Sommaire pour April 2023 de Opera Now

It’s time to say goodbye. After 25 years at the helm of Opera Now, I’m hanging up my editor’s hat and moving on to new horizons. It has been a whirlwind of a ride, which has taken me to the corners of the world in pursuit of an art form that has proved remarkably resilient, endlessly inventive and capable of thriving in the most unlikely circumstances. I have vivid recollections of Verdi’s Falstaff in a theatre built of ice in the Arctic Circle, where the orchestra played in woollen mittens in the bitter cold. In the summer heat of Mumbai, I caught the Indian premiere of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, receiving standing ovations from a local audience with little experience of opera. And then there was Wagner’s Das Liebesverbot, staged high…

UK opera singers have written to BBC executives to ask they reconsider the closure of the BBC Singers. Signed by 115 industry professionals, including Sir Bryn Terfel, Dame Sarah Connolly, Susan Bullock, Sophie Bevan, Alice Coote, Iestyn Davies and previous BBC Young Generation Artists, the letter highlights the wider impact of the cuts on the operatic infrastructure. It was sent as a response to the BBC’s Head of Orchestras and Choirs Simon Webb’s announcement on 7 March of the closure of the BBC Singers, as well as a reduction by 20% of salaried positions in its orchestras. In the letter, also published in the Times, singers called for the BBC to ‘reconsider its decision’, expressing how ‘…the BBC has provided opportunities for so many on their way to international renown.…

News & Notes Venice is a city in perpetual state of renaissance. During the succession of Biennales that take place each year, its centuries old churches and palazzi become home to weird, wacky and often wonderful contemporary art installations, its swish canal-side hotels and vast warehouses on the edge of the water host grand receptions for celebrities from the world of film, art, fashion and music. The city may be steeped in history, but it also resonates with the very latest trends in modern culture. This palimpsest of old and new chimes neatly with the philosophy of Cyrille Vigneron, President and CEO of the luxury brand company Cartier, respecting and celebrating heritage while layering it with new ideas and innovative technology. Cartier made its glamorous presence felt in Venice as…

At a time when London has been lamenting the potential loss of English National Opera, Athens has been enjoying an inspired and enterprising second season at its second operatic venue: the newly named Olympia Municipal Music Theatre ‘Maria Callas’, former home of Greek National Opera (GNO) before its move to a magnificent and superbly equipped new theatre at the Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre in 2018. When GNO moved out a year earlier, the Olympia Theatre – where Maria Callas made her operatic debut and sang extensively during the second world war – was closed. The building, owned by the National Bank of Greece, was up for leasing and the bidders were the Ministry of Culture, the Athens Festival and the Athens Municipality under its culturally sensitive new Mayor, Kostas Bakoyannis,…

When, in December, the music world remembers the 100th birthday of Maria Callas, much focus will rest on the soprano’s extraordinary recorded legacy. At the height of her fame as the operatic recording was reaching a remarkable golden age, some of the glorious sets Callas sung on remain top repertoire recommendations today. Today’s custodian of that catalogue, Warner Classics, will later this year celebrate Callas’s art, and by extension the operatic era in which she recorded, with a mammoth boxset, comprising 131 CDs, 3 Blu-ray discs and a DVD. Called La Davina, Maria Callas in all her roles, it will, says the label, be ‘the most comprehensive box of Callas recordings ever released’. It includes her complete studio recordings, an extensive collection of her best live recordings, the masterclasses she…

If Italy is the home of opera, then Verona is the home of grand opera on a grand scale – especially in this anniversary year. June 2023 will mark the one hundredth season at the Arena Opera Festival, where for more than a century opera has enthralled audiences from around the world. As with so much of the Italian operatic tradition, the story begins with Giuseppe Verdi. In 1913 the Veronese tenor Giovanni Zenatello was looking for a way to commemorate the composer’s birth centenary. He hit on the idea of using his home city’s ancient Roman amphitheatre to host a celebratory opera production. Together with the theatre impresario Ottone Rovato and the conductor Tullio Serafin, he planned and produced a special series of performances of Verdi’s Aida. But this…

‘Quattro. Quattro e - pronta!’ comes the voice of Fabio Dolci as he sits in what was once the retiring room of the director of Ravenna’s opera house. ‘Quattro!’ - Camera Four is now live. ‘Due. Due - pronta!’ says Dolci as he prepares to cut to Camera Two. ‘Due!’ The small room is blacked out and full of recently unpacked electronic equipment cases, not out of place inside Doctor Who’s Tardis. Dolci is flanked by Melania, assistant video director with a shooting script and Clementia, the music video assistant. They both announce cues either from an adapted libretto in Melania’s hands or from the score when the camera cue is purely musical. A few metres further away in the director’s box itself is a tripod supporting locked-off Camera Three…

Hot on the heels of her triumphs as Fedora at La Scala and the Met, soprano Sonya Yoncheva has released a new album called The Courtesan, singing under the assured baton of Marco Armiliato. It is a collection of arias sung by female characters engaged as a mistress or working as a high-level prostitute in order to support themselves: some seemingly voluntarily, such as Manon, others through force, like Mascagni’s Iris. The operatic pathway is strewn with their corpses, perhaps something to ponder the next time you hum along to a melody from Massenet or Puccini. In the album’s booklet, Yoncheva references Veronica Franco, a 16th-century Venetian cortigiana onesta, or honest courtesan, famous for her humanist intellect, poetry and proto-feminist advocacy as well her prowess in more traditional sexual pursuits.…

Tom Hawkes, a much loved British opera director, has died aged 84. Hawkes studied in London at the Royal Academy of Music before establishing himself as an in-demand director of opera, both in the UK and abroad. Starting at the Royal Manchester College of Music and Derby Playhouse as Stage Director in 1964, he directed his first professional opera– Rossini’s La Chenerentola with the Sadler’s Wells Opera in 1965. Hawkes directed productions for Opera Holland Park and the ENO, as well as holding the position of Director of Productions for Handel Opera, for whom he directed ten productions at Sadler’s Wells Theatre. Also a talented landscape painter, Hawkes captured beautifully in watercolour the scenery of Dartmoor and Cornwall, as well as his home around inner-city London. Speaking on his life in…

In January 2023, Israeli-born Dan Ettinger became Music Director of the oldest opera house in the world: the exquisite Teatro San Carlo in Naples. He had already conducted four productions there in the past two years: Carmen in the Piazza del Plebiscito in summer 2021, Così fan tutte in Chiara Muti’s production in 2021/22 and Samson et Dalila last autumn, and will inaugurate his tenure with a new production of Die Walküre with Jonas Kaufmann as Siegmund. Until then, Ettinger had only worked in Italy once before, about 20 years ago in Trieste. ‘But when Stéphane Lissner, the San Carlo’s Intendant, and Ilias Tzempetonidis, its Artistic and Casting Director, came to Naples and invited me here, I accepted because we had worked together so well in Paris. So I came,…

Live Reviews Grand Theatre, Leeds MUSIC ★★★★ STAGING ★★★★ Aco-production with Göteborg Opera, Rodula Gaitanou’s new staging for Opera North of the more familiar second (1916) version of the Strauss/Hofmannsthal confection made a positive impression on pretty well all fronts. Gaitanou’s productions always maintain a close connection with the original text while regularly offering a new slant. In this instance, the 18th-century ambience of the home of the richest man in Vienna was transformed into the Italian film studio Cinecittà in the Fellini period. George Souglides’ set matched with a shot taken of the director and his crew on set and published in the programme, while the commedia dell’arte troupe borrowed their costumes from a promenading band featured in the master’s 1963 classic, 8½. Casting worked well. Leading British soprano…

Live Reviews The title gave the game away, really: this staging of four Handel cantatas would be no picnic. Suspicions were confirmed when the orchestra trooped into the Stone Nest – aformer Welsh chapel in Shaftesbury Avenue, lofty, Gothic and vaulted, a space made for gloom, dry ice and spooky lighting – in Goth get up, and glowered at the audience. Who tittered nervously, of course, but the band got to work and began to play – standing, often moving around to create a surround-sound effect in the venue’s rich but clear acoustic. And then on barrelled an energetic dancer, Jonathon Luke Baker, as if hurled into the performing space, surrounded by audience on all sides, followed by counter-tenor Patrick Terry in a bit of a state as the bereaved,…

Elektra Strauss Sterling 1867/1868-2 ★★ Amore dolore Nicolò Balducci BIS 2645 ★★★★ Il capello di paglia di Firenze Rota Capriccio C5466 ★★★★ La vie parisienne Offenbach Naxos2.110753-54 ★★✩ CDs and digital Imust warn you that this Elektra gets off to an alarming start with a loud scream. I almost passed out. It is a live recording from the Royal Swedish Opera documenting soprano Laila Andersson-Palme’s farewell to the opera stage in 1996. Over thirty years beforehand she had sung one of the serving maids, with Birgit Nilsson in the title role, and later moved on to Chrysothemis. There, I suspect, she should have stayed, as her voice is bright and buoyant of tone, as befits a soprano who had started out in such roles as the Queen of the Night.…

Favourite time of day? Nights and very early morning. Favourite season? I would say fall but also spring because they both have the same sort of thing that I love. The transition from summer into fall, when it’s still not that cold but not that warm, it’s still like this glitter of sun. I also love the glimmer of redy golden leaf. And spring has this crispness of winter but then the greenery and flourishing of plants again. Favourite colour? Green. I’m wearing a green hoodie which I received as a gift and I now wear it all the time because I love it. Favourite artist? In terms of musicians, I would say Lukas Forchhammer, a singer from Copenhagen. It’s really beautiful music and the songs that he writes…