BREAKING NEWS: Opera & Ballet

Greene’s Jephtha

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 15:39:28 +0000

Fourteen years before Handel’s 1751 work Jephtha Maurice Greene produced a different English language oratorio on the same theme and with the same title. It’s now been recorded by the Early Opera Company.

Thje story is taken from Judges and concerns the recall of Jephtha from exile to lead the Israelite army against an Ammonite invasion (the people from the East bank of the Jordan not the cephalopods). Jephtha promises Jehovah that if he is victorious he will sacrifice the first creature “of virgin blood” he meets (shades of Idomeneo) which, of course, turns out to be his daughter. There’s no divine intervention and no happy ending.

Structurally the piece falls into two parts. The first is largely convinced with the Israelite Elders persuading a very reluctant Jephtha to take the job. The second is mostly a dialogue between Jephtha and daughter in which she persuades him that a vow to Jehovah is more important than her life. There’s also some discussion about the legitimacy of human sacrifice in general. Pretty standard Old Testament fare really.

Musically it’s pretty good in an entirely conventional way. Greene was clearly a highly competent musician (Organist at St Paul’s Cathedral, Organist and Composer to the Chapel
Royal, Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge and Master of the
King’s Music). It’s very much an oratorio rather than an opera in disguise (much more “tell” thant “show”) but it’s got some really good numbers notably Jephtha’s “Thou sweetest joy” and the daughter’s “Ah! my foreboding Fears” and the Second Elder’s rather sprightly “Against these new Alarms”.

It’s a solid cast too. Andrew Staples sings Jephtha with Mary Bevan as his daughter and they are excellent. Staples has a lovely lyrical tenor and soprano Bevan has quite a rich sound but great agility. The Elders are Michael Mofidian who is a proper bass and tenor Jeremy Budd who is another English early music stalwart. Jessica Cale has a brief appearance (unnamed role) in a duet with Bevan early in Part 2. There’s an excellent, appropriately sized, orchestra on period instruments and a sixteen person chorus. These are likely larger forces than at the premiere which was a private performance in a tavern. Christian Curnyn conducts with a sound sense of style.

The recording was made at the Church of St Augustine, Kilburn in March 2024 and it’s good even on the 44.1kHz/16 bit digital review copy. But this is a Chandos release recorded at 96kHz/24 bit and released as a two disk SACD set which should sound notably better. There’s a very comprehensive and useful booklet though one hardly needs the included text. All the singers have excellent diction.

Catalogue details: Chandos SACD CHSA 0408 2 (release date is April 18th 2025)

London Sinfonietta/Kemp - Boulez and Cage, 9 March 2025

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 12:26:30 +0000

Purcell Room

Cage: Six Melodies
Boulez: Improvisé—pour le Dr. K
Cage: Credo in US
Boulez: Dérive 1
Boulez: Domaines
Cage: Variations I

Francesca Amewudah-Rivers (actor)

Michael McCarthy (director)

Mark van de Wiel (clarinet)

Sarah Nicolls (prepared piano)

London Sinfonietta

Thomas Kemp (conductor)

Images: Monika S Jakubowska

This London Sinfonietta concert, ‘innovative’ in the best rather than the debased, trivial way, framed performances of works by Pierre Boulez and John Cage with engaging readings from their correspondence by Francesca Amewudah-Rivers and short filmed contributions. It made for an enthralling and enjoyable evening at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room, precisely because the level of performance was so high, ‘additions’, though they were far more than that, genuinely complementing rather than substituting for musical excellence. It was a delight, moreover, to see a sold-out venue, once again giving the lie to claims that no one is interested in hearing this music. Many of us have a deep thirst for it; the only reason we do not go more often is a lack of opportunities to do so. Many do not, just as many do not like all manner of things, whether Mozart, Beethoven, the Beatles, or anything else; there is no reason to be dishonest and substitute one’s own preferences and interests for the voice of the world-spirit. And there is every reason to welcome an all-too-rare opportunity to hear, rather than simply talk about, this music, especially in so illuminating a juxtaposition, which offered great musical contrasts as well as points of mutual historical fascination.

The first reading came not from the correspondence as such, although it is included in the Cambridge University Press Nattiez-Samuels edition as its first item. It was instead taken from Boulez’s 1949 spoken introduction – both manuscript and a rough draft are part of the Paul Sacher Stiftung – to the performance he helped organise of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, given at Suzanne Tézanas’s Paris salon. A brief filmed excerpt was juxtaposed with a live excerpt from Boulez’s own Second Piano Sonata of the previous year. Different worlds indeed, though the excerpted correspondence that followed suggested genuine interest in mutual exploration too, Boulez’s apology for sometimes writing in French – ‘my [English] grammar is still too shaky’ (3/11/12 January 1950) – typical of a humility for which he is still too infrequently credited.

Cage’s Six Melodies for violin and keyboard (piano) from this same year were given a delightful performance by Clio Gould and Elizabeth Burley, the rhythmic progression Boulez admired strongly yet far from didactically to the fore. Initially un-, even anti-‘violinistic’, the music seemed to grow both as music and as violin music, the third and fourth pieces in particular splendidly ‘fiddling’. It felt like a gateway to the meditative sensibility as well as to the chance operations that would increasingly characterise Cage’s music in the years to follow. Boulez’s 2005 revision of his 1969 tribute for the eightieth birthday of Aldred A. Kalmus of Universal Edition, Improvisé—pour le Dr. K, opened with typical piano éclat. A very strong initial sense of Schoenberg – and he is there somewhere – faded slightly when I realised: ‘of course: like the other Kalmus pieces, this was written for the Pierrot ensemble’. Flute trills and their generative tendency seemed prophetic of later explorations, not least … explosante-fixe …, though its progress was very different. It was over in a flash, as ever leaving one wishing for more.

A clip from the film Works of Calder, also from 1950, followed, including Cage’s music: ‘the first time I have felt the music to be necessary to a film’ (Boulez, 30 December 1950). Although Cage’s Credo in US was written earlier (1942) it seemed here to pre-empt the composer’s growing interest in chance operations through its use of radio music. Rhythm and sounds of percussion were truly infectious, leading up, so it seemed, to those Sonatas and Interludes. Boulez’s Dérive 1 (1984) offered more contrast than complement, though was no less welcome for that; it seemed to take up the baton from his earlier piece, the SACHER reference’s generative quality seductively palpable. Febrile, ever-transforming, a feast of Messiaenic colour, it spoke of and through Debussy rather than Cage’s Satie, and in its woodwind arabesques, similarly proclaimed a Stravinskian inheritance thoroughly internalised and transformed.

Mark van de Wiel’s performance of the solo version of Domaines (1961-8) proved a stunning tour de force. Whatever Boulez’s intention, the element of choice and mobility, the clarinettist selecting the order in which the pages, each on a different stand, are played, brings an inescapable element of what soon would be called music theatre to proceedings, the performer’s one-man show extended to two, counting his instrument. Apart from – though who could it be apart from? – van de Wiel’s equally outstanding virtuosity and musical understanding, one of Boulez’s triumphant reinstatements of the performer, what truly stood out was an almost Wagnerian unendliche Melodie. One felt vividly as well as merely heard the procedures at work in all parameters, attack included, in the longest of constructed lines.

Is Cage’s layering of transparencies in Variations I (1958) – to be performed by any number of performers on any instruments and any number thereof – more radical? Perhaps. Less ’Western’? Perhaps. Less ‘musical’? Perhaps. Given the presentation, it is hardly unreasonable to have felt led to ask such questions. Again, though, it was the contrast brought by something no less triumphantly ‘itself’ that was truly the thing. It brought with it a breath of the fresh air many felt Cage had imparted to Darmstadt.

Mahler - Symphony N°8 at the Bozar in Brussels

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 10:44:00 +0000

La Monnaie at Bozar, Brussels, Sunday March 9 2025

Conductor: Alain Altinoglu. Magna Peccatrix: Manuela Uhl. Una Poenitentium: Jacquelyn Wagner. Mater Gloriosa: Ilse Eerens. Mulier Samaritana: Nora Gubisch. Maria Aegyptiaca: Marvic Monreal. Doctor Marianus: Corby Welch. Pater Ecstaticus: Christopher Maltman. Pater Profundus: Gábor Bretz. La Monnaie Orchestra and Chorus. Belgian National Orchestra. La Monnaie Choir School and Children's Chorus. Vlaams Radiokoor (Flemish Radio Choir).

Photo: Marco Borggreve

This performance of Mahler’s Symphony N°8 at the Bozar in Brussels will probably be my last ever Mahler concert. I’ve tried over the years, hoping that one day I’d get what others see in his symphonies. More than twenty years ago, after a performance of his Symphony N°2, at the Châtelet, under Salonen, I wrote: ‘I booked this concert thinking that, perhaps, the Philharmonia under a famous conductor might work some kind of epiphany on me and that finally I'd understand. It didn't happen. I won't say exactly what went through my mind at various stages during this long piece, as I don't want to offend the many Mahler lovers around; let's just say it didn't include the word "profound" and that I have a Mahler problem.’

I thought that perhaps with the passing of time, I’d warm to him more, but it hasn’t happened. Rather the opposite. I sat through his third not so long ago on the radio, trying again, and found I now liked him even less than before. Richard Strauss couldn't understand Mahler’s obsession with suffering and redemption, supposedly telling Klemperer ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to be redeemed from.’ Neither do I. I even find the obsession a bit repugnant, as with Parsifal. And I don’t see what’s redeeming about nursery ditties, peasant dances and cowbells blown up to grotesque proportions.

‘Grotesque proportions’ are surely the operative words for his eighth. So much planning and organization and hard work and skill must go into it. But to me it remains a vacuous, megalomanic, rambling racket. At the end of the first part, on Sunday, my neighbour leant towards me and whispered, with some surprise, ‘C’est sans intérêt !’ (i.e. ‘It’s of no interest!’). I felt the same. ‘Apotheosis of the Salvation Army,’ I thought. But I’ll stop here as I've no more desire to upset Mahler’s many fans now than before.

Anyway, my neighbour and I are undoubtedly in a tiny minority. At the end, as after Götterdämmerung at La Monnaie last month, most of the audience was instantly on its feet, with a loud hoot followed by cheering for the chorus, the soloists, and each section of the orchestra as Alain Altinoglu - once again cheered loudest of all - invited them in turn to take their bows. He was in his element. It’s quite often said that, more than a conductor, this symphony needs a traffic policeman. But Altinoglu was his usual attentive, enthusiastic self, bouncing, even leaping up and down as he cued and coaxed in all directions (including the far rear of the house: see later), bringing to mind those old caricatures of Berlioz in frenzied action.

Among the soloists were some interesting singers new to me. Jacquelyn Wagner is an American soprano who, I see on doing a bit of research, has a remarkably wide repertoire and is already singing the Marschallin and Leonore. Her voice is silvery, healthy and secure, perhaps a bit monochrome in this ‘oratorio’ setting, but it would be interesting to hear her in an opera, doing some acting. Marvic Monreal is a young Maltese mezzo still doing the rounds of the regional houses, though she’s already sung Verdi’s Requiem alongside Calleja, Radvanovsky and Van Horn. She was one of the unusually excellent Norns in last month’s aforementioned Götterdämmerung, and here, as well as the warmth and strength of her singing, what struck me - and my neighbour - was her glowing presence, even in what I just called the oratorio setting. She looked as if she was ‘living’ the part, beaming inwardly as she sang. One to watch, perhaps.

The men were all good. Two were familiar to me: Maltman, solid as a rock, with a sound like shiny, jet-black obsidian, contrasting very satisfactorily with Gábor Bretz’s more velvety timbre, exuding the warmth and humanity of a Wotan bidding Brünnhilde farewell.

The American tenor Corby Welch, on the other hand, was a new name. From his engagements, I’d guess he’s based in Germany. He started out as an Erik (in Dutchman), but has since moved on to Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Loge, Siegmund, the Kaiser, Grimes… and Peter Quint. I found his singing interesting, though some people will not, I think, like it at all. He has a very expressive way of using (or not) the hardness in his voice, singing with or without vibrato… He barks out some notes for dramatic impact in a way that reminds me of some Russian tenors - a kind of deliberate malcanto - then slips seamlessly into a melting mezza voce, or into head voice and out again, seemingly all quite comfortably. It will be interesting to look out for him. Kaisers don’t grow on trees. Let's hope he doesn’t take on too much too fast.

Photo: Le Soir, Belgium, not credited

The Bozar hall's acoustics are usually very satisfactory: warm and round and woody, yet distinct. Was the space overwhelmed by the forces assembled for the Mahler? The two orchestras were, of course, packed on to the stage where usually you find only one. There were chorus members squelched up shoulder to shoulder like sardines (supposing sardines have shoulders) under the organ - the Bozar has a proper one, from Luxembourg builders Westenfelder - as well at the sides of the stage and shoehorned into the galleries above. There was a second brass section on the balcony at the rear. The soloists were lined up, as usual, like peas in a pod at the edge of the platform - apart from Ilse Eerens, who appeared near the ceiling, as befits the Virgin Mary.

For once, even with Altinoglu conducting in this usually excellent auditorium, and unlike his recent forays into Wagner, I found the mass of sound bewilderingly hard to parse. Also, I’m tempted to suggest the solo singers weren’t fully integrated into the whole. But I was on row H (and there was no A, B or C), so perhaps I was just too close to them, and too low with regard to the orchestra, for the sound to gel. The press reviews I’ve read are, at any rate, dithyrambic, so it’s probably better for those who are fond of Mahler to stick to those.

Personally, I was glad when it was over. I didn’t feel redeemed in the slightest.

Monkey Man – Review

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 03:30:44 +0000

Monkey Man is a film written (with two co-authors), directed, and produced by British actor Dev Patel, who also stars as the title character. Patel was the young star of Slumdog Millionaire, among other major credits. The movie is an action thriller in the same general neighborhood of the John Wick movies and many of those by Quentin Tarantino. Stylistically, it is quite different from these two other kinds of action films.

Tarantino’s violent scenes occur episodically and dot the overarching story. They often come as a surprise. They are an instrument of storytelling, they are not the tale itself.

The John Wick movies, by contrast, are supported almost entirely by their hyperactive portrayal of highly stylized and choreographed scenes of violence. The story is secondary or sometimes nonexistent – violence is the substance. It is performed with so much elegance that it seems disembodied from the plot. In one scene, a fight of extraordinary complexity is performed in a club where hundreds of people are dancing. As the fight grows in intensity, the dancers ignore the action and continue their rhythmic contortions as if nothing were happening.

Chad Stahelski directed all four of the John Wick films. He first achieved prominence as a stunt performer and coordinator, notably as the key stunt double for Keanu Reeves (the titular character of all four Wick films) on The Matrix (1999) and as the martial arts stunt coordinator on its first two sequels. His violent vision permeates all four movies.

Monkey Man is just as violent as the John Wick movies, but stylistically, it is an ocean away. Its filmography is gritty and rough, like its plot, unlike the smooth gloss of the Stahelski films. Violence is a consequence, not an end. It is a revenge story told over a long span.

Monkey Man doesn’t even have a name; he’s called ‘Kid’ throughout the drama. He starts life in a pastoral village where his mother is burned to death by the machinations of a corrupt guru ( Baba Shakti) and carried out by an equally corrupt police chief (Rana Singh). Kid permanently scars his hands trying to put out the fire consuming his mother. The rest of the movie is a long and uncertain trip to vengeance. His inept fighting ability is at first inadequate for the task he’s assumed.

The title Monkey Man comes from the mask he wears when he fights and always loses at an underground fight club in Mumbai. He then gets a job in a luxury brothel and cocaine den, Kings, disguised as a social club where he suffers further abuse. He is almost killed when he unsuccessfully tries to shoot Rana and has to fight his way out of the place. He is chased by the police, wounded, and falls into a canal and is rescued by Alpha, the keeper of a local temple devoted to Ardhanarishvara. Kid trains in combat to fight for himself and the marginalized.

“During Diwali, Baba’s candidate gets elected and their nationalist party celebrates at Kings. Kid bleaches his monkey mask white and fights his way inside with improvised weapons, joined by Alpha and his warriors. Queenie (the madame of Kings) attempts to shoot Kid but is killed by Sita (an exploited prostitute). Kid beats Rana mercilessly in a fistfight, killing him. He uses Queenie’s severed thumb to access the penthouse and reach Baba, who stabs him with blades hidden in his padukas. Kid kills Baba using the same blades against him. Having finally avenged his mother’s death, Kid collapses from his injuries, reminiscing about Neela (his mother) and his devotion to Hanuman (his village).” [Adapted from Wickipedia synopsis]

The story’s arch is similar to that of Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, though the Count never kills anyone – his revenge is more subtle. When Kid’s martial prowess is honed to full effect, he dispatches enemies with a scabarous effectiveness and intensity unique to this specimen of violent-action movies, a genre that has become as fully established in the celluloid world as were the oversaturated MGM musicals of the late forties and early fifties.

Whether this film is a one-off or the start of a series of violent adventures is not known now. Kid’s ambiguous fate at the film’s conclusion leaves room for his return. The 35-year-old Patel has mastered fight art to an elevated position. He has a personal view of the form that is distinct from those of his contemporaries and he’s much younger. Given his abundant talent, he could move in a host of directions. So fine is his mastery of this type of film that the cliches and triteness of the story escape detection until it’s over and the viewer is released from Patel’s narrative spell. Only then does one notice the conventional villains and the over-simplified depictions of complicated problems.

The movie is available on Amazon Prime. Cineastes should not miss it.

Alceste at Versailles

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 13:30:24 +0000

My review of the Chateau de Versailles Spectacles recording of Lully’s Alceste is now up at Opera Canada

Reality Check: Der fliegende Holländer at the Palau de les Arts

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 15:57:50 +0000

Wagner – Der fliegende Holländer

Holländer – Nicholas Brownlee
Senta – Elisabet Strid
Erik – Stanislas de Barbeyrac
Daland – Franz-Josef Selig
Steuermann – Moisés Marín
Mary – Eva Kroon

Coro de la Comunidad de Madrid, Cor de la Generalitat Valenciana, Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana / James Gaffigan.
Stage director – Willy Decker.

Palau de les Arts, València. Saturday, March 8th, 2025.

With this run of Der fliegende Holländer, James Gaffigan marks his final production as Music Director of the Palau de les Arts in València. He leaves an orchestra that is among the three finest opera orchestras in the world – with a deeply appreciative audience. I was perhaps less than overjoyed to see that the house has appointed Mark Elder to be his successor, a conductor who managed to suck the life out of Elektra in Naples last year, and whose performances have rarely, if ever, filled me with excitement. It’s a shame because there really are some fantastic, younger opera conductors around currently, without a permanent appointment, who, in my humble opinion as a back seat driver, would likely have made a more satisfying choice at the head of this outstanding orchestra. For Gaffigan’s final production, the house imported Willy Decker’s staging from the Teatro Regio Torino, where it was in turn imported from the Opéra de Paris, France, and featured an international cast mainly of the new generation of singers in this repertoire.

Photo: © Miguel Lorenzo & Mikel Ponce.

Decker’s staging, tonight revived by Stefan Heinrichs, posits an interesting question. To what extent do these fantastical legends, such as that of the Holländer, represent the delusions of a psychotic mind? Yet he doesn’t start out with that question; instead, he threads it through the evening until the final scene forces us to ask it and confront the reality of those tales that have been told over generations. Decker places the action in a large room, with a large painting showing the sea in the centre, and an oversize door on the side, through which waves are visible when it opens. In so doing, he creates a claustrophobic atmosphere that seems to take us deep into Senta’s psyche. The way in which the large painting appears, almost surreptitiously, to morph into a painting of the Holländer’s ship in a way that only Senta could see, was incredibly disturbing, as indeed was the sight of the red sails that appeared through the painting at the Holländer’s first entrance. Similarly, Decker uses the door opening to show us the shadow of the Holländer standing outside, as if wanting to prove his realness through something that also feels intangible. The evening constantly seems to progress through both real and imagined – as the choruses sang to the Holländer’s sailors on his ship, the men of Daland’s ship collapsed to the ground, leaving us with an uneasy sense of the two crews morphing into one. When the Holländer finally revealed his true nature, the fact that Senta mouthed his words along with him, forced us to reflect on whether this was all, in fact, a figment of her imagination. What Decker has given us is a staging full of ambiguity, one where we are taken into the mind of someone suffering from mental illness, yet in doing so are left wondering what is actually real in what we see.

Photo: © Miguel Lorenzo & Mikel Ponce.

The evening had clearly been fluently revived by Heinrichs, with personenregie that was logical and showed characters clearly engaging with each other. His direction of the large chorus was also confident, with the choristers moved around the stage logically. It struck me also that Decker’s building up of tension in his staging throughout the evening was also mirrored in Gaffigan’s conducting. At the start of the evening, it all felt rather restrained. The overture was full of the salty sea air, just like the air one could experience outside on entering the house, yet the textures felt transparent, with strings playing with a welcome use of minimal vibrato to colour the tone. Throughout the evening, Gaffigan’s tempi were relatively swift, with the exception of the Holländer/Senta duet in Act 2, which did feel like it dropped the tension somewhat. The entire evening came in around 2 hours and 12 minutes. Gaffigan also found a similarly welcome swing to the spinning chorus, which took shape quite delightfully. What struck me, however, was that Gaffigan was very much playing the long game, so that when Act 3 arrived, that was the moment he let his orchestra fully off the leash, with the off-stage chorus interacting with the on-stage tenors and basses and making a tremendous noise. Throughout the evening, Gaffigan was a highly considerate accompanist to his singers, always letting the voices through. He was rewarded with superlative orchestral playing from his musicians – the quality of the all-important brass playing was exceptional, not a split note from them all night. The wind playing also had a genuine personality, not least the eloquent cor anglais solo, while the strings were both athletically lean and silky in approach. The quality of their performance tonight is testament to the outstanding work Gaffigan has done with them, to maintain the quality that Valencians have become accustomed to from their orchestra.

Photo: © Miguel Lorenzo & Mikel Ponce.

I had the pleasure of seeing Nicholas Brownlee as Wotan in Das Rheingold in Munich last year and was keen to hear him again. His Holländer tonight brought many of the same qualities that one experienced then – an admirable firmness of tone, impeccable diction, and a voice able to carry over the tumult in the pit. This is a role that sits well in his bass-baritone, there was never any sense of him being stretched by the tessitura. That said, it did sound to my ears that the support isn’t completely lined up. This is a very hard feeling to describe, but in a voice like his, one would like to hear a column of sound that stretches from the feet right up and over the head. From what I heard of Brownlee tonight, it sounded that the way the sound was produced was tense and muscular. As I always write, mine are only one pair of ears and others will hear things differently, but this was very much a sense I had throughout the evening. His is a very rare talent and an exceptionally exciting one, and I very much hope that Brownlee has good people around him advising him.

Photo: © Miguel Lorenzo & Mikel Ponce.

Elisabet Strid sang Senta with a well-schooled technique. Indeed, it struck me that she sang this music as if it were bel canto, phrasing those long florid lines with an impeccable legato. This was also apparent in the ballad, in which she crossed the registers with both intelligence and ease, as well as the utmost musicality. Strid’s soprano is quite soft-grained in sound, but certainly does not lack in amplitude. Senta is also a role that sits quite high and there were a few passages where Strid’s soprano threatened to succumb to the forces of gravity and her tuning went awry. That said, hers was a lyrical, intelligent, and compelling account of the role. Stanislas de Barbeyrac continues to explore the Wagnerian repertoire, with this assumption of Erik. It’s a role that sits well for his bright tenor, with focused tone. He sang his music in excellent German and a grateful legato. Again, it did sound to my ears that he’s still working the role into the voice, the top wasn’t quite as connected as one might have expected it to be, tightening somewhat up there where it should ideally bloom. This really is a role that is an ideal match for his tenor and I look forward to hearing him grow even more into it through the coming seasons.

Photo: © Miguel Lorenzo & Mikel Ponce.

Franz-Josef Selig’s bass appears to be transcending the passage of time as Daland. Yes, it does sound that he needs to make a little more of an effort to sustain those longer, legato lines than previously, but his bass is still very full in tone and in amplitude. Moisés Marín was an extrovert Steuermann, while Eva Kroon sang Mary in a fruity contralto. The Cor de la Generalitat Valenciana, usually one of the finest opera choruses out there, was not on its best form tonight. Now prepared by its new director, Jordi Blanch Tordera, the tuning in the sopranos and mezzos was not at the level I would expect here, with a couple of over-prominent vibratos dominating the blend and drooping the pitch. They did sing with an impressive unanimity of approach and ensemble, however. The tenors and basses were excellent, singing with tremendous volume, the tenors shining out with silvery tone into the house. They were joined by the tenors and basses of the Coro de la Comunidad de Madrid, prepared by Javier Carmena, for the off-stage portions in Act 3.

Photo: © Miguel Lorenzo & Mikel Ponce.

There was so much to enjoy in this evening’s Holländer. The singing of the principals represented the new generation of Wagnerians assuming this repertoire today. Decker’s staging was a work of intelligence and insight, forcing us to reflect on the real and the imagined. The house orchestra was on glorious form for their outgoing chief, who gave us a reading that built up gradually, culminating in a thrilling conclusion in its final act. The audience response was exceptionally generous, with particularly loud applause for Strid, Brownlee, and Gaffigan and his orchestra.

Measure for Measure

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 14:49:57 +0000

HOUSE + BODY’s production of Measure for Measure currently playing in the Studio Theatre at Crow’s is Shakespeare with a twist. It’s an adaptation written and directed by Christopher Manousos. The schtick is that it’s part of a radio series of live Shakespeare and we are watching the goings on in the studio where five actors play all twenty characters with commercials, sponsor messages and the rest of the baggage of radio broadcasts. There are also some “off stage” shenanigans involving the actors; principally the two women who engage in wistful glances and then have an almost steamy scene in the “interval”. I’m going to speculate that this is a sort of nod to Isabella’s ambiguous nature in the actual play.

It’s well done and good fun. All five players have impressive resumes and they really are good. Sébastien Heins is a creepy Angelo but becomes ten times creepier when he morphs into the executioner Abhorson. Beck Lloyd is a very sexy Isabella who is also hilarious as the Malapropian constable Elbow. Katherine Gauthier plays so many parts; male and female, that it’s quite challenging to figure out which at any one time despite an uncanny ability to find a different voice and a different body language for each.

Jamie Cavanagh as the Duke and his alter ego Friar Lodowick is also convincing and some of the best comic acting comes from Danté Prince as, inter alia, Lucio, Claudio and Pompey. His quick fire conversations with himself are often very funny indeed and he doubles up as the radio continuity announcer.

I think the approach taken here is a clever one. Measure for Measure is as feeble as most Shakespeare comedies and a bit grim with multiple threatened executions, severed heads and what not(*). Putting a spin on it that ameliorates the grimness and creates some new sources of humour makes sense. It’s also sensibly cut so that it comes in around two hours including an interval. All in all, it’s an enjoyable evening with some fine acting.

Measure for Measure runs at Crow’s Theatre until March 16th.

(*)I found myself wondering whether the mucking about with executions etc inspired the Blackadder series 2 episode “Head”.

Photo credits: Kendra Epik

Opera Parallèle's The Pigeon Keeper

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 16:59:45 +0000

* Notes *Opera Parallèle gave a moving world premiere of David Hanlon's The Pigeon Keeper at Cowell Theater in San Francisco last night. The piece was prepared meticulously and is engaging on many levels. The drama is set on an unnamed Mediterranean island beset by drought and refugees that wash ashore. The libretto, by Stephanie Fleishmann, has a dreamy folk tale aspect to it. The narrative centers on a 12-year-old girl Orsia whose bird loving mother has died seven years ago after giving birth to a stillborn son. The fisherman father Thalasso won't talk about his dead wife. The islanders are unwelcoming of the newcomers, but it is through an encounter with the village outcast only known as the Pigeon Keeper in the story that Orsia and her father come to find healing. Hanlon's music has a lot to recommend it, lots of colors and texture and at least one hummable tune. He got the San Francisco Girls Chorus to sound like everything from a flock of pigeons to a rain shower. Oddly, at 80 minutes, the piece felt neither long nor short, it was its own suspension in time. Maestra Nicole Paiement conducted with intensity and exactitude, every note felt intentional. There weren't even a dozen instruments, yet the orchestra sounded strong and unified. Director Brian Staufenbiel's production employs a multistoried set that is transformed with projections and props, seamlessly switching the scenes with some help from the members of the girls chorus. There were some very effective surprises with how the flock of pigeons and the waves of the sea are depicted. The singers all seemed perfectly cast and completely believable in their roles. The members of the San Francisco Girls Chorus sounded cohesive and ethereal, especially soloist Shayla Sauvie. As Thalasso, baritone Craig Irvin sounds very clear and the pain of the character felt real. The tenor Bernard Holcomb sang the title role but also is the Widow Grocer and the Schoolteacher. It was so impressive that he could embody these three people so fully, it took me nearly an hour to put together that he was the same person. He really did sound different in each role. Soprano Angela Yam is about the size of a very dainty 12-year-old and sang Orsia with some beautifully sustained high notes. Her voice has a pure lucidity and beauty, she was also able to distinctly convey the emotions of the piece. * Tattling * There was only a little talking a couple of times during the performance, which had no intermission. The audience seemed rapt and engaged. I mentioned to my companion that I thought the composer was a piano accompanist in Merola perhaps 15 years ago. I was pleased to note that Hanlon is a Merolino from 2010 and was an Adler Fellow as well.

Trident Moon

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 15:42:28 +0000

Trident Moon, by Anusree Roy and directed by Nina Lee Aquino opened at Crow’s Theatre on Friday night. It’s set in 1947 during the Partition of India and concerns a bunch of women in the back of a truck seeking safety in what has become India. Arun is a Hindu servant to a Moslem family. Her boss, presumably to show he is not soft on Hindus, has beheaded her husband and sons. In revenge she has shot him and kidnapped three of his women folk in the hope that they can be multiply raped by Hindu men when they reach “safety”. The truck also contains her sister who has been accidentally, but seriously, wounded in the shooting, her retarded daughter and a box with the three heads. The truck is driven by her brother.

(L to R back) Afroza Banu, Michelle Mohammed, Anusree Roy, Prerna Nehta, Zorana Sadiq, and Imali Prerera. (Front) Sahiba Arora and Sehar Bhojani

Along the way they pick up some other women with equally horrific stories and are then attacked by bandits who kill the brother but prove pretty useless when it comes to robbing or assaulting the women. Rather weirdly one of the Moslem women is trusted to take over the driving though why Arun trusts her is not clear. Eventually the sister dies and they reach India. Along the way there’s a lot of violence, guns, expressions of sectarian hatred and graphic descriptions of sexual assault.

(L to R) Mirza Sarhan, Zorana Sadiq, Imali Perera, Afroza Banu, Muhaddisah, and Anusree Roy (front)

This being a play directed by Aquino and playing at Crow’s technical theatrical values are high. The writing is tight, the acting convincing; with a very fine performance by Sahiba Arora as Arun, it flows and it has very effective lighting and sound design. It’s all very professional but….

(L to R) Sahiba Arora, Zorana Sadiq, Sehar Bhojani, and Anusree Roy

Maybe if one knew nothing about Partition one would learn something but I’m not new to the subject. I know how ghastly it was and that both displacements and deaths ran into many millions. The scale was huge (one of the greatest migrations in all of human history). The hatred is still alive eighty years later and is still used by governments for nefarious ends whether that’s the ongoing conflict in Kashmir, running battles in Brampton or the fact that tonight the Indian cricket team will play the final of a tournament hosted by Pakistan in Dubai because they still won’t cross the border.

(L to R) Zorana Sadiq, Sahiba Arora, Anusree Roy, Sehar Bhojani (lying down) Prerna Nehta, and Muhaddisah

I admire the technical excellence of Trident Moon but I didn’t enjoy it, or find it cathartic, or find it educational. And I have never really bought into Stalin’s adage that one death is a tragedy but a million are a statistic. Of course, your mileage may vary.

L to R: Sahiba Arora, Afroza Banu (standing), Zorana Sadiq, Michelle Mohammed, Prerna Nehta, Sehar Bhojani (lying down), Imali Perera (standing), Anusree Roy, and Muhaddisah

Trident Moon continues at Crow’s Theatre until March 30th.

Photo credits: Dahlia Katz

Uchida - Beethoven, Schoenberg, Kurtág, and Schubert, 7 March 2025

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 09:48:26 +0000

Royal Festival Hall

Beethoven: Piano Sonata no.27 in E minor, op.90
Schoenberg: Three Piano Pieces, op.11
Kurtág: Márta ligaturája
Schubert: Piano Sonata no.21 in B-flat major, op.posth., D 960

Mitsuko Uchida (piano)

An evening with Mitsuko Uchida is rarely less than a privilege, and this was no exception. One audience member at the start seemed to take the idea a little too far, resolutely continuing to film her despite verbal and gestural requests to stop. An usher had to walk across the hall and point a sign forbidding use of telephones in the person’s face. Extraordinary! What with that and an onslaught of coughing that again occasioned requests in vain from the platform to desist, we certainly experienced the worst of live performance. Fortunately, there was enough of the best to compensate.

The first item on the programme, Beethoven’s E minor Sonata, op.90, took a while properly to get going (a state of affairs perhaps not entirely unrelated to the case of the manic telephone user). Contrasts, especially dynamic contrasts, were immediately present. More broadly, the strange, wonderful world of Beethoven on the cusp of ‘lateness’ was with us. If some of the first movement in particular was a little brittle, that was not entirely inappropriate for this fractured world. Accentuated by very sparing use of the pedal, much of it entirely unpedalled, here was a Beethoven that was anything but comfortable or routine, even if I sometimes felt a slight lack of the continuity that underlies discontinuity. An almost Schubertian intimacy to the close, presaging the second half of the recital, came close to erasing any such reservations. The second movement seemed to breathe the air already of the late Bagatelles, in particular their lyricism, even when turned outward. Occasional technical faltering was of little import; the crucial things were engagement with and expression of Beethoven’s truculent humanism.

Voice-leading in the first of Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces seemed in context to take its leave not only from Brahms but directly from Beethoven. So, indeed, did much else: contrasts now here become fully dialectical; melodic fragments wending their necessary yet sometimes difficult way; and harmony, yes harmony, too. Above all, there was here a not entirely dissimilar obstinacy—and nobility of spirit. Formal command was unquestionable, as founded on harmony as, say, the Beethoven of Daniel Barenboim (or Wilhelm Furtwängler). Much the same could be said of the second piece, over which the spirits of Wagner and Liszt hovered still more clearly. The third felt very much like the final movement of a ‘sonata’ of a dark variety that was yet possessed of magical chiaroscuro.

The second half opened with Kurtág’s 2020 miniature Márta ligaturája, written for cimbalom, but here played directly from what seemed to be small manuscript pages (presumably copies), rendering the tribute to the composer’s beloved wife Marta all the more moving. Again, harmony and voice-leading seemed to pick up from where we had left off, only all the more distilled. If kinship with Schoenberg’s op.11 came across with particular strength, the emotional import came closer to his evocation of funeral bells for Mahler in the last of the Six Piano Pieces, op.19. Harmonies, not least pristine major chords, surprised and beguiled.

Schubert’s final piano sonata followed less attacca than might have been the case, given the audience’s inability to keep quiet. The opening was nevertheless a thing of magic, possessed of seemingly intimate dynamic gradations, strength lying in intimacy and fragility, in persistence. This movement, indeed the sonata, as a whole reminded us what happiness can be built on pain, and vice versa. The last thing one needs here is a maudlin path, tempting though it may be. (I recall my own youthful attempts.) Instead, Schubert’s nobility of utterance was treasured, allowing it to speak ‘for itself’, however illusory that performative idea might be in practice. Ambivalence ran deep, especially in oscillation between major and minor. The recapitulation was, quite properly, a second development: one of a very different nature from those of Beethoven, one that seemingly never gave him a moment’s thought. The sound of Uchida’s chords in the coda would have been worth the price of admission alone

Beautifully judged in tempo, as in all else, the slow movement neither dragged nor was rushed. It built; it sang; it said what needed to be said. The revelation of C-sharp major silenced any questions about how to understand it enharmonically and in relation to the tonality of the piece as a whole; Schubert, Uchida, and we knew. A light-footed scherzo, if not quite lifting the clouds, suspended them for a moment. Its trio’s ambiguity, strange even by Schubert’s standards, duly registered, thus paving the way for the manifold, still deeper ambiguities of the finale, its decidedly non-Beethovenian subjectivity simply present, immanent. That said, there was here too a decidedly human, as well as humanist, obstinacy that seemed to bind together all the compositional voices on this programme: in this case, both aptly and surprisingly, in the returns of the rondo theme and the alternative, fleetingly Mahlerian vistas of the episodes.

Farewell to Natalie Dessay

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 20:20:10 +0000

Few singers over the years have given me as much pleasure as Natalie Dessay. She and pianist Philippe Cassard have now announced their upcoming retirement from concert performance (Natalie retired from the stage a few years ago) and are about to release an album of their farewell tour material. It’s called Oiseaux de passage and it’s half an hour or so of bird themed chansons with some English language musical theatre numbers included for good measure.

In fact it kicks off with three songs in English; “I want magic” from André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire, “Green finch and linnet bird” from Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and Laetitia’s aria from Menotti’s The Old Maid and the Thief. These are all sung impeccably with a real sense of Broadway style, especially the somewhat more operatic Sondheim.

The rest of the record is in French and it’s all 20th century material except for one Chausson piece from 1882. There are songs by Samuel Barber, Reynaldo Hahn, Maurice Ravel, Louis Beydts and Francis Poulenc. I particularly liked Hahn’s Le rossignol des lilas which is very Hahn, very beautiful and suits Natalie’s voice very well. I also enjoyed the quite dramatic and very funny La Dame de Monte-Carlo by Poulenc which closes out the record. Overall, it’s a very well sung and played mini-concert.

It was recorded in the 500 seat Le Nef at Le Couvent des Dominicains in Guebwiller in September last year and it’s a very natural and clear sounding recording. It’s being released as a physical CD, MP3 and FLAC/ALAC/WAV at 44.1 kHz/16 bit and 96kHz/24 bit resolutions. I listened to the CD res version. The booklet is a hoot. As well as text and translations it has the original letters, phone messages and so on that eventually led to the pair collaborating albeit with some reluctance on Natalie’s part.

Catalogue information: La Dolce Volta LDV150. (Release date 28th March or 112th April depending which source one reads!)

Postoperative Outcomes Following Preweekend Surgery

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 20:32:35 +0000

A paper just published by the JAMA Online (it can be downloaded below) shows a small but “significant increase in risk of complications, readmissions, and mortality compared with those treated after the weekend. Further study is needed to understand differences in care that may underpin these observations and ensure that patients receive high-quality care regardless of the day of the week.”

The belief that surgery performed late in the week is riskier than that performed at its start of the week has been thought true since I entered the profession. Hospitals operate with greatly reduced medical staff on weekends allowing for surgical complications to take longer to be observed than would happen with a full staff.

You have to dig deep into this study to find the supportive evidence for the statement made above about adverse events, but it’s there. Look at the figure and you will see which types of surgeries do worse when performed at the end of the week. Cardiovascular surgery has the worst end of the week outcomes of all the classes of surgery examined.

I always advised my patients to schedule their operations for Monday or Tuesday. The week-end effect is not a new concept, but it has not been as thoroughly studied as in the paper.

JAMA Postoperative Outcomes Following Preweekend Surgery Download

Duke Bluebeard’s Castle

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 20:20:21 +0000

Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is a one act symbolist opera for two singers based on a French folk tale. It’s scored for a large orchestra and uses quite a lot of dissonance and it’s a famously tough sing for the singer (soprano or mezzo) singing Judit. It’s been recorded a lot. Wikipedia lists 32 audio or video recordings, not including this new one from Gabor Brertz, Rinat Shaham and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Karina Cavellakis.

It’s pretty good. Bretz is absolutely solid; lots of power but lyricism too. Shaham has lots of interesting colours but is occasionally a bit strident as she competes to be heard with the orchestra in the most dramatic passages. Cavellakis gets some rather lovely delicate playing from the orchestra but can also conjure up high drama. This is helped by a very clean high resolution recording. A good place to hear it is the climax at the opening of the Fifth Door which is loud and dramatic but very clean.

The recording was made at Studio 5 in the Muziekcentrum van der Omroep in Hilversum in June last year. It’s being released as a physical CD, MP3 and ALAC/FLAC/WAV in 44.1/16, 96/24 and 192/24 resolutions and Dolby Atmos, DXD/DSD64. I listened to the 192/24 version and, as mentioned it’s excellent. There’s a comprehensive booklet with full Hungarian text and English translation.

Catalogue information: Pentatone PTC5187225 (due for release 4th April)

Dame Felicity Lott & Jason Carr at the Théâtre de l'Athénée Louis-Jouvet in Paris

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 08:59:00 +0000

Théâtre de l'Athénée Louis-Jouvet, Paris, Monday March 3 2025

Photo: DAVID HARTLEY/Shutterst/SIPA

Soprano: Dame Felicity Lott. Piano and vocals: Jason Carr.

Georges Auric: Printemps
Francis Poulenc: Violon, Hier, La Dame de Monte Carlo
Georges Auric: Pas d'âge pour l'amour, Bonjour Tristesse, It's April again
Richard Rodgers: Slaughter on 10th Avenue, Never say no, To keep my love alive, Bewitched
Cole Porter: You don't know Paree
Reynaldo Hahn: Automne
Joseph Kosma: Autumn Leaves
Noël Coward: Useless useful phrases, I'll follow my secret heart, If Love were all
Maurice Yvain: Yes!
Francis Poulenc: Les chemins de l'amour

Some of my blog's habitués (they do exist) will know that I sometimes quote the people around me at the opera. 'My neighbour', 'the man behind', 'a Frenchman'... One of these was 'the little old lady'. This was Dodo, and she adored Dame Felicity Lott. 'Quelle classe!' she would exclaim. Which is true. We saw Lott together as the Marschallin, and the Countess in Capriccio, but our happiest shared memories of all were probably of her Belle Hélène and Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein, in Laurent Pelly's productions, high points in the Châtelet's operatic heyday. Memorable evenings those were, among the many memorable times spent with Dodo, including a marvellous week in Istanbul ('Une très belle ville. Des toilettes propres partout!') while she was bravely facing down her disease, which I mentioned in my garbled account of the Paris Opera's awful Entführung in 2014. She had been diagnosed with cancer just before she retired, and was finally defeated by it six months after that Istanbul jaunt.

I don't know Lott personally. The nearest I ever got to her was when 'my neighbour', seeing she was in the same restaurant as us after Der Rosenkavalier, couldn't resist stopping to thank her as we left. But she's a singer who creates such a rapport with her audiences that this recital felt a bit like meeting a dear old friend after a long absence, suspecting this would be the last time... And as it coincided with the tenth anniversary of Dodo's death, knowing how much she'd have enjoyed it meant she was on my mind all the while. In the circumstances, even I, normally soulless and stony-hearted, was affected by all this emotional charge.

Photo: LP/Bastien Moignoux

As you can see above, Lott and her pianist and fellow vocalist (e.g. in Coward) Jason Carr put together an eclectic programme, but a subtle and sophisticated one, interweaving nods to various points in Lott's career in France with wry, autumnal fin-de-carrière allusions (i.e. we're none of us getting any younger) and contrasting comic numbers. Lott introduced the sets and explained the choices herself, in French, divulging how much thought had gone into the clever enchaînement while creating a relaxed, familiar atmosphere.

As my neighbour (yes, he's still with us) said afterwards, Felicity Lott's voice, in her late 70s, 'is what it is.' The years have diminished it, of course. But Lott's professionalism and technique, her total mastery of her instrument, of its capacities, of the virtues that can, in fact, be made of certain necessities, are unimpaired. She's as attentive as ever to the text, responsive to every word, chiselling every vocal detail with her usual intelligence and finesse, and without falling into mannerism. Her diction is still impeccable; you can take my French neighbour's word for that, too: he understood, he told me, every word. And though her voice is, as I said, diminished, she can still muster some powerful notes in the upper medium, taking advantage of them to bring dynamic contrast and variety. She can still float ethereal pianissimi, too. And, strikingly, she can still sing through a phrase, without taking a breath, where any singer might legitimately have paused for air.

As we all know, her storytelling - tragic, ironic or outright comic - has always been perfectly judged as well: astute, sensitive, wistful but never maudlin, or knowing and wry, with occasional bursts of exuberance, but never tacky or OTT. Starting cold (on a chilly evening) with Auric's tricky Printemps was perhaps a mistake, but Lott explained that she chose it because she'd sung it on exactly the same spot forty (she rolled her eyes) years before. Once her voice was properly warmed up, the rest of the 90-minute programme, performed without a break, was a largely low-key, poignant yet dazzling display of her art.

On the humorous side, the evening's highlight was probably Rodgers and Hart's To keep my love alive, a wicked song about disposing of successive husbands in a variety of ways. Lott delved into her repertoire of expressions and gestures, familiar from her Offenbach days, to act it out with perfect comic timing and effect. On the more crepuscular, valedictory side, at the programme's core were certainly Poulenc's La Dame de Monte Carlo and, to end, Les chemins de l'amour. I must admit, I was surprised to see La Dame de Monte Carlo on the programme at all, seeing it as a potentially over-ambitous choice for a singer approaching (though far from looking) 80. But then I thought, Dame Felicity knows what she's doing. And of course she did. It was a remarkable performance.

With only 550 seats, the Athénée is a little belle-époque jewel-box of a space, and I was on the fourth row. So this Monday evening offered a moving moment of intimacy with a great artist, and a welcome opportunity to pay tribute to someone who's given us so much pleasure over the years.

Dodo would have loved it.

Lortie - Chopin, 27 February 2025

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 18:50:20 +0000

Barbican Hall

Études, op.10
Trois Nouvelles Études, B130
Études, op.25

Louis Lortie (piano)

I do not think I had previously heard all of Chopin’s piano studies given on a single evening. Fortunately, Louis Lortie’s recital was not one of those occasions on which one ends up thinking that might have made more sense as a CD than a concert programme; there is certainly much to be gained by hearing the works together, not only the two celebrated sets, but also the Trois Nouvelles Études written in 1839 as a contribution to Ignaz Moscheles and François-Joseph Fétis’s Méthode des méthodes de piano. It is not unusual in a piano recital to feel that the music following the interval flows more freely; if that was the case here, that is not to say that the first half was without interest, far from it. And whatever quibbles one might have – there will always be something – there is something heroic to the very attempt, let alone to its navigation with such success.

Indeed, Lortie’s way with the op.10 Études was in some ways surprising. Often, the technical difficulties underlying the idea of a study came across more strongly than usual as essence as opposed to mere starting-point. In the opening C major piece, fingerwork and basic figuration very much were the music material. In the F major Étude, all was generated from tightly sprung rhythms. Voice-leading very much did its work in the E-flat major and minor studies. There was a keen sense of progression too, the C-sharp minor study vehement, torrential even, and notably proceeding from its two immediate predecessors. That is not to say there was not lyricism, as for instance in the E major study, given not without rubato yet enough simplicity; but even there, the technical ‘point’ of the piece shone through. Whether the balance tilted too much in that direction is doubtless in part a matter of taste, though for me sometimes it did. I certainly felt the loss of subjectivity in the ‘Revolutionary’ Study, an odd anti-climax whose detachment felt at odds with ‘problem’ and material alike.

The three Nouvelles Études seemed to strike a better overall balance, as did the op.25 set. In the former, Scarlatti’s ‘ingenious jesting with art’ came to mind, Lortie uncommonly successful even among great pianists in transforming the ‘problem’ into music from the outset. The first in particular can readily sound more an ‘exercise’ than anything else, but here was deeply involving; as, in its necessarily lighter way, was the second. The A-flat major opening study of op.25 built and sang, its trajectory beautifully plotted. Slightly odd hesitations in the second piece of the op.10 set were nowhere to be heard in the long line of its counterpart here, whilst the richness of texture in the succeeding F major study proved duly engrossing. Technical demands were not banished, but there was a more consistent, conventional sense of these as miniature tone poems proceeding from a technical question: nowhere more so than in the G-sharp minor Étude. A delectable G-flat major Étude dug just deep enough. The concluding C minor piece of this set worked considerably better to my ears as a conclusion than its counterpart prior to the interval, very much a profound utterance of the soul.

The first encore – alas, I missed the second – a generous G minor Ballade, was oddly dream-like: not necessarily how I think of it, but successfully reimagined on Lortie’s own terms. This was, then, anything but a run-of-the-mill Chopin recital. I was often thrilled and, even where slightly puzzled, found myself at least intrigued.

Tea For Two

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 13:17:01 +0000

Last Friday’s lunchtime concert in the RBA was given by the France-Canada Academy of Vocal Arts at the University of Toronto. That mouthful is the moniker of a collaboration between the Faculty of Music and the Académie Francis Poulenc. So this last week members of the AFP had been in Toronto working with students and faculty here on French chansons and canadian art song. Fridays concert showcased six singer/pianist teams singing French song rep from both sides of the Canadian Channel.

It was varied and enjoyable and, at times, very accomplished indeed. Soprano Joanna Goddard is definitely a rising star at UoT and her light, bright soprano sounded really nice in some songs by the Viardots and Yiannis Foulidis. Joel Goodfellow also impressed at the keyboard.

One of the visitors; bass-baritone Pierre-Yves Cras impressed with Duparc’s “La vague et la cloche” and Mathieu’s “Il pleure dans mon coeur”. He’s an excellent interpreter of text with loads of power that he can use to dramatic effect where needed. Excellent work from Etienne Caron at the piano.

Next up was contralto Nicole Percifield. I’ve loved her voice for what seems like ages and she just gets better. She gave a very expressive account of the late John Beckwith’s “J’ai perdu mon amant” and a rather sexy rendering of Bizet’s “Adieux de l’hôtesse arabe”. Accompaniment was by Dakota Scott-Digout who also seems to have been around for ever!

Baritone Félix Merle sang the first of two settings of Nelligan’s “Claire de lune intellectuel”, this one by Louis Dominique Roy. It was quite dramatic and contrasted nicely with Gounod’s elegiac “Départ”. Both songs were sung with impeccable diction and fine accompaniment from Flore-Elise Capelier.

Next up was another setting of “Clair de lune intellectuel”; this time by UoT grad student Maria Eduarda Mendes Martins. This combined lyricism and a fair bit of drama and was nicely sung by soprano Hanne Morit Mordal Iversen with Dakota accompanying again. It was followed by a sensitive and quite gentle version of Dutilleux’ symbolist “Barque d’or”.

And finally, a tenor; and a very good one. He showed proper tenoring in Poulenc’s “La grâce exilée” and then real fireworks for both singer and pianist (Minira Najafzade) in the same composer’s crazy “Aussi bien les cigales”. A pair of songs by Pierre Mercure were equally well done.

Definitely one of the most interesting song recitals I’ve been to recently.

Photos capped from this Youtube video of the whole concert.

Minimalist Onegin

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 18:25:07 +0000

Laurent Pelly’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin was recorded for video at La Monnaie – De Munt in 2023. It’s a severely minimalist production set somewhere, around 1900 or so. I say somewhere because there’s nothing very Russian about it. It could be any country gentry and peasants scenario followed by a society ball. There are no uniforms in sight. Even Gremin wears ordinary evening clothes, albeit with orders and medals.

The set for the first two acts is a large square platform revolving at centre stage. It’s about three feet above stage level. In the opening scene the Larinas and their guests inhabit the platform while the peasantry is at stage level, in semi darkness, and provide the motive power to turn the platform. Then the platform becomes static with the back half folded up to make a back wall for Tatyana’s bedroom. Act 2 sees us back with the rotating element but now the guests at Tatyana’s name day party are on both levels, with Lensky wandering disconsolately around at stage level.. During the duel scene, everything is very dark which makes it quite hard to see exactly what’s what. In Act 3 all this goes and we have a sort of vestigial staircase arrangement with lanterns on which all the action takes place. It’s still all very dark.

Costuming is strictly civilian and quite simple, especially for the ladies, at least in the first two acts. There are modest ankle length dresses in pastel colours for the girls and three piece suits with wing collars and ties for the men. In the last act it’s all properly grand ballroom with tails, evening gowns, jewellery and decorations.

With such a setting everything really depends on the Personenregie (with some help from the choreography). It’s good; rooted in Pelly’s belief that all the characters are “driven by frustration”. They act as they do because they believe or intuit that “something” is missing. The singers convey this convincingly. Sally Matthews is a very good Tatyana. She’s properly girlish in the first two acts but seems to transform physically and vocally in Act 3. Her body language is more mature and she even manages to make her voice sound older. She’s well matched by Stéphane Degout in the title role. He oozes stiff arrogance in the first two acts and is really not at all likeable, while singing with style. He comes close to pulling off a credible transformation in Act 3. I’m not sure anybody ever makes Onegin’s behaviour in Act 3 entirely credible though! Lilly Jørstad is quite charming as Olga and there’s some really nice singing from Bogdan Volkov as Lensky. Nicolas Courjal is both dignified and convincingly passionate as Gremin.

The minor roles are nicely done and the chorus sings very well and the ball scenes seem to be managed by seeding the chorus’ best movers with some real dancers. The ballroom scenes; town and country, are complex and fun to watch. The house orchestra sounds fine and Alain Altinoglu conducts effectively enough.

François Roussillon directs for video. He does rather well. From the beginning of the duel scene right to the end light levels on stage are uneven and generally dim. He still manages to show what matters and he takes a fairly expansive view when there’s a lot happening; as in the two dance scenes. On Blu-ray the picture is just good enough. I’d be wary of DVD for this one. Sound; PCM stereo and DTS-MA surround, though is excellent throughout. There’s a useful interview with Pelly in the booklet which also features a detailed track listing. Subtitle options are English, German, French, Korean and Japanese.

I suppose in terms of other options the main contender for a fairly traditional Onegin would still be Robert Carsen’s version recorded at the Met in 2007 with Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Renée Fleming. Though if you live in Toronto you might be getting a bit tired of that production! The new one stands up pretty well as a solidly acted and sung performance.

Catalogue information: Naxos Blu-ray NBD0185V (release date 14th March)

Radio Interview With The Front Row

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 14:27:48 +0000

Lubbock’s classical music station is KLZK 105.7. Its program “The Front Row is a weekday program devoted to coverage of the art and cultural community on the South Plains. Host Clint Barrick unpacks the musical, artistic, theatrical, and cultural events offered to the public and interviews the movers and shakers who create, sponsor, and provide these opportunities to everyone in the Lubbock area.”

Below is an interview I gave on the program last month. The interviewer is Clint Barrack.

Gina Cigna

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 21:13:36 +0000

Gina Cigna (1900-2001) was a dramatic soprano who was prominent during the interwar years. She was born in Angers, France to parents of Italian ancestry. She initially trained as a pianist studying with the renowned pianist Alfred Cortot. In 1921 she married French tenor Maurice Sens who convinced her to turn to singing.

In 1927, she debuted at La Scala as Freia in Das Rheingold. Over the next two years, she sang minor roles with the company. In 1929 she appeared as Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni and scored a big success. Thereafter, she appeared at many of the world’s major opera houses singing the core Italian dramatic soprano parts.

She gave her first performance at the Met as Aida in 1937. She got good reviews for her Aida performance and was rapturously received by the Met’s audience. During the same month of her appearance at the Met she sang the leads in Il Trovatore, Norma, and La Gioconda. Audience interest remained high, but the critics were harsh. She returned to the New York company the following season adding Don Giovanni, again as Donna Elvira, and Cavalleria Rusticana to her Met list – but that was it. She never again sang at the Met. By the time World War II was over so was most of her voice.

She continued to appear at La Scala until 1945. In 1948, she suffered a severe automobile accident, which ended her career. He is also said to have suffered a heart attack in the same year, but given her survival to age 101 I doubt the diagnosis. She spent her post-operatic career as a voice teacher.

She participated in the first complete recordings of Norma and Turandot – both for Cetra Records.

Cigna’s singing was known for its power and intensity. Her noticeable vibrato may bother some listeners. I have no trouble with it. The fine details of vocal expression were not part of her armamentarium. These deficiencies likely explain the divergence between the critics and the audience. Her best years were the thirties. Her voice lost effect when she was still relatively young due to the punishment her vocal style inflicted on it.

Below are eight examples of her singing made in the studio and in performance. Her best singing seems to correspond with her performances in the early thirties.

‘In questa regia’ from Turandot is from the studio recording of the opera. The tenor heard at the end is Francesco Merli.

‘Casta Diva’ is from the complete recording of Norma.

The two arias from Aida are from a Met performance. Note the audience’s reaction. ‘Ritorna vincitor’

‘O patria mia’

‘D’amor sull’ali rosee’ from Il Trovatore does not meet the stylistic requirements of this great aria which are beyond Cigna’s ability to realize its great demands.

She does better with the three verismo aria that conclude this piece. ‘La mamma morte’ is from Act 3 of Girodano’s Andrea Chenier. The aria plays to the soprano’s strengths – effective declamation and powerful high notes.

One of opera’s guiltiest pleasures is Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur. I confess to sucumbing to Adriana’s vocal delights. ‘Io son l’umile ancella’ is from Act 1.

‘Poveri fiori’ is from Act 4. The flowers she sings about were poisoned by her rival in love. She kisses the flowers and dies, but not before singing a few very good tunes.

Cigna represents the style of singing of Italian opera that was dominant about a century ago. One can understand her popularity during her prime even if she was not at the top of a very strong list of Italian style singers like Claudia Muzio and Rosa Ponselle.

Literary Dreams: Yevgeny Onegin at the Teatro alla Scala

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 14:49:53 +0000

Tchaikovsky – Yevgeny Onegin (Евгений Онегин)

Tatyana – Aida Garifullina
Olga – Elmina Hasan
Larina – Alisa Kolosova
Filippyevna – Julia Gertseva
Lensky – Dmitry Korchak
Yevgeny Onegin – Alexey Markov
Triquet – Yaroslav Abaimov
Zaretski – Oleg Budaratskiy
Prince Gremin – Dmitry Ulyanov

Coro del Teatro alla Scala, Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala / Timur Zangiev.
Stage director – Mario Martone.

Teatro alla Scala, Milan, Italy. Sunday, March 2nd 2025.

Following on from his thoughtful and intelligent staging of Khovanshchina in 2019, just before the world changed, the Teatro alla Scala has once again, with this Yevgeny Onegin, confided one of the greatest of all Russian operas to Mario Martone’s stage direction. Similarly, after his positive interpretation of Pikovaya Dama in 2022, at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the house again invited Timur Zangiev to lead the musical direction of the evening. It isn’t often these days that we see a cast made up of almost entirely Russian singers in the west, and it’s a reminder that Russia has given us some of the greatest art of western civilization, even though, right now, the country is more known for its violence rather than its culture.

Photo: © Brescia & Amisano / Teatro alla Scala

What Martone’s production of Onegin has in common with the Khovanshchina of six years ago is its intelligence and thoughtfulness. He sets the action in the present day, initially in a field of wheat with a bunker-like room in which Tatyana sings her letter scene, which is also crowded with books. Martone pulls out a real tension here between the knowledge and dreams that emerge from literature (and indeed how Tatyana listens to music on her headphones, from music), and the more quotidian, carnal interactions of the country-dwellers. As the crowd celebrated in the opening scene, Tatyana was seen sitting at the front of the stage, listening to music and reading, separated from society. Similarly, in her name day party, Tatyana isn’t seen at first. Instead, she’s revealed to be sitting in her room, alone with her books, immediately after Onegin’s dance with Olga. That contrast between reading and social interaction I found to be most compelling – particularly in how Onegin sat on a pile of books to give his rejection to Tatyana, literally sitting on her dreams, just after he flirted with a group of young ladies on his way to see her.

Photo: © Brescia & Amisano / Teatro alla Scala

Yet, Martone makes an even deeper point and one that seems especially timely. In the name day party, the chorus sings of the appearance of a military band. And indeed, the band shows up, while chorus members brand Kalashnikovs in celebration. While this happens, a group of danseuses pile Tatyana’s books up, and these subsequently go up in flames, while her room collapses. I found it an extremely potent image, that idea that to get ahead Tatyana needed to forget her reading and the joy she obtained from literature; but also, that we as a society lose so much of our humanity by focusing on militarism and forgetting the greatness and influence of literature and art. Yes, Tatyana may end up a Princess, but at what cost? The way Martone stages the St Petersburg scene is also incredibly striking. A red drape at the front of the stage allows us to perceive people dancing and celebrating behind, while Onegin, now the outsider, ruminates at the front of the stage – his role and that of Tatyana, literally reversed. It was interesting to hear a woman in the Platea complain loudly after the scene that the ‘discoteca’ she saw was not what she expected with the music, simply because Martone’s reading has a rare intelligence and visual flair. The final scene is staged on a completely bare, black stage, the idea that Tatyana and Onegin, now without books, without art, left alone with their emotions with nowhere to hide, fully brought out the solitude experienced by both characters.

Photo: © Brescia & Amisano / Teatro alla Scala

In the main, Martone’s personenregie was efficient. Given the lack of a substantial set, he rightly had his singers spend most of the evening at the front of the stage. The chorus was parked on stage to sing, with the danseurs and danseuses providing the physical activity. Indeed, I found the breakdancing in the opening peasants’ chorus to be most exhilarating. That said, I left the theatre tonight with an appreciation that Martone’s was an extremely thoughtful and intelligent reading, but not one that particularly moved me. I do, however, think that that wasn’t ultimately due to his direction, but rather it was due to the musical aspects of the evening.

Photo: © Brescia & Amisano / Teatro alla Scala

Starting with Zangiev’s conducting. I did have some positive impressions at first. He brought out a haunting loneliness and solitude in the opening measures that promised much. Similarly, the descending phrase in the double basses just before the peasants’ chorus, was phrased like a group of Russian choral basses descending to the sepulchral depths. Yet as the evening developed, it was clear that Zangiev was focusing on beauty of sound rather than a sense of dramatic impetus, in turn draining the work of its deep emotion. Tempi would frequently come to a complete halt – for example in ‘kuda, kuda?’, where I longed for him to keep things moving. Furthermore, despite it being well into the run, there were a number of moments where he lost control of the ensemble, for instance in the peasant’s chorus where the chorus went their own way, or during the letter scene where the strings were not unanimous in approach. The playing from the orchestra was not at the level I know they’re capable of, following their thrilling playing in December’s Forza del destino, with string intonation frequently rather raw. That said, the horn playing was notable for its cantabile beauty. The chorus, prepared by Alberto Malazzi, continued to demonstrate the significant improvements made under his direction. Although ensemble wasn’t always watertight, this was more likely to be due to direction from the pit rather than their preparation. They sang with confidence: sopranos solid in tone, while there were some deliciously rich contraltos. The tenors and basses sang with ringing tone.

Photo: © Brescia & Amisano / Teatro alla Scala

Aida Garifullina was a scenically rather glamorous Tatyana. She started well, her opening duet with Olga demonstrating an agreeably dark-toned soprano with silky reach. As the evening progressed, it became clear that Tatyana is a role that is somewhat heavy for Garifullina’s current vocal estate. The voice is narrow, lacking in the creamy richness the part requires, with the tone frequently sharp due to the pressure she put on it to reach into the house. Indeed, her intonation really wasn’t suitable for those of a sensitive disposition, with the final duet showing her to be skating around the notes rather than sitting directly on them. Unfortunately, the voice didn’t quite have the heft it needed to take wing in those glorious soaring phrases in that final duet. The letter scene also felt lacking in emotional depth, not fully bringing out the beauty of those particularly Russian sounds.

Photo: © Brescia & Amisano / Teatro alla Scala

Alexey Markov was an implacable Onegin. There was a coldness to his interpretation due to the icy tone, that was at one with the conception of his character as unfeeling. It did mean that the steeliness at the core of the voice made his dancing with Olga at the name day party seem particularly malicious. The downside is that this approach made his duel scene with Lensky, here staged as a game of Russian roulette, lack any kind of emotion or regret. In turn, I lacked a sense of his character’s journey as he realized his mistake in rejecting Tatyana years ago, simply because of the narrowness of his palette of tone colours. Furthermore, the voice took on an alarming dryness in the final scene, which left me to fear that Markov would not be able to last the course. He managed to get to the end, but it did sound like that it was touch and go as we got there.

Photo: © Brescia & Amisano / Teatro alla Scala

Dmitry Korchak sang his opening expressions of love to Olga with real extroversion, perhaps influenced by the location, it initially sounded more like Puccini than Tchaikovsky. Later, he found more light and shade in his reading – his ode to chez Larin in the name day party sung with real delicacy and impeccable breath control, particularly necessary due to the stasis from the pit. His ‘kuda, kuda?’ was sung with focused inwardness and impressive control of dynamics. Elmina Hasan was a confident Olga, sung in an agreeably peachy mezzo, although she had an unfortunate memory lapse and missed out the final phrase of her opening arioso. Alisa Kolosova was a very glamourous sounding Larina. Her mezzo is wonderfully rich and rounded, with fabulous sheen to the tone and utterly healthy in sound. The registers may have parted company in Julia Gertseva’s mezzo, but she sang her Filippyevna with genuine warmth and humanity. Dmitry Ulyanov sang Gremin’s aria with eloquence and long phrases, again necessary due to the slow tempo, although the tone did tend to a little greyness. Yaroslav Abaimov sang Triquet’s couplets in impeccable French. The remainder of the cast was much more at the level one would expect at this legendary address.

Photo: © Brescia & Amisano / Teatro alla Scala

This was a rather mixed evening. Musically, the most positive aspects were found in Korchak’s Lensky, Kolosova’s Larina, and the enthusiastic singing of Malazzi’s chorus. I found Martone’s staging to be thoughtful and insightful, although it didn’t move me quite as much as I felt it could have, simply due to the slow tempi set in the pit and the rather problematic assumptions of the two leading roles. That said, Martone gives us a plea for humanity and reminds us of the centrality of art and literature to civilized society – a message that could not be more pertinent today. Audience reaction at the close was gen

Brews, Beauties and Brawlers

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 14:47:38 +0000

So on Saturday night at St.Olave’s CE I finally managed to catch a concert in the Apocryphonia series. It was titled Brews, Beauties and Brawlers and was billed as “classical” meets “punk”. It was a collection of pieces for piano, solo voice and/or choir and organiser Alexander Capellazzo had recruited four voices of each type with soloists coming from the group. Narmina Afaniyeva was at the piano. Everybody (and some of the audience) had dressed for the occasion!

The music was largely drinking songs or love songs from the 17th and 19th/early 20th century. The featured composers were Purcell, Coleridge-Taylor (the composer not the albatross dude), Vaughan Williams and Stanford. The conclusion, and the longest piece on the programme, was Charles Villiers Stanford’s Phaudrig Crohoore; a choral ballad of 1896 to text by Sheridan le Fanu (the vampire guy) about a very large Irishman who falls in love, drinks, fights and gets killed in the 1798 rising.

And if one Le Fanu work about. getting pointlessly killed in 1798 were not enough the concert opened with an excerpt from Stanford’s opera Shamus O’Brien sung by John Holland and chorus. After that there was a substantial break from Oirishry with some acerbic songs about drink and prostitution by Purcell featuring Thera Barclay, Grace Quinsey, Lucia Santilly and David Walsh as soloists plus Stanford’s Molly Brannigan sung by Alexander and two extracts from Vaughan William’s Sir John in Love; “Sigh No More Ladies” with Catharin Carew and “Back and Side Go Bare” from the chorus.

More Vaughan Williams after the break with The Sky Above the Roof sung by Jada Alexiou. This sounds a lot like the music in his two great song cycles which, to my mind, elevated it above some of the parlour song like material like the three Coleridge-Taylor songs to texts by Heine that followed. These were nicely sung by Alessia Naccarato, Catharin Carew and Máiri Demings but I’m a bit allergic to Victorian/Edwardian respectability. Give me the roistering, rogering Restoration any day!

Narmina treated us to some very nice piano solo music from Coleridge -Taylor before the big number. In Phaudrig Crohoore the “hero” was sung by Gabriel Sanchez-Ortega with David Walsh as his nemesis Michael O’Hanlon and much energetic work from the ensemble. I could have used text for this but it wasn’t hard to fathom the gist. There’s lots of drinking, O’Hanlon marries Crohoore’s squezze but the latter causes ructions in the church before being kicked out and dying womantically during the rising and “the green grass grows over his grave” (of course). Very nicely done but I’m also rather allergic to the Celtic Twilight so not entirely my thing.

Apocryphonia’s mission is to programme vocal music that nobody else is doing which is admirable, if risky. Predictably I liked some pieces more than others but, all in all, it was a good show by a talented bunch of singers. And if you think this rep is obscure their next concert on May 12th and 16th features music from Antwerp from the early decades of the Eighty Years War.

Don Giovanni at Livermore Valley Opera

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 18:58:12 +0000

* Notes * Livermore Valley Opera's Don Giovanni (Ovation pictured, photograph by author) opened last night at the Bankhead Theater. The opera is cast well and the production is very committed. Robert Herriot's staging used video projections that featured monstrous roses in every scene. They seemed to have blood vessels and looked almost three-dimensional. The action all was well-motivated, the threats of violence seem very real. The Act I finale had pistols in it so that it made sense that Don Giovanni was able to be cornered and then his escape once he had gotten in control of weapons also was believable. The video projections and stripped down set made for easy scene changes. Mozart leaves the orchestra exposed and every false start or intonation error was on full display under Maestro Alexander Katsman, especially since there are so few people in the pit. It was all very lively and certainly there was never a dull moment. The three sopranos in the cast were all quite powerful singers. Meryl Dominguez has such a strong voice as Donna Anna. Cara Gabrielson has a sharper edge to her sound but this works well for Donna Elvira, who does seem somewhat hysterical. I was most partial to Phoebe Chee's Zerlina, she's sweet but also sassy, and has a nice rounded warmth. Our leading man, baritone Titus Muzi III, embodies Don Giovanni beautifully, even though he hurt his right knee in rehearsal and had to use a cane for the prima. He moves well and looks quite dashing. His voice is not entirely resonant through his whole range. His Champagne aria felt rushed and not perfectly sparkling but his serenade in Act II was lovely. Tenor David Walton was convincing as Don Ottavio, as was bass-baritone Samuel J. Weiser as Leporello. Walton sounded very pretty, while Weiser has a distinct vibrato. Bass-baritone Joseph Calzada made the most of his small role, his Masetto was charming. Best of all was bass Kirk Eichelberger, his Commendatore was commanding. His low notes are rich and full, and his last scene at dinner when he asks Don Giovanni to repent is terrifying. *Tattling * There was a lot of talking during Act I and much crackling of plastic in Act II. At least no electronic noises were noted, and not too much coughing. I was introduced to mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, who is the most famous resident of the city I live in. She liked my outfit and also shared a chocolate chip cookie with me. She was there for the Young Musicians Choral Orchestra, who performed in the lobby before the opera.

Seven Veils theatrical release

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 14:36:53 +0000

Atom Egoyan’s 2023 film Seven Veils filmed at the Canadian Opera Company and featuring members of the cast of that season’s run of Strauss’ Salome is getting a theatrical release on March 7th. I can’t find exact details on whe and where it’s showing but at least some Cineplex and Landmark cinemas will have it. I saw it pre-pre-release at the Four Seasons Centre in September 2023. My thoughts are here.

Scandinavian Bohemians: La bohème at the Kungliga Opera

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 12:22:36 +0000

Puccini – La bohème

Mimì – Hanna Husáhr
Rodolfo – Bror Magnus Tødenes
Marcello – Jeremy Carpenter
Musetta – Vivianne Holmberg
Schaunard – Ola Eliasson
Colline – John Erik Eleby
Benoît – Niklas Björling Rygert
Alcindoro – Peter Haeggström

Barn från Adolf Fredriks Musikklasser, Kungliga Operans Kör, Kungliga Hovkapellet / Vincenzo Milletarì.
Stage director – José Cura.

Kungliga Operan, Stockholm, Sweden. Friday, February 28th, 2025.

Surprisingly, tonight marked my first-ever visit to the Kungliga Opera in Stockholm, Sweden. It’s certainly a handsome venue; the auditorium a gilded jewel of a theatre, intimate in size and seating 1200. The main attraction for this revival of José Cura’s 2015 staging of La bohème, was the presence of Vincenzo Milletarì in the pit. Having seen him conduct a sublime Suor Angelica in Milan last year, I was very keen to have the opportunity to hear him in a much more substantial work. As always, I very much appreciate the opportunity to hear young singers and names new to me. I was also keen to see Bror Magnus Tødenes, who was a revelation in Armide in Vienna around a decade ago, similarly singing a more substantial role than his assignment there.

Cura’s staging takes a very interesting angle on this, one of the most-performed titles in the repertoire – and tonight celebrating its thousandth performance in Stockholm. Rather than setting it in Paris, Cura instead sets it in the Swedish capital. He wouldn’t be the first to change the location of this opera – after all, there have been productions of bohème set in outer space. Yet he goes even further. He changes the libretto, instead making it about actual cultural figures in Scandinavian cultural history. Rodolfo becomes August Strindberg, Marcello is Edvard Munch, Schaunard incarnates Edvard Grieg, while Colline becomes Søren Kierkegaard. Musetta is similarly transformed into Tulla Larsen, Café Momus becomes a place called Berns, while the references to ‘Parigi’ in the libretto are changed to ‘Stoccolma’. The one character who doesn’t have a Scandinavian equivalent is, of course, Mimì. I found that quite a moving idea – the thought that the other bohemians went on to produce significant works of art and literature, while Mimì is today forgotten, a person whose happiness and demise are now merely a footnote in the lives of those she entered. This sense of fleeting happiness is an aspect I find particularly true to the work and a deeply affecting one.

Moreover, Cura, who also designed the lighting, sets and costumes, uses the back of the stage to project images of artworks by Munch – including The Scream at the start of Act 4. This certainly added context to the evening, particularly so as the ‘mar rosso’ to which Marcello referred in his opening lines was a woman with a red wig. That said, there were a number of aspects that I found less convincing in Cura’s staging. The placement of the choruses in Act 2 had them too far back on stage for maximal impact. Similarly, the sets were relatively bare, not necessarily providing the acoustical support the singers would benefit from – particularly noticeable given that this was a relatively light-voiced cast. The set changes also required some considerable assembly time, slowing down the pace of the evening, despite Milletarì’s best efforts to keep tension high. I certainly felt that the adaptation worked on the whole, and I wasn’t particularly deranged by name changes in the libretto, although I wasn’t always convinced by the execution.

Tødenes brought a youthful, focused tenor to Rodolfo’s music. The voice is bright, with the crystalline purity of a Norwegian spring. He’s also a bright-eyed, eager stage presence. It pains me to write, however, that I’m not convinced this is a role for him at this time – even in such an intimately-sized house. He made the effort to sing with an admirable legato, though those Italian double consonants needed more attention. While he attempted to sing with an uplifting high C in ‘che gelida manina’, the top sounded under pressure, losing that beauty of tone that the voice has so much of. Tødenes also made the unfortunate choice of singing the final phrases of Act 1 in octaves with Mimì, and was sadly unable to sustain it. There was a generosity to his singing that was admirable, but I would suggest that his strengths lie more with Mozart and Händel, than with Puccini – at least for now.

Hanna Husáhr sang Mimì in a similarly bright soprano. The voice had a glacial iciness to the tone that gave her Mimì a haunting sense of her imminent demise. She filled her music with emotion, as she sang ‘il primo sole è mio’ in her ‘mi chiamano Mimì’, there was a sense of hopefulness of wanting to hold onto a tangible moment that was so deeply affecting. Indeed, the gentleman seated next to me was in floods of tears. Later, as Husáhr sang her ‘D’onde lieta usci’, she was able to add a creaminess to the tone that made the music full of optimistic regrets. Undoubtedly a thoughtful and intelligent reading of the part.

The remaining cast was decent. Jeremy Carpenter sang Marcello in a slightly grainy baritone at first, though as he warmed up through the evening, the tone filled out. Vivianne Holmberg sang Musetta in a focused, diamantine soprano, able to carry with ease through the house. Ola Eliasson was a firm-voiced Schaunard, while John Erik Eleby was a very welcome find as Colline, singing his ode to the coat in a rich, resonant bass – very impressive. Niklas Björling Rygert and Peter Haeggström were confident as Benoît and Alcindoro respectively. The choruses, with adults prepared by Ines Kaun and children by Karin Bjurvald, dispatched their contributions with precision – although I do wish they had been brought forward on stage to bathe us more in that wall of sound.

That brings me to Milletarì and his orchestra. His conducting was very special indeed. Right from those opening measures, there was a real sense of cantabile beauty, of soaring lyricism, of optimism and high spirits, that just made the impending tragedy all the more moving. Stockholm may be a long way from Lucca, but Milletarì managed to get his Nordic players to phrase like real Italians. He brought out so much colour in the orchestration, helped by absolutely superb playing from the band: silky strings embossed with twinkling harps, piquant winds, and brass that sounded full of portents of modernity. Moreover, there was an absolute and total sense that Milletarì breathes this music just like a singer does, supporting his colleagues, giving us both a fabulous bath of sound from the pit, while always letting the voices through. Milletarì is a major talent. I left tonight with a sense that he truly lives and breathes this music with the essence of his soul. Without doubt, one of the finest Puccini conductors I’ve had the privilege of hearing.

There was much to enjoy in tonight’s bohème. The singing was decent on the whole, even if I left concerned for Tødenes’ undeniably handsome instrument with such a heavy assignment, while Husáhr gave us a lovely Mimì. Cura’s staging was definitely intriguing. I felt that the Scandinavian updating worked on the whole, although I wasn’t completely convinced by some of his directorial choices in terms of personenregie. But where tonight gave an enormous amount of pleasure was in Milletarì’s glorious conducting and in the playing of the excellent house orchestra. The ovations at the closing curtain were generous, particularly so for Tødenes.

Finale 44 – Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 20:01:48 +0000

Beethoven’s C minor Symphony, built around the universally known four-note phrase, transitions quietly from its third movement to its fourth. The brief journey over the orchestra explodes in a burst of C major, unusual for a symphony that began in a minor key. The four-note figure occurs repeatedly in different guises as it does in the previous three. The movement, a triumph of composition, ends the triumphant symphony in a triumphant blaze. When its’s over one can only respond with awe.

Below are two performances of this movement conducted by of the two greatest conductors of the 20th century – Wilhelm Furtwängler and Arturo Toscanini. When it comes to the core German repertory, I usually prefer Furtwängler’s readings to those of his older Italian contemporary – but not in this case. It’s a close call, but, for whatever little it’s worth, I give the nod to Toscanini. I think his greater energy and faster pace wins out of the German’s great sense of structure and tonal grandeur – but it’s just an opinion. In the end, it’s Beethoven who’s the victor.

Furtwängler and the Vienna Philharmonic

Toscanini and the NBC Symphony

Opéra Magazine's 'pick of the month' recording for March 2025

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 18:07:00 +0000

The March issue of France’s Opéra Magazine is here already, so it's still going after all. Its favourite recording this month, to which it awards one of its ‘Diamonds’, is Vannina Santoni’s Par Amour, a recital of French and Italian operatic arias from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.

All of it seems to be available free on YouTube.

Wagner, Götterdämmerung (Le Crépuscule des Dieux) at La Monnaie in Brussels

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 12:52:00 +0000

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday February 23 2025

Conductor: Alain Altinoglu. Production: Pierre Audi. Video: Chris Kondek. Sets: Michael Simon. Costumes: Petra Reinhardt. Lighting: Valerio Tiberi. Siegfried: Bryan Register. Gunther: Andrew Foster-Williams. Alberich: Scott Hendricks. Hagen: Ain Anger. Brünnhilde: Ingela Brimberg. Gutrune: Annett Fritsch. Waltraute: Nora Gubisch. Erste Norn: Marvic Monreal. Zweite Norn: Iris Van Wijnen. Dritte Norn: Katie Low. Woglinde: Tamara Banješević. Wellgunde: Jelena Kordić. Flosshilde: Christel Loetzsch. La Monnaie Orchestra and Men’s Chorus.

Photos: © Monika Rittershaus

As I mentioned in my last article (on the subject of Calixto Bieito’s production of Das Rheingold at the Paris Opera), in what the French might call une histoire belge, La Monnaie’s Ring cycle started with Romeo Castellucci as its director, and is now ending with Pierre Audi. What I didn’t mention was that I actually missed Audi’s much-admired Siegfried in September, as I was still on holiday in Greece. So all I’ll have seen of his vision of the ‘Siegfried diptych’ - not, I believe, a mere transplant from his Amsterdam Ring - is this Götterdämmerung.

But I’ll get on to the production later. First, the music.

It’s unusual at La Monnaie, whose patrons are generally quiet, especially after lunching on fried black pudding and wortelstoemp, to see the whole of the parterre on its feet, cheering. They cheered all the singers, but cheered loudest of all for Alain Altinoglu. I read somewhere recently that there are supposedly no bad orchestras, only bad conductors, the implication being, I guess, that a good conductor can make a silk purse of a sow’s ear. Not that La Monnaie’s orchestra was ever, in the last 35 or so years I’ve been hearing it, a sow’s ear. It was always a solid, stolid pit band, good at, say, middle Verdi. But as I've mentioned before, e.g. when writing up a concert performance of Parsifal three years ago, Alain Altinoglu has coached his musicians up to almost dazzling new heights, and here they were at their absolute best (as, too, was La Monnaie’s men’s chorus, despite the curious, comical antics they get up to in the production).

Altinoglu’s approach to the score is detailed and analytical without being desiccated: perhaps something like Boulez, but with more of a smile on his face. You’re gripped by his storytelling, and time flies. In addition, his cast was almost uniformly strong. So it would be nitpicking of me, having described the standing ovation that greeted them, to dwell on any defects.

To start, the Norns were really excellent, as, to end, were the Rhinemaidens, who’d disappointed in Castellucci’s Rheingold - in other words, in case you’re now getting confused, the Rheingold that initiated this Ring now terminated, very differently (see below), by Audi.

Andrew Foster-Williams is a singer I first came across getting his nipples tweaked in Jonathan Kent’s unforgettable production of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen. Since then, I’ve seen him a number of times in less comical roles, and always been struck by his dramatic and vocal commitment. In this Ring’s Das Rheingold, he only had Donner to sing. But in the Twilight, he was an appropriately weaselly, craven Gunther, with a timbre that seemed a mirror-image of former Freia Annett Fritsch’s Gutrune, as if designedly to underscore their representation as possibly incestuous twins in Audi’s production (see below again). I was a bit cool about that Freia of hers, but had found her striking as Fiordiligi some years back, also at La Monnaie, and was fascinated by her champagne-coloured, brushed-metal timbre here.

Nora Gubisch no longer has the power or range to shine in Waltraute’s higher or more agitated passages - and, in a leather jerkin with two shields, she had some bizarre business to perform - but I have to admit her quieter, more intimate tale was told very expressively indeed. However, after being stripped stark naked, doused in black paint and tortured in Das Rheingold while still phrasing beautifully, Scott Hendricks - with a lot less to do of course - seemed somehow absent in Götterdämmerung, a pale reflection of his former Alberich. A cold perhaps, since so many singers have been struck by them recently.

In the same house in 2019, Bryan Register, as I wrote at the time, ‘was a very good Tristan, particularly at the tenderest or darkest moments, when he sang daringly softly, only just audible over the pit.’ Based on his performance last Sunday, I wonder if he can still carry off the whole of Tristan (he still sings it), but his middle range is very satisfactorily sturdy, energetic and ‘crunchy’, placing the emphasis more on a ‘very strong’ and ‘very brave’ Siegfried than the ‘very young’ and ‘very stupid’ one sometimes played up in other productions.

In 2018, I noted that ‘The hard, bright metal’ of Ingela Brimberg’s voice as Elsa, also in the same house, ‘suited the more dramatic moments better than the tender ones.’ Her timbre is still adamantine, but carries her through the role securely, if not particularly seductively, to an impressive immolation scene.

As the custom is to leave the best till last, I come, now, to Ain Anger. He’s an imposing giant of a man, truly ‘strapping,’ as the saying goes in some often-mocked US reviews. My first encounter with him was as a Sarastro I’m afraid I called ‘dreadful,’ nearly twenty years ago in La Fura dels Baus’s ‘bouncy castle’ production of Die Zauberflöte. But perhaps I’d had a bad day, perhaps he had… whatever, twenty years have passed, and now, as Hagen, he’s absolutely in his element: resounding, dark-voiced, and possibly the one principal in this particular production who succeeded in fashioning as complete a character dramatically as vocally.

So, what about this production?

This is the eleventh Pierre Audi staging I’ve seen since I started writing my blog. But as, unlike many directors, he works with a variety of creative teams, I can’t say that his name, when it appears on programmes, evokes any particular style, or that, stumbling upon one of his productions, I might guess whose it was. He has, perhaps, a preference for abstract, geometric designs and a fondness for simple, timeless costumes, and his directing is usually efficient but unobtrusive. His productions are mildly modern, but unencumbered by intellectual concepts, i.e. not really what people call ‘regie’. Some of the most memorable afternoons or evenings I’ve had at the opera over the last 25 years have involved him as director, and I don’t remember one absolute stinker. But, as opera depends on the successful concatenation of a number of discrete elements, not just the staging, I don’t necessarily recall these productions distinctly, in the way I do those of, say, Tcherniakov, Castellucci or Warlikowski. Or even, dare I say it, in some cases of David McVicar.

Audi’s Brussels Götterdämmerung bears out what I wrote above. It combines abstract, boxy props, in metallic or plastic finishes, gliding round or suspended - alongside the odd floating nugget - above the stage, with sophisticated coloured lighting (red, blue, yellow…) and plain, timeless costumes. The result is a déjà-vu modernist aesthetic that distantly recalls Wieland Wagner - which is not to say that it doesn’t offer some very handsome images. The acting is mostly well-managed and conventional, but occasionally breaks into startlingly incongruous expressionist movements and attitudes, with one or two details I’ll deal with below that risk raising a laugh. Overall, Audi's approach didn't appeal to me: I found it largely bland and in the middle of act two I got bored. But I know some people are happy enough with it - glad, among other things, it doesn’t hammer home a philosophical Konzept of any kind.

The acts are framed by rapid-fire videos of children drawing and painting what we suppose are the story and its characters. These clips fail in whatever purpose they were meant to have, as they simply look out of place, like a gimmicky afterthought. The stage is delimited by symbols that change from act to act: a blackened tree trunk, a neon lance, a coppery (or red-gold?) metal plaque, and crumpled steel representing (I guess) the Rhine. Much use is made of two turntables as the various large objects slither around, conveniently concealing entrances and exits. Eventually, as a change from light boxes and cuboids, the central part of act three is dominated by a large, impressive, and to some extent inscrutable black sculpture hovering above the stage. In the gloom, I could make out at least one horse, a dragon’s (or dinosaur’s) muzzle, possibly an eagle and some ravens, and maybe a toad, clustered together.

Though Konzept-lite, the production does attempt a few isolated ideas. Gunther and Gutrune are got up as twins (in matching cassocks and wigs) and behave incestuously. But that’s confusing: you’re puzzled to find Gutrune so in love with Siegfried so soon after, and so upset at his death. Siegfried and Gunther go together to fetch Brünnhilde: you wonder what that adds to the plot. The Norns, at the start, are wrapped up like larvae in cocoons, combing their long locks. Alberich’s gnarled, steely hands appear first (a bit like Santa Claus's) over the edge of a tall, square, chimney-like structure before he emerges for his exchange with Hagen. The Gibichung vassals are lined up in two black blocks, sometimes standing, sometimes seated on black benches, faceless under black, pointed hoods, recalling Spanish penitents in Holy Week. In act three, the Rhinemaidens appear first as bathing beauties, with flippers (as in Bieito’s aforementioned production in Paris, which is otherwise as different as can be), then slip into slinky metallic skirts that shimmer aquatically.

Along the way, as I mentioned above, there are some almost laughable details. The Tarnhelm, for example, is a floppy, telescopic, conical sun-hat of a kind Carole Lombard once posed in in the 30s. Its gilded folds bounce up and down over Siegfried’s face. In her black leather jerkin, Waltraute, otherwise acting quite rationally, suddenly performs a wild, writhing dance with her two shields, as if emoting to Vaughan-Williams’ A Vision of Aeroplanes. Those serried ranks of penitent-vassals burst into a routine described vividly by a lissome young friend of mine in Los Angeles as ‘the herky jerky Gibichung ensemble.’

The end of the work, when we hope to be wowed by stunning, spectacular fireworks, is something of a damp squib. It is handled largely through a succession of lighting effects on a bare stage: a square of flickering red LEDs for the fire, a glowing white backdrop for Brunnhilde’s exit - to the rear and on foot - and dark blue, against a barrage of spotlights, as the Rhinemaidens subdue Hagen, apparently just by kicking and sitting on him, and together, on the floor, hold up the gold. This visual minimalism does, however, have the advantage of leaving plenty of room for the music.

Which, as I say, scored a triumph.

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

This is the trailer:

At the time of writing, the complete performance is also available on YT.

And as a bonus, here's Maestro Wenarto's peerless Immolation Scene:

Gottfried Benn and the Philosophy of Mind

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 01:52:09 +0000

Gunter Wolf is a German physician who has long been interested in the interaction of medicine and the humanities. His latest publication is about the author and physician Gottfried Benn (1886-1956). He is not nearly as well known to English-speaking audiences as he is in Germany. Wolf’s essay, which can be downloaded below, is intended to familiarize the reader with Benn’s biography and to analyze the novella in more detail, especially in terms of the concepts of the mind’s philosophy.

Wolf not only examines the concept of the mind, he stimulates it as well. He reviews “Benn’s unsteady life focusing on his 1916 novella ‘Gehirne’ (Brains), in which the protagonist (likely Benn’s alter ego) desperately tries to find mental processes, feelings, and the soul in the naked physical brain. This reductive material approach to the body-soul relationship has severe negative effects on the protagonist.”

Gunter Wolf: Gottfried Benn´s “brains” novella from 1916:
implications for the philosophy of mind Download

Götterdämmerung, Regents Opera, 16 February 2025

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 13:27:23 +0000

York Hall, Bethnal Green

Images: Steve Gregson
Siegfried (Peter Furlong), Hagen (Simon Wilding), Gunther (Andrew Mayor)

First Norn - Ingeborg Novrup Børch
Second Norn, Flosshilde – Mae Haydorn
Third Norn, Woglinde – Jillian Finnamore
Brünnhilde – Catharine Woodward
Siegfried – Peter Furlong
Gunther – Andrew Mayor
Hagen – Simon Wilding
Gutrune – Justine Viani
Waltraute – Catherine Backhouse
Alberich – Oliver Gibbs
Wellgunde – Elizabeth Findon
Vassals – Davide Basso, Max Catalano, Anthony Colasanto, Jacob Dyksterhouse, Tim Sawers, Alfred Mitchell, Ed Walters, Robin Whitehouse, Guy Wood-Gush

Director – Caroline Staunton
Assistant directors – Eleanor Strutt, Keiko Sumida
Designs – Isabella van Braeckel
Lighting – Patrick Malmström
Producer – CJ Heaver

Members of London Gay Men’s Chorus

Members of Regents Opera Upper Voices Chorus

Regents Opera Ensemble

Ben Woodward (conductor)

The Norns (Ingeborg Novrup Børch, Mae Heydorn, Jillian Finnamore)

Wagner’s Ring is the drama of our time, yet it is surely the drama of every time. Seeing Opera North’s concert Rheingold only five days after the fateful 2016 referendum, the work seemed to take its leave from that. In our present malaise, Götterdämmerung inevitably seems closer than ever. Wagner, after all, pointed to the great virtue of myth being its alleged truth for all time, its content inexhaustible for any age. He is not saying quite the same thing there, although nor is he saying something entirely different. Tempting though it might be to proceed down that road, the particularity of this particular production and performance should be our primary concern. If my personal experience was less than ideal, in that I was unable to see Die Walküre and Siegfried, the final day of Wagner’s Ring spoke mostly for itself, with tantalising suggestions of what I might have missed—and dearly wish that I had not.

Caroline Staunton’s production continues to tell the story with great intelligence and clarity, further framing refreshing rather than distracting. The sense of a collection of objects, a museum or gallery even, has developed since Rheingold’s contest of Valhalla and Nibelheim, to something less distant, incontestably ‘present’, as many of the best Götterdammerungen have always been. In any Ring, thoughts almost inevitably turn to that of Pierre Boulez and Patrice Chéreau: testament not only to its extraordinary quality, almost taking upon itself that mythical quality to which Wagner referred, but also to its historical fortune, falling in the right place at the right time, and with the right technology (television) spreading its word. This is unquestionably, as Chéreau remarked and showed, a post-religious society of increasingly desperate rituals, which knows no morality and finds it difficult, perhaps impossible, to ‘know’ at all. Here, the sense of objects curated, possessed, and, like the gold, fatefully valued – an ‘art market’ not so very different from what one might encounter, say, in the Tate Modern’s Turner Prize – entwines with Wagner’s epic, genealogical method, verbal and musical, of telling, retelling, adding standpoints and perspectives, never repeating. The world of the Norns seeks, perhaps, to protect objects gathered from earlier instalments. One can see and feel this when, as a gallery spectator, one ventures during the intervals to inspect the saucepan and tins, presumably Mime’s, from Siegfried, and other such objets.

Hagen, Gunther, Brünnhilde, (Catharine Woodward) Gutrune (Justine Viani)

The following world of the Gibichungs glories, trivially yet palpably, in their extraction and abstraction, in the fetishist need to add to the collection, as Alberich needed to add to his hoard, Wagner’s furchtbare Not turned Lacanian. (We might reflect on that as we seek to add to the collection of Ring performances we have seen. Why are we doing this? Is it as mere collectors, perhaps closer to Nietzsche’s ‘Wagnerians’ or as something more active, as participants, as the revolutionary audience Wagner himself demanded?) I could not help but think of the denizens of Frank Castorf’s Götterdämmerung safeguarding their Picassos as Brünnhilde, purposely underwhelmingly, set Wall Street (slightly) ablaze. That consumerism appears to be what drives Gunther and Gutrune to wish to acquire Siegfried and Brünnhilde, though Hagen of course knows better and deeper. When all is returned to the Rhinemaidens, one can read this in all manner of ways; an ecological imperative is not necessarily to the scenic fore, though it hardly need be, since it will surely present itself to any thinking person in the midst of our climate emergency.

Instead, we are prompted to think of the role art and its commodification, as well as more general sliding into the ‘mere’ craft, indeed ‘effect without cause’ Wagner diagnosed in the more meretricious would-be art of his own time. Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century, is transposed to the Ring in a Bethnal Green boxing ring. And the ring itself, like various of these objects more akin to Loge’s Rheingold toyland ‘Tand’ than the fearsome object we have been led to believe, gains whatever power it might have through the act of investing. It is less a matter of it working on account of belief, than on account of its valuation, or perhaps better a financialised, late-capitalist merging of the two; until, that is, the bottom falls out of the market, as it always will, rope of Fate or otherwise.

Gunther, Brünnhilde

Conductor Ben Woodward and his small ensemble continued to work wonders. Of course there are times when one longs for a full orchestra, just as in a large theatre, there are times when one longs to be able to see the faces of those onstage. What surprised was how relatively few they were. Götterdämmerung surely presents the toughest challenge in this sense of the four dramas. Das Rheingold as Kammerspiel makes considerable sense, but the cosmic scale and grand opéra hauntings of this tale of Siegfried’s death and Brünnhilde’s redemption, heard through all that has passed before, seem to require something different. Maintaining tension over its vast span is difficult enough at Bayreuth or Covent Garden. Even the most exalted orchestras will slip here and there. This, however, was decidedly not the moment for Beckmesserish quibbles. Musical drama unfolded with care and intelligence, in tandem with the staging yet far from enslaved to it. Opportunities to hear it anew, sometimes even a little ‘inside out’, were gladly taken, forming part of an overall refreshment for the jaded, as well as a riveting introduction for those enabled to attend for the first time. The instrumentalists deserve nothing but praise for their contributions throughout, and choral forces brought welcome and, in this context, all the more telling contrast, permitting that larger-scale operatic world thrillingly to burst in.

Hagen

None of this could, of course, have been achieved without the contributions from an excellent set of singing-actors. Different audience members will have had different favourites, and all contributed to a drama that was very much greater than the sum of its parts. Nonetheless, I was particularly struck by Simon Wilding’s Hagen and Catharine Woodward’s Brünnhilde (partly the roles, no doubt, though only partly). Wilding’s Hagen, dark and dangerous, simply owned the stage, a study in evil and its undeniable charm. The scene with his father proved especially moving, Oliver Gibbs not so much reprising as developing his outstanding Alberich for new, still darker times. Woodward’s Brünnhilde was similarly blessed of stage presence. Art in many respects conceals art: it was difficult not to feel that this simply ‘was’ the Valkyrie, and these simply ‘were’ the final phases of her journey. She could certainly sing too, offering an Immolation Scene of equal humanity and grandeur, in tandem with conductor and orchestra. It seemed, then, in many ways fitting that, at the end of the second-act trio, perhaps haunted here more by Verdi than Meyerbeer, Staunton should offer the twist of an unexpected passing union between Hagen and Brünnhilde.

Gunther and Gutrune offer different challenges, of course. Vocal portrayal of weak characters is always a tough call, to which Andrew Mayor and Justine Viani rose very well indeed. The key, it seemed, lay in portrayal arising from the text, as was also the case with Peter Furlong’s tireless Siegfried, the character clearly, intriguingly traumatised. I suspect a clue to this would have been found in Siegfried; even without, it pointed to the difficulties our age and indeed Wagner’s (later Attic tragedy too, for that matter) have found in heroism. Catherine Backhouse gave a heartfelt reading of Waltraute’s pleading. Norns and Rhinemaidens emerged in fine ensemble, without sacrifice to individual voice.

To conclude, then, may I once again suggest that any reader feeling able to do so might consider supporting this extraordinary venture, thrice denied Arts Council funding? The ecology of opera in this country is now as parlous as that of the world around us. Maybe, just maybe, Götterdämmerung can still be averted.

Met Announces 25-26 Season

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 17:56:46 +0000

The Met has announced the repertory for next season. It can be viewed in the PDF below or on the Met’s website. A few observations about the upcoming season:

While there is only one opera by Verdi and one by Wagner there will be two by Bellini. Both La Sonnambula and I Puritani will be new productions. The two Puccini operas (Bohemè and Butterfly) will be performed so often that they will make up almost half of the season. Traviata will consume about a quarter leaving a few scraps for all the rest of the operas. Of course, there will be three new operas that have about a 0.3% of survival. If anyone cares to know how I made this calculation I can supply the arithmetic later.

Ryan Speedo Green who will sing in a few supporting roles during the upcoming season will get the biggest part of his Met career when he assumes the title role in Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

Xabier Anduaga the young Spanish tenor who is making a big impression at many of the major houses while still not 30 will appear as Elvino in Bellini’s La Sonnambula. if your Spanish is passable check out this video for more info about the tenor.

Lise Davidsen and Michael Spyres will be in a new production of Tristan und
Isolde. Both singers will sing their roles in Wagner’s tale of errant love for the first time at the Met. Spyres who has more registers than the Royal Corp wanted to sing all nine solo parts but was talked out of the attempt by the president who threatened to ban transgender singing. Many mezzo-sopranos are grateful.

Asmik Grigorian will return to the Met as Tatania in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. This is a part that suits the great soprano perfectly.

The three new operas (all new productions) are The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay based on Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Mason Bates composed the music set to Gene Scheer’s libretto. Here’s how the Met describes the opera.

In this exhilarating new adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, set shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, two Jewish cousins invent an anti-fascist superhero and launch their own comic-book series, hoping to recruit America into the fight against Nazism. Incorporating scintillating electronic elements and a variety of musical styles, composer Mason Bates’s eclectic score moves seamlessly among the three worlds of Gene Scheer’s libretto: Nazi-occupied Prague, the bustling streets of New York City, and the technicolor realm of comic-book fantasy. Bartlett Sher’s production provides spectacular visuals to match, with towering sets and proscenium-filling projections designed by Jenny Melville and Mark Grimmer of 59. Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Opening Night premiere, and baritone Andrzej Filończyk makes his Met debut as the artist Joe Kavalier, who flees Czechoslovakia and arrives at the Brooklyn doorstep of writer Sam Clay, sung by tenor Miles Mykkanen.

Innocence gets the following description:

Depicting the wide web of trauma left in the wake of a school shooting, the late, great Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s final opera is a raw and unflinching cri de coeur in response to the senseless violence of our modern age. Captivating with its eerie, darkly beautiful sound-world and diverse vocal styles, ranging from traditional opera to expressionistic speak-singing to Scandinavian folk music, Innocence, with libretto by prominent Finnish author Sofi Oksanen, was greeted upon its 2021 premiere by awestruck reviews and hailed as “completely exhilarating” (The New York Times), “a modern masterpiece” (The Telegraph). For its Met premiere—in Simon Stone’s powerfully direct original production—the cast is anchored by mezzo- soprano Joyce DiDonato and Finnish ethno-pop singer Vilma Jää as a grieving mother and the daughter she lost in the shooting, as well as soprano Jacquelyn Stucker and tenor Miles Mykkanen as a young couple whose wedding, a decade after the tragedy, uncovers buried secrets and reopens old wounds. Maestro Susanna Mälkki, a close friend and collaborator of Saariaho’s, conducts what she calls “one of the most important works of our time.”

El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego gets this blurb:

American composer Gabriela Lena Frank makes her Met debut with her first opera, a magical-realist portrait of Mexico’s painterly power couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, with libretto by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Nilo Cruz. Fashioned as a reversal of the Orpheus and Euridice myth, the story depicts Frida, sung by leading mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, leaving the underworld on the Day of the Dead and reuniting with Diego, portrayed by baritone Carlos Álvarez. The famously feuding pair briefly relive their tumultuous love, embracing both the passion and the pain before bidding the land of the living a final farewell. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Met premiere of Frank’s opera, a “confident, richly imagined score” (The New Yorker) that “bursts with color and fresh individuality” (Los Angeles Times). The vibrant new production, taking enthusiastic inspiration from Frida and Diego’s paintings, is directed and choreographed by Deborah Colker, following her remarkable 2024 debut staging of Ainadamar.

I guess that the financially strapped Met hopes to recoup the cost of these new productions of new operas by building the season around Bohemè, Butterfly, and Traviata. But an old warhorse can get spavined.

Met 25-26 Season Download

Mary, Queen of Scots, ENO, 15 February 2025

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 16:01:42 +0000

Coliseum

Images: Ellie Kurttz
Queen Mary (Heidi Stober)

Queen Mary – Heidi Stober
James Stewart, Earl of Moray – Alex Otterburn
Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley – Rupert Charlesworth
James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell – John Findon
David Riccio – Barnaby Rea
Cardinal Beaton – Darren Jeffery
Lord Gordon – Alastair Miles
Earl of Ruthven – Ronald Samm
Earl of Morton – Jolyon Loy
Mary Seton – Jenny Stafford
Mary Beaton – Monica McGhee
Mary Livingston – Felicity Buckland
Mary Fleming – Siān Griffiths

Director, designs – Stewart Laing
Associate costume designs – Mady Berry
Lighting – D.M. Wood

Choreography – Alex McCabe

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus director: Matthew Quinn)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Joana Carneiro (conductor)

Written to the composer’s own libretto based on Amalia Elguera’s unpublished play Moray – direct collaboration having proved difficult – Thea Musgrave’s Mary, Queen of Scots has had, by contemporary operatic standards, rather a happy history since its 1977 Edinburgh premiere. It has reached various stages in the United Kingdom, United States and Germany. Last year, a new production was mounted in Leipzig. Now, in co-production with San Francisco Opera, it receives its premiere at ENO. It may have seemed a bold step for the company in its current, parlous condition, yet it was rewarded with both an artistic success and something approaching a full house. It was a delight to see the composer, approaching 97, in the audience and receiving justly warm and prolonged applause.

Earl of Bothwell (Barnaby Rea), James Stewart (Alex Otterburn), Mary

People can create, perform, and appreciate successful art regardless of personal circumstances; there nevertheless seems something apt for a Scottish woman who received part of her education in France (studying with Nadia Boulanger) who thereafter spent much of her life, if not in exile then working in another English-speaking country (the USA), to have written an opera on this theme. If it does not fall into the category of experimental opera, seeking to reinvent or reimagine the genre, to expand its theatrical and/or musical boundaries; nor is it seeking to do so, without proving self-consciously archaising. Mary Queen of Scots is rather a highly competent, engaging work which, in its three acts, come across as the equal of many an accomplished work by the likes of Britten or even, in some moods, Henze. In musical dramaturgy, if hardly language, the opera takes its place more in a line from Verdi than Wagner. Musgrave is equally, palpably adept at many of the classic set pieces and expectations of the genre, evoking with similar sureness requirements and shifts in general atmosphere, music for dancing, and crowd scenes set against individual feeling. Turning inwards for an aria, in which certain instrumentation colours a character’s – and our – response, music and drama might be understood as traditionally operatic, without pushing any particular aesthetic as to what anything other than itself should be.

Likewise, a broadly tonal musical language sounds straightforwardly to be what it is, rather than self-consciously reinstating tonality—or anything else. I could sense a mind at work planning its musical structure in tandem with the drama, without bringing that modernistically to the fore. The ENO Orchestra and (a regrettably thinned down) Chorus under conductor Joana Carneiro were surely instrumental to realising this success. One would never have had the sense this was not a repertory work they had been playing for years—save, perhaps for the keen sense of discovery. We felt, even knew, we were in safe hands, though.

The cast was, of course, similarly crucial to such achievement. Heidi Stober gave a touching, multi-faceted performance in the title role, in no evident sense bound by the expectations such a portrayal must necessarily greet. One felt in her plight the twin demands of life and fate ground tragically by politics low and high. Alex Otterburn’s quicksilver James Stewart proved nicely enigmatic. If there remained a nagging suspicion one should dislike the character more than one did, that stood testament to the artists’ gift for bringing alive both the character and his own necessities. Rupert Charlesworth had one properly despise Darnley in his amoral weakness. I struggled somewhat to gain the measure of the Earl of Bothwell, but that seemed to be more inherent in the drama, perhaps the staging too, than in John Findon’s well-sung performance. Darren Jeffery’s Cardinal Beaton and Barnaby Rea’s Riccio were clearly, vividly presented; not that the two have much in common beyond that. Smaller roles were all well taken, rebuking the idea that one can, let alone should, uproot a company such as ENO and dump it somewhere else; such depth comes from building on a living tradition, not that the Arts Council has idea or interest in such an idea.

David Riccio (Barnaby Rea), Lord Darnley (Rupert Charlesworth), James Stewart

Stewart Laing’s production was at best a mixed bag, though that may in part have been a matter of limited resources. If it tried to do more with a broadly comparable black-box space than Ruth Knight had for Britten’s Gloriana in 2022, Knight’s caution emerged all the wiser. A marquee was built and taken down with considerable noise: a metaphor, no doubt, yet one that added little. Other than that, we had strangely inappropriate costumes, their lack of social differentiation was puzzling. Warm anoraks were the thing across the board, perhaps because the opera is set in Scotland, although, especially in crowd scenes, we appeared to be closer to the world of The Flying Dutchman. If the idea – and I think it may have been – was to evoke twentieth-century Protestant-Catholic sectarianism, then it might have been more rigorously applied, strange exceptions throwing the whole thing into disarray, unaided by other aspects of the staging. To be fair, though, one could certainly understand why Mary would only have returned to this Scotland with the greatest of reluctance; it was difficult to imagine how what we saw would have been worth a mass, a Lord’s Supper, or anything else.

Cardinal Beaton (Darren Jeffery)

I could not understand why Alastair Miles’s dour yet honest Lord Gordon wore a dog collar; let alone why, if so, he should be dressed more as Presbyterian minister than Catholic priest. But then his part in the drama more generally seemed strange on any discernible historical terms, not least in his stabbing of James Stewart (as the Earl of Moray is referred to). Conflation of characters, however much it may pain historians, is far from an unusual dramatic device; if we go down this route, we shall be here all day. This nonetheless remained a perplexing choice. Bothwell’s rape of Mary nevertheless registered in duly horrifying fashion. I do not know the work itself well enough – indeed at all, other than from this performance – to be sure whether the nature of the act is originally so clear. I sensed there might be a suggestion of greater ambiguity, though that may be entirely wrong. In any case, there none here; it cast its dark, terrible shadow over all that remained to be shown.

The Met should revive Lucrezia Borgia

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 11:00:49 +0000

Lucrezia Borgia — given only one night more than a century ago. Giustizia per Lucrezia!!!

The post The Met should revive Lucrezia Borgia appeared first on Parterre Box.

Wagner - Das Rheingold (L'Or du Rhin), at the Paris Opera.

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 15:22:00 +0000

ONP Bastille, Paris, Tuesday February 11 2025

Conductor: Pablo Heras-Casado. Production: Calixto Bieito. Sets: Rebecca Ringst. Costumes: Ingo Krügler. Lighting: Michael Bauer. Video: Sarah Derendinger. Wotan: Iain Paterson. Donner: Florent Mbia. Froh: Matthew Cairns. Loge: Simon O'Neill. Fasolt: Kwangchul Youn. Fafner: Mika Kares. Alberich: Brian Mulligan. Mime: Gerhard Siegel. Fricka: Eve-Maud Hubeaux. Freia: Eliza Boom. Erda: Marie-Nicole Lemieux. Woglinde: Margarita Polonskaya. Wellgunde: Isabel Signoret. Flosshilde: Katharina Magiera. Orchestra of the Opéra National de Paris.

Photos: Herwig Prammer/ONP

These are head-spinning times for Ring cycles, at least as far as I’m concerned. The Paris Opera originally scheduled Bieito’s five years ago. Covid intervened, and it was postponed. In the meantime, at the end of 2023, Brussels launched its own cycle, directed by Romeo Castellucci. His Rheingold and Walküre were among the most enthralling productions I’ve ever seen of anything. But La Monnaie couldn't afford to pursue Castellucci’s spellbinding vision, and brought in Pierre Audi, from Amsterdam, to complete the project instead. While Audi’s Götterdämmerung awaits me next weekend, Bieito’s Rheingold has now appeared in Paris.

Ludovic Tézier, billed as Wotan when we paid for our tickets, dropped out, ostensibly on health grounds. He was replaced by Iain Paterson, whom I saw quite recently as Nick Shadow at Garnier. But early in the run, with viruses prowling around like the troops of Midian, Paterson too fell ill and, as the Paris Opera had nobody waiting to jump in, ended up ‘sprechstimming’ through one evening until, in a feat reminiscent of Dame Gwyneth Jones’ singing the Empress and the Dyer’s Wife gleichzeitig, Alberich (Brian Mulligan), with nothing more to do, was able to take over from the wings. (I’m not making this up, you know.) Paterson was replaced on February 5th by Nicholas Brownlee - mistakenly first-named ‘Lawrence’ on the hastily-updated Paris Opera website, causing some chuckles till the blooper was corrected. But he was back on Tuesday night, more of which later.

The new production, while not the best ever, turned out to be better than I feared, having read some negative reviews. The new production so far, I should perhaps say, as it isn’t easy to appraise a Rheingold, 'mere' prelude to a much longer construction. (This was also the reason Calixto Bieito gave for not appearing at the end of the first night: he will, he says, take his bow after Götterdämmerung.) The contrast between Castellucci’s approach and Bieito’s could scarcely be greater. Castellucci is allusive, thoughtful, erudite, artistic, poetic, oneiric, to some extent abstract… and with him you escape, as you pick apart myriad references to global cultures and their myths, into an inner, intellectual world. Bieito, on the other hand, plunges you mercilessly into a trashy, cartoon vision of the nightmare reality taking shape around us right now. In it, the mastery of data and new technologies bestow wealth, power, and the promise of eternal, post-human life on a rogues’ gallery of archetypal characters who, when they appeared in Dallas or Dynasty, we thought were comically fictional, but are now in charge of the world’s superpowers, busily ushering in a new (but far from improved) world order.

The staging is fairly simple. It centres on Valhalla, a giant cube of fretted metal through which we glimpse a labyrinth of stairways, landings, corridors and rooms and some as-yet-unlit light fittings. There are projections - of underground vaults stacked with ingots, of Wotan’s eyes (one blank), bodies on drips, nervous systems, eyeballs and so on - but they’re hard to parse alongside the live action on stage. (They’re more legible in the production photos.) Underneath, once the whole stage has risen using the Bastille’s powerful, but seldom exploited, machinery, we encounter another labyrinth: laboratories cluttered with work benches, wiring, plastic body parts, masks, servers twinkling in cages and monitors ablaze with DayGlo colours. Here, Alberich and Mime mine data, perhaps also Bitcoin, and work on developing a humanoid - beguilingly played by a dancer in a second skin - in slender, female form, a partner, we guess, for loveless Alberich. He tugs at her wiring as he cradles her.

It all starts, of course, with the Rhinemaidens, in electric blue wetsuits with a yellow stripe down the side, and matching flippers, with oxygen tanks strapped to their backs. They emerge, like Bond girls, from the Rhine, represented - not for the first time - by a billowing curtain, iridescent and translucent. Weighed down by a tangled mass of thick, black cables trailing from the back of a waistcoat, Alberich, pathologically sex-obsessed, soon has one hand in his unzipped flies. The Rhinemaidens’ teasing ends in blood, a band of it carved with a blade on Alberich’s forehead. In a rage, he tears down the curtain in a vivid flourish of fluorescent orange.

And so we meet our rogues’ gallery. Wotan and Fricka, asleep at first on an endlessly long, button-backed sofa, might be a power-couple from anywhere: Russia, Latin America, Asia, Europe, the US… Wotan wears black and carries a bucket of apples (these end up all over the stage till Freia, a boho environmentalist in green wellies, gathers them up). Fricka has a sharply-tailored, full-length leopard-print coat and, sometimes, sunglasses. Fasolt and Fafner probably represent finance and energy; the former wears a suit, the latter a stetson, a fringed suède jacket, and cowboy boots. Loge to me suggested organised crime, Erda, in a green mac, perhaps journalism or academia. Froh is a kind of Hare Krishna adept, beamining inanely, in reddish robes, Donner I don’t really know what, except that he has a blue baseball cap and a sledgehammer.

If you’re OK with the ideas that big data are the new gold, transhumanist, post-body immortality is the new eternal youth, and the twilight of post-enlightenment values and the world order we believed in, is rapidly drawing in, then the overall concept is workable and painfully, tragically topical. Also, while the director's soap-opera archetypes may not develop far as characters, the acting is good: it’s detailed and looks natural. Bieto’s a pro; sometimes (I think of last season’s The Exterminating Angel) a near-genius. But in the realisation, this production (so far) seems marked by a number of weaknesses. For example…

That huge Valhalla-cum-data-centre is on stage throughout, but while you keep expecting it to do something: open up, light up, pivot… nothing happens until, at the end, in an orgy of stage smoke and spotlight beams, the façade lowers like a drawbridge, and Wotan and Fricka clamber up a staircase littered with tangled cables. As the static cube fills much of the space, the action, such as it is, is confined to a broad strip across the apron. The vast underground laboratories, cluttered with equipment, are manned only by Mime. Shouldn’t there be young engineers beavering away in front of all those monitors and lugging artificial limbs around?

Highlights such as Alberich’s transformations are managed bathetically: to turn into a snake, he resorts to the train of cables we saw at the start; to shrink to a toad, he pulls on a rubber frog’s mask, eliciting a ripple of giggles from the audience. Erda, who just saunters in, in her mac, round a corner of the building, has no aura. Freia barely exists, though among the riddles of the production, at the end, she smears herself in oil as Loge approaches her with a flame. Does this signal the death, under the new order, of the environmentalist dream, its ideals and projects up in smoke?

An AI image of a baby crowned with electrodes is projected at the rear, and the curtain falls. It will be interesting to see how all this is developed, how well it can be sustained, and whether the riddles are solved, over the next three instalments.

The casting was to some extent puzzling too: good singers, not all in the right roles. First among the exceptions was Gerhard Siegel (unless I missed something, the only German in the cast), an idiomatic, multi-hued, subtle character-tenor, whose experience shone as Mime. Equally experienced and convincing was bass Kwangchul Youn, a familiar (and always welcome) face in Paris. His dark, rounded, mature Fasolt contrasted well (vocally and physically) with the younger, less familiar and perhaps a touch more cavernous Mika Kares. Simon O'Neill is a convincingly on-the-ball Loge, his bright, metallic timbre unchanging from bottom to top, so perhaps a touch short on variety and nuance.

Brian Mulligan has such an elegant, clear baritone voice I’m surprised to read what roles he’s known for. You imagine him singing Wolfram’s Abendstern, or Lieder for that matter. It’s harder to think of him as a baddie, in blacker roles. Perhaps singing Alberich and Wotan on a single evening took its toll, as last Tuesday he was audibly too tired, by the time he reached the curse, to carry it off with due impact.

Eve-Maud Hubeaux played Fricka with her usual imperious presence and charisma, but I still think (having also witnessed her Gertrude and Grande Vestale in the same house) that the Bastille doesn’t suit her voice. It reduces her impact and authority in these roles that need it so much. The usually excellent Marie-Nicole Lemieux, who sang Fricka in Castellucci’s Walküre (‘stunning… vehement, buxom and juicy,’ I wrote at the time) seemed miscast as Erda, and the almost incidental way her intervention was directed (who’s this? you wondered) drained it of mystery and resonance.

In this production, Freia, too, is almost an afterthought, though the poor singer does get dragged in and out unceremoniously on a plastic tarpaulin, and plays an enigmatic part, as mentioned above, at the end. Eliza Boom made little vocal impact in the vast house. The Rhinemaidens were, on the other hand, unusually radiant and seductive, physically and vocally.

Iain Paterson has had a rough time with this Rheingold. It has now, on and off, had four different Wotans: Paterson himself, Nicholas Brownlee, John Lundgren and Derek Welton. On February 11, Paterson sang, but was obviously still not in peak form. However, he’s a mature, experienced singer and a good actor. He soldiered on and mobilised these combined skills to make a virtue of necessity. His voice sounded tired, old and worn, even fleshless and threadbare. At times he relied on a surprisingly tenor-ish timbre, rather than any vocal body underneath, to carry over the pit. But he turned all this to his advantage and played Wotan as a weary, very human sort of god, already facing the twilight. It worked. Or at any rate, it worked for me and my companions on row 7 of the stalls. Whether it worked right up to the top and rear of the gaping auditorium and its cantilevered balconies is another question.

Pablo Heras-Casado is tipped, rightly or wrongly, to be the Paris Opera’s next music director. If it turns out to be true, then based on this Rheingold, the contrast with Dudamel or Jordan will be sharp. His Wagner, pitched modestly somewhere between Mendelssohn and Schumann in weight, is transparent and analytical, almost matter-of-fact - not to say prosaic and dry. The orchestra was big: you could see six harps in the pit, though, as the playing was reined in, I can’t say we actually heard them (though we heard fluffed horn notes well enough). Lushness is avoided, and highlights in the score that would typically be pointed up as especially significant to the plot seem deliberately demystified, treated as unemphatically in the pit as on stage. When the gods go up into Valhalla (in this case leaving Freia behind with Loge and his flame), in our ignorance perhaps, we expect a wall of sound, a blaze of brass, to blast us out of our seats. Well no. We remain seated. So if the rumours turn out to be true, I’m not sure I’ll be glad about it.

The Met should revive Maria Stuarda

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 11:00:40 +0000

Now that Lisette Oropesa is doing the McVicar co-production of Maria Stuarda in Madrid, can the Met revive it with her?

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Federico’s Lament

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 22:07:24 +0000

Francesco Cilea (1866-1950) had the misfortune of attempting a career as an opera composer during the period dominated by Giacomo Puccini. His modest compositional skill forced him to abandon opera after 1907, mostly for pedagogy. He is best known for L’arlesiana (1897) and Adriana Lecouvreur (1902). Both operas benefited from the presence of Enrico Caruso in their tenor leads.

Of the two operas just mentioned Adriana Lecouvreur is far more often performed. In fact, the Met has never done L’arlesiana while Adriana Lecouvreur has staged Adriana 81 times. The opera survives mainly because of its Act 2 tenor aria È la solita storia del pastore (Federico’s Lament). The lyrics in Italian and English are below

Federico is madly in love with a girl from Arles, the Arlesiana of the title, but his family has arranged his marriage with Vivetta. Vivetta has always loved Federico since childhood and is disappointed to know of his love for l’Arlesiana. When he has been left alone, Federico reads the letters of l’Arlesiana (which prove she has another lover) and ponders them with his broken heart. The ‘poor boy’ in the second line is Federico’s brother who has a learning disability – he’s called L’Innocente.

The aria requires both beauty of tone and stylistic excellence to be fully realized. Just about every tenor includes it on one of his recordings on recitals. Giuseppe Di Stefano’s 1947 recording made when he was just 25 years old sets the standard for those who followed him. Federico’s lament Di Stefano. The high note commonly sung near the end is a tenorial insertion; it’s not in the score.

Mario Lanza was born the same year as Di Stefano – 1921. This recording was made in concert at the Royal Albert Hall the year before he died. Lamento di Federico Lanza. Note how dark his voice had become. He seems to have developed into a spinto tenor.

Alfredo Krauss was one of the great stylists of the last century. His singing of the aria is finely honed and limited only by the size of his lyric tenor. Federico’s Lament Krauss

Franco Bonisolli had a beautiful tenor that was capable of producing great singing. Alas, he also had spells during which bizarre behavior drove him off the operatic rails. His rendition of this aria is excellent. Federico’s Lament Bonisolli.

Salvatore Fisichella was one of the great bel canto tenors of the 20th century. For reasons mysterious to me he only sang five performances at the Met all in 1986. He gets everything his lyric voice will allow from the aria. Federico’s Lament Fisichella.

Ferruccio Tagliaviani had a very light tenor; he was noted for his piano singing. He participated in the first complete recording of the opera in 1951. Tagliavini Federico’s Lament.

Jonas Kaufmann has a very wide repertoire. He can sing bel canto, Verdi, Puccini, and Wagner. His reading of the aria is finely nuanced and fully expresses the text. The only quibble, and it’s a very small one, is the ‘brown’ sound of his voice. Ferdico’s Lament Kaufmann

Rolando Villazon is one of opera’s sad stories. He was in the middle of a great career when his voice left him. He was able to reconstruct it so he could sing light roles but he never got back to the top of the pole where he was until disaster struck. Federico’s lament Villazon.

Modest though Cilea’s achievements are he has a lasting position in opera, a feat attained by only a few composers.

È la solita storia del pastore…
Il povero ragazzo voleva raccontarla
E s’addormì.
C’è nel sonno l’oblio.
Come l’invidio!
Anch’io vorrei dormir così,
nel sonno almen l’oblio trovar!
La pace sol cercando io vo’.
Vorrei poter tutto scordar!
Ma ogni sforzo è vano.
Davanti ho sempre di lei
il dolce sembiante.
La pace tolta è solo a me.
Perché degg’io tanto penar?
Lei! Sempre lei mi parla al cor!
Fatale vision, mi lascia!
Mi fai tanto male! Ahimè!

It’s the old tale of the shepherd…
The poor boy wanted to retell it
And he fell asleep.
There is oblivion in sleep.
How I envy him!
I too would like to sleep like that
To find oblivion at least in slumber!
I am searching only for peace.
I would like to be able to forget everything!
Yet every effort is in vain.
Before me I always have
her sweet face.
Peace is ever taken from me.
Why must I suffer so very much?
She, as always speaks to my heart.
Fatal vision, leave me!
You hurt me so deeply! Alas!

Maternal Vengeance: Lucrezia Borgia at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 15:11:12 +0000

Donizetti – Lucrezia Borgia

Don Alfonso – Alex Esposito
Donna Lucrezia Borgia – Lidia Fridman
Gennaro – Enea Scala
Maffio Orsini – Daniela Mack
Jeppo Liverotto – Raffaele Feo
Don Apostolo Gazella – Arturo Espinosa
Ascanio Petrucci – Alessio Verna
Oloferno Vitellozzo – Eduardo Niave
Gubetta – Roberto Accurso
Rustighello – Enrico Casari
Astolfo – Rocco Cavalluzzi

Coro del Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Orchestra del Teatro dell’Opera di Roma / Roberto Abbado.
Stage director – Valentina Carrasco.

Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Rome, Italy. Sunday, February 16th, 2025.

This new production of Lucrezia Borgia at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma opened this evening. Confided to the stage direction of Valentina Carrasco and the musical direction of Roberto Abbado, as is customary here the house has double cast the production with a number of notable bel canto talents. I’ll come straight out and say that I’m obsessed with this work. It’s a terrific romp with some magnificent musical numbers, not least that bravura final scene for Lucrezia. Yet, as always with bel canto, it requires singers who can really do justice to this magnificent music with its demanding technical detail.

Carrasco’s production manages to tell the story pretty clearly. She presents it very much with a focus on the history of the backstory between Lucrezia and Gennaro, with a stage backdrop in the opening measures of the prologue showing an ultrasound as Lucrezia was prone on a bed. As the evening progressed, Carrasco gave us a world of shadowy conspirators, hiding behind drapes, who would enter and exit constantly, giving us a sense of a world where nothing was as it seemed on the surface. I found this an intelligent and interesting approach to take. Furthermore, there was real dramatic energy between Lidia Fridman’s Lucrezia and Alex Esposito’s Alfonso in their big confrontation, a fullw sense of characters truly engaging with each other. Indeed, the visuals also included skulls on poles chez Borgia, a reminder that her history very much powered her interactions with others. The party chez Negroni was also nicely done, the stage covered in golden drapes that were dramatically removed as Lucrezia entered to announce the poisoning. This was demonstrated in a most striking way, with the friends developing letters on their backs as a result of the poisoning spelling out BORGIA in a way that was in revenge for Gennaro removing the B in the previous act.

In many respects, Carrasco’s staging gave a great deal of pleasure, and in its clarity rendered the events of the plot in a cogent and dramatically insightful way. Yet, I still found there to be a significant number of issues. The direction of the chorus was relatively perfunctory, with a fair bit of standing and delivering. The stage at the Teatro Costanzi is only slightly higher than the level of the platea, while Carrasco staged the first scene between Lucrezia and Gennaro with both, prone, at the front of the stage. Unfortunately, it meant that I couldn’t see it from my seat towards the back. Furthermore, she also had Fridman sing Lucrezia’s final scene on her knees at the front of the stage, again limiting sightlines for those at the back of the platea. I don’t know whether Carrasco has any vocal training, but it struck me that filling the stage with drapes and not giving singers any solid surfaces to support projection was less than helpful. It did mean that both Fridman and Daniela Mack’s Maffio Orsini sounded lacking in amplitude compared to their male-identifying colleagues. Carrasco’s staging undoubtedly looks good, but I’m not convinced it’s entirely helpful for the singers.

Abbado led an orchestra on terrific form. The quality of the playing he obtained from them was excellent. Strings were true in intonation all night and the winds and brass were nicely balanced. Attack was unanimous and precise throughout the band, and there was a real sense of lyrical beauty superimposed over a driving rhythmic framework. And yet, there was something about Abbado’s conducting that didn’t quite fully convince me, and I’m fully aware that this is very much a matter of personal taste. It was definitely technically proficient, tempi were generally nicely swift, and there was a sense of rhythmic drive there. And yet, it tended towards being slightly over-manicured, perhaps needing more of a sense of dynamism to take us to the horrific conclusion. It felt very professional in approach, yet also rather earthbound. The chorus, prepared by Ciro Visco, was on good form tonight. The tenors and basses sang with real discipline and focus, while the sopranos and mezzos were hampered in their projection by being placed in the pit in the final scene – although the visual of Lucrezia alone was striking.

Fridman has clearly worked extremely hard on the style and on her technique. She sang her opening number with real poise, floating the high-lying lines with ease, the legato even. The voice has an appealing darkness, yet she also rose up to the high E-flat at the end of the evening. She, in common with her castmates, frequently decorated the line with stylish ornamentation, bringing the music alive and giving it a stamp of individuality. She found a real sense of loss in the final scene, making the slower sections genuinely reflective, filling them with feeling, and she dispatched the rapid-fire runs with accuracy and a more than creditable stab at a trill. Unfortunately, Fridman was hampered acoustically by the set and her placement on stage, which meant that the voice lacked amplitude – at least from my seat.

Similarly, Daniela Mack’s Orsini also seemed to be hampered acoustically, not always audible in the ensembles. Part of the reason for this was that the role lies relatively low for Mack’s mezzo, being a true contralto role. This meant that intonation in the opening scene was less than optimal, due to the effort of singing down there in a less germane part of the voice. Mack’s musicality was never in question, and when she was able to ornament the lines to take her up through the range, she was significantly more audible – again with the caveat that this was from my seat. Perhaps those elsewhere in the theatre might have had a different experience.

Enea Scala gave us a fabulous Gennaro. He lives and breathes this style, his tenor able to ping into the theatre with ease. He sang his music with an impeccable legato, combined with bright and focused tone. The voice soared with delicious effortlessness through the range and Scala was an appropriately thoughtful yet swaggering stage presence. Another notable role debut for this excellent singer. Esposito also has this style in his bones, given that he’s a native of Donizetti’s home town of Bergamo. His bass-baritone was in magnificent shape tonight, able to dispatch his music with authority, even throughout the range, ringing out into the theatre, yet never compromising the beauty of the tone. Not to mention his impeccable legato and implicit musicality. The remaining roles reflected the quality one would expect at this historic house. Particularly the handsome-toned Arturo Espinosa and Alessio Verna as Gazella and Petrucci respectively.

This was an evening that did contain a lot to enjoy. Carrasco’s staging was notable for its visual interest and its clarity of storytelling, even if acoustically it wasn’t ideally helpful for the singers, and in terms of sightlines wasn’t quite optimal. She cert

Of paunches and princes

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 14:00:43 +0000

Revivals of Falstaff in Milan and Don Carlo in Naples have Larry Wolff thinking across the six decades of Verdi‘s career

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The Met should revive La voix humaine and Erwartung

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 11:00:59 +0000

While I have an entire laundry list of operas (Maria Regina d’Inghilterra, Loreley, La Wally, Sadko, The Snow Maiden, The Golden Cockerel, La Fiamma, and many others) I wish the Met would do – especially after Medea was such a success – I think realistically speaking this double-bill would be lovely for Sondra Radvanovsky at this point.

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Lucrezia Borgia

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 14:00:21 +0000

A live opening night broadcast from Rome.

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Shaping Destiny: Götterdämmerung at La Monnaie – De Munt

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 11:17:16 +0000

Wagner – Götterdämmerung

Siegfried – Bryan Register
Gunther – Andrew Foster-Williams
Alberich – Scott Hendricks
Hagen – Ain Anger
Brünnhilde – Ingela Brimberg
Gutrune – Anett Fritsch
Waltraute – Nora Gubisch
Erste Norn – Marvic Monreal
Zweite Norn – Iris Van Wijnen
Dritte Norn – Katie Lowe
Woglinde – Tamara Banješević
Wellgunde – Jelena Kordić
Flosshilde – Christel Loetzsch

Koor van de Munt, Orchestre symphonique de la Monnaie / Alain Altinoglu.
Stage director – Pierre Audi.

La Monnaie – De Munt, Brussels, Belgium. Saturday, February 15th, 2025.

It wasn’t quite supposed to end like this. The Brussels Ring, marking the closure of Peter De Caluwe’s acclaimed tenure at this historic house, should have been entirely directed by Romeo Castellucci. However, as readers will surely be aware by now, Castellucci renounced the project early last year, leaving the house scrambling to complete the cycle on a reduced budget. It’s something of a miracle, then, that we got fully staged productions of Siegfried last fall, and now Götterdämmerung, with Pierre Audi taking over directing duties at very short notice.

Audi’s is an extremely visual staging, focused on creating striking stage pictures. The sets, by Michael Simon, are minimalistic, constructed around two large blocks for Brünnhilde’s rock and the Norns and Rhinemaidens’ scenes that danced balletically around the rotating stage; while the Gibichung hall, was set in a place where blocks were hung from the ceiling and also circulated around the floor. As was in the case in Siegfried, Audi made use of video, by Chris Kondek, at the start and end of each act, showing children drawing and acting out aspects of the plot. In so doing, perhaps Audi was attempting to remind us of how universal stories of heroes and villains are, although I’m not quite sure how a story about a woman being abducted and forced to marry someone would be appropriate for children. Furthermore, this idea of a child-like story coming to life also felt rather underplayed, as if added on at the start and end of each act, and felt disconnected with the clean lines that Audi and his creative team gave us to look at. It was interesting how Audi parked a replica of the World Ash Tree on one side of the proscenium, and what I presume to be Wotan’s spear on the other. Yet again, it felt that these were placed there for visual interest, rather than engaged with.

Given the limited preparation time that Audi and his team had, it’s perhaps unfair to critique his staging too comprehensively. And yet, I found his personenregie to be problematic. As with the clean lines of the set, his placement of singers on the stage was also based on linear patterns. The principals would frequently be placed as a triangle on stage, singing their lines to the front. This meant that I felt there was little sense of who these characters really were, and the relationships between them. It seemed instead that they existed in separate worlds to each other. In turn, there was a coldness and lack of emotion to the characterizations that I found lacked humanity. Audi did make the Gibichung siblings rather incestuous, with Gunther and Gutrune initially constantly on top of each other. Elsewhere, some of the direction was rather risible. Waltraute circulated around the stage as if she’d had a few too many of the excellent beers this country offers. Similarly, the Rhinemaidens jumping on Hagen in the closing scene to snatch the ring back was also, perhaps unintendedly, comic. Of course, given the limited budget, one couldn’t have expected a visual spectacular in the closing pages, but having Brünnhilde walk off into the background did feel a bit anticlimactic. That said, the most striking aspect of Audi’s staging was Valerio Tiberi’s lighting. He managed to create so many impressive effects on stage, whether rays of light encompassing the stage action, or amplifying the half-lights of the Tarnhelm in its murky gloominess. It is, however, a minor miracle that we got a fully-staged production this evening and, while there were a number of aspects that didn’t quite convince, that Audi and his team were able to create this lengthy evening is reason for gratitude.

Ingela Brimberg brought her familiar bright soprano to the role of Brünnhilde. My appreciation of her singing has grown since I discovered that she’s in her seventh decade. She certainly sounds like a singer twenty years younger, even if it’s a primarily lyric voice made to sound wider. It did take Brimberg a little while to get into her stride this evening. The opening duet sounded a little dry in tone and she was a little far from the high C at the summit. As the evening progressed, the voice found an appealing freshness and ease on high that rang through the theatre. Brimberg also has an impressively instinctive musicality, knowing how to use the voice and where the tricky spots are, for example in the way that she crossed the registers with professionalism. She rose to a hieratic immolation scene: although parked on stage to sing to the front, she filled the words with meaning, bringing the drama out through the text.

Bryan Register sang Siegfried in a big, bulky heldentenor. The voice is somewhat grainy in tone, but he has stamina to spare, dispatching Siegfried’s greetings to Hagen and his vassals in Act 3 with ease, ringing out on top even after a very long evening. He wasn’t just about the volume though; he paid full attention to Wagner’s dynamic markings, making his character much more three-dimensional than we often hear. It meant that his Siegfried was both heroic and thoughtful. Ain Anger was a massive-voiced Hagen. He focused that huge tone into a burst of sound for his assembling of his vassals, never compromising it, but instead thrilling us with a wave of vocal energy. He was also a consummate stage presence, spitting out the text, finding sheer malice through that union of word and physicality. Most impressive.

Anett Fritsch brought her gleaming soprano to the role of Gutrune. Hers was a more lyrical assumption of the role than we often hear, the voice ringing out with beauty, everything sung off the text, yet the tone was never forced. Andrew Foster-Williams sang Gunther in his compact, focused baritone. The voice sounded slightly stretched by the higher reaches of the part, but his singing was always musical. Nora Gubisch was perhaps miscast as Waltraute. The voice became brittle with fuller dynamics higher up, although when the part sat in the middle, there was an agreeable warmth. She certainly made much of the text and gamely executed Audi’s rather unusual stage direction for her.

Scott Hendricks made so much of little as Alberich, really making his cameo count. The voice had an acidic edge to it that was deliciously evil and his stage physicality was unstinting. We also had a confident trio of Norns, with Marvic Monreal’s plush, warm contralto giving much pleasure, although Katie Lowe’s bulky soprano was verbally rather indistinct. The Rhinemaidens were mellifluously sung by a trio of voices that blended deliciously together. The impact of the chorus, prepared by Emmanuel Trenque, was sadly hampered by Audi’s direction that had them lined up in rows from the front to the back of the stage. This meant that we lacked the opportunity to be pinned back against our seats by the sheer massive wall of sound that they could have produced. That said, they did sing with focus and discipline.

I have left Alain Altinoglu and his orchestra until last. Their playing has been the consistent asset through the whole of this cycle. Over the course of the last ten years, Altinoglu has transformed this band into one of the greatest opera orchestras in the world. It struck me that he conducted them just like a singer would approach their music. For instance, in the introduction to that opening Siegfried/Brünnhilde duet, the way that the strings soared through the registers with a sense of connection between them, felt utterly vocal in approach. Indeed, it felt that Altinoglu’s conducting combined both a beauty of phraseology with a precision of attack, bringing together the best of Latin and Northern European approaches to this music. They phrased Wagner’s lines with the passion and phrasing of Italians, combined with the precision of Germans, creating a sound that was utterly distinctive. He moulded the textures masterfully, bringing out detail, all while bathing the auditorium in a glow of sound. In the Trauermarsch, Altinoglu gave that stabbing motif a sense of horrific precision, yet combined it with an optimistic exuberance that made one feel that there was indeed hope ahead. The quality of the playing he obtained from the orchestra was superlative – the strings both silky and sweet, oboes and clarinets piquant, and the brass solid all night, particularly in the tricky writing in the interlude between scenes one and two of Act 2.

I must admit to some mixed feelings at the conclusion of this cycle. There’s undoubtedly a sense of what might have been had Castellucci completed his vision. At the same time, the fact that Audi and his team were able to give us a fully realized staging on reduced time and budget is something that we should all be grateful for, even if it left me with a number of reservations. The singing was always decent and so much was brought out through the text. This Ring has been, above all, an enormous achievement for Altinoglu and his orchestra. What they have achieved over the last two years is something that will live long in the history of this storied house. The audience responded

The Met should revive The Nose

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 11:00:26 +0000

William Kentridge‘s production of The Nose. I think it’s his strongest production for the Met, the piece is a masterpiece and this is a time for absurdity. Bring in Maestro Keri-Lynn Wilson who did such an outstanding job with Mtsensk.

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Orpheus and Eurydice

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 17:00:45 +0000

A live streaming performance from The Dallas Opera.

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Ariadne auf Naxos

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 14:00:20 +0000

Jessye Norman sings the title role of a performance recorded in New York in 1985

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Le maschere

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 14:00:06 +0000

A rare performance of Mascagni’s opera recorded at the Wexford Festival last fall.

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The Met should revive Akhnaten

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 11:00:57 +0000

Both a brilliant composition and an outstanding production

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Sung and spoken tragedy

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 14:00:14 +0000

The return of Cherubini‘s Medée to the Opéra Comique may be a homecoming, but Nigel Wilkinson almost went home at intermission.

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The Met should revive its “Parade” triple bill

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 11:00:48 +0000

John Dexter and David Hockney‘s French triple bill of Poulenc‘s Les mamelles de Tirésias, Satie‘s Parade, and Ravel‘s L’enfant et les sortilèges, last seen in 2002. This clip is from Barcelona but you can enjoy Gabriel Bermúdez nonetheless.

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Back to the island

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 14:00:48 +0000

Annapolis Opera presented a celebration of Leonard Bernstein’s reflections on love, relationships, and marriage, pairing a fully staged production of Trouble in Tahiti with a collection of songs from other Bernstein compositions.

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The Met should revive Saint-François d’Assise

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 11:00:26 +0000

The Met was built for Saint-François d’Assise. It is a huge work, and it needs a huge space. And Ingo Metzmacher.

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The Press Loses What’s Left of Its Mind Over NIH Cuts to Indirect Costs

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 22:52:24 +0000

The news that Elon Musk and the Trump administration want to cut indirect costs on NIH (National Institutes of Health) grants has caused a tsunami of hysteria not seen since the year 2000 craze. NIH Budget Cuts Are the ‘Apocalypse of American Science,’ Experts Say. Much of the outcries are the result of ignorance, but some of the doom-sayers should know better.

Some background information is needed for the average person, and alas some of the scientists as well. Indirect costs are a negotiated percentage of the amount of a grant that is paid to the administration of the organization (typically a medical school or teaching hospital) for which the scientist receiving the grant is employed. For example, suppose the grant is $1,000,000. If the institution’s indirect cost rate is 50% an additional $500,000 is paid to the dean or other administrative officer to fund heating, electricity, air conditioning, and other upkeep of the facilities where the research will be conducted. That’s the theory.

In reality, most of those facilities exist with or without the extra funds from indirect costs. They form a slush fund for all sorts of functions unrelated to research. Sometimes a very successful researcher cuts a deal with the dean and gets back some of the indirect costs to use for further research or other related activities. On other occasions, the department chair gets some of the indirect costs back to the department’s general funding which explains the complaints by department chairmen about the proposed cuts.

When I was on the NIH study section that reviewed nephrology grant applications indirect costs were a constant irritant. One of the Harvard Hospitals had an indirect cost rate of 120%. We were repeatedly told to ignore the indirect cost rate when adjusting the budget for direct costs. But like jury nullification, we couldn’t, and the very high indirect cost of a very rich institution found its way into a reduced budget for direct costs which, of course, was unfair to the applicant who usually had no influence on the institutional indirect cost rate.

At the same time I was reviewing grant applications for the NIH I was also doing the same for the American Heart Association and the National Kidney Foundation. These organizations limited indirect costs to 10%. No institution ever turned down money from these and similar groups that paid low indirect costs.

What effect would the proposed cut have on medical research? Almost none. When an NIH grant is approved and funded, two separate events, a proportion of the primary recipient’s salary is paid for by the NIH – other salaries may also be paid. If the applicant says he will spend 25% of his time on the proposed research and the study section agrees that such an allocation of time is appropriate then 25% of his salary is paid from the direct cost of the grant relieving the dean or department chair from paying that amount. Thus the dean or chair gets a twofer. He pays less for his faculty member while receiving an indirect cost reimbursement for the salary he no longer pays.

The facilities in which the research is carried out are usually already in place and paid for with or without indirect costs. The great bulk of NIH grants go to about 20 institutions all of which are very affluent and could do the funded research with a fraction of the indirect costs they receive.

I suspect that Elon Musk doesn’t fully understand the indirect cost scam that Harvard and Yale (and similar institutions) are imposing on the NIH budget – indirect costs for those very rich universities of more than 65% are usurious. He just sees huge amounts of money going to fund an inflated overhead. If he really knew what was going on he come down harder on these academic administrators who are like administrators the world over. The public can easily be scared by cries that cancer won’t be cured or that sick children will not be healed because money will be withheld from administrators.

Indirect costs have been an open scandal among NIH funded researchers for generations. These costs can be reduced without jeopardy to medical research or the health of the country. I hope both politicians and journalists can be educated about the true nature of these costs allowing money now being spent by administrators to be diverted back to researchers where they can be used to add to the sum of our medical and scientific knowledge. A medical apocalypse is not near. The press is feeding misinformation about a subject about which they know almost nothing. It’s supplied by medical administrators who do know the truth of indirect costs which they seek to camouflage with distortions designed to scare the public into fearing for their lives and those of their children.

The takeaway message is that indirect costs go mainly to administrators. Decreasing them will have little or no effect on medical research.