. Unikanti Choir, Maîtrise des Hauts-de-Seine children’s choir.

Photos: Vincent Pontet

I suppose it had to happen one day…

If I’ve done my sums right, this Rosenkavalier at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées was my sixteenth Krzysztof Warlikowski production, not counting the times I’ve gone back to see some of them more than once. Since I was first hooked by his Makropoulos at the Bastille, through thick and thin - inevitably, some of his productions are less ‘thick’ than others - I’ve been a fan. I missed his first for the Paris Opera - Iphigénie en Tauride, in 2006 - but made up for that by seeing it later. I’ve explained time after time to people who complain that his ‘tics’ are predictable that, if you like Bruckner symphonies, novels by Ivy Compton-Burnett or Carry-On films, you want more of the same, not something completely different. I’m living proof that the assertion I once read online, that ‘nobody makes a special trip to see an opera just for the director,’ is false: I’ve scheduled trips to see Warlikowski’s work beyond Paris and Brussels. I’ve invited friends to see it too, and made fans of them as well. They aren’t usually interested in opera, but if Warlikowski’s directing, they want to go.

But this time, for the first time, I wasn't convinced. And as the press had raised my expectations high, implying this show was Warlikowski at his best, and shocked at the booing that greeted it, I was sorely disappointed.

Not that he hadn’t done his homework, as usual. Warlikowski is an intelligent, thoughtful director. He takes the job seriously and - I believe, though others don’t - respects the works he’s staging. Like Romeo Castellucci’s, his productions are underpinned by a mille-feuille of interrelated references. You may not get them all, but you're sure every detail, every design choice and gesture, has been thought through and is significant. Like multiple layers of paint on canvas or wood, these substrates may not be obvious but they’re there, adding depth and complexity to your experience. His work is like a puzzle that keeps you wondering, keeps you guessing, forces you to think. Puzzles can be addictive.

This new Rosenkavalier is - like Robert Carsen’s Capriccio at the Palais Garnier - site-specific. The single set is inspired by the Théâtre des Champs Elysées (and its Studio) itself, in the house’s ‘signature’ pinkish burgundy, with a sinuous, sleek balcony on the rear wall. It is at once a stage, a backstage area, and an auditorium, sometimes equipped with rows of seats, sometimes with three dressing tables with gleaming mirrors and, yes, a washbasin. Mobile walls of square glass bricks, set in a red grid, refer directly to a revolutionary modernist building in Paris called the Maison de Verre (1928). They glide across to form smaller spaces as the plot requires.

In this evocative space, the production interweaves the key notion of performative representation - the public staging of modern life on digital ‘glass house’ platforms - with the gender ambiguities and other issues inherent in Hofmannsthal’s libretto, and the history - including Josephine Baker’s Revue Nègre (1925) - of the house. It also bears in mind that the origins of the story were French, and plays with a kind of Vienna-Paris artistic dichotomy, pre- and post-WWI (cf. all these references to the 20s).

But I can’t go into every detail; this article, already long, would go on forever. Here, instead, are just a few pointers that I hope will give an idea of how it looked and felt.

The Marschallin is portrayed as a ‘digitally famous’ personality, somewhere between a mature (and slender) Kim Kardashian and Anna Wintour. Her life is lived mostly in public, surrounded by a kind of cour des miracles of camp, extravagantly-dressed, gender-fluid fashion victims. Annina and Valzacchi wield cameras and microphones, the pet-seller pulls a tiny mechanical dog on a string, the orphans look and giggle like Japanese cosplay teenagers, and the hammy scene acted out by the Italian singer - a boxer in red trunks - and the Marschallin stretched out like a silent-film star on the bed, is captured with a smartphone by by Hippolyte, stretched out on the floor.

The Marschallin’s in charge, deliberately staging Octavian’s ‘handover’. At the end of act one, she checks on Sophie, who’s at her dressing-table getting ready for the presentation in act two, which the Marschallin observes, with her (female) sidekick Mohamed, from the balcony. Whether they’re actually watching the live action, or Robert Wiene’s 1926 silent film of Der Rosenkavalier, shot in Vienna and projected here, is left unclear.

The third act, at the inn, opens with the vivid green curtain that brought the second to a close, and is watched by all of the entourage we met in the first, from their seats under the balcony. Leopold, an afro-haired break dancer, helps Octavian into a slinky black dress and bouffant black wig that recall Warlikowski’s ‘Amy Winehouse’ portrayal of Medea. The apparitions are near-naked black dancers with white faces. Or might they be white dancers with painted bodies? As the masquerade ends, before the trio, all take their bows at the front of the stage.

The three acts are doubly framed. A video, at the start, as the horns strike up, shows two beautiful women in bed: the older Gens with dark hair, the younger O'Sullivan blonde. At the end, during the new couple’s final duet, we see another video: the Marschallin pours herself a drink after she joins her husband at home. Sophie, meanwhile, removes Octavian’s curly red wig and lets down her hair: blonde again.

A dense production, full of ideas… so why didn’t it work for me this time?

In Eurotrashy Europe, we’re used to what the French call décalages: mismatches between text, plot and what we see on stage. Provided the concepts behind it all are convincing enough, the mental gymnastics involved can be interesting and entertaining. So my WTF threshold is high, but this time, I found the constant discrepancies exasperating.

Is it possible to update Der Rosenkavalier to the present day, or is it better to stop at WWI? The director does nothing to explain Octavian’s sword on the bedroom floor - not even borrowing a fencing helmet from his staging of Don Carlos. His deliberately ungendered approach (to Octavian in particular: we never really know if he or she is, well, a he or a she) might be fine, only it clashes all the time with Hofmannsthal’s gendered text. And it’s very hard to believe that his Marschallin would dismiss her household of mincing fashionistas to get ready to go to church. Who is this present-day ‘Marschallin’ anyway? Of course, Instagram influencers are supposed to wield influence, and Anna Wintour is fashion royalty, but where does Marie-Thérèse get all her power? And what, in this day and age, is all this rigmarole about Ochs needing a young nobleman to present a silver rose?

Worst of all, and most disconcerting to me, much of the acting, which usually rings true in Warlikowski’s productions, is hammy and camp: old-fashioned, caricatural camp, I mean, recalling Benny Hill shows, and Mr. Humphries in Are You Being Served? Even the way people smoke, taking great gulps at their cigarettes in too-quick succession, looks fake. (The constant smoking, in particular, exasperated my neighbour as, like the break-dancing to Strauss’s waltzes, we’ve seen too much of it recently) Perhaps just as, in my view, Laurent Pelly would be better-off sticking to comedy, Warlikowski should steer clear of it in future.

Musically, the evening was a mixed bag. Among the supporting roles, Yoann Le Lan’s innkeeper stood out, though the poor chap choked on his topmost note. Some may recall François Piolino as the cross-gendered fairy Manto in José Montalvo’s vividly memorable production of Rameau’s Les Paladins, more than two decades ago. Even if vocally he’s no longer at his best, it was nice to find him again here, after making an honourable career of these smaller parts, as both majordomos.

Eléonore Pancrazi was an unusually ripe- and round-voiced Annina, and Krešimir Špicer a resounding, almost roaring, Valzacchi. Jean-Sébastien Bou plainly enjoyed playing Faninal, but, though he’s a singer I generally like, he was in his worst barking mode the evening I was there, blasting out his good notes like a foghorn. ‘Shouting,’ a friend of mine who likes him less has always called it.

Francesco Demuro, flexing his muscles for the smartphone cameras as a kind of Rocky-cum-Rudolf Valentino, made a three-course meal of his Italian aria, hamming it up outrageously, but hitting all the notes. Peter Rose is a veteran Ochs. His voice now shows signs of fatigue, sometimes lacking body. The subterranean last note of his parting ‘Keine Nacht dir zu lang’ was barely audible. But his experience showed in the fluency he brought to the character’s ‘patter’, a parlando so natural it verged on Sprechstimme.

I certainly got a thrill from the presentation scene, but after that it seemed as if Regula Mühlemann (Sophie) - a little bit mature and sturdy, incidentally, for her prim little girl’s yellow velvet coat and frilly socks - had shot her vocal bolt. As a result, the final trio wasn’t quite the sublime escalation we look forward to (supposing we’ve stayed to the end). Odd casting, I thought.

But Niamh O'Sullivan, whom I’d only previously seen in Händel (Second Harlot in Solomon in Madrid) was a convincingly vehement Octavian. Back then I’d found her voice ‘interestingly deep and dark,’ and that darkness and complexity combined in an appropriately virile timbre. This contrasted nicely with the supple elegance of Véronique Gens as the Marschallin, so some of the evening’s best bits came when the two were together. Gens’s voice, instantly recognisable, is quite catnippy to me. I love its easy grace, and dark-gold, satiny core. So I’m glad she got the chance to fulfil her wish to sing the part by replacing Marlis Petersen, initially announced. As you might expect, she brought to it a natural, unaffected nobility, rare these days, that reminded me of Dame Felicity Lott’s incarnation, more years ago than I care to count.

Strauss doesn’t really run in the veins of the Orchestre National de France. To my mind (but I'm not a musicologist) he calls, at least in his most spectacularly complex passages, for a special degree of rhythmic and chromatic fluency and clarity; a good conductor will help the players mark the rhythmic pulse underlying all those flourishes, to keep the score legible. Henrik Nánási’s conducting seemed, on the contrary, pretty bland and featureless to me. There were no great brass outbursts - in the act two presentation, for example, the trumpets played like a tenor afraid of cracking at the top, copping out just when you expected them to dazzle. Fast tuttis were somehow slithery and formless.

The orchestra was best, I'd say, at the softer string passages and (as usual) in woodwind solos. So to me, as the famous trio was, in the end, wanting, the finest moment of the evening was a sublime ‘Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding.’

And finally, a classic scene from a different production:

Note: an edited version of this post may be published on Parterre.com.

Opera Massacres I – Two by Meyerbeer

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 12:54:06 +0000

Death and opera are as linked as bacon and eggs. The subject of this short series of articles is wholesale death – death that kills not only the principals, but the supers as well. This grim occurrence often gets the composer’s best effort, which is my excuse for presenting it.

I’ll start with Meyerbeer. He was the most popular composer of operas in the 19th century. Beginning in the early 20th century, his works fell out of favor, overwhelmed by those of Verdi, Wagner, and Puccini. Though they never completely vanished, their appearance was rare to almost invisible.

One reason they were not performed was that they required extensive resources to stage, as well as a posse of great voices. Also, tastes change, and Meyerbeer seemed old-fashioned and overblown. But the taste cycle is always in motion, and Meyerbeer once again seems attractive despite the paucity of great voices up to the task he set for his principals. Also important is that at his best he is very good.

The two operas discussed here are his two best – Les Huguenots and Le Prophète. Both deal with religious themes, and both end badly for lots of people. Eugène Scribe, who turned out librettos and “well-made” plays like drops in a thunderstorm, wrote the book for both operas. The plots of these archetypal French Grand Operas are very complex. I’ll just summarize their conclusions, which end in carnage.

Les Huguenots took five years to construct. Meyerbeer, who was independently wealthy, could take his time to get things exactly as he wanted. The opera is about the events leading to the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572, when thousands of French Protestants (Huguenots) were massacred by their Catholic compatriots. The event is historical; the characters and their interactions were invented by Scribe.

The opera was a triumph at its premiere at the Paris Opéra. It was the first work to receive 1000 performances at the Opéra. Yet between 1936 to 2018 it went unperformed by the Opéra. Berlioz called the score a “musical encyclopedia”. The Met has done the opera 129 times, but the last performance there was in 1915. If the company could find a proper cast, it seems time for a revival.

The opera ends with Protestant Raoul (tenor) and his Catholic lover together in a church. She knows of the planned massacre of all the Protestants led by her father, St Bris, and abjures her Catholic faith to share Raoul’s religion. Everyone is murdered. As Valentine dies, St Bris discovers that he has killed his own daughter. If this sounds like the end of Halévy’s La Juive (1835), it’s because it is the same – father discovers he’s killed his daughter. Luther’s hymn “Ein feste Burg” is a motif frequently used in the opera. For a synopsis of the story and more, go here.

Le Prophète (1849) was his next French Grand Opera. It is based on the life of John of Leiden, the Anabaptist leader and “King of Münster”. Scribe was again the librettist. The opera is in five acts, as was standard for the Opéra. It was another colossal success for Meyerbeer. Berlioz was again very impressed by Meyerbeer’s skill and invention.

His dominant position in French opera, combined with his Judaism, bred envy and resentment. Wagner was particularly hateful toward Meyerbeer, verging on maniacal anti-Semitism. This behavior was manifest only after Wagner had established himself as a composer. Meyerbeer had helped Wagner early in his career to such an extent that he wrote that without Meyerbeer ‘My wife and I would have starved in Paris’. And Meyerbeer continued his support; he recommended Rienzi to Dresden, and in 1841 he recommended The Flying Dutchman to Berlin.

The complex libretto is filled with ambiguity and darkness. There is no conventional love story; rather, the two protagonists are John and his mother, Fidès. The opera ends in the great hall of the Münster palace. John knows that Imperial troops are approaching and that he will be killed. He has the doors to the hall sealed after his enemies have entered. A huge explosion is triggered, and flames cause the palace to collapse, killing everyone. Sounds like a Wagner opera you may know. I’ll come to that one in a subsequent post.

As I mentioned above, Meyerbeer’s operas are big and require many fine singers. But these characteristics are true for Verdi’s Don Carlos and Aida. The same applies to many of Wagner’s operas. Yet they are regularly staged at both large and smaller houses. Meyerbeer’s turn may be coming around again.

La Bohème at SF Opera

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 13:18:21 +0000

* Notes *
Last night's opening of La Bohème at San Francisco Opera was rather charming with great physical comedy, some lovely singing, and beautiful playing. The revived production is efficient and keeps the timing to a spare 2 hours and 20 minutes.

The production, designed by David Farley, consists of many flat pieces to depict Paris. The scenes change by separating and being able to be turned around and rearranged. Perhaps not breathtaking realistic but scene changes go very quickly and we were never kept waiting. arranged such that a new scene is revealed with simple rotation of the set. Katherine M. Carter's direction the production from John Caird seemed perfectly suited to the piece, there were lots of laughs.

Maestro Ramón Tebar had the orchestra sounding together and very pretty. The woodwinds were particularly poignant and the strings sounded lush.

There was much fine singing and acting. Bass-baritone Dale Travis is always solid as a very funny Benoit and charismatic Alcindoro. Baritone Samuel Kidd sounds sweet as Schaunard, he moves well and is convincing. Bass Bogdan Talos was grave as Colline when needed but also very amusing when called for.

Soprano Andrea Carroll sang Musetta with a piquant sass. Her "Quando me'n vo'" was a showstopper. Baritone Lucas Meachem is a delightful Marcello, his interactions with Musetta felt very believable.

Our leads both have strong voices. Tenor Pene Pati's Rodolfo is endearing and his voice is warm and plummy. His "Che gelida manina" was very pretty, though he seemed to struggle a bit with the duet that followed. He did better with the Act III duet. Soprano Karen Chia-ling Ho sang Mimì with a certain fragility that works nicely. She has some absolutely beautiful low notes, very rich and well-supported.

* Tattling *
The audience seemed engaged and interested. There was an unfortunate amount of mobile phone rings in the center of the orchestra level, three times in Act I and three more for Act III.

Met Opera’s 25-26 HD Season

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 17:33:37 +0000

The Metropolitan Opera has announced the operas that will be telecast next season. They are listed below. For further details about the telecasts and the upcoming season, please visit this link.

A few comments about these shows. Two Bellini operas out of a total of eight is an oddity. The first of these will mark the Met debut of Spanish tenor Xabier Anduaga. He has caused a stir because of the beauty of his lyric tenor. The young (b 1995) singer has evoked comparisons to Giuseppe Di Stefano, Alfredo Kraus, and Luciano Pavarotti. He will be joined by Nadine Sierra as the somnambulist.

La Bohème will have no cast, conductor, or orchestra as it has been done so often that the house can perform it on its own.

Andrea Chénier needs a solid spinto or dramatic tenor on the order of Mario Del Monaco, Richard Tucker, or Franco Corelli. Unfortunately, the Met has nobody at their level of excellence and will present Piotr Beczała in the title role. He is a lyric tenor, not up to spinto roles, as his weak appearance as his Radames the season showed. He’s also near the end of his career.

Tristan und Isolde is a daunting test for both soprano and tenor. Soprano Lise Davidsen, who just added motherhood (twins) to her roles, should be a fine Isolde. She’s scheduled for Brunhilde in the Met’s Ring Cycle in the 26-27 season. Tenor Michael Spyres, who has the weirdest repertoire in operatic history, could be great or awful as Tristan. Die Zeit wird es zeigen.

2025-26 Season
Vincenzo Bellini
La Sonnambula
Live Performance
Sat, Oct 18, 2025 1:00 PM ET

Giacomo Puccini
La Bohème
Live Performance
Sat, Nov 08, 2025 1:00 PM ET

Richard Strauss
Arabella
Live Performance
Sat, Nov 22, 2025 1:00 PM ET

Umberto Giordano
Andrea Chénier
Live Performance
Sat, Dec 13, 2025 1:00 PM ET

Vincenzo Bellini
I Puritani
Live Performance
Sat, Jan 10, 2026 1:00 PM ET

Richard Wagner
Tristan und Isolde
Live Performance
Sat, Mar 21, 2026 12:00 PM ET

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Eugene Onegin
Sat, May 02, 2026 1:00 PM ET

Gabriela Lena Frank / Libretto by Nilo Cruz
El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego
Live Performance
Sat, May 30, 2026 1:00 PM ET

Artistic Union: Les Indes galantes at the Teatro Real

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 10:11:13 +0000

Rameau – Les Indes galantes

Amour / Phani / Fatime / Zima – Julie Roset
Hébé / Émilie / Zaïre / Atalide – Ana Quintans
Valère / Don Carlos / Tacmas / Damon – Mathias Vidal
Bellone / Osman / Huascar / Ali / Don Alvar – Andreas Wolf

Structure Rualité, Chœur de Chambre de Namur, Cappella Mediterranea / Leonardo García-Alarcón.
Stage director and choreographer – Bintou Dembélé.

Teatro Real, Madrid, Spain. Sunday, June 1st, 2025.

This ‘choreographed concert’ performance of Les Indes galantes, has its origins in a staged production at the Opéra de Paris back in 2019. There, Clément Cogitore invited Bintou Dembélé, one of France’s most acclaimed hip-hop dancers and choreographers, together with her company Structure Rualité, to provide the dance element for this ballet héroïque. Following the success of that production, the conductor, Leonardo García-Alarcón, was keen to continue his collaboration with Dembélé and the result is this version which, after these four Madrid performances, of which tonight was the last, will also be seen in Lyon, the Scala, and São Paulo, among other places.

Although billed on the Teatro Real’s website as a semi-staging, this was so much more than that. This was a performance in which soloists, dancers, chorus and orchestra were as one. The orchestra was placed on stage, around the back, while from time to time, groups of instrumentalists were brought to the front. García-Alarcón started the evening conducting from the front of the stage, without a score, to then move to the centre of the orchestral forces to lead the music from one of the two harpsichords on stage. The vocal soloists were positioned from both being around the room, starting the evening from the royal box, to also being on stage. Similarly, the chorus sang from the auditorium and from the stage, while the dancers were also positioned strategically, entering and exiting through the Platea or, at one point, waving large cloths around to imitate sails from throughout the auditorium.

Despite the lack of set, a large light feature, by Benjamin Nesme, dominated the stage, able to illustrate the text through becoming the sun or by bathing the auditorium in streams of light. There was something utterly magical to hear Ana Quintans’ soprano ring out across the auditorium in the opening moments of the prologue; similarly, as Julie Roset sang ‘Viens, Hymen’ from a side balcony, the flute solo situated on the opposite balcony, the effect was utterly captivating. I found the way that Dembélé’s choreography paced the evening to be similarly insightful. At first, the dancers seemed to be engaging in traditional, eighteenth-century courtly movements. Then, as the evening developed, they brought movements reflective of hip-hop dancing, including krump, to the stage. Dembélé choreographed the singers of the Chœur de Chambre de Namur as much as she had choreographed her dancers, offering stage pictures of increasing complexity, making us wonder whether we were indeed watching singers or dancers. There was something extremely moving to watch these two disparate art forms come together to create a total work of art – even in what was ostensibly a concert setting. The dance amplifying the music, and vice versa. Yet what Dembélé has given us is something even deeper. It’s no coincidence that this is a work that exoticizes the ‘other’, whether Turkish, Inca or Aboriginal American. Uniting dancers and musicians from two very different traditions gives this music a sense of timelessness, of uniting people across boundaries and traditions that are ultimately artificial. Yet, what will stay with me is the choreography of ‘forêts paisibles’. Allow me to take a moment to remind you of the text:

Forêts paisibles,
Jamais un vain désir ne trouble ici nos cœurs.
S’ils sont sensibles,
Fortune, ce n’est pas au prix de tes faveurs.

Street dance has its origins as a way of social expression and cultural identity in urban communities, something that on surface level might seem far from the world of Rameau. And yet, here, I feel that Dembélé takes us into something much deeper. For so many of us, music is a way of escaping the world, of finding expression in something deeper – in the same way that dance is for others. In so doing, the dancers and singers here find a way to use the music and text to express themselves, to find a freedom from the world that exists through musical and physical expression. So that our hearts are not troubled, but instead find peace and freedom through artistic expression. I found it extraordinarily moving, with the singers dancing as much as the dancers, and dancers using the music to express their physicality, both from different traditions, yet united by text, dance and sound. It really is one of the most extraordinary things I’ve had the privilege of seeing.

Of course, the evening would not have had the impact it did without the musical side being so strong. Despite conducting from various places around the stage, and despite the disparate positioning of the singers and instrumentalists around the auditorium, ensemble throughout the evening was absolutely immaculate. The singers of the Chœur de Chambre de Namur not only managed to execute complex dance moves, they also managed to sing their music without a single stray note or entry out of place. The precision and quality of their singing was absolutely staggering, the blend unanimous and pitch unwavering. They had clearly been exceptionally well prepared by Thibaut Lenaerts. The orchestral playing was similarly excellent. The winds were particularly engaging, with piquant oboes and deliciously raspy bassoons. The trumpets also were on their very best behaviour, ringing out over the textures, and the string intonation was solid. García-Alarcón’s tempi felt ideal. He gave his singers space to float those long, melismatic lines, but also gave a rhythmic precision that swept the evening along and made the hours feel like seconds.

Quintans has one of the most ravishingly beautiful soprano voices around. The way that she floated the opening phrases of the prologue with long, twisting lines, a legato of incredible smoothness, and fabulous trills, was enchanting. She really understands this music implicitly, singing in eloquent French, using the words to illustrate the line and bring out meaning. The voice soars with such glorious beauty, it was impossible not to be transported. Roset of course had one of the most wonderful arias in her ‘Viens, Hymen’. Her tone is narrower that Quintans and, at the start of the evening the words were somewhat occluded, but she warmed up nicely to sing with haunting purity, the voice soaring with ease, unencumbered by the forces of gravity. Mathias Vidal brought his customary focused tenor to his music, at one point accompanying himself on the harpsichord. This was the fourth performance in four days, so any tiredness at the very top of the voice is understandable. As always, his verbal acuity and freshness of tone gave much pleasure. Andreas Wolf coped extremely well with music that took him from very low to very high. His bass-baritone is in excellent shape, firm and healthy of tone, and rich and full at the bottom.

This was an evening unlike any other. Dembélé and García-Alarcón have given us something astonishing, a total union of art forms that entertains, inspires, and moves in equal measure. Musically, it was absolutely superb on every level, and the visuals, both the lighting, placement of artists around the room, and the sheer physical energy produced, all combined to amplify and highlight this remarkable score. I very much hope this is only the beginning of the collaboration between these two great artists, and that Dembélé will be inspired to explore more of the French baroque with García-Alarcón. The audience response at the close was completely ecstatic, understandably so, because this is a very special evening.