BREAKING NEWS: Opera & Ballet

Confluencias

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 12:54:23 +0000

Flamenco is an interesting genre. It’s journey from India to Southern Spain via the Middle East and North Africa means it has influenced everything from Hindustani classical music through just about the whole Islamic world to its influence on Western classical (imagine Carmen without flamenco) and across the pond to Argentina and tango. Confluencias; a new Juno nominated album by Lara Wong and Melón Jimenez pays tribute to that global influence with a series of flamenco-jazz numbers inspired by that geographic spread.

Lara Wong plays bansuri; a bamboo side flute, and Melón Jimenez plays flamenco guitar and percussion. There’s also some use of electronics and double bass player Gil Maestro joins in on the first track.

The influences are naturally very varied and I’m not going to do a track-by-track but rather pick up on a few that I find particularly interesting. There are several drawn from disparate Spanish sources including De Sevilla a Kerala which is basically a sevillana; a four part dance from Andalusia. We stay in southern Spain for Confluencias which takes the haunting rhythms and melodies of the seguiriya; songs traditionally sung by blacksmiths as they worked. Here plaintive melody on the bansuri blends with intricate guitar, percussion and electronic drone. It’s followed by the Celtic influenced Finisterre which reminds us that in many cultures smiths are carriers of tradition and more. Un Nuevo Amanecer takes us back to flamenco’s roots with an improvisation for bansuri and guitar based on the morning raga Bhairar.

There’s more besides. In total there are seven tracks making up about 40 minutes of music. The music is quite varied and easy to listen to without being at all banal. it’s also well recorded with considerable detail and a solid soundstage. It’s available as a physical CD, MP3 or standard resolution WAV/FLAC (my copy). There’s a booklet with useful notes on the tracks.

Catalogue information: Self published: Check out http://www.larwong.com/melonlara for information on how to buy a copy.

The complete du Pré

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 20:16:19 +0000

I first started to think seriously about the late Jacqueline du Pré when I saw the Woolf/Vavrek opera Jacqueline in 2020 at Tapestry. Subsequently I listened to the CD release and attended the remount at Tapestry in February this year. Then I saw that all of her concerto recordings for HMV (back catalogue now owned by Warner Classics) made between 1965 and 1970 had got a major facelift along the lines of the Solti Ring. The original analogue tapes have been digitized at 192kHz/24 bit using the latest technology and then remastered for SACD. The result is a four hybrid SACD box set called The Great Cello Concertos.

As best I can tell what we have here were originally eight LPs comprising 280 minutes of music. The obvious recordings are included. There’s the Elgar with Sir John Barbirolli and the LSO which established her reputation and is still considered the “gold standard” by many people. There’s the Delius with Sir Malcolm Sargent and the RPO which is really lovely. There are recordings made with her husband Daniel Barenboim and four different orchestras. These include really good versions of the Schumann and Dvorak concertos.

There’s less familiar material as well including two Haydn concertos, the Saint-Saëns, the Lalo, the Boccherini and one I’d never heard of by Georg Matthias Monn. Most of these recordings have been written about umpteen times and rereleased in a variety of formats and combinations so I imagine many readers will have at least some of these recordings. And with so much information about these performances available I don’t feel the need to repeat what has been said before. Let’s just state the obvious; they are very individual, some would say eccentric, and quite compelling.

Why buy this release? It’s the first time they have been available in anything like this sort of resolution and they do sound really good. It’s stereo only of course; no surround track.

Catalogue information: Warner Classics 2173252029

Félix Fourdrain - Les Contes de Perrault, at the Théâtre de l’Athénée-Louis Jouvet in Paris

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 15:21:00 +0000

Théâtre de l’Athénée-Louis Jouvet, Paris, Tuesday April 15 2025

Conductor: Dylan Corlay. Production: Valérie Lesort. Sets and Costumes: Vanessa Sannino. Lighting: Pascal Laajili.Video: Vanessa Sannino, Julie Boissy, Joris Thouvenin. Choreography: Rémi Boissy. Puppets and Masks: Carole Allemand, Louise Digard, Einat Landais, Jérémie Legroux. Cendrillon, Le petit Poucet, Chaperon Rouge: Anaïs Merlin. La fée Morgane: Julie Mathevet. Olibrius: Romain Dayez. Le Prince Charmant: Enguerrand de Hys. Madame de Houspignoles: Lara Neumann. Le Chat Botté: Camille Brault. Aurore: Eléonore Gagey. Javotte: Hortense Venot. Croquemitaine, Meunier, Huissier: Richard Delestre. La Pinchonniere, Barbe-Bleue: Philippe Brocard. La reine Guillaumette: Lucile Komitès. Le roi Guillaume: Geoffroy Buffière. Chorus and Orchestra: Les Frivolités Parisiennes.

Photos: © Fabrice Robin

Quand vous sentez des brûlures,

Des lourdeurs et du pyrosis,

De la gêne, des boursouflures,

Agissez vite, sans sursis

(...)

Prenez du bi,

Prenez du car,

Prenez du bicarbonate de soude,

Et vous m’en direz des nouvelles,

Car jamais un estomac ne boude

Au bibi, au bibi, au bibi, au bibi,

Au bicarbonate de soude.*

As Félix Fourdrain (1880-1923) is not a household name, I’ll start my post with a few paragraphs, easily skipped if you aren’t interested, about the man and his work. For these, I’m indebted to the programme notes issued by the Atelier Lyrique de Tourcoing in anticipation of performances there later this month, and to Wikipedia. The website musicologie.org also offers some biographical notes, and a full list of Fourdrain’s works.

Like Saint-Saëns, Messager, Hervé and Lecocq, Fourdrain initially studied the organ, emerging from Widor’s classes (not Massenet’s, as is sometimes stated, though Massenet encouraged him in his career) at the Paris Conservatoire with a premier prix. But, also like them, he was irresistibly drawn to the theatre, and already by the time he was 27, his La Légende du Point d’Argentan premiered at the Opéra Comique. Arthur Bernède, one of its librettists, would soon pair up with Paul de Choudens (who also wrote for Mascagni and Leoncavallo, inter alia) to pen the texts for several of Fourdrain’s later stage works.

If the composer is now largely forgotten, along with even his most popular operetta, Les Maris de Ginette, it may simply be because he died of pneumonia at 43. In his day, he was successful enough. He published (usually through the Choudens family’s business: they were the publishers of Faust, Carmen and Les Contes… d’Hoffmann) vocal works of various kinds: operettas, operas, many songs, the odd instrumental piece, patriotic works during WWI and, as in the case of Les Contes de Perrault, Féeries.

The Féerie, so Professor Wiki tells us, was a genre ‘known for fantasy plots and spectacular visuals, including lavish scenery and mechanically worked stage effects. Féeries blended music, dancing, pantomime, and acrobatics, as well as magical transformations created by designers and stage technicians (...) and an extensive use of supernatural elements.’ Offenbach himself produced five, from Le Roi Carotte to Le Voyage dans la Lune. As the managers of the Gaîté Lyrique, where Les Contes was premiered at the end of 1913 (with Yvonne Printemps as Prince Charming, apparently) were soon to take over the Opéra Comique, they wanted to go out with a bang and a splash, so Fourdrain’s féerie was staged especially lavishly.

Just as he hated La Belle Hélène, Zola looked down on féeries, and Reynaldo Hahn, while acknowledging Fourdrain’s talent in setting Bernède and Choudens’ text, complained, with something of a sniff, that the work as a whole failed to respect the style of Perrault’s tales. But in Gil Blas, a daily paper of the period, Isidore de Lara - a less fastidious composer and critic than Hahn - enthused that the score ‘sparkles with youth, gaiety and lively rhythms (and) displays a marked sense of the comic and the fantastically picturesque (...) The orchestration (...) is the work of a man well-versed in his craft (with) an individual touch.’

Les Contes de Perrault is in four acts. The tales it strings tortuously together into a single plot can be guessed from its characters’ names: Cinderella, Hop-o’-My Thumb, Red Riding Hood, Prince Charming, Puss-in-Boots, Bluebeard, and so on. In short, Cinderella, having met Prince Charming (the former Hop-o’-My Thumb, ennobled, like all his family, by the good fairy), escapes Bluebeard and his guest, the ogre, and hides in a donkey skin until put to sleep by the demon Olibrius for 100 years and awakened at last as Sleeping Beauty. You get the idea…

The score, meanwhile, is unmistakably of its time, combining wistful salon waltzes, lively polkas and madcap gallops with more languorous echoes of Massenet - Cendrillon of course, and the magical mood of Esclarmonde. However much Hahn may have sniffed at it, it bears his stamp as well, and, fairy tales obligent, there’s lots of Rimsky-Korsakov’s twinkling orchestration in there too. Not to mention the music hall, as in the daft couplets quoted at the top of this post, wherein - to Hahn’s dismay - Bluebeard recommends bicarb to the dyspeptic ogre (too many plump children at one sitting). So, a kaleidoscopic, topsy-turvy score. But you can’t help, as you hear it, foreseeing the catastrophe on the horizon. With that hindsight, it has constant bittersweet undertones.

As I’ve mentioned before, the 'Frivolités Parisiennes' troupe came together in 2012 to dust off and produce - sometimes with the Palazzetto Bru Zane - French light opera of the 19th and 20th centuries: opéra-comique, opéra bouffe, opérette, vaudevilles, period French musicals and the like. I first encountered them performing Hervé’s totally batty Mam’zelle Nitouche in 2019, one of the highlights of the ongoing revival of these half-forgotten French works, to which they are making such an entertaining contribution. Any production of theirs is, in my opinion, worth investigating.

Director Valérie Lesort’s La Périchole, at the Opéra Comique in 2022, was spectacularly colourful and full of gags, but steadfastly unfunny. Admittedly, La Périchole isn’t Offenbach’s funniest work. But Les Contes is a different kettle of fish, and her production, this time, is clever, expertly managed, and a great success. Its vivid colours and contrasts, fretted sets, shadow-plays, cardboard cut-outs and stiff, flat costumes (characters enter and exit sideways, crab-like) recall the pop-up books we had as children - or still have today: I keep a couple of beauties beside my sofa.

How the magic is worked is made evident. Extras in simple white Pierrot outfits shift things around without hiding, and puppeteers work their wonders in full sight: a writhing red snake (symbolising the evil Olibrius) attacks a blue bird (Morgane, the good fairy), bluebirds and butterflies dress Cinderella for the ball, clouds on sticks unfold into sheep, the ogre and bluebeard end up as giant fowl, roasted on spits, and the sails on Puss-in-Boots’ miller’s mill are just like the ones on the paper windmill I’m waving aloft, as a blond-haired toddler in shorts, in a tiny, black-and-white holiday photo from Bournemouth…

The success of this kind of work relies on the high-voltage energy its protagonists put into it - and very exhausting it must be to keep up. But keep it up they all do, pantomime style, in the British sense of the word, i.e. an arch, grimacing, nod-nod, wink-wink, vaudeville-type show aimed at one level for kids and at another for adults. You can’t account for individual performances in the same way as for, say, Don Carlos, as singing is only occasionally the point. Indeed, the buffo roles, stars of the show, tend to eclipse the young soprano, Anaïs Merlin (new to me), whose Cinderella is nevertheless on stage practically from start to finish. Her ringing soprano suits the feisty character assigned to Cinders in this reading, more than it would a more simpering or submissive one.

Those scene-stealing buffo roles are Croquemitaine the ogre, Bluebeard, and the wicked and wickedly camp Olibrius, played by a willowy giant of a man in a devilish costume, black and bristling with red snakes, whose booming baritone comes with an unexpectedly delicate falsetto top: Romain Dayez (also new to me). The ogre, his massive jaw and paunch both bouncing up-and-down comically on elastic cords, is played with pure music-hall gusto by Richard Delestre, while Bluebeard is the sonorous operatic baritone Philippe Brocard I first encountered in Maurice Yvain’s Gosse de Riche, another Frivolités show.

Also in Gosse de Riche, and a spirited lead in several of these revivals over the past few years, was Lara Neumann; but Madame de Houspignoles, Cinderella’s mum, is more of a pantomime-dame part, giving her plenty of eye-rolling, face-pulling action, but less to sing.

Others in the cast come from wider-ranging operatic backgrounds. La Fée Morgane is a coloratura role - albeit less demanding than Massenet’s fairy - ably performed by Julie Mathevet, whom I’ve already seen as Eine Fünfzehnjährige in Lulu, in both Paris and Brussels, and as Zerlina. Similarly, the last time I heard our Prince Charming, incisive tenor Enguerrand de Hys - after some Offenbach and then Poulenc - was as Surrey in La Monnaie’s Henry VIII.

The supporting roles were stoutly defended, with unfailing verve, and a good time was had by all, as provincial reporters used to write in the local paper after any festive event. These days, with the world in the state it’s in, people need this kind of inconsequential escapism. The audience roared as if Callas had just sung Lucia, and we all left feeling we’d have lots of children and live happily ever after.

(Music starts in the following clip after 40 seconds)

------------------------------

*When you feel heartburn,

Heaviness and acid,

Discomfort and swelling,

Act fast, without delay

(...)

Take some bi,

Take some car,

Take some bicarbonate of soda,

And tell me all about it,

For no stomach ever resists

Bibi, bibi, bibi, bibi,

Bicarbonate of soda.

Skeletons in the Closet: Un ballo in maschera at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 15:37:43 +0000

Verdi – Un ballo in Maschera

Amelia – Laura Stella
Riccardo – Matteo Lippi
Ulrica – Chiara Mogini
Renato – Amartuvshin Enkhbat
Oscar – Claudia Ceraulo
Silvano – Andrea Borghini
Samuel – Zhang Zhibin
Tom – Park Kwangisk
Un giudice – Cristobal Campos Marin

Coro del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna / Riccardo Frizza.
Stage director – Daniele Menghini.

Teatro Comunale di Bologna – Comunale Nouveau, Bologna, Italy. Tuesday, April 15th, 2025.

This new production of Un ballo in maschera opened at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna’s temporary home on Sunday. As is usually the case here, the run was double-cast, although there was a further change this evening with Laura Stella jumping in for an indisposed Maria Teresa Leva. The staging was confided to Daniele Menghini. I must admit to some significant trepidation when I saw his name listed as the stage director. My previous encounters with his work have been less than satisfactory. These consisted of a Carmen in Macerata that made this vibrant opera tedious, a Tristan in Palermo that had a naked man perambulating the stage, and an Elisir in Turin that sucked the life out of that glorious opera.

Photo: © Andrea Ranzi

I’m very happy to report that on this occasion, that trepidation was misplaced. Unlike his other productions, Menghini instead here focuses on actually telling the story, rather than adding extraneous layers of visual ‘noise’ that drown out the work. He sets the action in a simple tiered set, by Davide Signorini, which is accessorized for each scene with various bits of stage decoration. The set is dominated by a throne to the left, through which a strange, crawling danseur exits in the Ulrica scene, and is later covered in skulls in the closing scene. It struck me that Menghini might be making a statement about colonialism here – the fact that America was built on the skulls of its aboriginal people.

Photo: © Andrea Ranzi

Similarly, throughout the evening, Menghini makes use of some striking stage pictures. The skeleton at the back of the stage during the Renato/Amelia confrontation, suggesting a brutality that was all-encompassing in this conspiratorial society. Having Riccardo sing his big ‘Ma se m’è forza perderti’ in front of the curtain, meant that it could open to show a vibrant ball scene with a full stage. So vibrant in fact, that the lady in front of me couldn’t help but take a photo. The sight of Amelia in the horrid field, surrounded by skulls, was also particularly striking. I do have reservations about some of Menghini’s personenregie. Amartuvshin Enkhbat as Renato is a bit of a statuesque actor, and he appeared to have been left to his own devices. On the whole, however, this is the most successful staging I’ve seen by Menghini, simply because he concentrates on the clarity of his storytelling and proved himself willing to trust the work.

Photo: © Andrea Ranzi

Riccardo Frizza led a Comunale orchestra on luminous form – even in this difficult acoustic. He found a mahogany depth to the string tone, encouraging his players to experiment with vibrato, pulling the vibrations from the sound to make the Ulrica scene even more creepy. The wind playing also had a captivating, cantabile beauty. I did, however, find Frizza’s tempi surprisingly sluggish. The closing anthem of Act 1 seemed far too ponderous in approach, while ‘morrò’ seemed to just grind to a halt. I found attack to be a bit soft-grained, and throughout I longed for Frizza to bring that lightness of approach and sheer dynamism that he brings to his Donizetti. It was an engaging enough reading, he kept the disparate forces appropriately together, but I missed the vitality and vigour I’ve heard him bring on other occasions. The chorus, prepared by Gea Garatti Ansini, confirmed their place as the finest opera chorus in the Italian Republic currently. The tenors and basses sang with supreme precision of tuning in the unaccompanied off-stage section at the end of Act 2, with the basses warmly resonant. The sopranos and mezzos sang with warm tone and agreeable blend.

Photo: © Andrea Ranzi

Matteo Lippi gave us a wonderful Riccardo. What a delight it was to hear able to fully rise to this music, singing with eloquent diction and warm, sunny tone – not to mention an impeccable legato. Furthermore, he had room to spare in the final scene, the voice seemingly unlimited in stamina, despite the relatively demanding assignment, never forcing the voice further than it can go. The voice has such brightness and warmth to the tone, such agreeable sunniness, that his singing gave an immense amount of pleasure. Amartuvshin sang with impressive stylistic awareness and clarity of diction. The tone itself is quite complex in texture, warm and rich. He’s also the owner of an appropriately smooth legato, without a trace of aspiration. He brought a genuine sense of feeling to the middle section of his ‘eri tu’, where so many before have just blasted it out. Here, Amartuvshin found a beauty and contemplation that very much brought his character to life. If only he had been given some stronger stage direction by Menghin. Make no mistake, this gentleman can certainly sing.

Photo: © Andrea Ranzi

I don’t know when Stella received the notification that she would be going on as Amelia. Perhaps some last-minute nerves might explain the fact that it took a couple of acts for her intonation to settle. Her big scene at the horrid field saw her get through the ascent to the high C through sheer willpower, the voice with a metallic core but perhaps lacking in spin. Once she got to ‘morrò’ something happened. Stella pulled back on the tone and used the dynamics to bring Amelia’s pain to life, sustaining the extremely long lines, particularly at Frizza’s incredibly slow tempo, with ease and feeling. No doubt that with more time and notice, Stella would give us an even more deeply-felt Amelia.

Photo: © Andrea Ranzi

The remainder of the cast reflected the excellent standards of the house. Chiara Mogini was a confident Ulrica. She was unafraid to go for the chestiness, while she was utterly fearless on top, bringing out the hieratic declamations of the sibyl to life with forthright generosity. Claudia Ceraulo was a crystalline Oscar, turning the corners with ease and panache, with a more than creditable stab at a trill. Both Zhang Zhibin and Park Kwangisk, as Samuel and Tom respectively, sang with warm resonance, while Andrea Borghini sang Silvano in a handsome baritone, one I’d like to hear more of.

Photo: © Andrea Ranzi

This was undoubtedly an engaging evening in the theatre. Menghini’s staging is by far the most successful thing I’ve seen from him, simply because he focuses on the clarity of the storytelling and creates effective stage pictures, in collaboration with his creative team. Frizza’s reading felt quite sluggish on the whole, but he did obtain some superb playing from the Comunale orchestra, again cementing their place as one of the finest orchestras in the Italian Republic. The singing had much to enjoy, with Lippi’s Riccardo singing with such Italianate warmth and generosity. The audience responded at the close with generous ovations for the entire cast.

Klezmerized!

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 14:03:20 +0000

Tuesday’s concert in the RBA was at the unusual time of 5.30pm and it was rammed. Whether that was a function of the time slot or the following that Schmaltz and Pepper have built up in the short time they have been around I don’t know but it was impressive. And so was the concert. Schmaltz and Pepper consists of some amazingly versatile and virtuosic musicians; Rebekah Wolkstein on violin and vocals, Eric Abramovitz on clarinet, Drew Jurecka on lots of stuff, Jeremy Ledbetter onb piano and Michael Herring on bass.

I first saw this band at TSM last year and I was very impressed. On Tuesday they presented some of the material they did then, like the very funny I’m Sorry Mama and The Gefilte Fugue but a lot was new including a Beethoven medley Ode to Oy; which gets extra points for featuring the slow movement from the Seventh Symphony, and a rather gently melodic number Neshama. There was also another overbearing parent song but it was mother-in-law problems this time.

I think there are three things that draw me to this band. They blend a range of styles (though mainly klezmer and Yiddish swing) in fun ways, they are incredibly good musicians and they just exude fun. (They also sell hats… everybody does these days it seems). They are scheduled again at Toronto Summer Music this year (July 16th @ Walter Hall) and they have a CD about to be released (May 18th at Heliconian). Keep tuned for a review.

Photo credits: Karen E. Reeves.

Greyscale Macbeth

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 12:56:13 +0000

Christof Loy’s production of Verdi’s Macbeth filmed at the Liceu in Barcelona in 2016 is grey, very grey. Costumes and lighting are such that one might think one is watching a black and white film. The first, brief, touch of colour; some lights and bunches of flowers appears at the beginning of Act 4. Beyond the greyness the vibe is essentially late 19th century and it’s pretty sparse. It’s also very dark; at times almost unwatchably so on video (even Blu-ray).

Musically and dramatically it’s rather interesting and good. It’s the 1865 Paris version including the ballet but in Italian with the 1847 conclusion (Macbeth dies on stage). There are some interesting touches. The witches are basically the Macbeth’s household staff with the addition of facial hair. The two witch scenes are both also a bit mad, especially the potioning in Act 3. The apparition scene is nicely done with the future kings in dress uniform in glass display cases emerging from the stage floor. The ballet (choreography by Thomas Wilhelm) looks like it’s going to be like, say, a conventional production of Les Sylphides but it gets a bit more sinister. The dancers are bare foot and several are men in drag. It’s effective.

The performances are very good across the board. Ludovic Tézier is a very strong Macbeth; his “Pietà, rispetto, onore” is stunning. He’s well matched by Martina Serafin as his wife who goes convincingly from connivingly evil to cracked. She has power and excellent coloratura. They sing well together too. Vitalij Kowaljow, as Banco, is a proper bass. Saimir Pirgu, as Macduff, has thrilling high notes heard to good effect in “Ah, la paterna mano” and Albert Casals is a very solid Malcolm.

The house chorus really throws itself into the action and sings splendidly and Giampaolo Bisanti gets excellent, red-blooded, playing from the orchestra. It all sounds really exciting where it’s supposed to and eery where that’s required.

This must have been a bit of a nightmare to film and it’s not entirely successful as a video because of the sense of vague shapes flitting around in semi-darkness but I think Fabrice Castanier does a decent job in the circumstances. Video quality is good on Blu-ray and both DTS-HD and PCM stereo sound tracks are excellent. The booklet has some bare bones information about the work and the production plus a track listing. Subtitle options are Italian, English, French, German, Spanish, Catalan, Japanese and Korean.

The real problem with this disk is that, despite fine performances, the dark and grey production is hard to watch on video. Alternatives include the straightforward Covent Garden version and the rather more conceptual Warlikowski production which features a typically intense performance from Asmik Grigorian.

Catalogue information: C Major Blu-ray 768804

Back to Castro’s… again

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 13:26:57 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve been to a regular Opera Revue show and they were playing my favourite of their regular venues; Castro’s yesterday. Also, besides the usual gang of Alex Hajek, Dani Friesen and Claire Harris there was Alex Hetherington, so I went. I had a great time. It was classic Operas Revue; some arias, some music theatre, Kurt Weill and a couple of parodies. And Alex H. Boy does she sound loud in a small space like Castro’s! Plus this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to hear her sing the Countess from Marriage of Figaro (which will surely lead to expulsion from the Mezzos Guild).

I think Castro’s on a sunny Sunday afternoon is the perfect way to catch Opera Revue. The space is the right size and shape (i.e,. doesn’t feel like a railway tunnel). It’s a bar not a theatre. There’s natural light. And, above all, they have decent beer. If you haven’t tried opera in a pub maybe you should. I recommend it.

Photo credits: Dorothea Unwin and Alex Hajek

Verdi - Don Carlos ('rehearsal' score, in French) at the Paris Opera Bastille

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 09:07:00 +0000

ONP Bastille, Paris, Wednesday April 9, 2025

Conductor: Simone Young. Production: Krzysztof Warlikowski. Sets and costumes: Małgorzata Szczęśniak. Lighting: Felice Ross. Video: Denis Guéguin. Choreography: Claude Bardouil. Don Carlos: Charles Castronovo. Elisabeth de Valois: Marina Rebeka. Philippe II: Christian Van Horn. La Princesse Eboli: Ekaterina Gubanova. Rodrigue: Andrzej Filończyk. Le Grand Inquisiteur: Alexander Tsymbalyuk. Un Moine: Sava Vemić. Thibault: Marine Chagnon. Une voix d’en haut: Teona Todua. Le Comte de Lerme: Manase Latu. Un héraut royal: Hyun-Jong Roh. Un coryphée: Christian Rodrigue Moungoungou. Six députés flamands: Amin Ahangaran, Niall Anderson, Alejandro Baliñas Vieites, Vartan Gabrielian, Florent Mbia, Milan Perišić. Charles Quint: Yann Collette. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

Photos: Franck Ferville/ONP

This is the third time I’ve seen this Warlikowski production. I saw it first as Don Carlos, in 2017, starring Kaufmann, Yoncheva, Tézier and Garanča, then again as Don Carlo, in 2019, with Fabiano, Car, Dupuis and Rachvelishvili. But any chance to hear Verdi’s score in the French version, nearly complete (including that magnificent ‘Lacrimosa’ ensemble after Posa’s sacrifice), is to be jumped at with almost any cast. So I jumped.

I described the production in full, as well as I could after one sitting, in my 2017 post about the French version, and added a paragraph more about it again in 2019, when I heard it in Italian and, to my surprise and for whatever reason, found the performance dramatically more satisfactory. It was probably because Fabio Luisi, not Philippe Jordan, was in the pit: ‘The result is more dramatic overall, and theatrically more coherent and convincing, making better sense of Warlikowski's characteristically thoughtful production.’

This year, it seemed to me the production had matured, if such can be said, into something thoroughly sound and deeply satisfying: a genuine repertory production. When it’s played complete, all the personal and political implications and issues of Don Carlos are laid out in full, making the whole experience (‘plot’ seems too unambitious a word) easier to apprehend and deeper, richer, more complex in substance. And Warlikowski tells it fairly straightforwardly, though of course - as an intelligent, thoughtful director - with his own slants, insights and nuances. Anyway, just follow the links above to see, if you haven’t already, how the show unfolds.

As for the score, as far as I know, this year Simone Young used the same one as Jordan in 2017: what’s called the ‘rehearsal’ score, i.e. everything Verdi originally submitted to ‘La Grande Boutique’ before any cuts were made, except the ballets. Performances thus start at 6 pm (tough on people with regular jobs) and you’re out to dine shortly before 11.

In sum, this was a good evening all round, musically and theatrically. No doubt one of the best of my current season. But however good a performance is, we all have thoughts and impressions going through our minds as we sit there. I’ll outline a few of mine, but they are in no way meant to detract from the impact of the evening overall: we left the house unusually happy.

Simone Young has, I see, quite a lot of fans online, wishing she were invited to conduct in Paris more often. Some of them would no doubt like her to get the music director job vacant since Dudamel quit Paris so suddenly and unexpectedly. My only experience of her work before now, was in Salome in 2022, and my thoughts last Wednesday evening match those I set down three years ago: her conducting ‘was detailed and respectful (...), but to me rather plain and dull and dutiful, never letting rip in torrents of either joy or horror, never stretching the orchestra to its limits - far from it.’ She’s visibly attentive to her players and singers and is no doubt a safe pair of hands: the performance goes by without undue incident. And there’s perhaps some merit in a consistently moderate approach, more dutiful and diligent than dazzling, that avoids mannerisms, eccentricities, and yanking the score about. But the result brings us nothing new, no surprises, no intriguing insights, and little relief. Moments of high drama, where you expect to be moved, shocked or thrilled, lack… well, high drama. Everything passes by at the same temperature (‘oddly placid’ were the words I used of that Salome). Which is why I mention Young’s conducting first: I think she could have goaded the singers on more at key points in the score and chivvied them into delivering more dramatic oomph to these highlights.

The chorus was in peak form: this is the kind of work that finds them at their best. The supporting roles were well filled too, contributing to the overall sense of an evening with unusually few weaknesses. As Thibault, Marine Chagnon, though agreeable, was only partially audible. But Sava Vemić’s resonant monk, Manase Latu’s Comte de Lerme and the Héraut Royal of Hyun-Jong Roh all made their mark. Their French was comprehensible, too, making them the exceptions in an evening of fuzzy articulation and exotic pronunciation (none of the principles was French) - not to mention occasional memory lapses when you suspected what you were hearing was simply gobbledegook or rhubarb-rhubarb, made up on the spot.

In 2017, when this production was new, the Polish baritone Andrzej Filończyk was one of the Flemish deputies. Now he’s been promoted to Posa. His voice is youthful, healthy and clear, firm as a laser beam, perhaps a touch dry and lacking in variation in colour. It will be interesting to see how he develops with age and experience. Unfortunately for him, many in the audience must still have had memories of Ludovic Tézier in mind: however odious comparison may be, it’s hard to avoid. 'Ah, je meurs, l'âme joyeuse’ was inevitably not the same with Filończyk and Castronovo as with Tézier and Kaufmann.

Alexander Tsymbalyuk, a Ukrainian bass, was new to me. There was something of the curate’s egg about his singing: some really great notes, especially in the middle range, yet sometimes an oddly fleshless, breathless sound. And though he’s labelled a bass, when he made his octave drop on ‘sire’, the bottom just fell out. I suppose that’s par for the course, though. At any rate, his Inquisitor could have been a lot blacker; there wasn’t enough contrast with Christian Van Horn’s Philip or enough flesh-creeping menace in their clash, which ought to build up to something terrifying, but didn't.

Van Horn is a singer I’d only heard once before, as Narbal. I like his voice very much, a kind of butterscotch sound (work that one out!), clear yet complex and sonorous. I did wonder, though, whether Philip is really a logical role for him at this stage. Philip complains of old age, of his white hair, but Van Horn, fit and luxuriantly bearded, looks very much like King George V in the absolute pink, around the time of his coronation. You wouldn’t be surprised if, in the end, Elisabeth was quite easily reconciled to her fate. He made such an elegant success of ‘Elle ne m’aime pas’, and I liked his voice so much in general that I hesitate to mention it, but it’s something I seem to end up writing in every post, whatever the opera and whoever the baritone, bass baritone or bass: his lowest notes were weak. Perhaps they should all be sent off to a special school for special courses to beef up their bottoms.

Ekaterina Gubanova is, in contrast, a singer I’ve seen so many times, in so many guises - from Third Lady, Emilia and Suzuki, through Judith and Fricka, to Ortrud and, last year, a powerfully-sung (i.e. not screeched and caterwauled) Herodias, having a ball - that I seriously wondered if there weren’t more than one mezzo with the same name. Hers isn’t an altogether typical Eboli: not a plummy, potentially hammy monstre sacré, milking it for all it’s worth, at any rate. Like Van Horn’s Philip, her Eboli is clearer than usual, and this clarity, along with her directness and precision, made the ‘Veil Song’ less tedious a set-piece than it can turn out to be. Oddly, in the third act, she seemed less self-assured and somehow fuzzier, and though, later still, ‘O don fatal’ was loudly applauded, it wasn’t the mezzo showpiece it usually is, and didn’t have the audience going wild and cheering to the rafters.

I’ve seen Charles Castronovo several times, but in recent years he’d slipped off my radar. When I first saw him, as Nemorino, getting on for 20 years ago, I wrote he was ‘the revelation of this show,’ with a ‘rounder, darker’ voice than that of Juan Diego Flórez. Now, some of the early reviewers of this run have claimed that Castronovo’s voice failed to penetrate beyond the footlights into the Bastille. Perhaps that was so at the premiere, when the critics were invited, but it wasn’t the case on Wednesday, at all. However, his voice, rather than having obvious squillo, as it’s called, is now quite a ‘dark’ tenor, à la Kaufmann (though less powerful), soft and and smoky at the top. As such, it isn’t well suited to the Bastille’s famously challenging acoustics. It might have been more comfortable for Castronovo to take Carlos on at a less demanding venue: while not the weak link some accounts have postulated, he seemed pushed to his limit most of the evening. Also, while Kaufmann broods and Fabiano seethes naturally, each in his different way suiting Warlikowski’s vision of Carlos as tortured and suicidal, Castronovo is, even at 50, more a little boy lost. There's no way he’s going to dash off and save Flanders.

Disrupting the usual protocol, I really had to leave Marina Rebeka till last. I’d heard and read a lot about her but never seen her before, one reason I bought tickets to see this production again. As Elisabeth, she was simply sensational, vocally and dramatically. It was obvious from the very first notes: early on, my neighbour leaned to me and whispered, with audible satisfaction, ‘C'est une vraie voix.’ Her voice is gleaming and crystalline, with a powerful flash of the dramatic soprano we don’t always get in this role, and some metal at the top. As such, a perfect soprano voice for the Bastille, soaring over the stage apron and pit into the vast auditorium in a way Parisians witness only too rarely. Her icily regal bearing suits the daughter of Henri II and Catherine de Medici, radiating a firm sense of her status and the duties it involves.

She was clearly a notch above everyone else in the cast, even Van Horn, which is why I saved her till last. And I agree with an online critic who wrote that if she can just give us one or two floated pianissimi, Caballé-style but without overdoing it, she may well be the Elisabeth of the present day. I hope I’ll have the good fortune of seeing her again soon, in Paris or elsewhere.

Quest

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 13:34:48 +0000

Saturday night at the new performance space at 877 Yonge Street saw a concert inaugurating Cultureland’s residency at Tapestry Opera. The performance consisted mainly of excerpts from Cultureland’s recent and “in progress” operas accompanied on piano by Carolyn Maule and directed by Renée Salewski.

First up were three scenes from The Refugees (music Afarin Mansouri, text Jennifer Wise) performed by Natalya Gennadi, Annie Ramos, Tahirih Vejdani, Catherine Carew, Thea Barclay and Alex Hajek. The theme of refugees washing up on a beach somewhere in the EU to an ambiguous reception has become almost a Toronto theatre cliché but this was nicely done with natalya in a kind of big sister role and Alex doubling as the father and some sort of local bigwig (complete with red baseball cap.

Next, Thera Barclay performed an aria from Afarin’s children’s opera Little Heart, based on an Iranian children’s book. Thera managed a suitably girlish tone and dramatic persona. Nicely done. Next came two arias from Echoes of Bisotoon; the only piece I had previously seen. Farhad’s aria was performed suitably heroically by Gabriel Sanchez-Ortega and the love duet with Shirin (Kathryn Rose Johnston) was beautifully sung and rather touching.

A bit of a change of pace with a dance from another Mansouri work; The Endless Sea. The choreography was interesting and beautifully performed by Viana Vikamis to a recorded soundtrack from Thin Edge Collective, Mansouri and Milad Bagheri. The last piece saw Thera back for “Look Within”;an aria from Afarin’s upcoming opera Hypatia. Neo-platonic philosophy isn’t the most obvious subject for an aria but it worked and was beautifully sung. I really want to see this piece when it’s finished.

Throw in some fine playing from Carolyn; including some pretty involved extended technique, and some improvised percussion from Naghme Farahmand and it made for a satisfying evening.

Mahabharata – part 2

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 15:23:58 +0000

There’s a change in both style and pace for part 2 of Why Not Theatre’s Mahabharata. (See review of part 1). The stage band is gone and the whole back wall is given over to video screens. Sometimes the whole is used and sometimes just the top half; often using split screen effects. Hana Kim’s projections are front and centre in this instalment.

So where are we? The Pandava’s have returned from exile and Duryodhna has refused to consider any kind of partition of the kingdom. Krishna mediates but to no avail. This is rather well done with excellent use of video of the live action to reinforce it. It’s war and it will draw in the whole world. Krishna wants to remain neutral so he offers Arjuna the choice of his, unarmed, service or his million warriors; the Kauravas will get the unchosen offering. Arjuna chooses Krishna as his charioteer.

And so to the field of Kurukshetra where the opposing legions face off in battle array. Krishna and Arjuna ride out to recce but Arjuna has doubts about the rightness of waging war on kin. He is instructed in dharma and bakhti (duty) by Krishna in the section of the poem known as the Bhagavad Gita. The staging here is just amazing. Projections of cosmic creation and destruction play in the background and a golden avatar of Krishna appears and sings the hymn in Sanskrit (surtitles than goodness!). The other avatar of Krishna and Arjuna take yoga poses. The scene is spectacularly beautiful and the singing (Meher Pavri) sensational. Robert Oppenheimer would have loved this.

So Arjuna returns to duty and the multi-day fighting begins. The key actions take place. Arjuna kills Karna. Bhishma is riddled with arrows. Bhima kills all hundred Kauravas. Shakuni narrates the action to Dhritarashtra and Gandhari and all the time Lord Shiva dances. This is Jay Emmanuel in Bharatanatyam style symbolizing the Lord of Destruction and he continues throughout the battle action as the earth is soaked in blood and covered in corpses..

At the end only a handful of combatants are still alive and Dhritarashtra and Gandhari, together with Kunti, renounce the world and go off to be hermits in the forest. The Pandavas reign for 36 years and we get further lessons in dharma as Yudhishtira’s lingering anger keeps the Pandavas out of Heaven. But we close, as we began, at the court of Arjuna’s great-grandson Janemajaya where he is listening to the story. The moral is clear. Revenge is not dharma and he ends the blood feud with the snakes.

Taking both parts together, this is an extraordinary achievement. Ravi Jain and Miriam Fernandes and their creative team have successfully turned a major, highly complex, deeply ambiguous epic into compelling theatre. They have assembled a stellar cast (see review of part 1 for details) and created magic. Go see it if you can.

Canadian Stage’s presentation of The Mahabharata parts 1 and 2 is playing at the Bluma Appel Theatre until April 27th.

Photo credits: David Cooper

Die Zauberflöte

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 13:00:48 +0000

A live broadcast from New York

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Macbeth

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 13:00:04 +0000

Domen Krizaj and Tamara Wilson lead a performance of Verdi’s opera recorded in Frankfurt in December

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Adolescent Recollections: Der fliegende Holländer at the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 11:10:55 +0000

Wagner – Der fliegende Holländer

Holländer – Claudio Otelli
Senta – Dorothea Herbert
Erik – Ewandros Stenzowski
Daland – Park Youngdoo
Steuermann – Joshua Sanders
Mary – Ariana Lucas

Extrachor des Hessischen Staatstheaters Wiesbaden, Chor des Hessischen Staatstheaters Wiesbaden, Hessisches Staatsorchester Wiesbaden / Lin Chinchao.
Stage director – Martin G Berger.

Staatstheater, Wiesbaden, Germany. Friday, April 10th, 2025.

My last visit to the Staatstheater in Wiesbaden was back in 2018, so I was certainly overdue a visit. The house is absolutely exquisite, with one of the most beautiful theatre bars anywhere. It’s also a very intimate space, which meant that when I saw Götterdämmerung here back in 2018, with the great Evelyn Herlitzius and Andreas Schager singing their opening duet, it was one of the loudest things I’ve ever heard. The size of the house also meant that this evening’s fliegende Holländer was similarly visceral in musical impact, with both the orchestra and voices extremely vivid and prominent.

Photo: © Thomas Aurin

I don’t think I’d come across the work of stage director Martin G Berger previously. Upon entering the auditorium, the surtitles set the scene: An entrepreneur, Daland, hosts a pirate-themed party every seven years. Twenty-one years ago, his wife took his then fourteen-year-old daughter Senta away. This year was the first time she had returned to her originally family home. As Senta entered the home during the overture, she was handed a red skirt. Then the Steuermann, after the sailors brought beer in to the garage of the house, raised one of the floorboards to find a box below, full of photos, that he proceeded to masturbate to. Berger used video, by Vincent Stefan, to illustrate the fact that the younger Senta was forced to dress up in the red skirt to then be abused by a figure dressed up as a pirate. Berger isn’t the first to reflect on this story as the product of abuse, but he may be the first to illustrate it so blatantly. This was a world where rather than spinning wheels, Mary encouraged the ladies to spin the bottle. A world where women, and indeed men, were seen as sexual objects to be had and disposed of.

Photo: © Thomas Aurin

Given that Daland promises Senta to the Holländer in the libretto as an object to have, at first glance using Senta as being given to another man to abuse, might seem to be a cogent and logical starting point for a staging. Yet unfortunately Berger’s staging abounds in non sequiturs. What is the role of Erik precisely? Who is the Holländer and why is Senta obsessed with him? Is Senta’s single-minded pursuit of the Holländer simply her way of avenging her abusers? I’m not convinced in the slightest that Berger actually manages to answer these questions or indeed actually give us a persuasive staging that stands up to any kind of deeper critical scrutiny. Both Dorothea Herbert and the chorus were absolutely fearless physically, despite the difficult demands placed on them to simulate abuse. While I am loathe to give spoilers, in the closing three minutes, Berger did at least attempt to find some kind of dénouement. A group of teenagers, of all genders, approached the front of the stage, similarly outfitted in a red skirt similar to that which Senta wore when she was abused. At the rear of the stage, a group of chorus members, put on pirate hats for the final tableau. This was the moment where Berger finally started to explain his concept, but by then it felt far too late. Despite the best efforts of the cast, the personenregie that consisted of barely-directed principals gesticulating to the front, combined with the fact that there were so many gaps in the concept and narrative that Berger presented, all meant that this was an evening that felt considerably longer than its two-hour and fifteen-minute running time.

Photo: © Thomas Aurin

That is in no way a reflection on the quality of the musical performance. Having not been here for a number of years, I was pleasantly surprised by the improvement in the quality of the orchestra since my previous visit. Yes, there were a few split brass notes, but string intonation was true throughout and there was some very individual and characterful wind playing – particularly from the solo oboe. This points to the positive standards obtained by the house music director, Leo McFall. Unfortunately, McFall was unable to conduct as planned tonight, and the evening was led by resident conductor Lin Chinchao. Lin’s reading showed some really good qualities, not least in the way that the melodies found a lyrical logic in the overture, making it sound like Teutonic bel canto, just as it should. Indeed, the opening Daland/Holländer duet sounded like something from Bellini, with long, lyrical lines superimposed over a pulsating rhythmic foundation. I did find, however, that Chin’s tempi did have a tendency to sag in some of the later duets, not helping the lack of dramatic insight on stage. Still, it was an efficient reading and he kept the disparate forces together with precision.

Photo: © Thomas Aurin

Claudio Otelli was the third Holländer scheduled for this evening and I was eager to hear him, having heard his thrilling Alberich in Bologna last year. Otelli is in his late sixties but the voice and technique are as strong as ever. The sound he produces is big and focused, with words always front and centre. The tone is firm, with a slight grey edge that brought out the Holländer’s world-weariness fully. The voice is so even from top to bottom, the tessitura holding no terrors for him. A seriously impressive piece of singing. Herbert sang Senta in a bright, slightly chalky soprano. The voice is big, with a visceral impact in a house of this size. She had clearly worked hard on the passaggio-crossing treacherousness of the ballad, while the voice rang out at the top, those long, high-lying phrases holding no terrors. Naturally, her diction was also impeccable. Perhaps there’s a relatively limited palette of tone colours there, but Herbert knows how to use dynamics to illustrate the music most intelligently.

Photo: © Thomas Aurin

As Erik, Ewandros Stenzowski sang his music in an equally bright tenor, able to ring out on high with ease. The tone does have a slight graininess to it, but he’s clearly an agreeably musical singer. Park Youngdoo sang Daland in a big, rich bass, words always clear and forward. Ariana Lucas was a fruity Mary, with a rich chestiness, while Joshua Sanders sang the Steuermann in a beefier tenor than we might be used to, and could certainly make a very good Erik in future. The choruses, prepared by Albert Horne, sang with confidence and generosity. The tenors and basses made a massive sound, the tone firm and rich and ensemble impeccable. The sopranos and mezzos were generous in their vibrations, although the exuberance of the sopranos’ tone dd not always ensure a consistency of approach to tuning.

Photo: © Vincent Stefan

Musically, this was a more than decent account of the score. The singing of the principals gave so much to enjoy and Lin gave us an efficient and vivid traversal of the score. The orchestral playing and choral singing had so much to offer. Sadly, the evening was let down by Berger’s staging. It’s not that Berger lacked an interesting take on the narrative – certainly the starting point that he had would make for an interesting exploration of the work. Sadly, this wasn’t it. It looked expensive and I left wondering if the money would have been better spent on some more detailed and coherent personenregie. The audience reaction at the close was extremely generous to the singers and musicians.

A favorite Donizetti performance from Flamand

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 10:00:26 +0000

Walking out of this Lucia performance from October 2010, my companion said to me, “No mystery who Seattle Opera’s Artist of the Year is going to be.” Aleksandra Kurzak did end up getting that award, to no one’s surprise!

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Mahabharata – part 1

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 18:31:20 +0000

Mahabharata is one of the great epics. It’s long (my somewhat abridged translation runs 1400 pages) and it’s complex. To condense it into five hours or so of theatre and still have it retain its essential qualities is astonishing but, based on the first part which I saw at the Bluma Appel Theatre last night, Why Not Theatre’s production does just that.

Miriam Fernandes and Ravi Jain have blended story telling, acting, music and dance into a spectacular and compelling theatrical experience. There are many, many characters though at the centre is the struggle for power among the descendants of Shantanu, king of the Kurus. This resolves into a rivalry between two sets of brothers; the Pandavas and their collective wife Draupadi and the Kauravas; the hundred sons of the blind king Dhritarashtra and his queen Gandhari, led by the eldest, Duryodhana. They are assisted by various gods, demi-gods and heroes while all being caught up in a feud with the Nagas (snakes). The epic themes of Love, Honour, Ambition, Pride and Revenge are all on display. And underlying it all is the eternal interplay of Karma and Dharma; how free are we and what is “right conduct”?

Structurally in the play we have Miriam Fernandes as the narrator guiding us through the complexities while the cast acts out the key events with a good deal of very accomplished dancing in several traditional styles. Backing all this up is a band playing (mostly) traditional Indian instruments led by Suba Sankaram. The music itself effectively combines traditional elements and newly composed music by Suba and John Gzowski.

There are some really strong performances and it’s hard to know where to start. Maybe with the relationship between the wise old Dhrishtarashta, played with restraint and dignity by Ravin Ganatra and his ambitious and impulsive son Duryodhna played with a kind of nervous , febrile energy by Darren Kuppan. The latter is heavily under the influence of his controlling mother Gandhari, played by Goldy Notay, and her rather sinister brother Shakuni, played by Sakuntala Ramanee (there is quite a lot of gender bending in the casting). Throw into the mix Karna; half brother of the Pandavas by the Sun God, who has thrown in his lot with Duryodhna. Navtej Sandhu brilliantly encapsulates his resentment at being treated as a commoner by his half-sibs while projecting a warrior persona as strong as Arjuna’s.

In the other camp we have the Pandavas. Shawn Ahmed portrays Yudishthira as cool and sensible but overly concerned with his honour where perhaps greater issues of Dharma are at stake. He is well matched by Munish Sharma as an appropriately large and rambunctuous Bhima and Anaka Maharaj-Sandhu as the great archer Arjuna who we shall see more of in part 2. There’s a finely nuanced performance too from their tutor Bhishma played by Sukania Venugopa.

Towards the end of part 1 we also meet the Pandavas’ collective wife Draupadi; played with great dignity and a certain powerful stillness by Goldy Notay, and Neil D’Souza as Krishna. There’s humour here with the god presented as part Loki, part Christ. These two characters will become much more important in part 2.

Ravi Jain’s direction blends the various elements of stage action skilfully and creates some striking moments. I was particularly struck by the clever scene where Duryodhna tries to humiliate the enslaved Draupadi by having her stripped but her sari is infinitely long. This was neatly done! But that’s only one of a range of stunning effects achieved by sets by Lorenzo Savoini, lighting by Kevin Lamotte and projections by Hana Kim. The large stage is full of sound and action and it’s spectacular while consistently serving the narrative.

And speaking of the narrative where are we left at the end of part 1? Yudishthira has just gambled away the Pandavas’ inheritance and even the brothers themselves and Draupadi in a crooked dice game but Dhrishtarashta has redeemed them from slavery and sentenced them to exile in the forest while, for now at least, Duryodhna stands to inherit everything. I can’t wait for part 2 tonight!

Mahabharata is presented in two parts by Canadian Stage at the Bluma Appel Theatre until April 27th.

Photo credits: Michael Cooper (1st and last), David Cooper (the rest).

Restoration of Power: Siegfried at the Kölner Philharmonie

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 14:51:42 +0000

Wagner – Siegfried

Siegfried – Thomas Blondelle
Brünnhilde – Åsa Jäger
Mime – Christian Elsner
Der Wanderer – Derek Welton
Alberich – Daniel Schmutzhard
Fafner – Hanno Müller-Brachmann
Erda – Ulrike Schneider
Stimme des Waldvogels – Soloist of the Tölzer Knabenchor

Dresdner Festspielorchester, Concerto Köln / Kent Nagano.
Concert performance.

Philharmonie, Cologne, Germany. Thursday, April 10th, 2025.

Following their previous, and very successful, accounts of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, which I had the pleasure of seeing in Amsterdam in 2021 and Cologne in 2024 respectively, it was time for Kent Nagano, Concerto Köln and the Dresdner Festspielorchester to move on to Siegfried. I must admit this has always been the part of the Ring that I’ve found most difficult to get on with. Previously, I’ve found it to be full of longueurs, not least in the forest scene, while the fact that so much of this work is given over to recapitulating what happened previously doesn’t always result in a riveting evening in the theatre.

Concerto Köln. Photo: © Sonja Werner

Tonight, however, was different. We were given a concert performance, with a number of the singers singing from scores at the front. That said, the characters did engage with each other, whether through gestures or by simply addressing each other, so there was a sense of added theatricality in the evening, while Thomas Blondelle’s Siegfried wore casual attire in order to illustrate his character’s rustic nature. What struck me more than in the fully-staged performances I’ve seen of the work was how the drama was pushed through in the orchestra. Without sets and costumes to distract us, those constant interpolations of leitmotifs, that tapestry of constantly-changing musical-dramatic insights, felt even more pressing, driving the drama forward. It also helped that Nagano’s tempi were generally swift, the evening coming in at around four and a half hours, with two twenty-minute intermissions.

Yet what also made the work even more cogent and compelling was the contribution of the period sonorities of the orchestras. Right from the opening measures, with nutty winds and mahogany violas, there was a sense, once again, of the years of grime being removed from this work and a chance of hearing it in its full aural splendour. Yes, there were inevitably a few split brass notes given the length of the evening and the perils of working with instruments of Wagner’s time, but generally the brass playing was excellent – indeed better than I’ve heard from some orchestras on modern instruments. The overall soundworld of the band was darker, more sepia in tint, than the brighter sound of modern instruments. Furthermore, the minimal vibrato and gut strings gave the sound a fuller depth. The way that the colours in the band, the flinting winds and those woody strings, interplayed in the forging song was really special. That said, they were also capable of considerable volume, particularly in the opening to Act 2; while at the start of Act 3, Nagano pushed the drama through, building up a storming impetus in the Wotan/Erda scene that filled it with dramatic power in a way that I have never heard it before. The strings coped well with the treacherous high writing as Siegfried approached Brünnhilde’s rock. Yes, the sound was slightly hazy, but the loving portamenti they used, combined with that minimal vibrato, was utterly captivating. Once again, Nagano and his musicians have given us a revelation in orchestral sound.

Kent Nagano. Photo: © Antoine Saito

Blondelle is recognized as one of the finest character tenors before the public today, his Herodes is one of the best I’ve had the pleasure of hearing, so he was a surprising choice for Siegfried, perhaps reflecting the choice of a lighter voice for the title role. It’s true that his Siegfried was a lot more lyrical and indeed lighter than we’re used to, not always able to penetrate through the wall of orchestral sound – at least from my seat around 15 rows back from the front. That said, this isn’t a particularly voice-friendly acoustic either. Blondelle also lacks that penetrating top that the role ideally needs, not quite able to trumpet out on high in the forging song, for instance. What Blondelle did instead was the sing the role with his voice, never forcing it, always entirely aware of what his instrument is capable of. He’s a real stage animal, even in this concert setting, and though singing from a score, he used both his voice and his physicality to illustrate Siegfried’s impetuousness. An unconventional account of the role, certainly, but an interesting one nonetheless.

Derek Welton gave us a riveting account of the Wanderer’s music. His dark, resonant bass-baritone is utterly healthy in tone. Indeed, the sound is so handsome and masculine, that this has to be one of the healthiest accounts of this giant role I’ve had the pleasure of hearing. So much that Welton did was communicated through the text. Yet there was a sense of groundedness in his Wanderer, that sense of knowing that fate was fixed and that the power he once had was no longer, that made his account even more compelling – all communicated through the voice and use of text. Christian Elsner’s tenor may no longer be in the first flush of youth as Mime, but he sang his music with equal textual eloquence. While the top of the voice now needs a bit of heavy lifting to get up there and lacks a bit of spin, he got through the evening on sheer technique. Indeed, he gave us a masterclass in how to use his technique to negotiate the high-lying writing. Elsner has a professorial appointment in Karlsruhe and it’s clear that his students are in very good hands.

Daniel Schmutzhard was also a lighter-voiced Alberich than one might be used to, yet he raged passionately, his firm, compact baritone always projected through the text and never pushed further than it could go. In his relatively brief contribution, Hanno Müller-Brachmann boomed imposingly as Fafner, the darkness of the voice filling the auditorium. The Waldvogel was taken by a member of the Tölzer Knabenchor. The young man sang with real confidence, the words always clear, and coped well with the very high tessitura. Ulrike Schneider, a very last-minute replacement for Gerhild Romberger as Erda, held the stage most imposingly in her scene. Yes, the registers have parted company in her mezzo, but she sang her music with a generous chestiness and great authority. The fact that she and Welton were singing without scores reflected a deeper familiarity with their roles, which in turn brought even more dramatic insight.

Then there was Åsa Jäger’s Brünnhilde. She’s still very young but is also, without a shadow of a doubt, the owner of a magnificent natural instrument. The voice is capable of glorious amplitude, but she’s a sensitive singer and knows when to pull back and when to let her considerable instrument loose. She sang so radiantly, the voice bright yet also lyrical and able to phrase with generosity. I did feel that there’s still some work to do on the support – the voice tends to lose a little in quality as she pulls back on the volume, taking on a graininess that isn’t apparent at fuller amplitude. Jäger also knows how to use the text, caressing the words and bringing out meaning. I did regret that she didn’t hold on to her closing high C longer, I would have appreciated more of an opportunity to bathe myself in that sound. As I mentioned, she’s very young but is a major talent. I really hope that she has good people around her. There have been far too many Wagnerian shooting stars over the past few years, who have been pushed too far too soon by artist managers and intendants who don’t know how to develop voices. Jäger is most definitely a name to watch.

Photo: © KölnMusik / Guido Erbring

This was a revelatory evening. Nagano made this work sound more theatrical, more compelling that I’ve ever heard it before, through the seemingly unlimited palette of orchestral colour he was able to obtain from his musicians, but also in his pacing that kept the work flowing. Indeed, his tempo transitions always felt organic and natural, giving the work a logical narrative inevitability. The singing was, by and large, excellent – particularly in Welton and Jäger – while the entire cast was received most generously by the audience at the close, with particularly loud cheers for Blondelle. The Götterdämmerung is scheduled for June 4th, 2026 in Cologne and will no doubt be seen in other cities also. Most definitely a date for your diaries.

Curtain call. Photo: © operatraveller.com

Fathered in

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 13:00:38 +0000

Ahead of his only New York appearances this season later this month, parterre box looks forward to the return of estimable baritone Amartuvshin Enkhbat by sharing a clip featuring starry company.

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A favorite Donizetti performance from Camille

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 10:00:47 +0000

My favorite scene in my favourite Donizetti opera. Even if she does go ahead and sing that damnable cabaletta, it’s Mariella Devia and she can do little RONG.

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Opera Atelier’s David and Jonathan

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 17:23:33 +0000

My review of Opera Atelier’s production of Charpentier’s David and Jonathan which opened at Koerner Hall last night is now available at Opera Canada.

Photo: Bruce Zinger

Like the poem said by a lady in red

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 13:00:45 +0000

Boop! The Musical arrives on Broadway with plenty of colorful glitz, glamour, and talent with an empowering message for women to find their inner confidence to succeed and lead

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A favorite Donizetti performance from Leyla Gender-Bender

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 10:00:56 +0000

I’m convinced that someone else will claim this Donizetti opera before I do, but Maria Stuarda is definitely my very favorite Donizetti opera.

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Duo Oriana

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 13:39:53 +0000

Duo Oriana consists of soprano Sinéad White and lutenist Jonathan Stuchbery. They gave a lunchtime concert in the RBA on Tuesday. Unsurprisingly most of their repertoire consists of lute songs from the 16th and 17th (and even 18th) century but they have recently branched out with the Toronto Book of Ayres which sets verse by contemporary Toronto poets. We got to hear that for the first time on Tuesday.

They began though with English songs from around 1600. Two rather beautiful and gentle songs; Robert Johnson’s “Have you but seen a white lily grow” and John Danyel’s “Why canst thou not as others do?” were followed by two plaintive but not entirely serious “love songs”; Robert Jones’ “My complaining is but faining”, and Thomas Morley’s “Who is it that this dark knight”: Duo Oriana really have this style mastered. Sinéad sang clearly with minimum vibrato and restrained emotion and Jonathan accompanied sympathetically. Queen Elizabeth would have approved.

The first part of the Toronto Book of Ayres sets poetry by Martin Gomes. “O Daughter” and “O Mother” deal with a fraught relationship from both points of view. What intrigued me was that writing a “lute song” had inspired Martin to use a 16th century inflected language palette. It wasn’t an imitation or a parody of the period but he did dip into the vocabulary to good effect. It was interesting; of today and yet not of today.

Moving on a generation or two we heard William Lawes’ “Whiles I this standing lake” followed by a switch from lute to theorbo and Henry Purcell’s “Evening Hymn” with a prelude by (maybe) Bartolotti. This is one of the most beautiful of English songs and it got a lovely, restrained, elegant treatment from both musicians.

And so to the Toronto Book of Ayres part II. This sets two poems by Mellissa Davidson about the lost rivers and creeks of Toronto as an allegory for remembering. In some ways they sound like “singer songwriter” pieces which I suppose is not inappropriate. Are not the guitar toting minstrels of our own day the lineal descendants of young musicians who accompanied themselves on the lute so long ago?

And so to Scotland and on another century for James Oswald’s “The Parting Kiss”; a gentle farewell song from a man who would become Chamber Composer to George III. And finally, Henry Lawes “The Angler’s Song” which articulates the long held English view that the answer to trouble and care is to say “bugger it!” and go fishing. There’s a reason why Walton’s Compleat Angler is one of the best selling books of all time in English!

So, rather a lovely concert in a gentle, even genteel, way. Go see these two if you get a chance!

Photo credits: Karen E. Reeves

Never enough hours in the days of a queen

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 13:00:22 +0000

As a preview to a spring of Giulio Cesare, Chris’s Cache offers a rare pirate recording featuring Cecilia Bartoli, Andreas Scholl, and Les Arts Florissants.

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A favorite Donizetti performance from Ivy Lin

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 10:00:18 +0000

Kind of self-explanatory, but Maria Callas‘s mad scene in Anna Bolena has truly ruined this music for me.

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Le nozze di Figaro

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 13:00:48 +0000

A live broadcast from New York

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A favorite Donizetti performance from Harry Rose

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 10:00:05 +0000

A friend who frequents these pages recently turned me on to a Donizetti cantata that I had never heard of: his setting of the speech of Dante‘s Conte Ugolino.

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Seville servants

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 13:00:36 +0000

A muted and merry carousel ride out of feudalism in the Met’s production of Le nozze di Figaro

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A favorite Donizetti performance from Ortrud Jones

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 10:00:34 +0000

Leyla Gencer cussing out Shirley Verrett’s Elisabetta so convincingly the audience spontaneously breaks out in applause and bravas.

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Iolanta

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 13:00:40 +0000

A live video broadcast from Vienna of Tchaikovsky‘s opera

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Die Liebe der Danae

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 13:00:27 +0000

This performance has been canceled because of a strike.

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A favorite Donizetti performance from James Grant

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 10:00:23 +0000

In 1972, when I was 12 years old, my mother took me to the Salzburg Festival.

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Bevan/BBC SO/Wigglesworth - Berg and Debussy, 4 April 2025

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 15:08:28 +0000

Barbican Hall

Berg: Three Pieces from the Lyric Suite
Debussy, arr. John Adams: Le Livre de Baudelaire
Berg: Der Wein
Debussy: Nocturnes

Sophie Bevan (soprano)

BBC Symphony Chorus (chorus master: Neil Ferris)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

Not the least of Pierre Boulez’s legacies, in London and across the world, is programming such as this. It may be difficult for us now to realise – given the disappointing size of the Barbican audience, less difficult than we might have hoped – but a concert of Berg and Debussy would not so long ago have seemed daring, even reckless. Boulez, one might say, created the ‘modern’ orchestral repertoire. There is some exaggeration in that. He did not do so alone, even in his generation: musicians such as Michael Gielen played crucial roles too. They had forerunners too, conductors such as Hans Rosbaud and Hermann Scherchen, as well as successors. Boulez’s time at the BBC was nonetheless pivotal for London musical life; his more general example was of incalculable significance. Hearing this concert just a few days after the Barbican and BBC’s Total Immersion event for Boulez’s centenary extended the celebration—and the homage.

Boulez would surely have appreciated the clarity of the BBC SO strings in the three movements from Berg’s Lyric Suite, and indeed throughout, under Ryan Wigglesworth’s leadership. The ‘Andante amoroso’ started polished, directed, and cool, though not cold, its temperature rising without ever sounding Romantic. Whilst string orchestra versions of quartet music have a tendency to sound smoothed over, less radical, in their new, orchestral guise, the second movement here was an exception, especially in its scurrying, heard with impressive unanimity. One was drawn in to listen, in a manner not dissimilar to Webern or Nono. Wigglesworth and the orchestra fashioned a fine interplay between texture and harmony. The ‘Adagio appassionata’ dug more overtly deep, emanating from the world of Wozzeck and Lulu—as if a staging post between them, which in a way it is. The Zemlinsky quotation (‘Du bist mein Eigen’) was poignant, meaningful, and generative: far more than mere quotation.

John Adams’s 1994 orchestration of Debussy’s Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire (minus the fifth, ‘La Mort des amants’) varied in its proximity to what the composer might have done. There is nothing wrong with that; it was always skilful and inventive on its own terms. The opening ‘Le Balcon’ did not sound especially Debussyan in that respect. Hearing it after Berg, its twists and turns sounded more Germanic than one might have expected. At any rate, Sophie Bevan communicated Baudelaire’s words with great clarity, shaping them, as Wigglesworth did the orchestra’s, unobtrusively yet to excellent effect. There was languor, but not too much, motion and overall shape well balanced. ‘Harmonie du soir’ was similarly evocative; it seemed at times to move closer to a Debussyan, as well as a Wagnerian (above all Tristan) orchestral and particularly string sound. Pelléas hovered in the wings vocally for the final two, the charged language another connection in ‘Le Jet d’eau’. The opening scoring of ‘Recueillement’ seemed again to come from a Wagnerian world, violas, cellos, and harps, paving the way for woodwind and voice to combine in flesh and desire for its transcendence.

Baudelaire spanned the interval, twinned in the second half with Berg for Der Wein, which many will know from Boulez’s recording with Jessye Norman. Pelléas-malevolence persisted and mutated in the first poem, ‘Die Seele des Weines’, all the more so given Wigglesworth’s deliberate tempo. The opening, wandering bass line sounded as if Fafner had made his way onto the stage as Lulu’s new amant. (There is an idea for an opera—or perhaps not.) This was a rich vinous soul indeed, redolent of the French Wagnerism of a subsequent generation to the poet: the Revue wagnérienne, perhaps. Bevan once more span the line and worked the text with alchemy inherent in a fine vantage, matched note for note by the BBC SO. A riotous opening to the central ‘Der Wein der Liebenden’ subsided to suggest a world, as it is, very much post-Das Lied von der Erde, which persisted to a dark, yet ambiguous climax in ‘Der Wein des Einsamen’.

Back to Debussy to close, for Nocturnes, colours variegated to permit, if not quite every shade between rare primaries, then a good few nevertheless. Enchantment and ambiguity characterised ‘Nuages’, its musical parameters kept in fruitful, shifting balance. Allemonde malevolence gave way, at least momentarily, to fluted rays of sun. Colour was well and truly switched on for ‘Fêtes’, over which a celebrated maître had left an unforgettable visual and musical BBC performance to haunt memories and even proceedings. Wigglesworth was not inflexible, by any means, but rather ensured that relative flexibility was always directed towards a goal. Even in the Barbican, whose acoustic can hardly be accused of accentuating the mysterious, ‘Sirènes’ offered a more distant form of seduction than Der Wein. It flowed beautifully, and not without a little menace, in a full-blooded account from orchestra and voices alike. This was not a Debussy painted in pastel shades; it sounded all the better for that.

Betrothal in a Monastery

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 13:00:29 +0000

A live broadcast of Prokofiev‘s opera from Vienna’s Theater an der Wien

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Ainadamar

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 13:00:18 +0000

A performance recorded last fall in New York

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Povera Butterfly

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 14:00:34 +0000

A parade of young singers delight in an intimate Madama Butterfly at Amore Opera

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Sorrowful mystery

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 13:00:08 +0000

As tenor Pene Pati continues his Rodolfo-across-America tour, parterre box presents a snippet of his role debut as Werther from earlier this year.

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A favorite Donizetti performance from Mr. Portafiori

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 10:00:16 +0000

One of my favorite scenes from Donizetti is the Act I finale from Anna Bolena.

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Sick and tired

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 14:00:52 +0000

Before this weekend, I never thought I would want to leave an opera by Act I. The recent production of Puccini’s La bohème at the Lyric Opera of Chicago taught me that there’s a first time for everything.

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T’amo ancora qual t’amava in basso stato

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 13:00:06 +0000

As this is “Donizetti Month” here on parterre box, Chris’s Cache offers the recently deceased Paul Plishka and Opera Orchestra of New York with Carol Vaness in Anna Bolena and with Mariella Devia in the rarely heard Adelia.

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A favorite Donizetti performance from Last Castrato

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 10:00:51 +0000

La Favorita is my favorita. Whether it’s Favorita or Favorite, I love them both.

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Opera Philadelphia 2025-26

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Opera Philadelphia announced today its 50^th Anniversary 2025-2026 season, the second under the leadership of Anthony Roth Costanzo, but the first to bear his distinctive imprint.

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Monsoon wedding

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 14:00:10 +0000

IN Series concluded its exploration of the works of Claudio Monteverdi with a production of the composer’s final opera, L’incoronazione di Poppea, performed with the addition of Indian music and dance.

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Selvaggia e aspra e forte

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 13:00:28 +0000

Pascal Dusapin‘s dynamic and demanding traversal of Dante‘s Commedia arrives at the Paris Opera

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A favorite Donizetti performance from Darby Fegan

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 10:00:12 +0000

Fiorenza Cossotto in her prime had few equals, particularly in the Italian repertoire

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Born to command

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 13:00:55 +0000

Audacious star performances elevate safe direction in Richard II and The Seagull on London’s West End

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Anna Bolena

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 13:00:18 +0000

A live broadcast from Venice’s Teatro la Fenice

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Stefanovich/Dennis/BBC SO/Brabbins et al. - Boulez Total Immersion Day, 30 March 2025

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 11:33:22 +0000

Milton Court Concert Hall and Barbican Hall

Domaines for solo clarinet
Piano Sonata no.2
Dialogue de l’ombre double

Deux Études de musique concrète
Douze Notations
Incises
Cummings ist der Dichter
Pli selon Pli

Beñat Erro Díez, Lily Payne (clarinets)

Hannah Miller (recording engineer)

Tamara Stefanovich (piano)

Anna Dennis (soprano)

BBC Singers

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Martyn Brabbins (conductor)

Images: BBC/Mark Allan

Boulez at 100. It does not seem long since we were celebrating his 90^th here at the Barbican, with another BBC Total Immersion Day, likewise culminating in Pli selon pli, from Yeree Suh, Thierry Fischer, and (neither for the first nor the last time) the BBC Symphony Orchestra. It even does not seem so very long since, as a student, I came down to London to hear Boulez himself conduct the work at the Festival Hall for his 75^th. Strangely, it very much does seem like another world thinking back just five years earlier, to when I bought my first Boulez CD, having heard on Radio 3’s Building a Library the first movement of his now legendary Mahler Sixth with the Vienna Philharmonic and rushed out to spend a good few pennies I barely had, knowing this was something I must hear and have. It remains the recording closest to my heart (and mind) of the Mahler symphony closest to my heart (and mind). Given Boulez’s long association with the BBC, it was fitting and enlightening to begin the day with a cinema showing, first of a deftly assembled compendium of BBC material, presentationally fronted and fused with typical verve and light-worn learning by Tom Service, followed by a film from the late, greatly lamented Barrie Gavin.

A quick break for lunch was followed by an equally fitting and enlightening panel, chaired by Jonathan Cross, discussing Boulez at the BBC, musicians (harpist Sioned Williams and Daniel Meyer) and former Controller Nicholas Kenyon sharing memories, experience, and acute critical ears for what made those years so extraordinary and some aspects of their legacy. Every path to what increasingly seems to have assumed, Répons and Le Marteau sans maître notwithstanding, the stature of Boulez the composer’s popular masterwork – in its final form, it is unmistakeably finished, or at least seems so – will be different. This was no exception, but there was, even before the event, a sense of heading in that direction: appropriately enough from all directions, temporal and other. In a nod to his work with young musicians – we saw and heard tantalising excerpts from his National Youth Orchestra Gurrelieder on both films – and a statement of belief in the future of his music and his vision, we moved to Milton Court for a concert involving Guildhall School musicians, two clarinet works sandwiching the Second Piano Sonata, pli selon pli. Tamara Stefanovich, who has very recently issued her recording of the work, heroically stepped in at the shortest of notice for an indisposed Guildhall student, to add to a not inconsiderable workload later in the day (and a demanding programme, Structures II included, the previous night in Cologne).

We had heard Domaines but three weeks earlier in London, in a London Sinfonietta programme juxtaposing Boulez and Cage. Lily Payne’s performance had little to fear even from such an exalted comparison (Mark van de Wiel). Indeed, save for the different layout, music stands arranged in a line, aptly highlighting symmetry (Original-Miroir) rather than the circular (centrifugal) approach spatialised at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, thoughts did not turn at all to comparison. One concentrated, rather, on the here and now. Crystal clear in the Milton Court acoustic, it was as beautiful as it was meaningful, line spun, indeed created, with seemingly infinite variegation.

As it triumphantly reinstated the role of performance and the performer in Boulez’s music, so did Dialogue de l’ombre double from Beñat Erro Díez and his taped self (with Hannah Miller as recording engineer, and a little help from piano resonance too). Lights off signalled a distinctly later proliferation of sound in the shadow not only of the clarinet (and clarinettist) but of Répons too. It was a wondrously ‘achieved’ experience, both as work and performance, clarity of line, however complex, as strongly to the fore as in Domaines. Boulez’s ‘invisible theatre’ seemed born as much of Wagner as of Claudel, the magic of Bayreuth reborn in a strikingly different environment—ironically, perhaps, given his own lament that Wagner’s theatrical innovations had been so resolutely ignored by the actually existing theatrical ‘business’ of the opera houses whose destruction he (as Wagner) had once suggested. Here, perhaps, was the Boulez opera we never had, in darkness, light, and shadows.

This was a welcome reminder from both clarinettists that, for young players, Boulez’s music is first and foremost music, not an object of controversy. It never really was for my generation either; we all knew, which doubtless separates us from those who truly had to fight (in that case either), though we surely must continue to fight for it to be heard, given the ever-more-deplorable cultural reaction around us. It makes little sense, in any case, for young musicians to declare ‘Boulez est mort’. They relish its challenges, which will remain in one form or another, just as those of Bach and Beethoven do, but their essence will change, as Boulez takes his place in his own fabled ‘Museum’ of musical history. The Royal Academy of Music’s performance of sur Incises a few nights earlier, on Boulez’s birthday itself, was by all accounts a splendid, enriching experience for all concerned. It stands now at the heart of the repertoire of Berlin’s Boulez Ensemble, founded by Daniel Barenboim. There is cultural reaction, yes, as there is political reaction, but there is also hope.

As indeed there was in Stefanovich’s spectacular performance of the Sonata. I have a confession to make here. When I first heard the pianist perform it, I was too much in thrall to my won preconceptions of what it ‘should’ sound like. It was not even that I did not ‘like’ it; I did, very much, but part of me, brought up above all on Maurizio Pollini, unconsciously wondered whether I ‘should’, when it sounded so very different. Memories of that 2015 encounter remained with me, though, marinating in the ombre of conscious and unconscious alike, and I slowly realised it had begun to change my understanding of the work and its possibilities. What a joy, then, to celebrate the composer’s centenary not only with a new recording, but with so magnificent and, in the circumstances, unexpected a performance, which spoke of Boulez’s own advice to Stefanovich to think of reaching into a beehive.

The first movement ignited and transformed those memories, revealing a far more ‘universal’, less specifically ‘French’ Boulez, its molten lava that of the composer’s fire-breathing youth, its logic all the more clearly post-Schoenbergian. In fidelity was born the most personal expression, Boulez’s claim that he would be the first composer without a biography almost touchingly forlorn. The tumult of a trill, the momentum of a repeated note, the terror of a silence: all these and more were not only to be heard but to be felt in a rich slow movement that celebrated parenthesis yet nonetheless ‘cohered’, not entirely unlike late Beethoven (as well as quite unlike it). The scherzo’s making music through intervallic and other parameters fused through astonishing willpower a marriage of Debussy and Webern we only take for granted now on Boulez’s account. It gazed into the abyss and something – reflection, shadows, something else? – stared back. The fourth movement unleashed a very particular character, again from within, exultant in its Artaud-inspired cruelty, Beethoven annihilated and yet in some sense reborn, like Boulez himself in its after-shock.

Further discussion, led by Kate Molleson, Jonathan Cross joined by Gillian Moore, a longstanding, leading figure in Boulez’s later London appearances, offered a substantial, duly provocative apéritif for the evening concert. It also reminded us just how much London and the world’s appetite for such enrichment activities owed to Boulez’s own example. I myself learned more from his own pre-concert discussions than from a host of other concerts, even festivals. There would doubtless have been other paths and they can be interesting to speculate about. ‘Virtual’ history can have its own, well, virtues, in helping us refine understanding of what did happen. But Boulez, IRCAM, and more did, just as Beethoven, Wagner, and Mahler did. We were reminded, quite properly, of more awkward encounters and memories too. Was Boulez’s return to France at the expense of figures such as Xenakis? Perhaps. There is always danger in schematicism, although in practice that is more likely to come from the derrière than the avant garde (and despite the arrant nonsense one hears from some, even now, on Boulez and William Glock).

Heard partly in that light, the opening number in the Barbican concert reminded us of a path Boulez did not really take, though it was perhaps not entirely without issue in later encounters with tape and indeed live electronics. Two 1951-2 Études for tape suggested to Boulez above all the limitations of existing technology, as well as ‘Pierre Schaeffer’s “do-it-yourself” studio methods,’ to quote Caroline Potter’s informative programme note. There is always, at least for me, the oddity of hearing purely electronic music, without performers, in a concert setting. How will, even should, the audience react? Here in awkward silence, before Stefanovich returned for more piano music. It was a fascinating opportunity nonetheless to hear these serial manipulations of percussion sounds from the eve of Le Marteau sans maître. Whether intended whimsically or not – I doubt it, at least consciously – there was a winning air of that spirit, which certainly characterised some of Boulez’s difficult diplomacy with musicians and institutions, as we had heard in the first of the two talks.

Stefanovich renewed and extended our appreciation of Boulez the composer for piano. Dull souls will claim the earlier Boulez was the ‘real’ Boulez, or some such nonsense. They are perfectly entitled to their preferences; we all are. But if you cannot hear wonders in Incises and indeed sur Incises, to your taste or otherwise, just as you can in the Second Sonata, you are probably not hearing them in either. It was unmistakeably later, though far from late, Boulez—just as Dialogue de l’ombre double had been. The toccata-quality of the score was immediate, immanent even, in a scintillating journey suggestive also of earlier piano fantasias, Bach and beyond, and every bit as protean as the Sonata, just differently so. The twelve Notations that preceded it enabled us to hear another, similarly absorbing example of post-Romanticism, the bagatelle spirit of late Beethoven reborn and reheard via Bartók, Schoenberg, Messiaen, and others. The dialectic between mystery (IX) and mechanism (X) penetrated, both in work and performance, to the heart of the whole.

It would, given their long, incredibly productive association with Boulez, have been a great pity not to hear from the BBC Singers on such a day. That we can do so at all is, of course, no thanks to the corporation itself; for now, let us give thanks that we can, whilst remembering how strong the forces Boulez and so many others, aesthetic foes included, have had to fight against. Joining Martyn Brabbins and the BBC SO, their pinpoint precision was, in proper Boulezian style, never an end in itself, but rather the foundation of a exquisite, multi-directional (in that centrifugal, serialist and post-serialist sense) account of Cummings ist der Dichter. Warmth, as in Boulez’s own later performances of his music, was a hallmark, so was a hyper-expressivity that surely had its roots in Schoenberg as much as Webern, Debussy too. Given in a single, endlessly variegated whole, this offered opera-less drama that emerged almost like a tapestry that spoke and sang: a fusion, if you like, of Boulez’s earlier dark surrealism and his late fascination with Szymanowski, seeds of which one could imagine one heard here.

And so, to Pli selon pli. Memories, whether of that earlier Second Sonata performance or of other readings of this ‘portrait of Mallarmé’, are necessarily part of our experience. ‘Must I once again sing the praises of amnesia?’ Boulez once asked, and the answer in context – out of which the rhetorical question has too often been shamelessly extracted – is of course yes. Memories will never be obliterated, but they can too readily become Mahlerian ‘tradition’ as Schlamperei, to invoke once more one of Boulez’s most illustrious composer-conductor predecessors. This performance, from Anna Dennis, the BBC SO, and Brabbins, seemed to me the equal of any I have heard, probably surpassing that of ten years ago, even approaching the fina lencounter I heard from Boulez himself, in 2011 conducting Barbara Hannigan. That is not really the point, though. The past cannot be obliterated, nor did one of the most penetrating of all conductors of works from the ‘Museum’ ever think or wish it to be. He simply wished us to turn attention to the present – even the ‘present’ of the Museum’ – as we could and did here.

The opening of ‘Don’ issued an invitation to enter that none could refuse, trademark éclat followed by the seduction (and seductive birth!) of a ‘nuit d’Idumée’. Beautifully voiced and connected, this was a performance led by a conductor who, in quiet, unflashy security not unlike that of Boulez, showed that he ‘got it’, that he could and would be our guide to the work’s unfolding. Nowadays particularly, we hear much other music folding in but this is infinitely more than synthesis; it is a personal ‘voice’ that yet extends far beyond mere ‘personality’. Mesmerising in Mozartian qualities that already announced a period of ‘modern classicism’ (Arnold Whittall) in Boulezian works, in its seduction it no more brooked dissent than Così fan tutte (or Szymanowski). We had entered a Bergian labyrinth and never wished to leave.

Pascal Dusapin - Il Viaggio, Dante, at the Paris Opera's Palais Garnier

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

ONP Garnier, Paris, Wednesday March 26, 2025

Conductor: Kent Nagano. Production: Claus Guth. Sets: Étienne Pluss. Costumes: Gesine Völlm. Lighting: Fabrice Kebour. Video: Roland Horvath/rocafilm. Electroacoustics: Thierry Coduys. Dante: Bo Skovhus. Virgilio: David Leigh. Giovane Dante: Christel Loetzsch. Beatrice: Jennifer France. Lucia: Danae Kontora. Voce dei dannati: Dominique Visse. Narratore: Giovanni Battista Parodi. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

Pascal Dusapin is probably better known in France and Belgium than elsewhere, though his Faustus, the Last Night (2006) premiered in Berlin. But like me, he’s getting on for 70, and Il Viaggio, Dante, first performed at the Aix festival, in the summer of 2022, is something like his tenth opera, depending on how you classify his works: he apparently calls this one an ‘operatorio’. It’s the fourth I’ve seen, and browsing back through my posts, I find that various things I wrote about the first three are relevant to Il Viaggio as well. For example, on the subject of Macbeth Underworld, ‘The work overall might seem more oratorio-like than obviously operatic.’ I could, as you see, easily recycle some of these past remarks here, a fact I’m happy to take as indicating a certain degree of consistency on both his part and mine.

As a glance at a list of his works will show, Dusapin isn’t shy of taking on big themes: the myths of Orpheus, Medea and Penthesilea, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, Faust and, more than once, Dante. He and his faithful librettist, Frédéric Boyer, have based Il Viaggio not only on the Divine Comedy, but on La vita nuova as well, condensing it all to just 110 minutes, in a prologue and seven tableaux: Le départ, Chant de deuil, Les Limbes, Les neuf cercles de l'Enfer, Sortir du noir, Purgatoire and Paradis.

Again, referring to Macbeth Underworld I wrote: ‘director Thomas Jolly was involved from the outset in the creative process, making it something of a Gesamtkunstwerk in a virtuoso production.’ Much the same can be said of Il Viaggio: composer, librettist and director have obviously collaborated closely once more to create a work in which words, music and action cleave to each other like the pieces in a puzzle.

Funnily enough, more than once, when ruminating on Il Viaggio as I struggle to describe it, I’ve thought of Richard Strauss, not for any musical reason, but because the plot, if such it can be called, brings to my mind both Tod und Verklärung and the Four Last Songs. It deals, as a dying man’s past flashes before him, with journeying through the personal hell of loss, grief and pain, eventually coming to terms, as best we can, with the finality of death, and possibly, when it comes, welcoming it. ‘A journey both dreaded and hoped-for,’ as the librettist himself put it in interview.

Before opening up progressively - as if advancing, curtain after curtain, through Dante’s concentric spheres - into the spartan, abstract space of the inner world, the imagination, Guth’s staging is bookended by reality. At the beginning we watch a black-and-white film projected on a pale curtain, in a shade of green that will run through the production and that, in the circumstances I'm on the point of relating, might be called ‘nosocomial’- a clinically wan sort of colour reminiscent of hospital wards and institutions (though also, come to think of it, of Prada shop interiors). In the film, Dante, already agitated - or drugged, or drunk? - drives chaotically, on rough tracks, through a forest at night. Distracted by startling visions of Beatrice in his path, he crashes.

We next find him, battered and bloodied, in his drab, Florentine flat. Is he already dead, or bleeding to death? Does what happens next happen over time, or in a flash? We don’t really know and perhaps it isn’t essential. Here we meet the characters who will appear to him or travel with him on his journey through hell: Beatrice, more an icon than a developed character as such, in red; blind Lucia, in a black lamé cocktail dress and halo-like tiara, stumbling forward with one arm outstretched; Dante when young, in a neat, dark suit; tall, straight-backed Virgil, Bible black.

Forest and flat will both reappear at the end of the production, when Dante is finally - if I stick to the Straussian motif - transfigured. In between, after the walls of the apartment have slid aside, the abstract, imaginary world beyond the curtain has the feel of a nightmare circus or TV show: circus, perhaps inspired by Dante’s circles; or show, maybe with ‘Commedia’ in mind.

What, when I was a kid, we used to call a TV ‘compere’, in a sparkling white dinner jacket and glittery red shoes, introduces each tableau, declaiming Dante’s texts in the original old Italian. We advance first into Limbo, a kind of waiting room painted that pallid, nosocomial green - you can almost smell a hospital corridor - where people of all ages, from an old woman on the left to two sinister little Diane Arbus girls on the right, are lined up, all dressed in white, on chairs against the wall. While projected shadows suggest the movement of a metro train - this is, after all, a journey - the seated figures jerk into frenzied spasms. We will meet them all again, next time dressed in black.

Microphone in hand, the compere announces the circles of hell. Our guides, a couple of grinning assistants of the kind who help magicians or acrobats, hold up placards with the relevant numbers. The Voice of the Damned - the appropriately-cast Dominique Visse - is a demented, demonic hag in a red dress: Beatrice’s monstrous, mocking, chain-smoking double. (I’ve noticed that cigarettes, now hardly anyone smokes any more, have recently become a directorial fad.) As the chorus wails, Dante’s young double re-enacts Beatrice’s entombment in a neon-trimmed grave and those Limbo/subway figures reappear, the dead or dying Dante staggers, in torment, through his trials. Shafts of golden light appear from the right (same side as the window of his flat), and extras-cum-dancers are drawn towards it, through billowing clouds of stage smoke, as if by a magnet.

The walls of the flat close in again (with more video projections) and Dante is at last reunited with Beatrice: Paradise.

The production is meticulously directed, lit and performed. I have, of course, only sketched it summarily, but various video clips from both Aix and Paris, available online, give an idea of the overall aesthetic, along with snippets of action. The demands on the singers are considerable, and mostly well met - though in fact, not everyone actually sings as such.

The so-called Narratore announces more than he narrates, and though the excellent bass, Giovanni Battista Parodi, sings Italian repertory staples at La Scala, his job here was to declaim relevant selections of Dante’s original verses. Similarly, Dominique Visse’s part, as the voice of the damned, is all wild, shrieking and cackling Sprechgesang, something he has always done, as a ‘character countertenor’ with innumerable Arnaltas and Nutrices under his belt, very well.

As Virgil, the young American bass David Leigh doesn't really have the chance to develop a character, but nevertheless brought striking stature and dignity to his hieratic role.

Christel Loetzsch is a mezzo I’ve seen several times already in Brussels, first of all, as it happens, as one of the Three Weird Sisters (sic) in Macbeth Underworld, and more recently as Flosshilde and Rossweisse. As the young Dante, she gets some of Il Viaggio’s more lyrical writing to sing (there were fleeting moments when I imagined I’d heard phrases quoting Puccini). She was remarkably convincing, physically and vocally, as a youth, but not always audible enough over the orchestral and electroacoustic substrate.

The two sopranos - both of them, on occasion, launched into the stratosphere by Dusapin - fortunately contrasted well - and could reach all the notes. Danae Kontora’s voice is rather dry and wiry up there. Jennifer France’s is rounder and juicier. Though, obviously, a key player, she doesn’t get a great deal to sing, spending much of her time on stage simply advancing in stately fashion in her red dress, drawing on her cigarettes: an icon, as I said above, more than a developed personality. But her final, writhing, rhapsodic arioso (if that’s the term) was pretty magnificent.

The Dante of Il Viaggio is an agonised, tormented character. If age - compounded perhaps by his enduring commitment to taxing contemporary roles of this kind - is inevitably taking its toll on Bo Skovhus’s voice, wearing away the lower half, it doesn’t really matter. The top half remains valiant, and his performance overall was a gripping tour de force of tragic acting. It dominated the show.

Regarding the score, I’ll resume my copy/paste quotations… Of Penthesilea I wrote, in 2015: ‘Dusapin’s score is of course, in the circumstances, not what you might call easy listening; but it is by no means intractable (...) the chorus, commenting on the action from time to time, was haunting.’ All this is still true of Il Viaggio.

However, after his Roméo et Juliette, in 2008, I noted ‘his music has a definite form and is clearly going somewhere,’ which is less true of the current work. In Il Viaggio, the chamber orchestra, sharing the pit with that haunting, 24-voice chorus, delivers a slow-moving, lava-like flow of sound, a dark-hued substrate supporting the singing. It shifts, it heaves, it swells, it groans, sometimes it rumbles (there’s an organ), sometimes it shimmers (there’s a glass harmonica)... All of this is kept transparent, legible, firmly in place by an attentive, expert Kent Nagano, who premiered the work in Aix.

Dusapin generally avoids repetition, so there are no easily-recognisable forms, learnable motifs or noticeably sustained rhythms: the music relies more on its meandering harmonies, often quite tonal-sounding. There's certainly no foot-tapping rumty-tum or post-romantic swooning, so Carmen and La Bohème are safe. Dusapin himself said, in one of his interviews, that his music for Il Viaggio is more contemplative than before. It takes time to settle into the slow rhythmic pulse. Eventually, it becomes hypnotic, and you’re gripped.

But this is, I think, opera for people used to a lot of opera, people with the regular opera-goer’s ironclad buttocks and copper-clad bladder, inured to grinning through Parsifal and bearing it. It won’t become a popular hit. A number of people crept out after the first half hour, something I don’t remember ever seeing before.

However, those that stayed on, after the (disgraceful) disturbance, till the end applauded the cast (Skovhus especially, of course) the conductor and the composer, who was present, loudly and long. A taxing evening - you wouldn’t have wanted it to run over two hours - but a satisfying one.

Aimard - Ravel, 27 March 2025

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 13:54:59 +0000

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Jeux d’eau and Valses nobles et sentimentales (excerpts)
Le Tombeau de Couperin: ‘Prélude’, ‘Forlane’, ‘Toccata’
Miroirs: ‘Noctuelles’, ‘Alborada del gracioso’, ‘La Vallée des cloches’
Gaspard de la nuit

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)
Mathieu Amalric (speaker)

Presented more as show than recital, it was nevertheless the musical elements of this Queen Elizabeth Hall celebration of Ravel that shone through. The conceit did no harm; for one thing, it was a welcome opportunity to see Mathieu Amalric on a London stage. He took the part of a friend of Pierre-Laurent Aimard, calling to collect him to travel to a recital Aimard would be giving. Whilst Aimard did some last-minute practice – or rather played around with other music by Ravel – Amalric read from material with which his friend had helped inform him and also filmed him. The script could have done with more work, to be honest, but it did not get in the way; the warmth of their collaboration was evident.

And so, when the lights went down, the music began. Aimard’s selection of sheet music from the floor – we have all been there – and (very superior) busking through a few bars of Jeux d’eau, followed by excerpts from Valses nobles et sentimentales offered a winning amuse gueule, though naturally one wished to hear more, whilst retaining a sense of eavesdropping on practice. Then the doorbell rang: enter Amalric. He suggested that Aimard play the ‘Epilogue’, which served to cast a nostalgic shadow even over music we had not heard, lilt and voicing delectable.

Other readings followed, interspersed with music: Ravel writing to his mother in 1916 with a wounded reproach that he had not heard from her, another letter from the same year on ‘active duty’ opposing ‘patriotic’ efforts to prohibit performances of enemy music, such as that of Schoenberg and Bartók. The three movements from Le Tombeau de Couperin certainly gained something from enhanced awareness of their wartime context, as did the three from Miroirs from a 1905 letter to Maurice Delage, its talk of ‘smelting castles’ and the ‘wonderful symphony’ of their sounds nice preparation for the beauty in precision of ‘Noctuelles’ as composition and performance. Talk from another source of the cliché of Ravel’s Spain as more real than the real thing could momentarily be believed, in the Lisztian virtuosity of ‘Alborado del gracioso’, not least its exultant close. The more mysterious, even mystical realm of ‘La Vallée des cloches’ gave a sense of French music to come, Messiaen, even Boulez, heard at a different aural temperature, which paved the way for Gaspard de la nuit.

This was the concert ‘proper’, a performance that reminded me, among other things, how infrequently we hear this masterpiece. Why? Perhaps pianists still shy away from its demands, or only have it in their repertoire for a while. One can hardly blame them. At any rate, it was a treat from beginning to end chez Aimard. The unmistakeable shimmering of ‘Ondine’ registered with a freshness that, just maybe, had some roots in the novelty of presentation as well as in the excellent pianism and musicianship. Aimard’s wondrous spinning of a musical line, unfailingly eloquent, revelled in the Bösendorfer and its sound world. The terrifying yet somehow seductive insistence of ‘Le Gibet’ was heard at proper ‘temperature’ too, as if the myriad repeated notes throughout the evening had been leading here. ‘Scarbo’, his laughter and shadows, could be seen as well as heard, a still more fitting culmination with roots in all that had gone before. Had I not seen Aimard’s two hands with my own eyes, I might have sworn he had four.

Kapelis/Berliner Barock Solisten - Bach, 25 March 2025

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 18:49:18 +0000

Barbican Hall

Piano Concerto no.3 in D major, BWV 1054
Piano Concerto no.4 in A major, BWV 1055
Piano Concerto no.1 in D minor, BWV 1052
Piano Concerto no.2 in E major, BWV 1053
Piano Concerto no.5 in F minor, BWV 1056
Piano Concerto no.7 in G minor, BWV 1058

Berliner Barock Solisten

Alexandros Kapelis (piano)

Six out of the seven Bach keyboard concertos: a tall order by any standards, and in practice probably better suited to recording than live performance, or at least spit between a couple of concerts, interspersed with other works (and/or maybe multiple soloists, even instruments). Indeed, it came as little surprise to read that Alexandros Kapelis and the Berliner Barock Solisten have indeed recorded these works, plus the missing BWV 1057. Still, it was not the first and will not be the last concert to present more of a CD than a concert programme, and I chose to go, curious to see what would come of the idea.

Putting aside, insofar as one can, the programming, how then did it turn out? Perhaps inevitably, my experience was mixed, the second half to my ears generally stronger than the first. (There is nothing unusual about that in a solo piano recital or many other concerts.) Perhaps the biggest problem for me was a general uniformity of approach, especially during the first half. If one is going to programme this way, one surely needs to consider what makes these works different from one another and communicate that—as well, doubtless, as what they hold in common. The D major Concerto, BWV 1054, set a pattern for much of what was to come, its first movement bright and bouncy, piano playing less distinct – perhaps in part a matter of acoustics – than that of the strings, although here and elsewhere Kapelis’s trills were very much to be enjoyed.

What I missed even in isolation, and despite gravely beautiful playing from the Berlin strings in the slow movement, was a sense either of chamber music or of the pianist leading, let alone of interplay or tension between the two. The small orchestra (4.3.2.2.1), led by Daniele Gaede, pretty much did its own thing and Kapelis played along. Might a conductor have helped? Perhaps. Not that the orchestra needed it, but perhaps a conductor would have helped connect the soloist with them. Moreover, it was the orchestra, more than the pianist, that tended to vary its approach, the second slow movement (BWV 1055) more austere, somewhat ‘period’ in tone.

It was definitely Steinway rather than Bösendorfer playing and certainly seemed to be conceived for the piano. (Why would you play Bach on the piano only to try to make it sound like the harpsichord, in which endeavour you will certainly fail?) In the D minor Concerto, BWV 1052, there were some distinctly odd passages, violin imitation/derivation in the first movement sounding merely heavy, whilst the second often seemed listless, a relatively swift tempo notwithstanding. The third movement nonetheless sprang to life, mostly maintaining that impetus. There were even, much to the music’s benefit, a few signs of Kapelis actually leading proceedings.

The outer movements of BWV 1053 in E major largely maintained that shift of gear. The first was impressively variegated and well-articulated. There was a sense both of air behind the sails—and of high-quality sails too. I suspect it was no coincidence that the orchestra sounded more committed too. There was a better approach to chamber music in the Siciliano, even if usually of piano listening to and following the strings rather than of true give-and-take. When it came to solo passages, though, Kapelis’s playing was oddly detached, as if embarrassed to sound ‘Romantic’. The two final concertos mostly followed that pattern, with noticeable springs in the step for outer movements, the finales admirably vigorous. The slow movement of BWV 1058 was notably more successful, offering greater continuity and some genuinely lovely playing, than its counterpart in BWV 1056: oddly choppy, both at the time and as an encore.

Still, there was a large audience at the Barbican, many of whom will surely have been hearing some or all of these works for the first time. If I had reservations about some aspects of the performances, there was also much to enjoy. Further acquaintance with Bach’s music is rarely, if ever, anything but time well spent.