BREAKING NEWS: Opera & Ballet

Games of the Night Wind

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 16:38:35 +0000

Games of the Night Wind is a record of nocturnally inspired piano music played by Christina Petrowska Quilico. Much of the record is taken up by twelve nocturnes from Ontario composer David Jaeger. They are interspersed with pieces in similar mood by Polish composers Alexandre Tansman and Henryk Górecki and there is also a solitary piece by Tōru Takemitsu.

The Jaeger pieces were each inspired by a different piece of poetry dealing with some aspect of nocturnal experience. What they have in common is an abstracted, dreamy quality. Some are darker than others, some gentler and more lyrical and they are all interesting. Listening I was reminded of a comment of Brian Current’s to the effect that sometimes listening for things like melody, harmony and rhythm is less useful than listening for texture and I think that’s true of these pieces. They are all deeply textured but in different ways. They are played with great sensitivity.

The works by the other composers are complementary. All are similarly “of the night” and none of them are stylistically jarring so the entire album flows without breaking the predominant mood and it’s worth listening to right through end to end.

It was recorded in 2023 at Imagine Sound Studio in Toronto and it’s nicely balanced with the distinctive sounds of the piano clearly there; at least on the hi-res digital version I listened to. It’s due for (digital only) release on May 10th in MP3 and FLAC (CD quality and 96kHz/24 bit) formats. In common with other Navona releases there’s no booklet as such but the record has its own set of web pages.

Catalogue information: Navona records NV6630

Crying ‘Uncle’

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 14:00:41 +0000

More to the point, it seems like an inspired fit. Vanya is a good man with a deep, compassionate heart. He’s also irascible, sarcastic, indolent: his own worst enemy. This odd bundle of traits is very much in sync with Carell’s comic persona.

At the same time, the idea is an intriguing stretch. Vanya is one of the great theatrical roles—and a challenge for any actor. For Carell—still known primarily from TV and films—to take it on at the prestigious Lincoln Center venue is at once humble and ballsy. It implies a desire to expand audiences’ sense of him.

Anyway, that’s what I hoped for. In practice, the result is more dispiriting.
Directed by Lila Neugebauer and featuring a new translation/adaptation by Heidi Schreck, this Uncle Vanyaisn’t so much Carell and company stepping up to a new challenge as refashioning Chekhov’s play into a Steve Carell movie.

Theatrically speaking, that’s the mountain coming to Mohammed… with predictably mixed results.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlE3dMavt4w

Before we get there, a bit about the play. Uncle Vanya is the first of what would become Chekhov’s four canonical (indeed, theater-changing) plays, and introduces us to many of his core qualities.

We are on a large country estate, owned by the distinguished, successful, pompous professor Alexander Serebryakov, who is here with his young and beautiful second wife, Elena. (I’m using here the transliterated names in this version.) Others are staying on the estate, including Sonia (Alexander’s daughter) and Vanya (Alexander’s brother-in-law: his late first wife was Vanya’s sister). Astrov, a local doctor, lives here too, and shares frequent, mordant conversations with Vanya.

The surface plot involves details about the future of the estate and its management. Ultimately, though, what matters more is the intertwined lives of its central characters. There is love and loyalty among them, but in this fishbowl world resentments and complications grow, including romantic ones. Sonia loves Astrov. Astrov loves Elena. Elena loves Astrov… but is, of course, married to Alexander. Vanya in a sense is an observer here, but in mood and circumstances, closely bonded to his niece, Sonia. For both, life moves on, but seemingly with only limited possibilities.

Chekhov famously considered at least some of his plays “comedies,” and Uncle Vanya certainly has a farcical overlay in its structure: A is in love with B who is in love with C, and so on.

But—this is always rooted in a deep sense of pathos and yearning: laughing through tears is a way of life. Look up the term “Chekhovian,” and you’ll see for yourself!

At Lincoln Center, Chekhov’s plot remains, and in fact Schreck’s translation—comfortably colloquial but cannily evading anything specifically contemporary—might still work in a period setting (the play was first produced in 1899). But Neugebauer and especially costume designer Kaye Voyce make it clear that this is happening in a contemporary world.

More jarringly, the acting style across the board has a loose, often hipsterish hint of snark. While it registers the sort of incurable ennui that lies at the heart of Chekhov’s play—a group of people who are destined to be in each other’s company but mostly failing to connect in any happy sense—the humor, especially in the first scenes, is overplayed—and for me, this Uncle Vanya never recovers.

For all the time shifting and novelty, it also suffers from another common weak link in Chekhov productions: the absence of a cohesive theatrical style. These characters may be disparate, but they form a community and are part of the same milieu; here, even family members seem to come from entirely worlds.

As the pedantic Alexander, Alfred Molina brings a scale and brio that would work well in a traditional staging; but it feels a bit odd here. At the other end of the spectrum, William Jackson Harper very imaginatively invests Astrov with a droll modern spin, but it reduces the character’s deeper and more appealing traits.

Anika Noni Rose is more effective suggesting Yelena’s glamour and hauteur than the passion that underlies it. It’s the opposite situation for Alison Pill as Sonia. This wonderful actress here is constantly febrile, frequently dissolving into tears. The great pathos of Sonia is her heartbreaking invisibility. That quality would be more effectively conveyed through quiet acceptance of her dreary future.

And then, of course, there’s Steve Carell’s Vanya. He is a comfortable stage actor, running the gauntlet here from clowning to rage to grief. To me, though, it looks like an impressive display of skills from the actor’s toolkit. An audience is surely meant to find Vanya beyond exasperating, but I think we also need to love him. Frankly, I can’t get past Carell’s smugness.

Given this production’s comedic slant, it’s no surprise that two actors in small and funny supporting parts come off best. Mia Katigbak (as Marina, an elderly family nurse) and Jonathan Hadary (Waffles, a sort of loony hanger-on) are unfailingly delightful.

It’s no surprise either that director Lila Neugebauer hasn’t fused this into a cohesive universe or an emotionally compelling one. Staged on Mimi Lien’s deliberately spare set, the visual world is picturesque but rarely more than that.

The vastness of the Vivian Beaumont Theater is another issue—it’s an unfavorite space of mine, one that can work for musicals but rarely for plays. Surely this is a big part of the problem here, I thought.

Yet hours later, I remembered having seen Chekhov’s Ivanov here almost 30 years ago. That production, directed by the late Gerald Gutierrez and featuring Kevin Kline and a quite starry ensemble, is the best American production of a Chekhov play I’ve ever seen.

The Beaumont may not have been ideal, but the show very nearly was—perhaps because the company didn’t try so hard to put a new gloss on it.

Photos: Marc J. Franklin

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“I just sing whatever I can get my throat around”

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 13:00:55 +0000

It’s an exaggeration, of course, but since winning Operalia a decade ago, her appearances the Met so far have been restricted to Contessa and Donna Anna. San Francisco opera goers have been luckier – she’s appeared there as Eva and Rusalka, and Chicago got her first Don Carlos (in French!) this season.

Meanwhile, her repertoire in Europe is far more varied: a much-discussed Vêpres Siciliennes in Munich in 2018 revealed surprisingly fluid coloratura and an excellent trill from such a rich voice, and she’s been cast in everything from Alcina to Leonore to Ellen Orford to Rosalinde. But the American houses seem to have finally picked up on her potential in a wider range of roles, and this year sings the Marschallin in Santa Fe, Violetta in LA, and Trovatore at the Met – a worthy homecoming.

This season also marks Willis-Sørensen’s Carnegie Hall debut, not as part of Carnegie’s mainstage series but rather in a recital presented by The Center for Latter-Day Saint Arts. The raison d’être for the recital was the premiere of a new song cycle, composed for Willis-Sørensen by S. Andrew Lloyd as the winner of an annual composition competition in honour of Met Opera stalwart Ariel Bybee.

Titled Amaranthine, the five-movement cycle fluctuates between a film-score romanticism that allows Willis-Sørensen and pianist Tamar Sanikidze plenty of opportunity to soar and a gauzy, lightly atonal sound world. The most interesting part of the cycle is in the melismatic plainsong of the third movement, sung a cappella and reminiscent of Gregorian chant. If Lloyd’s music is attractive without being revelatory he’s undeniably skilled at writing for the voice, allowing ample opportunity for Willis-Sørensen to indulge in long, soaring lines and floated high notes.

The program started with Amy Beach’s Three Browning Songs, sung with rapturous tone and earnest disposition. A set of Rachmaninov romances found her on less familiar territory – a charmingly unfiltered stage personality, Willis-Sørensen commented to the audience that she found singing in Russian particularly challenging, and let out a sigh of relief after the wordy “Krysolov”. She sounded happiest in the long lines of “Son” and in the Valkyrian cries of “Au”, sounding uncomfortable with the delicate shifting harmonies of the first three songs.

She was on far finer form in a set of Sibelius songs, with possibly the best performance of these songs I’ve heard. Willis-Sørensen possesses both the delicacy needed for “Lasse liten” and sheer power for the slow-burn intensity of “Flickan kom ifrån sin älsklings mote.” It’s clearly a voice at its best in passionate outburst, and the yearning long lines of “Den första kyssen” and “Var det en dröm” were thrilling. She also revealed a potent lower register in the final two songs, plunging into a rich chest voice.

It was the final set of Strauss songs, though, that revealed just what that voice can do. While “Zueignung” and “Cäcilie” were appropriately rapturous, sailing above Sanikidze’s vigorous playing, “Morgen!” and “Allerseelen” showed just how intelligently Willis-Sørensen can shade the text and music and bring something new to songs we’ve all heard a million times before. But it was the much-rarer “Frühlingsfeier” that impressed me the most, its wild, tumultuous lines and erotically charged cries to Adonis making me long to hear her take on the same composer’s Danae or Helena.

The day before, I had the opportunity to have a fabulously unfiltered chat with Willis-Sørensen about her career, fach, and American pedagogy. We held the interview on the day of the solar eclipse, and the interview concluded, somewhat surreally, with the experience of her, wearing eclipse glasses, singing Rusalka’s Song to the Moon atop a Times Square rooftop.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_EBmhFv06s

I remember hearing you win Operalia a decade ago, singing “Dich teure Halle” – and here you are singing Violetta. How did that come about?

It was a coincidence of timing more than anything. There was a gap in the jugendlich dramatischer fach just when I was starting my career, and for my management it was a no-brainer to promote me that way. I speak German, and I’m also tall and blonde, so I think everyone was like “well, there’s a Valkyrie right there!”

Is that a difficult expectation to live up to as a young emerging singer?

I had been mostly singing Mozart, and then suddenly and quickly I was accelerating into this Wagnerianrepertoire. People were offering me Sieglinde and Senta and I had my trepidations, but my management was like, “at least you got a job!” That’s a difficult position to be in as a young singer – that’s not the vibe you want in the room when you’re discussing career plans, but it’s also difficult to get out of.

So what changed?

I was singing the more lyrical Wagner roles: Elsa, Elisabeth, and Eva and even then, I noticed that I had the most lyrical voice in the cast by a wide margin. I love singing Wagner and I love what it does harmonically, but I think that the glory of the voice isn’t really in that repertoire. The other thing is that I’d heard in some other singers this sort of, I don’t know, Teutonic presentation of their instrument which doesn’t align with my technical preference. I didn’t necessarily consider it a compliment to be told that I should only be singing German repertoire. I always really wanted to sing Verdi, and I remember my management saying to me, “look, I just don’t think that’s your path – maybe someone eventually will let you sing Verdi as a compliment to your ego, but it’s never going to be your thing.”

You started your career, as many singers do, with Mozart.

It’s strange, isn’t it – people saw me singing those Italian roles and thought Strauss and Wagner. I was singing things like Fiordiligi, with lots of coloratura, long secco recits which require a very strong command of Italian. I kept pushing my management for more Italian repertoire, and eventually I switched management because my new manager told me he could hear that potential in me. That started me off on a whole new path singing lots of Verdi, but I haven’t abandoned any of that old repertoire. I’m still singing Donna Anna, a bunch of Strauss roles, and I keep the lyrical Wagner roles in my repertoire as well.

Do you have to plan your seasons carefully, given the various requirements of these roles?

So, I just premiered Traviata in Los Angeles this weekend, and I just flew in from Hong Kong where I did my first Ariadne. While I was rehearsing, I thought to myself, “has anyone ever done Violetta and Ariadne within a month? This is so stupid, what am I doing?” But actually, I think they’ve helped each other. Ariadne brought in a lyricism and breath support for long phrases that have improved how I sing Violetta. It all feeds itself, and I think this diversity helps keep the voice flexible and long-lasting.

Do you feel confined by fach?

I like to say that my fach is non-fach – I just sing whatever I can get my throat around. If you asked me what my two favourite roles are, I’d say Violetta and Rusalka. Different fachs, one could argue, but I sing them with my voice and I’m happy with how I present those two roles. I admire singers like Renée Fleming who just sings whatever she wants to sing. That’s sort of my goal: how can I confuse people?

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=bc5uDZAMKXI

There’s being able to get your voice around the notes of all of these roles, and then there’s style. Is it scary to sing, say, Rosenkavalier or Fledermaus in Vienna, and then Trovatore in Italy?

Well, thank you for bringing that up, because that’s something I think about a lot and work very hard on! I think there’s this prevailing notion that one can only do one style well and I’m trying to fly in the face of that, and then sometimes I think that I’m a fraud and can’t do any style well! I think where it comes from is cultivating your own taste and aesthetic from listening. I listen a lot to historical recordings, my colleagues, conductors – for instance, whenever I do a Verdi role, I listen to Callas to study her technical and musical and dramatic choices to see how those would fit with my approach.

I also think we talk about style as if it’s this concrete thing – tastes also evolve with time, and each conductor will have their own choices. In Verdi, for example, some conductors are very come scritto, others prefer lots of rubati and portamenti. There’s this fear sometimes, especially in America, of portamenti, which is funny since it’s stylistically correct and healthy for the voice. So, I have to balance being uncompromising to my voice and my taste, but also flexible enough to fit in with a conductor’s musical vision and also to keep learning.

Let’s talk a bit about American training. There’s this idea that American singers need to have perfect technique and language skills…

Sorry to interrupt, but this is absolutely one of the topics I’m passionate about. Maybe this is heretical, but in America I think we sometimes focus on the wrong things. We focus so much on pronunciation – it’s important, of course, to try and sound native to remove as much artifice as possible. But it’s so much more important to work on the meaning of the text! When Javier Bardem does English movies, does his accent detract from his artistry? But for some reason, in the American operatic training system, we act like pronunciation is the most important thing.

Why do you think that is?

Maybe it’s easier! You just have to hire a native speaker to tell students how to roll their R’s. But for me, you need to be able to say something, not just to sing a role. And every time you say something you need a subtext – if you don’t consciously control that narrative, your subtext might accidentally be “I sound amazing!” and that’s boring. I have sat through many an impressive technical performance where the singer came across as just thinking about how great they sound, and it’s boring! The real point of performing is the connection you can forge between yourself and everyone else in the room, and being able to communicate is the difference between acceptable art and great art.

You were part of the ensemble at the Semperoper Dresden for three years. How do you think the fest system changed how you view fach?

Well, Dresden is a big house with a big ensemble – it’s not the kind of theatre where they say “tonight you sing Brünnhilde, tomorrow you sing Queen of the Night!” So, I mostly sang Mozart there, and some operetta which was fun. What I learned most from that experience was how casually people took it. It’s publicly subsidized, so they’re not as desperate to court public favour. If they’ve paid for a production they’ll remount it very quickly and you just jump in and do it. It’s not without its stresses, of course – I had my role debut as Vitellia with three days of rehearsal, pregnant with a cold and jetlag. I remember the set was in such a way that you had to enter through the auditorium doors, and on my first night I discovered it was locked! I was running around looking for a key so I could go onstage to do “Non più di fiori.” It should have been a complete disaster, but it wasn’t. I just did it, and then I realized that all those external conditions that we love to stress out about simply don’t matter. I’m not going to say it was the best performance of my life, but it helped me take the pressure off all the rest of my performances.

How does that compare with the American operatic system?

In Europe, there’s not this idea that if something isn’t absolutely perfect, that we’ll all die. In America, the pressure is so high and I find it destructive in a way. If you put so much pressure on the art, it has to sort of strangle itself out. And I see this a lot in young singers – we all have this panicked desperation not to be replaced by the next young singer. It’s so much the mindset here and also in England, and it’s completely manufactured! The first time I was invited to do a role at the Met, it was like, “do you want to be the 43^rd cover? If 42 others get kneecapped in the parking lot, then you’ll have your moment!”, you know? I can’t believe I had the guts to turn them down, but when I came back a few seasons later as the Countess in Figaro that was crucial in how I view myself and my career. I didn’t want to be in this racket, trying to claw my way up through all these people. It’s totally artificial, and I think it helps no one.

So tomorrow you’re making your Carnegie Hall debut, including a world premiere.

I know, right? A world premiere! I’ve never done one before, so I had no idea how it would go. What was interesting was being involved in the whole process from the beginning – I was on the jury selecting the composers, and being able to pick the aesthetic that appealed to me the most was fascinating. I surprised myself, I think, because I love direct, tonal music and I thought I would pick the most Broadway-sounding composer. But Lloyd’s music spoke to me and also presented a challenge.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWSgIRhHV90

In what way?

It was interesting not to have any reference material. The first two songs are harmonically quite complex, and the third song is in plainsong, with no metre and completely a cappella. It’s a tough nut to crack, but as I sing it, I also want the audience to be completely unaware of that. I want the audience not to be aware of all of the challenges that stood between me and getting this score into my brain and my vocal chords. But I’m so proud to be the first person to do this, and I don’t know what life this cycle will have in the future but right now I’m so excited to share it with the world.

Is it more pressure to do a world premiere than, say, Traviata?

I was talking to James Conlon right before our opening night of Traviata, and he was giving me all of these notes. He’s very picky, and there were a lot of notes! I had this moment of panic where I just thought, “what if I can’t do all of this?” and then I pulled myself together and told him, “don’t worry, I’ll manage, it’ll be great”. And he looked me in the eye and said, with so much wisdom, “it doesn’t have to be great, it just has to be fine.” And that took the pressure completely off! It’s in that relaxation and self-acceptance that allows you to, sometimes, stumble upon greatness.

Photos: Rebecca Reed, Cory Weaver (LA Opera), Katherine Ashmore (Royal Opera House)

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Gunshots

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 12:56:28 +0000

Guns and show business are found together almost as frequently as politicians and TV cameras. Opera is no exception Below are eight operas, well the last one is a trespasser, in which guns are part of the action. In some they are pivotal. My only requirement for inclusion in this article is that gunshots must be heard during the performance. A description without a shot is not enough for inclusion.

In the first of these, Der Freischütz, they are the whole story. The opera is a Singspiel with spoken dialogue like Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Beethoven’s Fidelio. Max wants to marry Agathe the head forester’s daughter, but to do so he has to prove his prowess as a marksman. The opera opens with Max losing a shooting contest to a peasant, Kilian, who is proclaimed ‘King of marksmen’. Max is overcome by despair that he will lose Agathe if his aim doesn’t improve. Agathe has rejected Kaspar who is the assistant forester and accordingly, he hates her, her father, and Max. He’s out for revenge. Kaspar is in league with the Devil who goes by the name Samiel. He’s been making magic bullets. He gives Max his last one and tells him to shoot an eagle far above outside of the range of any gun not loaded with a magic bullet. Max aims at the bird and is amazed to score a lethal hit. Kaspar persuades Max to meet him at midnight in the terrible Wolf’s Glen to cast seven more magic bullets. Six will hit, but the seventh belongs to the Samiel who can guide it wherever he pleases.

By the time Act 3 arrives they have made seven magic bullets. Each has used six. The last one is Max’s – the Devil’s bullet. Kaspar has sold his soul to the Devil and payment is now due. He makes a deal with Samiel that if Max kills Agathe with the seventh bullet, he, Kaspar, will get a three year reprieve and Max will go directly to Hell. What Kaspar doesn’t know is that Agathe is wearing a magic wedding gown that will protect her from harm. At the marksmanship trial, Max takes his shot which instead of hitting Agathe hits and kills Kaspar. The local prince sentences Max for making magic bullets to a probational year after which he can marry Agathe.

Der Freischütz was a huge success after its premiere in 1821 and is considered the first German romantic opera. It’s still occasionally performed. The Met last did it in 1970.

There’s a single shot in Carmen. It’s fired in Act 3 after Micaëla’s aria. Don Jose is keeping lookout when he sees an intruder. He fires but misses as he is as lousy a shot as he is a lover. The intruder is Escsamillo the famous bullfighter. Jose is first delighted to meet the star torero but turns ugly when he realizes that Escamillo is intent on seeing Carmen. They fight, but the rest of the gang shows up and stops the altercation. Jose shoots but misses

Tchaikovsky’s most performed opera, Eugene Onegin, features a duel to the death in Act 2. Onegin and Lensky are very close friends but get into a stupid argument when the former dances with the latter’s fiance. Onegin kills his friend who never gets off a shot. Puskin who wrote the verse novel on which the opera is based also died in a duel. On egin duel

The entire plot of Verdi’s La Forza Del Destino stems from an errant shot. In the opera’s first scene, Don Alvaro drops his pistol in submission to the Marquis of Calatrava who has caught him about to elope with his daughter Leonora. In an example of anything that can go wrong will go wrong, the gun goes off mortality wounding the Marquis who curses his daughter with his dying words. The following excerpt is from a legendary performance of the opera in 1956 featuring Zinka Milanov, Richard Tucker, Leonard Warren, and Cesare Siepi. Gun goes off

In Act 3 Don Alvaro makes friends with Don Carlo, Leonora’s brother, whose mission in life is to kill Alvaro. They’re both using aliases and don’t recognize each other. This friendship proves one of the shortest in human experience. They run off to fight the Battle of Velletri which is over in about a minute. There are a lot of gunshots that are often omitted, but the Met was firing cannons and muskets in 1956. Battle of Velletri

In Puccini’s Tosca each of the three principals dies differently. Baron Scarpia is stabbed by Tosca. Cavaradossi is executed by firing squad, which Tosca thinks is firing blanks, and after everything has gone wrong she jumps off the Castel Sant’Angelo exclaiming that she and Scarpia will meet before God. Firing squad

When Puccini wrote a cowboy opera, The Girl of the Golden West, it was inevitable that a pistol would be discharged. Several of them go off in Act 2. Dick Johnson, a bandit in disguise, visits Minne (the eponymous Girl) at her house. The local sheriff and his deputies have discovered his identity and are looking for him. He and Minnie fall in love. When he’s about to leave amid a snowstorm several shots are fired and he realizes the danger of leaving when the posse after him is so close. He accepts Minnie’s chaste invitation to stay the night. Sherrif Rance appears and discloses Johnson’s true identity. She tells him to leave and after explaining how his impoverished background led to a life of crime he goes only to be promptly shot. He staggers back into the house where Minnie hides him. Puccini’s opera is now recognized as the masterpiece it is. He thought it the best he had done to the time of its composition. While it will never be as popular as Bohème, Tosca, or Butterfly it is a work of extraordinary beauty and construction. First the gunshots in the distance, then the one that wounds Johnson. Minnie is Renata Tebaldi, Johnson is Mario Del Monaco. Both were at their vocal zeniths when this recording was made in the mid 50s. Notice how Puccini weaves melodies of great beauty as the dialogue proceeds – a skill granted to only a handful of composers.

Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace is only slightly shorter than the novel on which it is based. It’s in two parts and 13 scenes, the last of these depicts the fates of the veteran Platon Karataev and Pierre Bezukhov – the latter a protagonist of both the novel and opera. They have been rounded up by the French as prisoners and are with them as they retreat from Russia. Karataev cannot keep up and is shot, but Pierre and the others are rescued by the partisans. The first shot is the one that kills Karataev. This alerts the partisans to the French troops’ location and they attack with many volleys. Karataev’s execution and the rescue of Pierre.

The last work is not an opera though it has been performed by opera companies. Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story is loosely based on the plot of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Tony has killed Bernardo in Act 1. At the end of Act 2, he is shot by Bernardo’s friend Chino. Tony had been told that Maria was murdered and wants Chino to kill him. Tony’s death scene is below in a video taken from the 1961 movie.

There are doubtless more operas with gunshots, but the ones above are those that came to me without having to exert myself by doing some research and searching.

In comes company

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 10:00:26 +0000

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dprmPPVfas

Happy 54th birthday soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-ORjaxWYkE

On this day in 1970 Stephen Sondheim‘s musical Company opened on Broadway

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrRDrz53Q1E

Birthday anniversary of playwright and poet William Shakespeare (baptismal day in 1564),
soprano Florence Austral (1894),
contralto Marga Höffgen (1921),
soprano Wilma Lipp (1925),
and composer Conrad Susa (1935)

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ARC de triomphe

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 16:00:52 +0000

Roth Costanzo intends to maintain his performing career alongside his new administrative responsibilities.

Philadelphia correspondent David Fox:

What strikes me most here is that I imagined Opera Philadelphia – grappling as so many cultural institutions are with financial uncertainty – might look to an experienced, “safe” leader. Instead, with ARC they’ve made an audacious, glamorous, wild-card choice. It affirms the company’s confidence in David Devan’s vision for Festival O’s admixture of traditional opera placed alongside contemporary genre-defying work (and also, refreshingly, the company’s commitment to a positive, visible sense of queerness). At the same time, Devan himself is gone—and the residual costs related to Festival O remain a major issue. Ironically, I see this choice as both a tribute to him, and a need to move to the next step. To be continued!

More information available on Opera Philadelphia’s website.

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The Enchantress

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 15:10:11 +0000

The Enchantress (sometimes translated as The Sorceress) is a rather infrequently performed 1887 opera by Tchaikovsky. It got a production in Frankfurt in 2022 with an interesting cast. Asmik Grigorian plays the title character; Kuma or Nastasya, and Iain MacNeil, late of this parish, is Prince Nikita. It’s the first time I’ve come across him since he moved to Germany.

The director is Vasily Berkhatov and he’s chosen to take the original 15th century story; which Tchaikovsky intended as a commentary on the defects of Tsarist Russia, and translate it to the present where it works very well as a commentary on contemporary Russian autocracy. He also works with the more fantastical elements of the story very effectively.

The story is easy to summarize. Kuma is a widow running a bar or inn largely frequented by artsy types somewhere near Nizhny Novgorod. This Bohemian-ness has attracted the attention of the authoritarian and unpleasant local bishop Mamïrov who claims that Kuma is a witch and her establishment a den of vice that should be closed down. He shows up with the Prince on a sort of inspection which doesn’t go according to plan. The Prince becomes infatuated with Kuma and humiliates Mamïrov.

Back in the city Mamïrov convinces the conventionally pious Princess that her husband is having an affair with Kuma. When her son, Yuri, learns of this he swears to kill Kuma. He shows up at Numa’s place just after she has rather forcefully repelled his father’s advances klargely because she’s actually besotted with Yuri. She convinces hin that she is not having an affair with the Prince and Yuri promptly falls in love with her. They plan to run off together. That takes us up to the end of Act 3 in a pretty conventional, more or less realistic, manner. Then it goes all Russian folk tale. We seem to be in some sort of enchanted forest. The Princess meets a sorcerer (here played by the same person as Mamïrov) and obtains poison from him to “kill the witch”. Kuma shows up by boat for her tryst with Yuri but meets the Princess instead; who does poison her and then boasts to Yuri about it. Yuri curses her. The Prince shows up aiming to take Numa for himself but when he realises she has been murdered he kills Yuri and the Princess then goes mad and (in this version at least) may or may not kill himself too.

The staging is really very clever. It seems like a revolving stage is in play (though as so often it’s hard to tell on video). One area represents Numa’s bar and it’s full of artsy types drinking. There are dancers too; men in skirts and wolf’s heads. It contrasts with the palace which is represented by a rather bourgeois sitting room with an icon cabinet. The princess and her maid/confidante do yoga. The young Prince Yuri is a gym bunny and boxer and he’s also rather obviously a mummy’s boy and not too bright. These two basic sets do for the first three acts but at the end of Act 3 Numa goes through a door from her place to some alternate reality where menacing projections are playing. When she tries to go back through the same door it seems to lead to the palace but all of this now is weirdly lit with background projections to emphasis the shift from realism to something else. And it’s energetic and colourful and fun to watch.

All this is backed up by some excellent performances. Asmik Grigorian as Numa tends to hold centre stage whenever she’s on. She’s super sympathetic and, of course, she’s a fabulous singer. Her first big aria “If you look down the steep mountain” is a gorgeous display of carefully controlled and very idiomatic singing. Iain MacNeil is also very good. His two principal interactions with Grigorian; when they meet in Act 1 and in Act 3 where she rejects his advances (“pity isn’t love”) are very well done and he’s very convincing in the finale. He doesn’t really get a big aria but he sings very well in duets with Kuma and the Princess.

Alexander Mikhailov is Prince Yuri and he’s a proper Russian tenor. He produces impressive, ringing high notes and does a very decent job of working with the slightly pathetic character he’s given. The Princess is the reliable Claudia Mahnke. Her portrayal of the conventionally religious side of her character is convincing and there’s real venom in her “revenge” persona. She has a pleasing mature mezzo and sings some very good duets with both of the princes. Frederic Jost doubles as Mamïrov and the sorcerer Kudma. He’s suitably nasty and a proper bass. There’s a whole raft of minor characters and they are all pretty good. The dancers are excellent.

The Frankfurt Opera Chorus shows that it can act and sing very well. It sounds particularly lovely in the very Russian final chorus “If evil were sowed in the woods”. The orchestral writing is about one would expect from Tchaikovsky and the orchestra sounds appropriately romantic and Russian though, mercifully, the brass isn’t too Russian. Conductor Valentin Uryupin seems to both get the score and have a good understanding with the director and he keeps everything together in what is sometimes a busy, even chaotic, staging as well as getting a pretty lush sound out of his players.

Götz Filenius directs for video. It’s not an altogether easy show to film. The first act is very busy and there are low light levels and some quite weird lighting in Acts 3 and 4. I think it comes off pretty well though. It’s perfectly possible to follow the plot and see how the stage director is interpreting it. On Blu-ray it’s predictably good in the sound (DTS-HD-MA and PCM stereo) and video quality departments.

There are no extras on the disk but there is a very good interview with the director in the booklet. It sheds a good deal of light on his choices for this production. There’s also a synopsis and track listing. Subtitle options are English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese and Korean.

10.murder

John Adams’s 2000 opera-oratorio El Niño does just that, connecting the ancient past to the equally troubled present, a mosaic of spiritual poetry from the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds over ten centuries and medieval and baroque music with 20^th century minimalism.

To quote the program notes of the Metropolitan Opera’s premiere production:

Described by John Adams as his way of understanding what is meant by a miracle, El Niño is an opera-oratorio that brings the tradition of sacred works by composers like Bach and Handel into the modern era.

El Niño opened on Tuesday night in an enchanting new production by Lileana Blain-Cruz in a sensational Met debut along with several other debutants including soprano Julia Bullock, baritone Davóne Tines, conductor Marin Alsop, countertenors Key’mon W. Murrah and Siman Chung, set designer Adam Rigg and lighting designer Yi Zhao. (On May 1^st and 4^th, the Argentine mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack will perform as the mezzo soloist.) The audience received their efforts with genuine warmth and delight throughout the evening.

The night before the El Niño premiere, I watched the DVD of the Paris world premiere starring Dawn Upshaw, the dearly missed Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson and Sir Willard White conducted by Kent Nagano. The religious work was commissioned as a celebration of the impending new millennium. Adams and his collaborator Peter Sellars (the librettist and director) wanted to connect the conflicts of war and the travails of refugees fleeing political violence in ancient Judea to the problems of the modern world entering a new millennium.

Well ,we are now nearly a quarter century into the 21^st century of the new millennium. We are facing wars in Ukraine and Gaza that are dividing our world and yielding record numbers of refugees. Mostly Hispanic refugees are being turned away or imprisoned at America’s southern border. The theme is more topical and more timely than ever. Mary and Joseph and the infant savior must also flee political violence and oppression, braving potential hostility and rejection in foreign lands – they too are refugees who are part of an oppressed minority.

I must mention that in the second act there is an apocalyptic chorus that mentions that the “towers are falling” – written over a year before the bombing of the World Trade Center. The line gave me chills (I work 100 yards from the Trade Center and went into work that September morning…)

In Paris in the year 2000, Sellars’s multimedia production was stark and contemporary with dark backgrounds, no scenery and plain modern costumes. Dawn Upshaw’s Virgin Mary wore a red plaid shirt and black skirt and the men sported button-down shirts, t-shirts, and slacks. Gritty film projections showed Mary and Joseph stand-ins fleeing in their car on the highway to Egypt. Mary and St. Elizabeth greet each other in a basement laundry room and crying policemen are comforted on urban sidewalks. Sellars created a dark world of social dystopia and ominous foreboding throughout and the musical approach followed suit. Nagano’s tempos are driving with a darker orchestral sonority and louder volume – the pounding ostinatos suggest violence ready to erupt.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hFSuGwl7jU

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7EISGxGhJw

At the Met, Marin Alsop in Act I keeps the textures transparent and shimmering with greater delicacy and softness evoking spiritual wonder and beatific joy at the miracle of conception and birth. The musical style is evocative of Bach and Handel played in this fashion. Lileana Blain-Cruz sets her nativity story in a dreamlike South American landscape of saturated colors and lush flowers and trees evoking the Latin American primitivist art of Frida Kahlo. The chorus is dressed in long flowing gowns in iridescent colors and fanciful headdresses. There is a sense of childlike wonder and heightened theatricality.

While the darker elements were omnipresent in the Sellars world premiere staging, Blain-Cruz successfully shifts the tone from wonder and joy in Act I to political violence and displacement in Act II with the entrance of the despot Herod. Herod (Tines) enters in military uniform evoking Mussolini, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and Hitler below a larger-than-life statue of himself. Soldiers with machine guns pop up in the hills and mountains upstage. A final chorus of children close the evening in a prayer lauding the new savior. They charge us with the responsibility (currently broken) that we will keep the world peaceful and whole in order that they can have a safe and positive future.

Blain-Cruz does not depend on projected film but stages many of the incidents related in the text – puppet dragons (designed by another debuting artist James Ortiz) reminiscent of Chinatown and Mardi Gras parades appeared to threaten and then fall in worship before the infant Jesus. The choreography of another debutant, Marjani Forté-Saunders, keeps the stage as full of movement as it is of color. The eye and ear are constantly intrigued and delighted with a symphony of movement, sound, and imagery full of color and life. This is actually an opera that one could take a child or non-opera person to and expect them to enjoy and to be engaged by it.

Julia Bullock has a rich, low set soprano with a plummy yet pointed resonance in the middle register (very different from Upshaw’s piping, childlike high soprano). The top can turn reedy (the voice has notable lyric mezzo colorations with similarities to Frederica von Stade) but the added warmth and sonority gave this Mary an earthy yet pure quality. Bullock has the gift of stillness and simplicity onstage, she was never affected or self-consciously arty in her delivery. The voice filled the house quite well. I must mention that Bullock (a contemporary opera specialist and advocate) has made El Niño her own personal pet project involving herself in scaled down concert versions of the work for church and chamber performances which will tour the country later this year. I look forward to her Cleopatra in the Adams Antony and Cleopatra next season.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1h6nFI8cRs

J’Nai Bridges as the mezzo-soprano Mary/Narrator soloist started out a little tentatively with a slightly muffled delivery, but came into her own as the opera progressed, revealing a radiant, sensual presence and appealingly dusky mezzo voice (she had canceled the dress rehearsal and may be working through some indisposition). Her rendition of the Act I “La anunciación” lacked the sensual abandon and spiritual awakening of Hunt-Lieberson’s rendition, but she shined in the second half. I look forward to what Spanish speaker Daniela Mack brings to the part in May as the mezzo soloist is assigned much of the Spanish-language material.

Davóne Tines as the baritone Joseph/Herod/Narrator soloist brought another strong debut revealing a warm, velvety baritone with beautiful legato line, clear diction. A versatile artist, Tines brought a youthful sympathetic stage presence to Joseph while being properly imposing and threatening as Herod. A very promising beginning in this house for a rising young artist.

The trio of countertenors Eric Jurenas, Key’mon W. Murrah, and Siman Chung (who double as the Angel Gabriel and the Three Magi) provided a seamless blend of ethereal sound even when suspended high above the stage, flying on wires in the annunciation scene (Bullock as Mary also had her airborne moments in Act I). In his solo lines, Murrah revealed a rich distinctive sound.

Alsop maintained a virtuosic control of orchestral dynamics particularly in revealing a variety of orchestral detail while keeping the volume down to keep the voices in the forefront. Her command of the shimmering, delicately articulated orchestration in Act I was contrasted with greater density and thundering power in Act II as the Holy Family is threatened by earthly dangers. Balance, variety and abundant detail were evident all night long.

The Metropolitan Opera chorus was augmented by dancers, a children’s chorus and puppeteers bringing a sense of vibrant community which then was fragmented and driven into the wilderness in Act II. This was also a triumphant career finale for departing chorus master Donald Palumbo who was greeted with cheers by a standing audience at the final curtain calls.

The final cheers were for John Adams who strode out last and embraced conductor Marin Alsop.

This production is something of a testament to girl power since the director, conductor, the very involved lead soprano, and choreographer are all female. The change in tone, emphasis and emotional resonance in the conceptualization and realization of Adams’s opera-oratorio is a testament to their thoughtfulness.

Our divided and intransigent world is in dire need of joy, hope, peace, compassion, reconciliation, childlike innocence, and human connection. Adams’s El Niño is a radiant messenger of all of these direly needed life necessities which are being embodied on the stage of the Met in radiant color and vibrant life. It is also a fun night out. Lots of tickets are available – come together and connect with this experience.

Photos: Evan Zimmerman/MetOpera

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Gong with the wind

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 10:00:43 +0000

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWwJA1b2l7g

Born on this day in 1918 soprano Astrid Varnay

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1PRqoz3KMc

Birthday anniversary of bass Italo Tajo (1915),
singer Ella Fitzgerald (1917),
soprano Irene Jordan (1919),
bass Fritz Hübner (1933),
and tenor Seppo Ruohonen (1946)

Happy 75th birthday mezzo-soprano Cynthia Clarey

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Look there, look there!

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 13:00:06 +0000

Russian soprano Tamara Milashkina died in January at 89 years old, and Chris’s Cache remembers her with the performance I most identify with her—a 1977 Salzburg Iolanta with her husband Vladimir Atlantov as Robert—along with a much more recent performance of my favorite Tchaikovsky opera with last week’s podcast headliner Asmik Grigorian conducted by Kirill Petrenko.

I posted another Iolanta on Trove Thursday five years ago and rhapsodized then about my experiences with this opera.

I’ll simply add that Asmik’s father Gegam can be heard in the complete performance included in that earlier post.

I’ve been missing Russian opera as the Met hasn’t performed any this season and next season Pikovaya Dama doesn’t arrive until late May, so Chris’s Cache will be devoting an occasional installment over the next few months to this rich repertoire.

Tchaikovsky: Iolanta

Iolanta: Tamara Milashkina
Vaudemont: Zurab Sotkilava
Robert: Vladimir Atlantov
King René: Yevgeny Nesterenko
Ebn-Hakia: Yuri Grigoryev

Conductor: Leopold Hager
Salzburg
22 October 1977
In-house recording

Iolanta: Asmik Grigorian
Vaudemont: Liparit Avetisyan
Robert: Igor Golovatenko
King René: Mika Kares
Ibn-Hakia: Michael Kraus

Rundfunkchor Berlin
Berliner Philharmoniker
Conductor: Kirill Petrenko
Philharmonie, Berlin
15 January 2022
Broadcast

Milashkina and Atlantov can also be heard in earlier podcast episodes of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, the latter from the Bolshoi Opera’s 1975 visit to the Met, the only occasions the soprano sang at Lincoln Center.

Each Iolanta can be downloaded by clicking on the icon of a cloud with an arrow pointing downward on the audio player above and the resulting mp3 file will appear in your download directory.

Never miss an episode of Chris’s Cache! Subscribe to this podcast via Apple Podcasts or RSS.

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May listings

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 12:16:31 +0000

It’s coming towards the end of the traditional “season” but there’s sill plenty happening. Here’s how I see may shaping up at present (I expect more theatre listings will come in. They tend to be somewhat less notice!):

May 1st and 2nd: The TSO are coupling Brahms’ First Symphony with Emily D’Angelo and material from her enargeia CD.
Also on May 2nd the Women’s Musical Club are hosting Joyce El-Khoury in recital at Walter Hall.

May 3rd: Cherubini’s Medea opens a run at the COC (six performances ending May 17th).
May 3rd and 4th: Confluence Concerts are presenting Teiya Kasahara’s Dichterliebe: Whose Love?; a “gender expansive” look at the classic cycle.
May 3rd to 5th: Toronto Operetta Theatre have a run of Guerrero’ The Guest at the Inn in the Jane Mallett Theatre.
May 4th: Natalya Gennadi curates and performs in a Soundstreams show; Grandma’s Shawl at the Redwood Theatre.
May 8th: The RBA noon concert features Charlotte Siegel and Queen Hezumuryango.
May 9th: Hedda Gabler opens at Coalmine Theatre (previews May 5th to 8th; run May 9th to 26th) and First Métis Man of Odesa opens at Soulpepper. (preview May 8th; run May 9th to 19th).
May 14th is the Ensemble Studio cast’s turn at Don Pasquale at the COC.
May 15th: The lunchtime RBA concert features Simone Osborne with a programme that includes music by Cecilia Livingston.
May 16th: Crow’s Theatre and Obsidian Theatre open Jasmine Lee-Jones’ seven methods of killing kylie jenner. (previews 12th to 15th,; run 16th to 26th)
On May 21st and 22nd Tapestry has two food themed shows at Theatre Passe Muraille. The first features Jennifer Tung and Keith Klassen in Iron Chef d’Orchestre and the second has Acadienne Juliane Gallant in Le Kitchen Party.
May 30th it’s back to the RBA for a recital by Alex Hetherington and Ariane Cossette.

The greatest star

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 10:00:10 +0000

Happy 82nd birthday Barbra Streisand

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El Niño

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 16:00:42 +0000

Marin Alsop conducts Julia Bullock, J’Nai Bridges, Davóne Tines, and countertenors Siman Chung, Key’mon W. Murrah, and Eric Jurenas in a broadcast from New York

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The Rheingold Research Centre

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 13:32:29 +0000

It’s pretty difficult to judge whether or not a high concept production of Wagner’s Ring cycle is going to work or not just from Das Rheingold but I thought Dmitri Tcherniakov’s production for Staatsoper unter den Linden recorded in 2022 was pretty promising. His world is a large research complex designated ESCHE for reasons that aren’t clear. The time period seems to be 1970s or thereabouts. The research is essentially psychological and the characters are variously executives, scientists and experimental subjects.

The set appears to have four levels with multiple rooms on each level. Only two levels are visible at a time; the whole set being raised or lowered as necessary. It may also revolve but that’s hard to tell from the video. It must have cost a fortune!

We start in the “Stress Lab” where the Rhinemaidens are carrying out some sort of, apparently, VR experiment on Alberich. They are observing with clipboards while he is clearly experiencing the things described but, of course, we don’t see them. Eventually he goes rogue, breaks out of his restraints, wires etc, smashes lots of stuff and runs off with the rest. We can tell this is the gold because two scenes later the headset he’s wearing will reappear as the Tarnhelm.

The negotiation between Wotan and the giants takes place in a fancy boardroom on an upper level. Then Wotan and Loger take the elevator down to Nibelheim though not before the Rhinemaidens have exited the elevator to sit around smoking in some sort of reception area. Down we go through a level stacked with caged rabbits to the lowest level the “Study of Behavioural Models” where Alberich is being appropriately brutal.

Alberich’s Tarnhelm transformations are indicated by the reaction of the watchers. We really don’t see anything which seems to be a theme. We don’t actually see the gold in the next scene either. When we get back to the upper levels (the Rhine Maidens are still hanging about) it’s strangely low key. Alberich’s curse is rather matter of fact. There’s some energy between a very distressed Freia and the giants and a moment of violence when Fafner shoots Fasolt. But then the final scene has both Donner and Froh as sort of conjurors and Wotan making what seems like a boardroon speech or one of those pro-forma speeches one hears on first nights. “I’d like to thank our season sponsor Riesenheim Financial and the Nibelheim Arts Council…”

Bottom line, it’s really quite intriguing and I want to see where Tcherniakov takes the other three operas. It’s also visually stunning. But it’s not as obviously playful and clever as Herheim’s version down the road at DOB!

The performances though are superb. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Rheingold with better singing and acting. Michael Volle is extremely solid as Wotan; a commanding presence on the stage. The real star though is Rolando Villazón as Loge. Often Loge is not really sung but comes over in a kind of Sprechstimme. Here it’s proper full on tenor singing coupled with splendid acting that makes Loge a really intriguing character. Rather a brilliant bit of casting.

The giants are terrific too. It seems almost ridiculous to describe Mika Kares as dreamy but there’s something very touching about his obvious affection for Freia and it contrasts with the much more menacing Peter Rose as Fafner. Annett Fritsch’s Freia is very appealing too; a touch of vulnerability in the bullying and bluster. Claudia Mahnke is a pretty dominating Fricka. She should be interesting in the next instalment! Lauri Vasar, as Donner, and Siyabonga Maqungo, as Froh both sing lyrically and I guess give the director what he wants which is a couple of rather wimpy blusterers. There’s also a very measured and assured cameo from Anna Kissjudit as Erda.

There’s some startlingly vivid acting from Johannes Martin Kränzle as Alberich especially in the first scene. He’s fairly lyrical too. Not too much snorting and snarling. The same is true of Stephen Rügamer as Mime. Finally, there’s some pretty singing at the beginning and the end from Rhinemaidens Evelin Novak, Natalia Skrycka and Anna Lapkovskaya.

The orchestra has a big part to play in Rheingold and the Staatskapelle Berlin sounds splendid. It’s imposing and menacing when it needs to be and beautiful where that’s appropriate. No real surprise with Christian Thielemann conducting. Not only does he get into the structure of the music but he appears to be on the same page as Tcherniakov in wanting a more lyrical approach, especially with some of the characters, that one might not expect.

Andy Sommer does the filming and it’s pretty good. He mostly focuses on the one room where the action is in the moment and I did wonder if more was going on than one could see in the video but he does also give a good picture of how the set is constructed as a whole. The sound on Blu-ray (as usual DTS-HD-MA and 48kHz PCM stereo) is very good and so is the picture. There are some trailers on the disk but no other extras and the booklet isn’t very helpful about the production. The introduction is mostly about the history of the piece with one short paragraph on this production. The synopsis too is the Wikipedia version. Subtitle options are German, E

Dinosaur surviving the crunch

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 13:00:18 +0000

In it I recognized the larger construction of musical scenes (and even the wholesale recycling of tunes from within the same work). It implanted in me the understanding of accompanied recitative (and there’s a lot of it in Evita). Juan Perón’s introduction of his wife on the balcony at the top of Act Two could have been written by Stravinsky (and probably was, knowing Mr. Lloyd Webber’s fondness for cribbing plus he had the formidable Hershy Kay as his orchestrator). Although its musical language isn’t necessarily sophisticated, it planted the germs that later brought me to love masterworks like Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella and Wagner’s Parsifal.

My Patti LuPone fandom began almost immediately after hearing her ferocious performance on that OBC album that was astonishingly varied both dramatically and vocally. I’ve adored her in almost everything she’s done since, especially Lloyd Webber’s subsequent Sunset Boulevard (he said covering his face in shame). Oh, I don’t get me started on Glenn Close who I saw here in LA (pfft).

Saturday night at the Music Center LA Opera presented Ms. LuPone in her current one-woman show ‘A Life in Notes’ at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Her association with LA Opera goes back to her 2007 appearance here in Kurt Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny alongside Audra McDonald and Anthony Dean Griffey conducted by James Conlon (which, enshrined on DVD, won her two Grammys). She also hilariously closed Act One as the Turkish singer Samira in the 2015 production of The Ghosts of Versailles, entering on an enormous mechanical pink elephant which she promptly upstaged with ease.

Still it had been quite a while since I’d seen her live in concert and when I glanced at the birthdate on her Wikipedia page, it did make me pause (I won’t be ungallant and mention the exact number here). Needless to say, I adjusted my expectations accordingly and tucked in for an evening of what I assumed would be light vocal cocktail stylings heavy on entertaining and snappy Broadway banter. This proved a miscalculation on my part.

She entered in a stylish ladies’ tuxedo to a frenzied reaction from a packed audience that was obviously diva deprived for far too long. She explained that the songs chosen were special to her as they all had specific memories and reminded us all about how music becomes a touchstone in all our lives. So, naturally the evening started with more than a few numbers that she hadn’t been identified with previously and the choices were interesting. Leon Russell’s ‘A Song for You’ gave her a solid opening that didn’t test her range too severely and allowed her to immediately connect with the crowd. She segued to tunes from the 50s with ‘Come on-a My House’ and the Righteous Brothers’ ‘Ebb Tide.’

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sSFA-FSgrI

Her Music Director and Pianist Joseph Thalken sat at the Yamaha grand while Brad Phillips accompanied on almost every string instrument you could imagine while they both provided occasional back-up vocals. Mr. Thalken also provided the arrangements which included a charming doo-wop-tinged ’We Kiss in the Shadow’ from The King & I.

We also got ‘Town Without Pity’ and then a touching rendition of ‘I Wish it So’ from Marc Blitzstein’s famous 16-performance Broadway flop Juno, a song I knew only by reputation which proved a lovely discovery. Ms. LuPone then put the balcony in her crosshairs and ripped into ‘Some People’ from Gypsy with a verve that caused my mouth to fall open just a tiny bit.

I should acknowledge that the individual ingredients that comprise a Patti LuPone performance, the same ones that her detractors feast on, were all in evidence: The famously clipped diction, that bewitching way she likes to sing around the break in her voice, the occasional side-of-the-mouth-sneered delivery. And that’s to say nothing of the tommy-gun vibrato when she’s in full Broadway belt mode. Although it may have taken her a very few pages to warm up, her vocalism was consistently exciting and her interpretations alive in that unique way that is entirely hers. If pitch strayed momentarily, we can certainly blame time’s winged chariot, but all in all, I’m fighting the urge to use the phrase ‘astonishingly well-preserved’ with regards to the vocal instrument itself.

Just to prove that the Gypsy piece wasn’t a fluke of muscle memory we then got the Harold Arlen/Ira Gershwin ‘The Man that Got Away’ in a gently scorched reading that lacked nothing in power. She then surprised almost everyone with a spirited ‘Those Were the Days,’ which had a goodly portion of the crowd clapping along, as she closed the first half.

Returning refreshed Ms. LuPone took the stage in true diva fashion (literally) in a silver Oscar de la Renta sheath with cape flowing behind and we got a smart rendition of ‘On Broadway.’ She then offered the meal that we’d all been waiting for by performing, back-to-back mind you, her big hits from Evita, Les Miserables, and the recent revival of Company with nary a breath in-between and the last of which she sang while balancing and sipping from a martini glass. These three performances will stay with me for a long time if only because of their concentrated emotional power.

Further highlights included a wholly appropriate version of Janis Ian’s ‘Stars’ that was bittersweetly sung with a deft comic touch. A duo of Cole Porter’s followed with Ms. LuPone purposely making a mash of the tongue twisting lyrics for ‘Anything Goes’ and then reflecting on the AIDS crisis with ‘Every time We Say Goodbye’.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOlVLIuZ2Gw

She favored us with Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Time After Time’ and then gave Adele a run for her money with Bob Dylan’s ‘Make You Feel My Love.’ She closed the second half with more Dylan, ‘Forever Young’, before returning for the Lennon/McCartney ‘In My Life’ as an encore to put a lovely bow on the whole evening.

Scott Wittman directed with an eye to keeping things moving and never getting too sentimental. Her longtime associate Jeffrey Richman (of Frasier, Modern Family, and the recent Uncoupled fame) provided the witty between set banter which gave us all more than a few chuckles with her trademarked acerbic delivery. She also repeatedly and gratefully thanked the two musicians on stage, showing again and again how this was a true collaboration.

Words like ‘legendary’ and ‘iconic’ get thrown around with far too much ease of late and I am always reminded of what the great American actress Marian Seldes (who was one of Ms. LuPone’s teachers at Julliard) said about her years later in an interview:

“What I now realize is that Patti arrived with so great a talent that all we needed to do was to harness and husband it, to clean it up, so that she could share it. Anna Sokolow (another teacher) once joked that if Juilliard should catch fire, we should run to save Patti first, because everything else in that building could be easily replaced.”

It was a wonderful evening with one of our greatest singing actresses and it was a privilege to find her in such great form. Brava.

Photos: Douglas Friedman & Rahav Segev

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Put to pasture

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 10:00:54 +0000

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=31endWVIG3U

Born on this day in 1857 composer Ruggero Leoncavallo

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbdT6SbPY5s

Born on this day in 1928 performer and diplomat Shirley Temple

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L8aRx5oa1c

On this day in 1963 the Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick musical She Loves Me opened on Broadway (302 performances)

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjRhvf-w8TE

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Opera San José's Florencia en el Amazonas

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 19:37:25 +0000

* Notes * Daniel Catán's Florencia en el Amazonas (Act II pictured, photograph by David Allen) had a long overdue Bay Area premiere at Opera San José last weekend. The attractive new production features lots of strong singing. The music is reminiscent of Puccini, lots of shimmery swells of sound. The orchestra sounded robust under Maestro Joseph Marcheso. Likewise the singing was very powerful. Bass-baritone Vartan Gabrielian (Captain) has impressive low notes that resonate well. Baritone Ricardo José Rivera has a loud, booming voice, and he was suitably fey as Riolobo. Baritone Efraín Solís sounded very distinct from Rivera, his part as Alvaro is much more of this world, and his warm, textured sound was charming. He sang well with mezzo-soprano Guadalupe Paz, I like her part of Paula, as there are an interesting range of feelings that are explored with this role. Tenor César Delgado and soprano Aléxa Anderson are convincing as young lovers Arcadio and Rosalba. Delgado is plaintive and Anderson is bright. Soprano Elizabeth Caballero did a fine job with the title role of Florencia Grimaldi. She has a dramatic flair to her sound, her final aria "Escúchame" was effective. The set, designed by Liliana Duque-Piñeiro, has two pieces of scenery that suggest the river boat, basically some stairs with a deck and a paddlewheel. There are also a bunch of large cutout pieces hanging from the ceiling that are leaves and vines of the jungle, it is pretty, and the lighting pulls everything together. It wasn't always clear when the characters were on the boat or not, or when they were traveling on the river. Director Crystal Manich has the singers push the pieces of the set around to change the scenes, which went smoothly. I liked the butterfly imagery that was employed throughout the opera, there was a puppet, winged costumes, and blue butterfly confetti. * Tattling * The audience silent for the most part, I only noted a light crinkling of paper from the center of the orchestra level during Act II, but it was only for about a minute.

Opera Revue at Castro’s

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 13:11:51 +0000

I went to Opera Revue at Castro’s on Sunday afternoon. It’s the first time I’ve been to a regular Opera Revue show in a while because of geographic and scheduling constraints plus, of all their locations, I prefer Castro’s and they haven’t been there in a while.

It was good. There was the usual mix of opera, musical theatre, Weill and other stuff. Dani did those haiku songs. I can’t believe it’s been five years since I saw them last at Castro’s. The usual gang of Dani Friesen, Alex Hajek and Claire Elise-Harris were there plus mezzo Dorothea Unwin. Her first number was Schumann’s Widmung which was not only quite beautifully sung but also quite a gutsy choice for a first number at an opera-in-a-bar thing. There was a new TTC parody too. Three sets too, so quite a long afternoon. Fortunately Castro’s has good beer.

So, all in all, what one goes to these sorts of events for which got me thinking about opera in bars and why I haven’t been going so much. I think the gold standard was Against the Grain’s Opera Pub when it was at the Amsterdam Bicycle Club. It was the right size. Big enough to get a real crowd in but not too, too big and always jammed, so great atmosphere. As well as the usual suspects there were often people visiting town for COC shows either in the audience or sometimes even performing and it had a predictable regular time slot. The food was lousy and the beer so-so but it didn’t seem to matter. AtG moved first to the Tranzac, which was OK and then to The Drake. At that point it really stopped being “Opera Pub” and became “Opera in an Expensive Cocktail Bar” with about as much atmosphere as the surface of the moon. Not my thing.

At this point I find Opera Revue‘s shows much more fun but never quite manage to keep up with when and where they are and the venues vary a lot. Castro’s and the Emmet Ray work well. Others are a bit harder to get too or not very pubby. Maybe somebody could organise something at C’est What. I’d be up for that!

Yo soy Daniela

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 13:00:51 +0000

Mack’s stage career in the fifteen years or so since she graduated from the Merola program has steadily traversed the bread-and-butter mezzo repertoire through Rossini, though with a special focus on the music of Handel and a healthy dose of rarities. My most recent encounter with the singer was in Rossini’s Otello at Opera Philadelphia, where she did much to anchor what might have been merely a pleasing curiosity with an intense, dramatically grounded take on (the other) Desdemona.

She has only appeared at the Met in one production to date (debuting as the Kitchen Boy in Rusalka, though it looks like there was a Varvara in Ká?a Kabanová derailed by the pandemic), but that is set to change this month with the upcoming staging of John Adams’s El Niño. This, and her assumption last year of the title role in LA Opera’s Ultimo Sueno de Frida y Diego, are just two of examples of Mack’s attention to both new music and stories rooted in the Latin world (Mack was born in Buenos Aires). Thursday’s recital leaned heavily into these interests, with a world premiere song cycle by Rene Orth and a second half entirely devoted to Spanish-language songs.

Mack’s inviting core sound has a focused, slatey quality that can disarm with its solidity and presence, despite not being especially large. As heard this past week, it has highly a versatile foundation to meet the varied stylistic demands of the repertoire she pursues. A communicative performer on the recital stage as well, she embroiders each song with character details and interpretive choices that continually engage the listener.

The closest the program came to Mack’s stage work came in the opening selection of Rossini’s Giovanna d’Arco, a “solo cantata” from the composer’s Paris years. The ambitious fifteen-minute scena offered Mack a chance to display in miniature the dramatic variety she is capable of in the theater, as well as the corresponding vocal range: resonant low notes adding heft and color to the initial recitative section, a noble, dignified sound in the plaintive appeals to the character’s mother, and in the showpiece finale, an ability to integrate the fioritura material into lines with shape and direction.

The rest of the half was devoted to the world premiere At First, Now, Always. Orth, whose music for the new opera 10 Days in a Madhouse made a strong impression in Opera Philadelphia’s fall festival last year, here sets a sprawling text of nine songs by Jeanne Minahan on different aspects of motherhood. There was much to enjoy early on, the vocal line tugging at a poignant lyricism that stayed on the right side of saccharine, most winningly in the third song “After,” vulnerably read by Mack, her mezzo bright and precise. Later installments were less successful: the text, now addressing an adult child, became less abstract and felt like the final songs in a musical we hadn’t been watching, while a static quality crept into the vocal writing, winsome lines interrupted by sporadic vocal climaxes that seemed unmotivated by the text. The expressive and detailed piano writing was a highlight throughout, as skillfully realized by Lee.

Four songs of Astor Piazzolla (arranged by JP Jofre) kicked off the all-Spanish language second half, for which Mack and Lee were joined by the arranger on bandoneon (a relative of the accordion introduced in Argentina in the 19th century). After the piercing clarity of the Orth, Mack introduced a very different set of vocal colors here, a beguiling chocolatey sound for the opening “Vuelvo al Sur,” colorful spread vowel sounds, and a cutting swagger in the closing “Yo Soy Maria” from Piazzolla’s stage piece Maria de Buenos Aires. In a few instances the low range and less supported style resulted in Mack’s unamplified voice getting lost in the enhanced forces, but this was an enchanting set overall.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=vO7pn1zPSU4

Mack next gave a delicate reading of “Dulces Sueños,” a composition by Jofre, which served as a bridge to the next two selections by the famed early 20th century tango singer Carlos Gardel. Mack turned each of these popular songs into a riveting dramatic monologue, hushed and almost speaking at times, particularly in her bitter rendering of “Volver,” while Keun-A Lee deftly wove the tango elements in the piano part around Mack’s voice.

The home stretch featured the music of Spain, though “Spain” is probably more appropriate for the first selection: Rossini’s arch fantasia, “Canzonetta Spagnuola,” slyly delivered here. Federico García-Lorca’s impressionistic “La Tarara” showcased how secure and exciting Mack’s upper range could be at its most free, while Ruperto Chapi’s blistering “Carceleras” from his zarzuela Las hijas del Zebedeo featured breakneck diction and an ecstatic finish.

For the encores we first returned to “Spain” for a perfectly pleasant “Habanera” from Carmen, which Mack has performed onstage at Santa Fe among other locations. The real fire was reserved, however, for the second encore, in which Mack delivered a blistering rendition of “Malaguena” by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona.

Photos: Courtney Ruckman

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Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se’ sì grande

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 10:00:48 +0000

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaaQBJIpDxg

On this day in 1926 Wozzeck composed by Manfred Gurlitt premiered in Bremen (four months after Alban Berg‘s)

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lNOpWtAzII

Birthday anniversaries of playwright and novelist Henry Fielding (1707),
composer Juan Vert (1890),
contralto Kathleen Ferrier (1912),
and bass-baritone Franz Mazura (1924)

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Turandot

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 13:00:14 +0000

Olga Maslova, SeokJong Baek, Carlo Bosi, Simon Lim, and Valeria Sepe are conducted by Zubin Mehta in a live broadcast from Florence

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MetHD 2024/25

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 12:52:19 +0000

The Met HD in cinemas line up has been announced for 2024/25 so here’s my take on it. The first thing to notice is that there are only eight shows. There have been ten per season since 2012/13 and twelve before that. This is likely a reflection of the problems with audience numbers that all North American opera companies have been having. In the same time period the COC has cut back from 65-70 main stage performances per year to 42 and the Met’s “in house” audience problem has been well publicised. So what does that leave us with?

October 5th 2024: Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman. It’s a Bartlett Sher production which is a bit of a turn off, but an excellent cast with Benjamin Berheim as Hoffman and Erin Morley, Pretty Yende and Clémentine Margaine as the “ladies”. If you aren’t familiar with Ms. Margaine you are missing out. Christian Van Horn plays the villains.

October 19th 2024: Jeanine Tesori’s Grounded about a female fighter pilot turned drone operator. I am unfamiliar with Tesori’s music but much more familiar with the excellent Emily D’Angelo who plays the pilot in her first big Met role. The production is by Michael Mayer so it’s going to be projections and LED screens which does rather fit the subject matter. Probably the most interesting show in the line up.

November 23rd 2024 Puccini’s Tosca. It’s the McVicar production which is OK. First time around they toned it down a bit for the cinema. No idea if they will do that again or not. The attraction is the cast; especially Lise Davidsen as Tosca and Quinn Kelsey as Scarpia.

January 25th 2025: Verdi’s Aida. I’s new production by Michael Mayer but it sounds like teched up Zeffirelli. It’s still “spectacular” mythical Ancient Egypt. Might be worth it for Angel Blue in the title role and Yannick’s conducting.

March 15th 2025: Beethoven’s Fidelio. It’s not my favourite opera but it’s Jürgen Flimm’s production with a contemporary setting and it has Lise Davidsen as Leonora. The rest of the cast looks pretty good too.

April 26th. 2025: Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. It’s the rather traditional Richard Eyre production with an OK cast. Personally I wouldn’t go to the cinema to see Nozze which I’ve seen more times than I can count (or countess) unless the cast was remarkable but YMMV.

May 17th 2025: Strauss’ Salome in a new Claus Guth production. Elza van der Heever plays Salome and the rest of the cast is OK but I don’t see anything to get excited about. Yannick conducting Strauss is a plus though.

May 31st 2025: Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. It’s another Bartlett Sher production with an OK but unexciting cast. It’s the sort of show that brings in the tourists to the house on a quiet Wednesday but seems a bit lacking for an HD.

So, one brand new opera and two other new productions. Of the five revivals, three: Hoffman, Fidelio and Tosca at least have good looking casts. The other two revivals; shows that are done too often and here with routine casts, look pretty lack lustre. Probably an attempt to tempt the unadventurous. How excited am I? Not very, except for Grounded.

And thanks to Steve Feiertag for reminding to do this!

ETA: A further thought on declining numbers. It strikes me that the Met does precious little to promote the HD product; at least to what I would think is their target market… the people who go to live opera and theatre. Now I get positively inundated by email from opera companies and theatre companies and concert promoters large and small (in my own area of course). I get offered tickets for more shows than I can fit in my calendar. I hear next to nothing from the Met or Cineplex about the HD product so there’s nothing to pass on. They don’t seem to comp reviewers either. It’s not like the cinema screenings are ruinously expensive but when one’s calendar is full of free stuff who is going to pay for something unless it is extraordinary? So no reviews.

I suspect they leave “local” promotion to the cinemas but their publicity isn’t aimed at the people who might go to Met shows. What’s the point of a trailer for a Met HD broadcast before the latest Marvel franchise flick? Curious to know if there is intelligent promotion of this product elsewhere.

Sovvertitor di cuori

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 10:00:20 +0000

Born on this day in 1911 baritone Leonard Warren

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La Rondine in HD – 2024

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 22:53:37 +0000

Today’s HD telecast of Puccini’s afternoon off – La Rondine – was a repeat of the production of 2009 but with a different cast. The composer’s attempt to write an Italian opera vaguely in the style of a Viennese operetta contains a lot of beautiful music in the service of a work that’s not close to the masterpieces of his maturity. He also repeats tunes at a greater than usual frequency – to be sure, they’re good tunes but a little more invention would have made the work stronger. The ’09 telecast was marred by a technical glitch that wiped out the second half of Act 2 and the intermission. Today, management warned us that the local bad weather might cause technical problems proved wrong. There was not a hitch in transmission.

For La Rondine to work onstage there must be a fine singing actress as Magda – aka The Swallow. Angel Blue managed the first part with fine singing except for an occasional strained note. The acting part was essentially ignored. She has gained so much weight in recent years that just moving around the stage is the best she can do. Verisimilitude is no longer part of her armamentarium, not that verisimilitude is a regular visitor to the operatic stage.

Tenor Jonathan Tetelman made his Met debut this year as Ruggero the country bumpkin who falls in love with the wrong woman. He started as a baritone and later transitioned to tenor. He has been singing lyric roles such as Rodolfo in La Bohème, but I think he’s really a spinto and should move to heavier roles which apparently he’s doing. His voice seems not fully formed and sometimes quivers a bit. In what is a lyric part he did a lot of fortissimo singing or yelling. His basic sound when under full control is impressive. A plus, he looked great – tall, dark, and handsome. General manager Peter Gelb announced before the show that Tetelman was affected by season allergies, but would soldier on regardless. I’ve already stated many times that singers should not perform if they can’t give their best and that such announcements begging for pre-performance forgiveness are infra dig.

Tenor Bekhzod Davronov gave the best performance of the afternoon as the poet Prunier. He has a fine lyric voice and has been singing leading roles in many houses. He’ll be Alfredo in Santa Fe Opera’s staging of La Traviata this summer. His acting was the best of the cast. The Met should bring him back for bigger roles.

Soprano Emily Pogorelc was the maid Yvette. Vocally she was fine. She portrayed the maid having an affair with Prunier as a flibbertigibbet, a persona she carried through to the intermission interview during which she barely allowed Davronov a word regardless of the question asked. He did manage to say hello to his native Uzbekistan.

Bass-baritone Alfred Walker was very impressive as Rambaldo the man who was keeping Magda before she ran away with Ruggerro. In this production, he took her back when she decided marriage to a rube was not for her. The Met should give him bigger roles. His sound and stage presence are outstanding.

Conductor Speranza Scappucci made her Met debut in this production. The Rome native was the first female conductor at La Scala. She recently has been named the principal guest conductor at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. She led today’s performance with control and polish.

The Met’s art deco sets are still as excellent as 15 years ago. Perhaps even more so given the scenic atrocities that have littered its stage over the last decade and a half. If you are a Puccini fan, and if not you should be, and missed the broadcast catching the repeat next week is worthwhile.

The Met’s program for this performance is below the cast as a pdf.

La-Rondine-Met-2024-program Download

Barbara Hannigan – Messiaen

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 15:25:32 +0000

Barbara Hannigan’s latest recording project is a CD of Messiaen’s vocal music with pianist Bertrand Chamayou. It’s very much an equal pasrtnership with spme superb musicianship on display. It starts off with two cycles written for/inspired by Messiaen’s first wife. Chants de Terre et de Ciel celebrates the marriage and the birth of their young son. There’s some very dramatic singing here but what really stood out for me was Hannigan’s ability to float a note with perfect control and apparent ease. It works beautifully with the more delicate parts of the piano part.

The second set is the rather better known Poèmes pour MI. These are rather more lyrical and less dramatic songs (and heavily infused with Messiaen’s particular brand of Catholic mysticism) which really allows Hannigan and Chamayou to create a sort of “liquid” sound. Music and text flows in a really smooth way. Most of the time anyway. Where it makes dramatic sense the mood can be and is altered. In “Épouvante”, for example, an almost anguished vocalise is followed by a drop into something almost speechlike. It’s jarring but effective and feels right.

The final track is the nine minute “scena” La mort du nombre. It’s a dialogue between a “suffering soul”, sung here by tenor Charles Sy, and a more consolatory soul sung by Hannigan. For me there’s more than a touch of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy here! Sy has just the right amount of dramatic intensity and contrasts with the second soul’s more measured music. It’s been a while since I heard Charles sing and he’s sounding really good here. Violin (Vilde Frang) joins the piano for the instrumental component and adds an extra texture that ranges from meditative to ecstatic. This is Messiaen at his most distinctive rather like the Quartet for the End of Time. It’s a great addition to the record.

The recording was made at Muziekcentrum van de Omroep in 2021 and 2022 and it’s superb. I listened to hi-resolution digital (48kHz/24bit) and it’s really detailed. You can here the sound of this piano; not just any piano! The voices are also captured superbly. The booklet contains texts and bios and a very insightful essay by Hannigan on how and why this project came to be.

The album is due for release on May 24th as a physical CD and digitally in MP3 and CD quality and 96kHz/24 bit FLAC. It’s definitely worth going for the hi-res here.

Catalogue information: Alpha Records ALPHA 1033

La Rondine

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 13:00:24 +0000

Speranza Scappucci conducts Angel Blue, Jonathan Tetelman, Emily Pogorelc, and Dekhzod Davronov in a broadcast from New York

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Ein Laut so klagevoll

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 10:00:09 +0000

On this day in 1967 soprano Elisabeth Grummer made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Elsa

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Woking Phoenix

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 17:50:59 +0000

Woking Phoenix is a play developed and performed by Silk Bath Collective. It opened at Theatre Passe Muraille on Thursday night. It deals with that perennial Canadian issue; the immigrant experience. In this case it’s essentially a single Chinese mother with three children running a Chinese restaurant in small town Ontario. So one has the usual dynamics of kids growing up coupled with being “different” in a very homogenous community. It’s a co-creation of Aaron Jan and Gloria Mok , who also co-directed, and Besse Cheng who appears in the play as the elder daughter.

As theatre it feels a bit rough around the edges though it has some interesting and effective elements and some good acting. It’s at its best when it blends drama and some highly kinetic choreography (created by the Hanna Kiel with the cast). A good example of this is that the (gay) elder daughter’s retreat to the internet is shown by excerpts from video games acted out by other characters. There might be a bit too much of it but it is an effective device.

Less effective is the characterisation of the son as the stereotypical kid who thinks he’s going to be a rock star and so doesn’t need to do anything else in life but mope, play his guitar badly and sing awful songs. This makes sense dramatically but it gets tedious very quickly. It’s one of a number of places in the show where some cuts would have helped.

The younger daughter is the ever optimistic dutiful one who is working her socks off to make the restaurant work plus various side hustles. It’s kind of cute and it does add an edge when the mother’s death causes her to realise that they have never been and will never be fully accepted in that particular community, although to be honest that’s been painfully obvious for some time by that point. There’s an interesting twist in that the two older kids both leave for Toronto (where else) but return. The son has failed spectacularly as a musician. The daughter has succeeded as an overtly gay artist but still feels the need to return. It’s food for thought.

All of this plays out mostly in the family restaurant. Phoebe Hu, playing Ma, does a great job of portraying the increasing strain of raising a family while running a less than spectacularly successful business. There’s also a running joke about her learning English phrases from an increasingly temperamental boom box. She also doubles very effectively as a video game character in Charlie’s on-line activity.

In this she’s joined by Richard Lam playing Vince. They work very well together and I imagine if one knew more about RPGs than I do it would be even funnier. The rest of the time Lam plays the thoroughly irritating Vince only too well. His “band” is something to do with wolves and I can only take so much howling to badly played guitar. “Cringe humour” can be funny but only up to a point.

Bessie Cheng’s Charlie is quietly effective. She’s the artistic outsider; at odds with her mother and her contemporaries. She finds herself when she goes to Toronto. The mystery is why she comes back. And we might ask why Iris, the character played by Madelaine Hodges, stays but she does and Hodges gives perhaps the most nuanced performance of the night. There’s something very touching about her irrepressible (until the very end) optimism and she’s a great mover in a piece where movement plays a key role.

Overall Woking Phoenix feels like a sincere expression of some important aspects of the immigrant experience and it is very funny much of the time. That said, it also feels like a collective piece where some ideas got hung onto when they might have benefited from compression or excision. There’s probably a really good ninety minute play inside this two hour one.

Woking Phoenix continues at Theatre Passe Muraille until April 27th.

Photo credits: Jae Yang

LSO Performs Mahler’s Symphony #2

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 15:36:32 +0000

Mahler’s Second Symphony, The Resurrection Symphony, is one of the great works of Western Art. Titanic in its scale and overwhelming in its inspiration the demands it makes on a symphony orchestra are beyond formidable. Its stature is unsurpassed in the orchestral literature. Last night the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra performed the work in the First United Methodist Church. The venue change was necessary because the Buddy Holly Hall did not have the funds to add an organ to its main auditorium. The symphony’s finale requires an organ.

The LSO was joined by soloists Elena Villaló, Claudia Chapa, and the FUMC Chancel Choir. The performance was a triumph. The LSO met all the formidable demands of the work with superb playing. The fourth movement (Urlicht) is from Mahler’s song cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Ms Chapa sang it withrerstrained ease. The fifth movement, the longest of the five, is divided into two halves. The first is for orchestra alone. It introduces the resurrection theme which the chorus will later sing. In addition to the chorus, the second half uses two soloists – soprano and mezzo-soprano. The first eight lines of the text are from Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s ‘Die Auferstehung’ the remainder are by Mahler himself.

Conductor David Cho’s mastery of large forces, an understatement for the army of performers required by the symphony, was complete. Over the more than a dozen years he has conducted the LSO he has grown into a master of his craft. He had the score in front of him but rarely looked at it observing Pierre Monteux’s direction that “The score should be in the conductor’s head, not the conductor’s head in the score.” His conception of the gigantic work was incisive and revelatory. No conductor could have done Mahler’s great work better. Under his direction, the LSO has evolved into an ensemble equal to those found in cities many times the size of Lubbock.

The auditorium’s acoustics are not ideal for this symphony. There was too much reverberation and some of the sounds were muddy. It’s a pity that the Buddy Holly Hall with its magnificent acoustics could not be employed. It’s impossible to single out any of the players or singers as they all performed at the highest level.

The symphony will be performed again this evening. Due to the great demands it makes it’s not often that an audience gets to to hear this monumental work. When it’s performed at the high level it was last night it should not be missed. In summary, a dazzling performance of one of music’s greatest works

Counter culture

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 13:00:37 +0000

Personally, I find there to be no better way to get to know an artist than attending his or her recitals in an intimate setting. Not only the audience gets a full display of the artist’s talents up close, but the audience also discovers the non-musical aspects of the artist, from the preparedness and inspiration, background stories, all the way to how the artist presents his or her art. In a way, it’s always harder for me to criticize a recital because it’s oh so personal, tailored specifically by and/or for the artist.

I, however, had no such problems reviewing the extraordinary Polish countertenor Jakub Józef Orlinski’s recital with the esteemed Baroque period-instrument ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro on lase weekend at Bing Concert Hall in Stanford. Dubbed Beyond, the concert was the third of the 6-cities 2024 North America Tour with Il Pomo d’Oro in support of his October 2023-released album of the same name. Bay Area was lucky to receive two legs of this amazing concert, as it was also presented at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley five days prior (with a seminar and concert at SF Conservatory of Music in between).

Writing in the program notes for Cal Performances, Orlinski mentioned that:

“Beyond features music by Monteverdi, Caccini, Frescobaldi, Cavalli, Netti, Sartorio, Moratelli, and other early Baroque composers. In it, I delve into the meaning of the word “beyond,” particularly in the sense that this music resonates beyond its own time. It is still relevant, still alive, vibrant, touching, engaging, and entertaining.

Together with Il Pomo d’Oro and its acclaimed musicians, I’m taking you on a journey of discovery “beyond” the limits of a classical concert or musical concept. I’m helped in my endeavour by my dear friend Yannis François, whose period research dug up some extraordinary pieces, many of which—like some on my previous solo albums—became world premiere recordings.”

Furthermore, in the Beyond CD booklet (that Stanford Live included as part of its digital program), Yannis Françoiswrote the following:

“The idea of developing a programme for Jakub’s voice based around the Seicento (the 17th century in music) had been gestating in my mind for quite some time, given the particular expressiveness of his musicality in this repertoire. So vast are the possibilities afforded by this era that compiling the album, making the right choices, felt a daunting task: from operas to cantatas, serenades to canzoni for solo voice, the prospects seemed endless. I chose then not to choose, taking instead just one example from each of these forms, thus offering the listener an aural glimpse of the riches of this century.

Each programme I’ve constructed for Jakub has featured a core composer, a guiding light whose music inspires me through the development of the recital or brings that missing atmosphere to its overall balance. […] Here, for Beyond, our most represented figure is Giovanni Cesare Netti (1649–1686). It was only by chance that I discovered his manuscripts in the course of my research, and I was struck by the beauty of his compositions. The variety that inhabits his scenes is unbelievable; a single scene may feature a character producing recitatives and arias of totally different textures and colours. This is certainly the case here in Berillo’s scene from Netti’s opera La Filli (La moglie del fratello) (1682).”

The Sunday recital, 75-minutes long without intermission, essentially mirrored the programming for the CD above, as it showcased most of the arias and smaller number of instrumental pieces from the set in the same order, except for Biagio Marini’s instrumental “Passacalio” from Per ogni sorte di strumento musicale, Op. 22, No. 25.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jxhJS9Vn0s

I had the opportunity to review Orlinski a few times on these pages a few times before – from his title role debut in George Frideric Handel’s Tolomeo at 2020 Karlsruhe Handel Festival to the spellbinding turn as Orpheus in San Francisco Opera’s production two years ago – and he seemed to have gone from strength to strength each time I encountered him. True to his words, Beyond expanded the limits of a classical recital as it explored all Orlinski’s considerable talents and wrapped them in a single coherent presentation that I hadn’t been expecting when I stepped into the auditorium.

The show was basically a staged recital, complete with costumes and lighting (pity there wasn’t any lighting designer/coordinator mentioned, because it wasa pretty significant effort). It started in complete darkness, then the members of il Pomo d’Oro dressed in all black one by one entered the stage to stand behind their respective instruments, almost cult-like. Orlinski entered last, donning a long black rope adorned with gold trimmings (he wore a cream-colored suit with black undershirt underneath), and the stage was lighted up. From there the performance was launched into without a break or even a single spoken word (naturally, no score or stand for Orlinski in sight, either)!

Just the like CD, the show began with Ottone’s entrance aria “E pur io torno qui” – “one of the Seicento’s most famous scores for alto voice” according to the program – from Act 1 of Claudio Monteverdi’s last opera L’incoronazione di Poppea. The aria, with its ever-changing moods (from amorous to anger to resignation), was a perfect vehicle to give the audience a taste of things to come. Aided handsomely by the 10 members of il Pomo d’Oro, right from the start, Orlinski fully embodied the lovelorn Ottone with his voice and his mannerisms, his voice sounded warm and round. Even more noticeable than before was his dynamic phrasing and the colorful nuances of his voice, important aspects for dramatic aria like this. Canzone “Voglio di vita uscir” was appended to this scene to round off the journey of emotions, the feeling of despair and death.

The first instrumental portion came from the aforementioned Marini’s “Passacalio” played beautifully by il Pomo d’Oro. In this concert, il Pomo d’Oro weren’t only an accompanying ensemble, but importantly, they also provided a much-needed structure for the performance and contributed significantly to its success. It was truly exhilarating to see the camaraderie of each member of the group; with winks and smiles they acknowledged and supported each other and they found joy in performing the pieces, no matter how many times they performed together. During the piece (and most of the other instrumental pieces) Orlinski retreated to the back, allowing il Pomo d’Oro to get full spotlight treatment.

Two other lost-love arias followed, Giulio Caccini’s “Amarilli, mia bella” from Le nuove musiche (1602) and Girolamo Frescobaldi’s “Così mi disprezzate” from Arie musicali, Book I (1630) – the latter nicely demonstrated Orlinski’s considerable coloratura skill and breath control – before il Pomo d’Oro began a piece by Frescobaldi’s student, Johann Caspar Kerll’s Sonata for Two Violins in F major, which highlighted Alfia Bakieva and Jonathan Ponet’s expertise.

Orlinski pulled different tricks for the next few pieces. For L’amante consolato from Barbara Strozzi – the first professionally recognized female composer, according to the program – he took a portable LED light with him, walked up and down to the Terrace levels of Bing Concert Hall, and sang there, giving the recital an immersive feel. He then slipped back into the black robe and in dignified manner portrayed Pompeo as he attacked Francesco Cavalli’s “Incomprensibil nume” from his 1666 opera, Pompeo Magno. The breakdancing Orlinski made an appearance during the lengthy Sinfonia from Carlo Pallavicino’s first opera, Demetrio.

The show reached its apex with the first appearance of Beyond’s core composer, Giovanni Cesare Netti, the aforementioned Berillo’s scene from Act 2 of Netti’s second opera La Filli. Similar to Ottone’s entrance aria in the beginning, this mesmerizing scene was marked with a full range of emotions, from anger to acceptance. Here Orlinski trimmed down the antics and earnestly performed the scene with searing intensity both in his voice and his acting, drawing the audience deep into his interpretation. After such an emotional draining moment, guitarist Miguel Rincon began the next piece, Antonio Sartorio’s “La certezza di tua fede” from his 1677 opera Antonino e Pompeiano, with a guitar solo to lighten up the mood, before the whole ensemble and Orlinski joined in to sing about the constancy of love.

Once again, the concert took a different path for the final three songs, starting with Orlinski exploring his comedic timing as the cross-dressing nursemaid Crinalba in Netti’s 1681 opera L’Adamiro. With the black robe wrapped around his waist as his skirt and a black head veil, he contorted his body to resemble a frail old woman, even demanding one of the instrumentalists to bring him a chair! Vocally, he sang the first of Crinalba’s aria “Quanto più la donna invecchia” in an exaggerated accent and broken phrasings, which drew big laughs from the audience. “Son vecchia, patienza,” on the other hand, was done with elevated weariness and resignation. After a brief instrumental piece from 17^th Century Polish composer Adam Jarz?bski (his Tamburetta from Canzoni e concerti), the recital was concluded with Sebastiano Moratelli’s “Lungi dai nostri cor” from his serenata La Faretra smarrita, done in a solemn meditative way, before Orlinski turned off the portable light and left the stage in complete darkness.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=7foYOwOHKiQ

On that day, the audience truly appreciated Orlinski and il Pomo d’Oro’s efforts and showered the artists with thunderous and extended applause. He seemed to be very moved by the reception, so much so that he presented three encores, all of which came from his 2019 album Facce d’amore, also with il Pomo d’Oro. The first was “Chi scherza con Amor” from Giovanni Antonio Boretti’s opera Eliogabalo, followed by his calling card, “Lucidissima face” from Francesco Cavalli’s La Calisto, where he challenged the audience to mimic his coloratura with growing difficulties. The final, and lengthiest, was “Che m’ami ti prega” from Giuseppe Maria Orlandini and Johann Mattheson’s Nerone, during which he inserted a couple “breaks” to show off his vocal ranges to the audience’s delight.

This recital was truly a remarkable achievement for both Orlinski and the members of il Pomo d’Oro, a collaborative effort that was marked by high levels of showmanship, respect, and dedication to the lost art. It was truly one of a kind! I really wish I could have experienced it once again! There are only 2 shows left in the series, April 20^th in Peace Center, Greenville, SC and April 21^st at the University of Georgia, Athens, GA. Trust me, you’ll be sorry to miss this spectacle!

Photos: Marek Grotowski (from Wroclaw)

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Blow high

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 10:00:40 +0000

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnb3m90nl-E

On this day in 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein‘s Carousel opened on Broadway

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=MP7oatLydC0

On this day in 1774 Christoph Wilibald von Gluck‘s Iphigenia in Aulis premiered in Paris

Birthday anniversaries of composer Germaine Tailleferre (1892),
tenors Walter Widdop (1892) and Kenneth Riegel (1938),
conductor Joseph Keilberth (1908),
and mezzo-soprano Hertha Topper (1924)

Happy 88th birthday conductor Bernhard Klee
Happy 58th birthday soprano Veronique Gens
Happy 57th birthday soprano Barbara Frittoli

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Walt vs. the lemmings

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 13:52:57 +0000

A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney by Lucas Hnath opened last night at the Young Centre in a production by Outside the March and Soulpepper. It’s one of those pieces that is perhaps easier to admire than enjoy. Technically, everything about it is excellent but sitting through ninety minutes of egotistical bullying is not a whole lot of fun.

It’s very tightly written in the form of a screenplay about himself that Walt directs on stage. So we get a lot of $dialogue, “camera closes on Roy”, Cut! which makes for a kind of staccato, unsettling mood. That’s reinforced by the subject matter. Walt knows he is ill and when he starts coughing up blood between cigarettes it’s fairly obvious what’s happening. But Walt is one of those people who have to control everything and always get their way otherwise the world will go to Hell. Making successful mouse movies has convinced him that he’s a genius polymath with the answer to all the world’s problems and woe betide anyone who stands in his way. He’s manipulative and a bully and he uses then discards people.

We see this in the episode of the lemmings. He has branched out into nature documentaries but the lemmings refuse to jump and it’s costing time and money. As it happens lemmings don’t commit mass suicide but someone once showed Walt a drawing of them doing so, so it must be true. A means of projecting lemmings over the cliff is found. This sounds trivial but (a) it comes back to haunt the Disney corporation and (b) it’s the funniest scene in the play.

Walt’s foil, at least initially, is his brother Roy. Roy actually runs Disney and makes the corporation work while shielding Walt from a reality he can’t really deal with but Walt just sees him as a fairly useless factotum and bullies him mercilessly. Roy knows that Walt is the Disney brand so he tolerates it right up to the point it becomes intolerable. At which point Walt discards him and “adopts” his ex football player son-in-law Ron as his designated fixer.

Walt is also obsessed with immortality. After all, if he dies how will the World carry on? He wants one of his grandchildren named after him despite the fact that his daughter can’t stand him. And he wants his head to be cryogenically preserved until the technology is developed that can bring him back to (eternal) life. The final scene has Walt directing/describing his own freezing and decapitation. “The saw cuts through the spine” in deadpan narration.

It’s all really rather horrible but it’s brilliantly executed. Hnath’s writing is tight and razor sharp and he knows how to do quiet horror. (He also wrote Dana H). Walt is played brilliantly by Diego Matamoros. He’s on stage for the whole ninety minutes and is quite mesmerizing. Anand Rajaram, as the long suffering Roy, is also quite excellent. They are backed up by Tony Ofori as the rather gormless Ron and Katherine Cullen as his traumatised daughter. The latter makes the most of a fairly small part which serves to show just how destructive Walt is. His daughter can’t even hear his name without panicking.

Which beloved American opera company is urging patrons to keep the faith by hiring a controversial artist as its next General Director?

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Groundbreakers

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 10:00:40 +0000

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uhL_56jSRw

Happy 76th birthday soprano Catherine Malfitano

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DlPwXxS6Mk

Birthday anniversaries of composer Franz von Suppé (1819),
conductors Leopold Stokowski (1882) and Zdenek Chalabala (1899),
and sopranos Sylvia Fisher (1910) and Nadezda Kniplova (1932)

Happy 78th birthday tenor Robin Leggate

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Project Earth: The Blue Chapter

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 16:49:31 +0000

Project Earth: The Blue Chapter is the first in a projected series of CDs from the Iris Trio (Christine Carter – clarinet, Anna Petrovna – piano, Zoë Martin-Doike – viola) dealing with environmental issues. This one blends music by Florian Hoefner with poems by Don McKay. The longest piece on the CD is the multi-movement Bird Island Suite inspired by the bird life of nesting islands around Newfoundland but really dealing with broader issues of how we interact with and influence the natural world for good or ill. Usually the latter.

It starts with a poem and smooth jazz inflected number called “Audience”; which is about the experience of listening. It then takes us to sea cliffs in “Bird Island Cacophonic Choir” where it explores how we interpret a complex soundscape in words and a kind of jazz/minimalist fusion before taking us on a bird by bird tour of seabirds living, threatened and extinct; leach’s stormy petrel, the great auk, the northern penguin. The poems are complex and evocative with disturbing images; an albatross choking on a plastic toothbrush, and sometimes slip into Newfoundland dialect. The music is by turns busy/chattery and lyrical with some extended technique to express the more chaotic end of the bird spectrum. The minimalism and the jazz elements are still very much there and there are hints of Messiaen. I guess there were bound to be! I found it really interesting and quite moving.

It’s followed by Chorus of Wishes; a two part work again blending poetry and music around the theme of “hope for a surviving, thriving natural world”. The minimalism; suggestive of Reich and Glass, is very much to the fore here. Finally there is the four part Kinds of Blue celebrating the blue in nature from the pesky, chattery Blue Jay to the gentler shades of the Iris to the mellowness of ripe berries. Musically it’s by turns almost an elegy and something much more driven and busy. And, of course, the influence of the Blues is felt here.

This is a fun album. The poems are witty and moving and very well read by the poet. The music is of a piece with them and it’s played with great skill. Clearly the Iris Trio play together a lot as the teamwork is palpable. The recording is quite vivid (I listened to hi-res digital) and it’s available as a Physical CD or digitally as MP3 or CD quality and 96kHz/24 bit FLAC. There’s no digital booklet but there is useful descriptive material on the Centrediscs website.

ETA: There is a digital booklet and it’s very informative and contains all McKay’s poems. Currently it’s not showing as being available at distributors. Hopefully, by the time you read this that will have been addressed.

Catalogue information: Centrediscs CMCCD33924

Grigorian chant

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 13:00:17 +0000

Is Asmik Grigorian’s Cio-Cio-San the most highly anticipated Met debut this season? Her first performance on April 26^th is not scheduled for a free stream, but the second on April 30^th is.

In advance of her debut, Chris’s Cache showcases Grigorian’s versatility with broadcasts of the Lithuanian soprano in Halévy’s La Juive, Giordano’s Fedora and Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt.

Grigorian turns 43 the day after her Met Madama Butterfly HD, so she’s been performing for a good while now, but her rise to prominence began fewer than ten years ago. One might argue that her 2015 partnership with Dmitri Hvorostovsky in Rubinstein’s Demon first brought her a good deal of international attention, but the year before she’d starred in Tchaikovsky’s The Enchantress at the Theater an der Wien.

One can already see the star quality in her 2009 Mrs. Lovett in a Vilnius Sweeney Todd.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA3CSZqwcxg

No Met for Grigorian next season, but she’ll appear in recital at Zankel Hall in an all-Russian program similar to last summer’s at the Aix-en-Provence Festival.

She then moves into Carnegie’s main hall for a most unusual concert with the Cleveland Orchestra in which she performs Strauss’s Vier Letzte Lieder followed by the finale of Puccini’s Suor Angelica.

Andrea Caré, her Fedora Loris, posted a pirate video of a section of an orchestra rehearsal of today’s Giordano performance.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqZA7N8YGwk

One can see what a mesmerizing performer Grigorian is as I discovered for myself last fall in Hamburg.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWkTKPJlj9M

Halévy: La Juive

Rachel: Asmik Grigorian
La Princesse Eudoxie: Nicole Chevalier
Eléazar: Roberto Saccà
Léopold: Randall Bills
Le Cardinal de Brogni: Dmytri Ulyanov

Conductor: Tomás Netopil
Vlaamse Opera, Antwerp
14 April 2015
Broadcast

Giordano: Fedora

Fedora Romazov: Asmik Grigorian
Olga Sukarev: Sofie Asplund
Loris Ipanov: Andrea Caré
De Siriex: Ola Eliasson
Boleslao Lazinski: Martin Virin
Conductor: Tobias Ringborg

Swedish Royal Opera
10 December 2016
Broadcast

Korngold: Die Tote Stadt

Marietta: Asmik Grigorian
Brigitta: Cristina Damian
Paul: Klaus Florian Vogt
Frank / Fritz: Markus Werba

Conductor: Alan Gilbert
La Scala
28 May 2019
Broadcast

Each Grigorian performance can be downloaded by clicking on the icon of a cloud with an arrow pointing downward on the audio player above and the resulting mp3 file will appear in your download directory.

Never miss an episode of Chris’s Cache! Subscribe to this podcast via Apple Podcasts or RSS.

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Meine ganze Jugend dafür gehabt

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 10:00:33 +0000

Happy 84th birthday soprano/mezzo-soprano Anja Silja

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Pulling some strings

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 13:00:12 +0000

LA Opera’s Off Grand project has been exploring non-standard approaches to music and drama in a range of venues around Los Angeles since 1986. Yours truly, who has been steeped like cold brew coffee in mostly traditional operatic repertory for decades, has always been reluctant to accept invitations to these performances (c’mon, I do love some Stravinsky). First off, my imposter syndrome goes full-tilt when presented with a work I’ve never heard before that’s new and unrecorded. Now that I have a few world premieres under my belt, I’m only slightly hesitant.

But when my press invite came for the Book of Mountains and Seas, the collaboration between Chinese born contemporary composer Huang Ruo, the vocal ensemble Ars Nova Copenhagen, and master puppeteer and production designer Basil Twist, I was in.

I was ruined at a very tender age by the Robert Wise, Todd-AO, 70mm spectacular, The Sound of Music. I believe it was the second film I was ever taken to and it left such a deep impression on me that, as the story goes, I refused to leave the theater when it was over. First of all, Julie Andrews; that voice. Then the coup de grace was the Bill Baird Marionettes in “The Little Goatherd” number. By the time I was 10 years old I had a full marionette theater with the entire cast of “Hansel & Gretel.” A show which I would regularly perform to the Walt Disney record of excerpts from the Humperdinck opera with Marni Nixon as Gretel. Jim Henson (especially the work he did outside of the Muppets with designer Brian Froud) and Julie Taymor are particular favorites. All these seeds were planted early and well.

So I found my way to the Broad Stage in my Santa Monica neighborhood and tucked in to be dazzled.

The Book of Mountains and Seas is based on a series of Chinese myths that were first transcribed in the 4th Century B.C. Here there are four scenes presented: The Legend of Pangu (which tells the story of the creation of the Earth), The Spirit Bird (the story of a drowned princess fighting back at the sea in her bird spirit to avenge her death), The Legend of the Ten Suns (telling how we came to have only one sun and why it hides during the night), and finally Ku? Fù Chasing the Sun (the tale of a giant who runs to capture the sun and finally dies from exhaustion bringing renewal to the earth).

As with many Chinese stories, there was a deeply embedded message in these tales about yin and yang balance. How situations that first appear as one thing gradually take on a completely, and often opposite, meaning. Mr. Twist’s imagery was strong and he used, at first glance, relatively simple means to achieve it. Pieces of driftwood to signify the creator Pangu, large scale silks representing water and the sea, lanterns as the suns, and finally utilizing the driftwood again to assemble the giant Ku? Fù, a puppet that took at least five people to operate and stood well over 12-feet tall. The real magic was how he managed to mask what must be the enormous complexity of these effects for the audience.

Mr. Ruo’s music was solely percussion and required two musicians, Erica Hou and Yiri Inoo, fully kitted out with all manner of timpani. I heard all nature of gongs and drums and even glass harmonica on a few occasions. The score did have a mesmerizing effect to go along with the many arresting visual images telling the stories (though I could tell the person sitting next to me was enduring a hostage crisis most of the evening).

https://

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOQTQEQKJQE

The twelve members of the Ars Nova Copenhagen vocal ensemble performed in Chinese and also in a language the Mr. Ruo created specifically for the piece. Even though they specialize in polyphonic music, the score is particularly demanding when it comes to pitches (since percussion is their only guide) and rhythms. Since they were all robed in what appeared to be black velour or velvet so as not to reflect any light on the mostly dark stage, they should be doubly applauded for their efforts.

The lighting plot of Poe Saegusa worked almost constant miracles in concert with Mr. Twist’s set design: a dark circle inhabiting the back of the stage in front of a slightly less dark background. By sheer coincidence, it resembled a total eclipse. It enabled the puppeteers to enter and exit through the center or around the sides of the circle as if by magic.

The Legend of the Ten Suns was easily my favorite of the four as each of the rice paper lanterns appeared almost as if from nowhere and then very ritualistically, and slowly, began to interact with each other. As the music progressed, the lights inside the lanterns changed colors in sequence as they imperceptibly moved past the proscenium and into the theater to hang out over into the audience, finally withdrawing one by one at the end of the piece.

The puppet portraying Ku? Fù was assembled directly in front of the audience and its size and ease of movement, as it took running positions, was pretty extraordinary. His death brought about a symbol of rebirth and then a final solemn end.

My one quibble was that the text projected onto the disc in the rear wasn’t occasionally not bright enough to read in order to preserve the darkness necessary for the various puppetry effects.

After the performance, Creative Producer Beth Morrison, who has developed many of the LA Opera Off Grand presentations through her Beth Morrison Projects, invited both Mr. Ruo and Mr. Twist onstage for a very illuminating discussion about the creation of the project and they took questions from the audience as well. On the whole, it was a stunning performance of musical and theatrical wizardry.

Photos: Steven Pisano

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Every little thing she does is magic

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 10:00:01 +0000

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLrymlRE5QQ

Handel‘s Alcina (London, 1735)…

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuXWKq3_B7o

…Meyerbeer‘s Le prophète (Paris, 1849)…

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=vic7jA1iYgo

…and Gounod‘s Sapho (Paris, 1851)

Happy 82nd birthday baritone Leo Nucci

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArBfU4gRDaY

Birthday anniversaries of playwright John Millington Synge (1871),
mezzo-soprano Constance Shacklock (1913)
contralto Carol Brice (1918)
and soprano Marie Collier (1927)

Happy 80th birthday conductor Dennis Russell Davies

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Aprile Millo

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 17:17:56 +0000

Aprille Millo (b 1958) is an American soprano who became famous in her twenties. She appeared 161 times at the Met between 1984 and 2007. She was at her vocal peak between 1986 and 1996. Thereafter her appearances at the Met decreased until until she stopped singing with the company before she was 50.

She was the daughter of two opera singers. Born in New York and raised in California she received most of her musical education from her parents. The details of her life can be found here. Why her career tailed off at a premature age is not known to me. At her best, she had a lush spinto soprano that was reminiscent of Zinka Milanov. Like Milanov she was best known for her Verdi interpretations. Her roles outside the Verdi canon were those that Milanov also sang. Though there are numerous recordings of her singing a lot of them are not readily available. Below are seven examples of her art all from live performances. They are presented in the order of their composition.

‘Di geloso amor sprezzato’ is the trio that close Act 1 of Verdi’s Il Trovatore. It is the perfect example of the composer’s striking ability to depict jealousy and explosive energy in music. Luciano Pavarotti and Sherrill Milnes join Millo.

In the first scene of Act 3 of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera Renato decides to kill his wife Amelia whom he thinks guilty of an adulterous affair with his best friend. She’s almost guilty but not quite as Renato happened on the pair before carnal contact was possible. In ‘Morrò ma prima in grazia’ she protests her innocence and begs to see her son one last time.

‘Pace, pace, mio Dio’ from La Forza Del Destino is too well known to require more comment than I have already given it here in previous posts. Millo’s reading is outstanding both in the timbre of her sound and for its sensitive phrasing.

Next, Aida’s two great arias. The role was one of Millo’s finest. ‘Ritorna vincitor’ depicts Aida’s inner conflict between the welfare of her country (Ethiopia) and her father versus that of the man she loves who has just been appointed general of the Egyptian army that is intent on crushing her country. in the Nile Scene after her country has been decisively defeated by the Egyptians Aida laments that she will never see her homeland again. ‘O Patria mia’

Umberto Giordano’s universally successful opera is Andrea Chenier. Premiered in 1896 at La Scala it has virtuoso parts for soprano, baritone, and tenor – especially the last who had four arias. The big soprano aria ‘La momma morta’ is in Act 3. The French Revolution claimed the life of the mother of the aristocrat Maddalena di Coigny and left her homeless.

Antonín Dvořák’s ninth of 10 operas was written in 1900. It is the only one to have achieved a place in the international repertory. The ‘Song to the Moon’ is the most well known piece from the opera. It is often performed in recitals and on recordings. It occurs in Act 1. The water nymph, Rusalka, has fallen in love with a human prince. In the aria, she asks the moon to tell the prince of her love.

Millo was one of the great spinto sopranos for about a decade. Her singing at its best places her among the great singers of her type of any era. She still has a devoted following who relish her accomplishments.

La Damnation de Faust

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 13:00:03 +0000

A performance recorded last month from the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées conducted by Cristian M?celaru featuring Stanislas de Barbeyrac, Stéphanie d’Oustrac, and Jean Teitgen

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Havin’ a ball

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 13:00:02 +0000

Seen at the final show on April 7, the 100-minute, intermission-less show deftly combined the West Coast premiere of the comedic one act opera Vinkensport, or The Finch Opera by 2024 Grammy nominated (for his opera film Black Lodge) composer David T. Little and librettist Royce Vavrek, with the world premiere of the one act opera Balls by 2024 Oscar nominated (for her score for American Fiction) composer Laura Karpman and librettist Gail Collins.

Vinkensport was originally commissioned by Dawn Upshaw for the Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program, where it received its world premiere in 2010. Little subsequently created a new version for chamber orchestra, a commission from Opera Saratoga, and it premiered there in 2018. During the pandemic in 2020, Houston Grand Opera, Austin Opera and OPERA San Antonio (as part of the Texas Opera Alliance (TOA) initiative) developed a digital production of the opera co-directed by OSA General Director E. Loren Meeker and bass-baritone Ryan McKinny and conducted by Austin Opera’s Principal Conductor Timothy Myers. The full libretto of the opera can be found here

In the program, Birds (or to be precise, VInkensport) was billed as:

“a bittersweet comedy in one act inspired by the obscure Flemish folk sport, Finch-Sitting, where trained finches race to sing the most ‘susk-e-wiets’ (the song of the birds) over the course of an hour. We see a motley assortment of contestants battle it out to see who has the most melodious bird. As they compete, the joys, sorrows, delusions, and all-too-stark realities of the finches’ trainers are revealed. We never learn the competitors’ real names, they are just defined by their birds. Some play fair, some don’t. Some just don’t even want to be there at all. But almost all are lost in the world, finding comfort in the companionship of their birds.”

In other words, the opera was less about the sport and more about the nameless trainers behind the 6 competing finches, hilariously named (from left to right) Holy St. Francis (with its pious owner who was cheated by her husband), Farinelli (the cheating trainer with CD player), Sir Elton John (the rich socialite who was forced to enter competition by her husband), Hans Sachs (the coked-up trainer who drugged up his bird), Prince Gabriel III of Belgium (with its trainer who hated the sport but obligated to preserve his neglectful father’s legacy), and Atticus Finch (the proud guy neighbor to St. Francis’ trainer).

Despite the “comedy” label, the backstories of the trainers were mostly sad, tragic even, and, similarly, Little’s score, after the exuberant opening chorus introducing the sport, permeated the air with a sense of nostalgia, almost like revery, even though it was percussion-heavy. Little gave each character their own musical characteristics; the most obvious one was reserved for Hans Sachs’s trainer’s music with its heavy-rock inclination. Little and Vavrek smartly interwove the characters’ narratives into a coherent story, oftentimes by way of the saying, “At the mercy of one-ounce opera divas,” referring to the obvious. I just wished the outlook wasn’t so gloomy! The opera ended with a somewhat hopeful note, when one of the trainers (you could probably guess which one) let go of the finch after a decade of partnership and wished the finch a good life before being “molested” by the rich socialite. It was a story for another competition, probably!

In Karpman and Collins’s Balls (no pun intended), individuality shone through as the opera painstakingly recreated “The Battle of Sexes,” the famed September 20, 1973, match between 29-year-old Billie Jean King and 55-year-old Bobby Riggs, which King won in three sets. The program notes mentioned that the match “changed not only the perception and treatment of women in sports, but significantly advanced the women’s rights movement. The opera features a live tennis match as a central narrative device, along with actual commentary from the 1973 broadcast. Balls incorporates electronic sampling laced through the score and creative time-hopping – key figures like Larry King and Howard Cosell are joined by American Suffragette Susan B. Anthony.”

There was a lot to be admired in Balls, most prominently in Karpman’s propulsive score, which almost literally became the “ball” of the show (there was not a single tennis ball shown). She masterfully perused every instrument of the orchestra, blended over a wide range of musical styles and genres (from pop, rock, jazz to a cappella chant) and developed fast-pacing rhythm to match the quick nature of the tennis movements; it was truly Karpman’s grand operatic answer to Arthur Honegger’s Rugby (It was a pity that Opera Parallèle couldn’t fit Honegger’s magnificent piece in this production)!

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3fx4hwk80Y

Dramaturgically, however, Collins’ libretto proved to be pretty problematic, as personally I felt Balls was rather overstuffed with too many agendas that ironically diluted the central message of how the match advanced women’s right movement. As mentioned above, not only did Susan B. Anthony make an appearance (as a phantom-like supporter from the past), but the opera also found the time between the sets to highlight King’s marital issues with her then-husband Larry King, and even let King’s secretary (and secret lover) Marilyn Barnett sang an aria about wishing to share a house with King in Malibu! On the other hand, the need to faithfully reconstruct the game – from when King fell behind 3-2 in the first set to a large chunk of the third set – unfortunately created some moments of monotonous repetitions, no matter how hard Karpman varied her score each time.

Combining such an introverted piece like Vinkensport with this explosive one truly required considerable skills, and it was truly a testament to Creative Director Brian Staufenbiel’s ingenuity that Birds & Balls worked together seamlessly (without intermission!). Staunfenbiel framed the production as a showing of ABC “Wide World of Sports” broadcast with Howard Cosell, with each opera represented an episode of it (Artistic Director and conductor Nicole Paiement added incidental music in between). Meticulously Staufenbiel detailed the broadcast as if it traveled to Belgium for Birds portion and particularly to SFJazz Astrodome for Balls (the actual game was played at Houston Astrodome). In addition, he worked closely with Projection Designer David Murakami to expand the boundary of Miner Auditorium; in Birds, he used the projections to show the inner thoughts of each trainer (most memorably in showing how St. Francis’ trainer’s husband cheated on her at the kitchen table!). Even more impressive was Murakami’s projections for Balls, where he projected the audience on the wall to make the hall feel many times bigger.

The projection was also used to showcase videographer Lawrence Dillon’s “interviews” with Cosell, just like in real tournaments. Costume designer Y. Sharon Peng and lighting designer Mextly Couzin completed the creative team with their significant contributions in providing genre-appropriate outfits (I couldn’t help thinking that Peng borrowed some costumes from the musical Hair for the Vocal Quartet of Balls) and beautifully bright stage (especially during the match). The attention to detail for Balls was particularly impressive, from the way King entered the tennis court a la Cleopatra carried by four bare-chested muscle men (accompanied by Triumphal March from Aida) to Riggs’s wearing a yellow Sugar Daddy jacket during the match.

As impressive as the production was, I found the musical aspects to be even more rewarding. Paiement led the Orchestra in a reading that was brilliantly vivid and full of splendor; in her hands, both operas came alive. She expertly navigated among the ever-changing rhythms and musical genres with full control and confidence. Furthermore, she was clearly passionate about the pieces, and she was noticeably having fun conducting them. She even participated in the “interview” during the ads section of Balls (obviously rooting for King)! Similarly, the same passion emanated from pretty much every member of the Orchestra, lifting the performance to a higher level.

Opera Parallèle assembled a handsome cast of 12 to present the double-bill, many of whom were making their debuts with this production. Given the nature of the presentation, it wasn’t surprising that everyone in the cast were mic’ed. Nevertheless, the cast blended as a team, and they were uniformly excellent. Many of the cast members had roles in both operas.

In Birds, the three sopranos Jamie Chamberlin, Chelsea Hollow, and Shawnette Sulker dazzled as the trainers of, respectively, Holy St. Francis, Farinelli, and Sir Elton John. Chamberlin alternated between sadness and hope describing her husband’s infidelity and her attraction to Atticus Finch’s trainer. Hollow brought a much-needed comic relief in her story about Farinelli’s death and her subsequent cheating with a CD player, and Sulker was a hoot portraying the drunken rich socialite trasing a trip to Hong Kong for an appearance at the competition (later she traded that for dignity as Susan B. Anthony). The male counterparts were equally impressive in their smaller roles, from Nathan Granner’s manic energy as the drugged-up trainer, to Chung-Wai Soong’s negativity for the sport and Daniel Cilli’s heartfelt soliloquy at the end.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rrzwzfmzAQ

Second year Adler Fellows Nikola Printz embodied King wholeheartedly, bringing a round full voice to the character and demonstrated a full commitment for the demands of miming the action (of playing tennis). It was a very physical role that Printz excelled superbly; her many cries of “Pressure” were deeply felt and almost heartbreaking. Similarly, with a booming voice, Granner boasted and taunted as the chauvinistic Riggs, fully committed to the demanding role. In a short but scene-stealing role, soprano Tiffany Austin mesmerized as the lovelorn Barnett.

It was truly a pity that the run for this production was over, but congratulations were in order for everyone involved here for such a well-done and thought-provoking show. The audience on Sunday was very appreciative and they cheered heartily for each cast member. Opera Parallèle’s final show this season will be Gregory Spears and Greg Pierce’s Fellow Travelers, based on Thomas Mallon’s novel (the same basis for the Showtime miniseries). It will be presented on June 21-23 at Presidio Theatre and will surely deserve your attention!

Photos: Kristen Loken

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Resuming Flight: La rondine at the Teatro alla Scala

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 11:02:12 +0000

Puccini – La rondine

Magda – Mariangela Sicilia
Lisette – Rosalía Cid
Ruggero – Matteo Lippi
Prunier – Giovanni Sala
Rambaldo – Pietro Spagnoli
Périchaud – William Allione
Gobin – Pierluigi D’Aloia
Crébillon – Jo Wonjun
Yvette – Aleksandrina Mihaylova
Bianca – Martina Russomanno
Suzy – Andrea Niño
Rabonnier – Giordano Rossini
Georgette – Cristina Injeong Hwang
Gabriella – Serena Pasquini
Lolette – Silvia Spruzzola
Un maggiordomo – Giuseppe Capoferri
Uno studente – Andrea Semeraro
Voce di tenor (fuori scena) – Michele Mauro

Coro del Teatro alla Scala, Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala / Riccardo Chailly.
Stage director – Irina Brook.

Teatro alla Scala, Milan, Italy. Sunday, April 14th, 2024.

Tonight’s was the penultimate performance of Irina Brook’s new production of La rondine at the Scala. It uses an edition by Ricordi that differs from what one might have heard previously. For instance, Prunier’s composition of Doretta’s dream lasts for two verses before Magda takes it up. We lose Ruggero’s entrance aria, and the off-stage voice at the end of Act 2 is taken by a tenor, rather than a soprano. It did feel that the omission of Ruggero’s entrance aria was a bit of a loss here, since it gave Matteo Lippi less time to establish his character, and one would certainly have appreciated more opportunities to hear him sing.

This lack of character development is, unfortunately, an overriding impression that I had of Brook’s staging. I found it extremely problematic. Rather than illustrating the story, allowing her principals to drive the action forward, Brook constantly adds a layer of visual ‘noise’ throughout the entire evening. Act 1 appears to be set backstage as a cast rehearses something – it’s not clear what. A figure, who presents as female, is seen constantly gesticulating around the cast. I’m not sure if she’s a stage director or a stage manager, but she takes a physically active role in the proceedings, so much so that I just wanted to go up on stage and tell her to get off. It was incredibly distracting and added nothing to the narrative, instead drawing attention away from the cast and making them extras in their own stories. Similarly, the start of Act 2, is full of bright lights and a stage full of choristers and ballet dancers, with the lights being suspended up and down. Yet what this did, instead of amplifying the music and heightening its effects, was rather to drown out the music in layers of the aforementioned extraneous visual ‘noise’. So much so, that one simply had no idea where to look and it felt that the impact of the music was lost. Once one did focus on the chorus, for instance, it was clear that they were simply parked there. That glorious moment at ‘bevo al tuo fresco sorriso’, simply consisted of the principals placed at the front, hands outstretched to the audience, while a dancer wildly gesticulated at the back, drawing our attention away. The closing act, was set on a Côte d’Azur, where the sea is populated with ballet dancers in tutus. Magda takes her leave by walking, in procession with other women, towards a door marked ‘Exit’ at the back of the stage, as if participating in a moment recycled from a staging of Dialogues des carmélites. Perhaps Brook was attempting to make a point about how women are used by men and then disposed of. Yet like so much in her staging, it was unclear whether that was actually the point and, at any rate, its an idea that felt added on and completely at odds with the more innocent and heartfelt love the Ruggero showed Magda.

The Scala cast the show with a youthful group of singers. These aren’t the world’s biggest voices, and so they needed a set that was acoustically supportive to them. Unfortunately, they didn’t get it here. Patrick Kinmonth’s set had wide open spaces that did not provide the acoustic support the cast needed, although it was undoubtedly visually attractive. Had Brook placed the cast more appropriately on stage that might not have been as much of an issue, but having Rosalía Cid’s Lisette singing her Act 1 interjections from the middle of the stage, meant that she wasn’t as optimally audible as she could have been. There was one moment where this opera worked its magic on me. That was at the end of Act 2, when, for a brief second Magda and Ruggero were alone on stage, as Mariangela Sicilia’s Magda repeated ‘ti amo’, Sicilia filling it with emotion. It didn’t last for long until some extras came back on, but at least for a second, we had a glimpse of the deep emotion at the heart of the work.

It’s a real shame that Brook didn’t seem to trust her singers because musically, this was a very special evening. Riccardo Chailly led a Scala orchestra on glorious form, conjuring a seemingly unlimited palette of orchestral colour. The soupy portamenti in the strings, with a shimmering autumnal warmth at the core, seemed to embody the longing that lies at the core of this piece. Chailly managed to find both a lightness to the orchestral sound, which let his singers through despite the lack of acoustic support, while allowing the climaxes to ring out thrillingly. Indeed, that ensemble at ‘bevo al tuo fresco sorriso’ was definitely helped by the great improvements in the Scala chorus, who sang here with such firm tone, the sopranos pouring waves of sound out on high. I wish they had given us a bis. The brass was also on exceptional form all night.

Sicilia gave us a lovely Magda. There were some genuinely emotional moments here, and one can only imagine the impact her performance would have had in a more sensitive production. Sicilia has the ability to float the lines beautifully on high, able to allow the tone to open up, and also to pull it back to a thread of sound. She filled the words with meaning and, when given the opportunity to hold the stage, such as the end of Act 2, was deeply moving. Her closing lines to Ruggero, ‘Io riprendo il mio volo e la mia pena’, saw Sicilia finding so much heartbreak and resolve in the text. The voice is slender, with a pearly core, and a little hardness on top suggested to my ears that Magda might represent Sicilia’s current limits. Make no mistake, however, hers was a thoughtful and highly musical assumption.

Lippi brought a gloriously Italianate sound to Ruggero. The voice is a good size, with a sunny warmth at the core that lit up the room. He phrased his music with generosity and managed the passaggio expertly. There was a wide-eyed innocence and generosity to his reading that felt so right for the character. Giovanni Sala sang Prunier in a focused, well-placed tenor, which carried well despite the lack of acoustic support. His was a deliciously sardonic assumption, making so much of the text. Cid sang Lisette in a bright soprano, with easy reach on top and was an energetic stage presence.

Shade intended

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 10:00:46 +0000

On this day in 1738 Handel‘s Serse premiered in London

The post Shade intended appeared first on parterre box.

Bright Future: La sonnambula at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 10:10:36 +0000

Bellini – La sonnambula

Amina – Ruth Iniesta
Elvino – Marco Ciaponi
Il conte Rodolfo – Manuel Fuentes
Teresa – Monica Bacelli
Lisa – Francesca Benitez
Alessio – Mattia Rossi
Il notaro – Leonardo Trinciarelli

Coro del Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Orchestra del Teatro dell’Opera di Roma / Francesco Lanzillotta.
Stage director – Jean-Philippe Clarac & Olivier Delœuil “LE LAB”.

Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Rome, Italy. Saturday, April 13th, 2024.

As one will well know, Rome, Italy is a city of monuments and history, one of the cradles of western civilization, with the peninsula as a whole deeply entwined with opera as the birthplace of the art form. For its new production of La sonnambula, the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, has confided the staging to the French directorial duo of LE LAB. What they’ve given us, could on one level be seen as placing this opera within the wider history of art that abounds in this ancient city. On the other, it could be seen as an incoherent muddle. As is customary at this house, the run was cast with two separate sets of principals, I saw a more youthful cast made up of singers from Italy and the Spanish State.

As spectators took their seats at the start of the evening, the front of the stage made reference to a temporary art gallery called ‘Elvezia’. This, it transpires was the setting for the entire evening. Or was it? The performance opened with a short movie, with a woman (who we soon learn is Amina), texting her mother regarding her fears that Elvino will be late for their upcoming nuptials. The short film includes views of the eternal city, complete with its legendary traffic noise, which made it difficult to adjust the ears as the music then began. This art gallery seems to be a place where they also hold fashion shows, with Amina singing her opening number while working it down the runway; while the gallery also seems to form a dormitory with characters sleeping in beds spaced across the stage. LE LAB populate the back of the stage with film showing various bits of imagery, whether images of previous productions of Sonnambula that have taken place here, or classic paintings, in which the modern-day Amina poses side by side with the original. To be frank, I tuned out from these after a while, since they added nothing to what we saw. Nor did, the actress walking down the aisle during ‘Ah! non credea mirarti’, who it transpires was the double who appeared in Amina’s filmed interpolations – including displaying her fried eggs in zoom on the back of the stage.

Personenregie seemed to exemplify the issues with the staging as a whole. On the one hand, the relationships between the principals were clearly sketched out and coherent. On the other, the chorus was moved around efficiently and everyone knew where they needed to be, yet far too often, once moved, they were simply parked there. This all reinforced that impression of the staging being an incoherent jumble of ideas – was it meant to be a reflection on the history of art? Was it telling the story relatively straight albeit in an art gallery that doubles as a fashion show and dormitory? Yes, the morality of Sonnambula can be difficult for modern audiences to take seriously. After all, the scandal of being discovered in a man’s room is a bit dated. I’m just not convinced that LE LAB brought a coherent narrative to their staging that added up.

The other disappointment in the evening was Francesco Lanzillotta’s conducting. There were some good elements here. He encouraged his cast to use some elegant and imaginative ornamentation in their numbers, indispensable in this repertoire but frequently omitted. He obtained some good playing from the orchestra and the choral singing showed considerable improvements on my previous visits here. And yet, it was hard not to feel that he was incarnating the title of the work perhaps too seriously. His tempi were generally sleepy, and even when they weren’t, as in the final number, the lack of incisive rhythmic articulation meant that even the swifter tempi felt saggy. I longed for him to use a tighter sense of rhythmic approach, to use the orchestra to drive forward those long bel canto lines through a forward momentum that wasn’t always apparent here. It was undoubtedly beautiful, and he kept the disparate forces together, it was just that it felt rather somnolent.

Fortunately, it was the singing that really raised the quality of the evening. There are so many reasons to feel pessimistic about the future. Yet based on tonight, and some of my recent visits to the Italian Republic, the future of bel canto is not one of them. Ruth Iniesta gave us a deeply felt Amina. Her soprano is perhaps not the most refulgent, the tone rather chalky, yet she’s an incredibly instinctive musician. She understands this idiom, she knows the importance of spinning those long bel canto lines and she also pulled out some spectacular acuti, including one in her final scene that sent the audience into delirium. Occasionally, she has a tendency to land on the underside of the notes in some longer phrases, suggesting that the technique is still a bit of a work in progress, but she’s also relatively young and this will come with time. What Iniesta brings to her role, is the ability to use the text to draw out emotion, even within the confines of a problematic staging such as this.

Marco Ciaponi. Make a note of his name, because this is a tenor with some serious promise. His command of the passaggio is absolutely staggering, the registers so even, crossing between them with virtuosic ease in his runs. He has an easy top, that he deployed with frequent generosity, and terrific agility. Very occasionally, there was a tendency for some intrusive aspirates to enter the line, but he drew out so much through the words. Really impressive. As indeed was Francesca Benitez as Lisa. She also demonstrated impeccable agility, an easy top and immaculate diction. I’m not quite convinced that she’s the owner of a genuine trill as yet, but she’s an energetic and vibrant stage presence.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2LGb9HWSUU

Happy 66th birthday soprano Aprile Millo

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ-DUL4d6NM

On this day in 1883 Leo Delibes‘s Lakme premiered in Paris

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgIFZ2YBjMs

Birthday anniversaries of bass Salvatore Baccaloni (1900)
and conductor Jean Fournet (1913)

Happy 75th birthday soprano Eiddwen Harrhy

On this day in 1960 the Charles Strouse-Lee Adams musical Bye Bye Birdie opened on Broadway

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZldWwNZMmc

The post Bonney blue eyes appeared first on parterre box.

Golden Days – Mario Lanza

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 15:04:05 +0000

The title above is that of a new CD containing 23 selections sung by the late tenor. Why another Lanza disc when so many are already available? These have been remastered and converted to Digitally Extracted Stereo (DES).

When listened to on a good audio system the effect is magical. Lanza’s voice is even more beautiful than it sounded on the original mono recordings. The disc is available at Amazon – Golden Days Mario Lanza. Also, if you download it, only do so in a lossless format so that the full effect of the DES conversion will be maintained.

The only tenors I can think of with voices as beautiful as Lanza’s are Joseph Schmidt, Jussi Björling, and Giuseppe Di Stefano. His vocal production and technique were flawless; if premature death had not been his sad fate he likely would have morphed into a full-fledged spinto while retaining the beauty of his tone. If that had happened, and he had escaped the deadly embrace of the movie business, he would have been the greatest tenor of the 20th century.

Don’t buy this disc unless you have a first-rate audio system. Without it you will not be able to appreciate the wonderful technical effect that Robin Cherry and Stephen Cutler have achieved using the DES system.

My deep appreciation to Professor Derek McGovern for sending me the disc. He is a long-time Lanza aficionado who oversees the mariolanzatenor.com website. and who wrote the liner notes. The disc’s contents are below. It is a must have for Lanza fans or anyone interested in great singing.

Opera Parallèle's Birds and Balls

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 19:32:38 +0000

* Notes *Opera Parallèle gave a splendid performance of two comedic one-act operas yesterday at SFJAZZ. Done in one go, the evening began with David T. Little's Vinkensport, or The Finch Opera (pictured, photograph by Kristen Loken), which was followed by Laura Karpman's Balls. It was impressive how cohesively these works were presented together, both visually and musically. Director Brian Staufenbiel put us in a 70s telecast of these two very disparate sporting events, with Mark Hernandez as sports announcer Howard Cosell engaging the audience and even the conductor. There were projections surrounding us, and the live-image capture was especially effective. As always, Maestra Nicole Paiement deftly held the orchestra and singers together. It was fun to hear her conduct a bit of Verdi's Triumpal March from Aida in Balls, when Billie Jean King enters. At one point in this opera nearly all the musicians stopped playing their instruments and clapped beats with their hands, they were all very much synchronized, Paiement keeps everything very precise. Vinkensport is about Flemish folk sport of Finch-Sitting, in which trained finches try to sing the most "susk-e-wiets" in an hour as possible. In this opera there are six competitors, all the finches have very amusing names. Soprano Jamie Chamberlin gave a very vulnerable and human performance as Holy St. Francis's Trainer, she's had quite a lot going on in her personal life, while soprano Chelsea Hollow's character of who trains Farinelli is actually just using a tape recorder, since her bird is deceased. Hollow's voice is crystalline and very beautiful. Soprano Shawnette Sulker as Sir Elton John’s Trainer drinks many martinis and is very funny, her bird-like voice seems very apropos. Tenor Nathan Granner is likewise entertaining as Han Sach’s Trainer, his nice light sound is very pretty. Rich-toned bass-baritone Chung-Wai Soong is more somber as Prince Gabriel III of Belgium’s Trainer, we learn he inherited his role as trainer from his father. Baritone Daniel Cilli as Atticus Finch’s Trainer is also serious, setting his bird free in the end. Balls (pictured, photograph by Kristen Loken) tells the story of "The Battle of the Sexes" tennis game between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in 1973 with a surrealist bent, Susan B. Anthony is a character, and at one point Billie Jean King dons a tricorn hat. Many of the singers in the first opera were also in the second, but Balls has the jazz singer Tiffany Austin as King's secretary, Marilyn. Austin has a lovely voice that stood out. Tenor Nathan Granner is again very humorous as Bobby Riggs. Mezzo-soprano Nikola Printz was compelling as Billie Jean King, their sound is resonant and powerful. * Tattling * The audience was mostly quiet, but as Billie Jean King sang about the pressure of tennis, someone dropped some plastic cups in the Left Terrace, Row TJ.

Screening for Colon Cancer in Older Adults

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 13:31:44 +0000

Screening for disease is not as straightforward as it may seem on cursory examination. Sometimes it does not influence the course of the screened for disease and other times it may cause more harm than good as early intervention may result in more morbidity than if the disease had been undiagnosed. Then there is the issue of the age of the population to be screened. Obviously, the older the population the less they have to gain even from an effective screening procedure.

Screening for colon cancer is generally accepted as useful and effective. Mortality from the disease has decreased over the past 30 years. This observation suggests that screening and early diagnosis of premalignant lesions have been effective. But complicating this view is that the incidence of the disease has also fallen for unclear reasons. See Cancer Statistics 2024.

Let’s, however, assume that identifying premalignant lesions is useful and focus on the question of at what age should colonoscopy in patients already known to have such lesions be stopped. This issue was examined in Surveillance Colonoscopy Findings in Older Adults With a History of Colorectal Adenomas published by the JAMA Open Network. The complete paper is available for download below.

The patients studied were 70 to 85 years of age who received surveillance colonoscopy at a large, community-based US health care system between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2019; had an adenoma detected 12 or more months previously; and had at least 1 year of health plan enrollment before surveillance. Individuals were excluded due to prior colorectal cancer (CRC), hereditary CRC syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease, or prior colectomy or if the surveillance colonoscopy had an inadequate bowel preparation or was incomplete.

Advanced neoplasia was defined as any CRC or advanced adenoma. Advanced adenoma was defined as a conventional adenoma with high-grade dysplasia or villous or tubulovillous histologic features or as any conventional adenoma 10 mm or greater in size.

In a large, integrated health care system, among 9740 surveillance colonoscopies in patients 70 to 85 years of age with a history of colorectal adenoma, detection of CRC or advanced neoplasia did not increase significantly with age over five years of observation. Overall, CRC detection was rare (0.3%), while detection of advanced neoplasia was more common (12.0%). Patients with a history of advanced adenoma vs nonadvanced adenoma were more likely to have CRC detected, though still rarely (0.5% vs 0.2%), and were more likely to have advanced neoplasia detected (16.5% vs 10.6%).

The two figures below summarize the study’s findings. NAA is non-advanced adenoma. AA is advanced adenoma. The first figure depicts the incidence of CRC while the second shows the incidence of advanced neoplasia. Notice how low was the incidence of cancer.

The very low incidence of CRC in elderly subjects with adenomas regardless of type suggests that there should be some age at which the risks of colonoscopy exceed any benefit. These risks increase with age, particularly among those aged 75 years or older, and include heart attack, stroke, sedation-related adverse events (eg, aspiration pneumonia), bleeding, infection, and perforation. The data in this study suggest that elderly people with adenomas considered to be at high risk of CRC are actually not at very high risk. And that the procedure should be limited to those with a life expectancy of at least 10 years. Both 80 year men and women in the US have life expectancies of less than 10 years. Those younger with comorbidities will also fall into this group.

The obvious next question is what about routine colonoscopy in people who do not have adenomas? At what age should colonoscopy no longer be recommended? Current guidelines provide no direction as to what age the procedure should be stopped in patients with or without lesions. Any recommendation I would make as to what age the scope should remain in the cabinet would be pure speculation, but my guess is that age 65 to 70 would be a good time to discard routine colonoscopy in patients with no lesions.

Surveillance Colonoscopy Findings in Older Adults JAMA2024 Download

Carlo Bergonzi

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 20:41:14 +0000

Carlo Bergonzi (1924-2014) enjoyed a long career as a leading tenor with all of the world’s major opera companies. He was born in Polesine Parmense near Parma. During World War II he was an active anti-Nazi and in 1943 was imprisoned by the Germans. After being released by the Russians he walked over 100 km to reach an American base. On the way he contracted typhoid fever. By the time he reached Parma, he weighed 80 pounds. He made up for this loss in his later years.

He began his operatic career in 1948 as a baritone. After several years he realized that he was a tenor and retrained his voice for that range. He made his debut as a tenor in Bari in 1951. By 1953 he was at La Scala. His American debut was in Chicago in 1955. He was at the Met the following year, giving 323 performances over the next 32 years.

I heard him often during the first five years of his appearances in New York. After leaving New York I didn’t hear him in performance again until 1981 at the Lyric Opera of Chicago when he substituted for an indisposed Luciano Pavarotti as Nemorino in Donizetti’s L’elisir D’amore. Though he looked like a giant inverted bowling pin, his singing was great.

I also met him in a parking lot sometime in the early 80s. Between meetings in different Italian cities, my wife and I decided to make a side trip to Busseto to visit Verdi country. As we knew Bergonzi ran a small hotel and restaurant in the town, I Due Foscari, we booked a room for a single night. As we drove up to the hotel, Bergonzi was in the parking lot and motioned us to the spot he wanted he wanted us to deposit our car. That was the sum of our interactions during the four days we stayed at his Inn. There was no problem extending our visit as we were the only guests. I know the date was after 1981 as the small lobby of the hotel prominently displayed a large framed poster announcing the Met’s 25th Anniversary Bergonzi Gala autographed by Pavarotti who performed during the event. We also had dinner at the tenor’s restaurant. The food was excellent.

The reason we extended our time in Bussetto was because the town and its environs are full of points of interest. Verdi’s birthplace is in Le Roncole just outside of the town. The Villa Verdi is in Sant’Agata just outside of Busseto in the opposite direction. Cremona is a short drive away.

Bergonzi was particularly known for his singing of Verdi’s operas, though he was equally fine in all the other standard Italian tenor roles. His voice was a lirico spinto that while not characterized by an opulent sound was finely produced across its entire range. I think it was one of those voices that sounds better in the theater than on recordings. Below are 10 examples of Bergonzi’s singing that should give a good idea why he was so successful for such a long time.

First Verdi. The selections are presented in the order of their composition except for the final song. Ernani was composed in 1844 to a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave. It was the first of the 10 the writer was to provide for Verdi. Based on Victor Hugo’s play Hernani it was a big success and the first Verdi opera to win a large space in the international repertory. Come rugiada al cespite is in the first act. Ernani tells his bandit gang that the woman he loves, Elvira, is about to be forced to marry an old man. He plans to abduct, or from his perspective save her.

Verdi’s I Masnadieri is a four-act opera written for Jenny Lind. Based on Schiller’s Die Räuber it was first performed in London under the direction of the composer. Among the attendees at the first performance were Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and the Duke of Wellington. All though initially successful it disappeared after 15 years. O mio castel paterno is from Act 1.

Quando le sere al placido occurs in scene 3 of Act 2 in Verdi’s Luisa Miller. First performed in 1849 it was Verdi’s 16th opera. It too was based on a Schiller play – Kabale und Liebe. The aria is one of Verdi’s finest creations for the tenor. It requires great exclamatory power as well as the ability to carry a line of exceptional lyrical beauty.

Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera is among his greatest creations. It has everything – wonderful music, arias of the finest construction, passion, and exceptional dramatic impact. Forse la soglia attinse opens the second scene of Act 3. In it, Riccardo or King Gustavo depending on whether the opera is set in colonial Massachusetts or Sweden, shows his evolution from a lighthearted person of power into a mature man ready to sacrifice his own desire for the good of the woman he loves and her husband who was his best friend but who will kill him in the next scene. Another of Verdi’s great works for the tenor.

La vita è inferno all’infelice … O tu che in seno agli angeli occurs at the beginning of the Act 3 of Verdi’s La Forza Del Destinio. It is an ode to life’s misfortunes accompanied by a cloak of self-pity. Yet Don Alvaro, the tenor who sings it, has more disasters ahead of him than those he has hitherto experienced.

Verdi’s Requiem Mass written in honor of the novelist Alessandro Manzoni has a tenor aria in the middle of its ‘Dies Irae’ section. Ingemisco is often performed as a solo as part of a recital or recording.

Bergonzi was equally at home in the works of Puccini. The latter’s third opera, Manon Lescaut, was his first success. Donna non vidi mai depicts Des Grieux’s reaction to Manon’s youthful beauty. It is the first of a succession of great tenor arias all related to the tenor’s love for the soprano.

Che gelida manina is Rodolfo’s reaction to Mimì’s cold hand just after they’ve met in his garret on a very chilly Christmas Eve. Another operatic case of love at first sight. La Bohème is performed so often at the Met that it can sometimes be heard when the house is dark.

Recondita armonia is in the first act of Tosca. The artist Mario Cavaradossi is painting a picture of Mary Magdalene based on the blonde Marchesa Atavanti. He comments on the strange harmony between the fair-haired Marchesa and his dark-haired lover Floria Tosca.

Finally, a song. Paolo Tosti (1846-1916) was an Italian composer of songs. After emerging from poverty he became very successful and moved to England where even more fame and wealth awaited him. He became a British citizen and was knighted by his friend King Edward VII. Ideale is one of his best-known and frequently performed works.

Bergonzi’s long and distinguished career overlapped those of Björling, Tucker, Del Monaco, Corelli, Di Stefano, Pavarotti, and Domingo. That he was able to remain at the top of opera’s list for so long and among so many other great tenors was because of the excellence of his technique and the expressive power of his singing.