Indice dei contenuti per February 2023 in Opera Now

Front of House What is the point of touring live opera when we live in an age of cinema relays and streaming? Travelling to remote corners of the country with a lorry-load of sets and costumes and the considerable needs of a motley troupe of singers, instrumentalists and production managers sounds unwieldy and expensive at a time when everyone has an eye on the bottom line. On the other hand, few opera-goers would deny that the rewards of seeing a live performance are considerable: the edginess and unpredictability of a live theatre is one thing and the dialogue between stage and audience is something that simply can’t be replicated on a screen (not many of us would opt for a zoom call with friends if a real life drinks party…

PREVIEWS, NEWS AND EVENTS IN THE OPERA WORLD The Berlin Staatsoper’s general music director Daniel Barenboim has stepped down from his post after 30 years with the opera company in which he proved a distinguished, highly influential and sometimes controversial figure, helping to forge a new path for the former East German opera house following reunification. Barenboim, 80, was diagnosed last year with a serious neurological condition. In a statement released by the Staatsoper he said: ‘Unfortunately, my health has deteriorated significantly in the last year. I can no longer provide the performance that is rightly demanded of a general music director. Therefore, I ask for your understanding that I will give up this job on January 31, 2023. I ask the culture senator to dissolve the contract between us…

POULENC Live Reviews Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Rome Most opera houses start their season with a production of something dear and familiar aimed at pulling the crowds in. This might have been especially so in Rome, since conductor Michele Mariotti was making his operatic debut in the city. All credit, therefore, to the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, which opened its season with Poulenc’s 1956 story of the martyrdom of the nuns of Compiègne. It was a gamble that paid off amply. We open on a plain black stage. In the background are Jacques-Louis David’s portraits of women, symbolising the lives the Sisters have chosen to renounce. The gilt frames will become their prayer desks, and ultimately mark their deaths, as white curtains drop to fill each by turn to the…

PUCCINI Live Reviews Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam Tired of all the faux-Orientalism that blares at you visually whenever a new production of Puccini’s Turandot comes to town? Then head to the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam for Barrie Kosky’s unique, jarring vision. The opera’s simple plot is laid out by a Mandarin in its opening moments: here in legendary Peking, the pure Princess Turandot will marry the man of royal blood who can solve her three riddles. If he loses, he will be decapitated publicly. Moments later we learn that dozens have tried and failed – and the blood-hungry crowd wants more. The cruel guards push back the crowd. A new candidate for marriage/decapitation steps forward. So much for the literal story. Kosky deals in metaphor. ‘Turandot non esiste,’ Ping,…

CIMAROSA Live Reviews Florida Grand Opera, Miami Cimarosa’s18th-century commedia dell’arte opera was inspired by William Hogarth’s series of paintings entitled Marriage-àla-mode and the 1766 play The Clandestine Marriage. In Florida Grand Opera’s telling of the story, the opera was translated into Spanish as El matrimonio secreto and relocated to 1980s Miami Beach, showcasing that era’s iconic lifestyle and fashion. Created as part of the FGO’s ‘Made for Miami’ series, it was told from the female point of view as an amusing ‘ode to love’. In director Elena Araoz and designer Crystal Manich’s version, Geronimo is a Cuban businessman and proprietor of the (fictitious) Hotel Paraiso. His daughters, Elisetta and Carolina, widowed sister Fidalma, and Paolino work at the hotel. The rich visitor Count Robinson was in this version a character…

Château de Versailles Spectacles CVS070: 3 discs Cappella Mediterranea, under Leonardo Garcia Alarcón, released its recording of La finta pazza in May 2022 with a similar cast to the staged production, although among the major roles on the recording, Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian replaces Filippo Mineccia as Achille and Carlo Vistoli replaces Gabriel Jublin as Ulisse. It is good, though, that a constant is Mariana Flores as Deidamia, the ‘madwoman’ of the opera’s title. While the three-CD recording from Château de Versailles Spectacles does not offer visuals, it constitutes the most beautiful sound-only performance imaginable, the voices characterised to their utmost, perfectly placed in the sound-space. And having a recording of such detail enables micro-consideration of the many, many felicitous touches of the instrumental group. The Achilles on the recording, Bénos-Djian, is…

Number crunching In Berlin, opera house seats are subsidised by the public purse to around €200 each. Bearing in mind that €1 is worth just a little less than £1 these days, here are some other subsidyrelated figures to chew over: the Berlin Staatsoper alone receives over €150 million all told, when all the various bits of city, regional and national funding are taken into account. In Paris, the French government subsidises its national opera company to around €95 million – around 40 per cent of the Opéra de Paris’ operating costs. Meanwhile, the Royal Opera House in London, one of the great cultural treasures of the UK and of historic importance to the music world as a whole, is handed an annual sum of just over £22 million by…

IN MARCH 2023 Winner of the Belvedere Competition, mezzo soprano Aigul Akhmetshina garnered international attention after her critically celebrated success jumping in to perform the role of Carmen at the Royal Opera House at the age of 21. Lauded by the press for her velvety timbre and incredible charisma, Akhmetshina has been making waves in the opera world ever since with her debuts at the Teatro Real, Opera national de Paris, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Baden Baden Festival ON SALE 21 FEB YOUNG ARTISTS FOCUS Opera Now celebrates a new generation of opera singers and the people who are shaping their voices and careers Plus We find our why British countertenor Hugh Cutting’s career is riding high Join us for an exclusive tour of the Olympia Theatre in Athens, which has…

Live Reviews MUSSORGSKY New National Theatre, Tokyo The New National Theatre Tokyo’s 25th anniversary season featured the premiere of a daring new production of Boris Godunov conducted by Kazushi Ono and directed by Mariusz Treliński. The co-production with the Polish National Opera, where Treliński is artistic director, was originally scheduled to open in Warsaw in spring 2022 but the performances were cancelled as a protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, while the opera house in Warsaw was redeployed as a shelter for displaced Ukrainians. More challenges struck the production in July, when the NNTT announced cast changes, due to four Russian singers who had been signed to sing main roles in Tokyo being denied visas. While supporting the cancellation of the Warsaw performances, Treliński made it clear that the…

Live Reviews VERDI Teatro La Fenice, Venice There was an apt prosecco fizz to La Fenice’s merry romp through Verdi’s Falstaff as the theatre launched its new season with this lively, pacey production. Given director Adrian Noble’s illustrious career at the Royal Shakespeare Company, it’s not surprising that the Bard’s influence is evident throughout. He presents the opera, set in Elizabethan England, as if it were a play, and designer Dick Bird’s functional tiered Globe Theatre set dominates the stage. That the opera works so well in Italian is largely due to Arrigo Boito’s superb libretto, which captures something of the essence of Shakespeare. However, Noble’s further nods to the opera’s provenance were often too busy and distracting. In the crucial plot-setting scene in Ford’s garden where Alice and Meg…

ROSSINI Live Reviews Musik Theater an der Wien, Vienna Rossini’s music wonderfully sung and conducted with verve sounds like the perfect recipe for a lovely evening at the opera. But some of the other makings were missing in Tobias Kratzer’s new production of La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie) at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien. Not all of the bland moments could be remedied. As written, the opera runs for nearly four hours with interval. That’s stretching it even for Rossini fans, considering that the plot warrants no more telling than one act: a maidservant for a well-to-do family is accused of stealing a sliver spoon but is saved from execution in the last minute by the discovery that a magpie was the culprit. With the story not equal to…

DONIZETTI Live Reviews LA Opera, Los Angeles The opening of a new season at LA Opera feels like something out of a bygone era. Ladies in exquisite evening gowns and gentlemen dressed in black tie gather for the company’s major fund-raising event, the Opera Ball, which coincides with the first-night opera performance. This season, the elegance and formality of the audience was in stark contrast to the Lucia di Lammermoor on stage. Director Simon Stone replaced the rugged world of Scottish moorlands and castles, cited in both Walter Scott’s novel and in Donizetti’s opera, with a decaying small town in America’s Rust Belt. Stone’s stated aim was to depict the underbelly of contemporary society as ‘the wasteland of free-market capitalism’. There was a cheap motel, liquor store, pharmacy, and 24-hour…

RECORDINGS New Releases Xerxes Handel Orfeo C230063 Les Abencérages Cherubini Bru Zane 1050 Requiem Verdi Rondeau Production ROP 6196 Der Waffenschmied Lortzing Capriccio C5490 CDs and digital Are-release of Handel’s Xerxes on the Orfeo label is more interesting than entertaining. Recorded in Munich’s Herkulessaal in 1962, it enshrines a stylistic approach to the composer that is now generally considered obsolete: grand, broad and spacious under Rafael Kublík’s stately baton, with roles assigned to incorrect registers. But, as the booklet points out, it is also a step in the modern direction, with a leaner string sound and ‘midway between … aromanticallycoloured understanding of the Baroque and the modern original-sonority versions’. I concur. But it plods along at times, with little joy, perhaps not helped by being sung in German and recorded…

George Orwell wrote Animal Farm as a cautionary tale about how every struggle for freedom inevitably descends into tyranny. Orwell's allegorical satire, published in 1945, was directed at the Russian revolution of 1917 and its descent into Stalin’s violent dictatorship – atrajectory that still resonates around the world today. Orwell’s most famous aphorism, ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others’, is as true now as it was in the middle of last century. The Italian opera director Damiano Michieletto has nursed a long-held ambition to adapt Animal Farm, with its powerful characters and surprising twists and turns, into an opera. In Alexander Raskatov, the perfect composer for Michieletto’s project was found. Russian-born Raskatov has a track record in turning classic literature into compelling opera. His 2010…

Live Reviews FESTIVAL FOCUS In northern Lombardy, the city of Bergamo paid its annual homage to its most famous son during the two-week Donizetti Opera Festival in December. With all Covid restrictions removed and the city (along with nearby Brescia) gearing up to become Italy’s 2023 City of Culture, the festival drew an international crowd of singers, musicians and audiences to experience three of Gaetano Donizetti’s 65 completed operas. Two were neglected early works. And the line-up also featured, quite literally, a wellknown favourite. L’aio nell’imbarazzo (The Embarrassed Tutor) is a ‘comic melodrama’ composed for Rome in 1824, and was one of Donizetti’s earliest successes. The title might be better translated as ‘The Tutor Caught in the Middle’, as Gregorio, a tutor in a nobleman’s household, finds himself drawn into…

Live Reviews BOESMANS WORLD PREMIERE La Monnaie/De Munt, Brussels Philippe Boesmans, who died in April 2022, was the most prolific Belgian opera composer there has been in recent times (indeed, perhaps ever). His music for his eight operas commissioned by La Monnaie is never difficult to listen to, and his works remain popular in Belgium and have travelled beyond his native land. Almost all Boesmans’ operas have been based on successful plays. His first, La Passion de Gilles (1983), was about the monstrous child abuser Gilles de Rais. Its success, despite the nature of the subject matter, made Boesmans realise that his operatic material in future should be of unquestionable narrative validity and functionality. From his pen 10 years later came Reigen, based on Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde; then Shakespeare’s…

PUTS Live Reviews The Metropolitan Opera, New York Kevin Puts’ The Hours arrived at the Met as a ‘Gala Premiere’, which means that dinner jackets and flashy gowns were very much in evidence. And let’s face it, the fact that it was super-soprano Renée Fleming’s return to the stage (after a confusingly incorrect announcement of her retirement) seemed enough reason for a special evening. But alongside her was the marvelous Kelli O’Hara, perhaps better known as a Broadway star, and the epic Joyce di Donato, who seems incapable of boring or failing an audience. The opera is about three women in different places in different time periods, their stories all tied together in one way or another by Virginia Woolf ’s novel Mrs Dalloway – and indeed by three remarkable…

SACRATI Live Reviews Opera Royal de Versailles, Paris Billed as the first opera performed in France, Francesco Sacrati’s La finta pazza was heard at the court of Louis XIV in 1645. The production I saw in December last year, by Jean-Yves Ruf, began its life in Dijon in 2019 as a co-production with Versailles (a planned run in 2021 was cancelled). It was finally staged at the Opéra Royal to great acclaim, featuring Cappella Mediterranea under its founder, the Argentinian Baroque specialist Leonardo García Alarcón. The story of love is set in the time of the Trojan War. Achilles’ mother, the nymph Thétis (Tetide in the opera), tries to save her son from death in battle by hiding him on the Island of Skyros and disguising him as a woman…

NOW CHOICE Reference Recordings FR748 February can be a generally dispiriting month, and so it has proved here so far. So it is with much relief that I turn to a new release that brought joy and flavour to my listening. Crossover efforts are often contentious (as Camilla Nylund has already demonstrated) but mezzo-soprano Cecila Duarte has produced a zinger of an album here. Reencuentros (Re-encounters) is a collection of 12 Latin American songs, some classics, and every one is a winner. Daurte is Mexican, settled in Houston, but chooses numbers from all over South America in homage to a variety of talents – she starts with ‘Fina Estampa’ (by Peruvian Chabuca Granda) and ends with ‘Gracias a la vida’ (by Chilean Violeta Parra). Duarte references legendary performers such as…

GIHOON KIM Gihoon Kim, 31, is establishing himself as a leading baritone in a new generation of opera singers. Born in in the small town of Gokseong, South Korea, Kim has risen to prominence following a string of international competition successes, including Second Prize and the Audience Prize at Operalia 2019, and the Second Prize at the 2019 International Tchaikovsky Competition. He was named BBC Cardiff Singer of the World 2021, after which one eminent critic described his voice as ‘a velvet baritone capable of inspiring tears and awe’ Favourite time of day? Actually, I love bedtime. Rest is the best! Favourite season? Autumn, because the weather is neither cold nor hot and I like anything that’s just right – not too little or too much. Favourite colour? I love…