Tabla de contenidos para June 2023 en Opera Now

Deeply involved in all the arts, the comedian Barry Humphries, who died on April 22 at age 89, enjoyed citing musty, forgotten literati like Joseph Hocking or the landscape painter Charles Conder, whom he praised as ‘exquisitely insipid.’ Yet as an opera lover, Humphries thrilled to mainstream apogees of vocal art. As a castaway on a November 1973 episode of BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs programme, he opted for the duet ‘Glück, das mir verblieb’(Happiness that remained) from the opera Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. In a return appearance as a castaway in 2009, Humphries informed Desert Island host Kirsty Young that his favourite opera was Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, not least what he called the ‘spine-tingling moment’ of the Presentation of the Rose. He…

The final of the Kathleen Ferrier Awards took place at the Wigmore Hall on Friday 21 April, with a jury chaired by Elaine Padmore. First prize was awarded to Swiss baritone Felix Gygli, a Young Artist at the National Opera Studio and soon to join the International Opera Studio of the Opernhaus Zürich. Recipients of a joint second prize were soprano Matina Tsaroucha and tenor George Curnow. Pianist Harry Rylance received the Help Musicians Accompanist’s Prize with tenor Dafydd Jones receiving the Ferrier Loveday Song Prize. A multi-million pound legacy left by the late Philippa and David Seligman will be shared between the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama and Welsh National Opera to deliver lastING support to the training of singers in Wales. A passionate supporter of the…

UK Royal Opera House, Covent Garden MUSIC ★★★★ STAGING ★★★★ In one room, heart-shaped pastelpink balloons and ribboned chair covers set the scene for a wedding; in the adjacent space, a steel kitchen is lit like an operating table. Above, individual desks and colourful posters fill a classroom; the stage slowly spins, revealing the words ‘International School’. Chloe Lamford’s multi-purpose, two-storey construction is the perfectly stretched canvas upon which Kaija Saariaho’sInnocence is painted. We’re in Finland circa now, but we’re also exploring events that happened 10 years ago, through flashbacks and concurrent plots: the groom’s side of the wedding party guards a dark secret and waitress Tereza is our key. Through her distress at seeing the family, we – along with the bride – discover that a disinvited brother once…

Italy La Scala, Milan MUSIC ★ ★ ★ ★ STAGING ★ ★ ★ It feels a bit naughty watching Offenbach at La Scala, even when the production is as serious and ghoulishly dramatic as the new Tales of Hoffmann’s by the Turin-based Davide Livermore. For all the dark and sardonic wit (and there is plenty) Livermore leaves one in no doubt that story is as much about Offenbach’s approaching death as E. T. A Hoffmann’s. The morale of all four hours is that love always ends badly for men, however sincerely felt and wellintentioned. Even the lightest moments, the drinking songs and the various servants’ frolics, carried an undercurrent of threat. The setting is severe, the costumes by Gianluca Falaschi almost all black and white, whether scientific white coats or…

USA There was a lot of energy this year at the Sarasota Opera Winter Festival, both on and off the stage. Fully emerged from Covid pandemic restrictions, the festival offered multiple performances of its four operas, three of which I attended in a two-day opera marathon that included its Salute to the Stars Awards Luncheon where the best of Sarasota’s emerging talent performed. I first attended the ‘definitive’ fifth version of Madama Butterfly, which unfolded against a backdrop of verdant hills surrounding Nagasaki Harbour with a minka and pathway in the foreground. Considering the controversy surrounding the opera today, including some opera companies cancelling their scheduled Butterfly, director Stephanie Sundine made the traditional production relevant for today’s audiences by humanising the characters and minimising stereotyping, so the audience could both…

Favourite time of day? I love cooking, so my favourite time of day is early evening when I’m in the kitchen creating some kind of lovely meal. I sit with my girls, if I’m at home, and we knit or watch a film. Favourite season? I’m a massive Christmas fan, so winter – and I love coats. Favourite colour? I’ve painted the interior of most of the houses I’ve lived in different shades of green. I find that quite homely. Funnily enough, I never wear green, but I do buy green furniture… Favourite artist? Turner, the light and the drama of his paintings. Favourite building? The Frick in New York. I went there for the first time with a very good friend when we were doing Exterminating Angel and I…

How did you get into designing set for opera? I studied production design for stage and screen at The Northern School of Art, originally with the intention of become a prop maker for film. I got a work experience placement at Opera North in my second year and loved working at the company so much I went back every season to work in the props department. In 2018 I dedicated my final year of study to theoretically designing La bohème for Opera North, which I presented to them. Opera North was incredibly supportive of my ambition. In the same year I met the designer Charles Edwards, while he was working at Opera North on The Little Greats. Shortly after I graduated, I moved to London to assist him and he…

Turner prize-winning artist Lubaina Himid will present a solo exhibition at this summer’s Glyndebourne Festival entitled What Does Love Sound Like? Featuring a series of large-scale paintings, the exhibited work will be visual responses to the operas being performed at the festival, including Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites and Handel’s Semele. Born in Zanzibar in 1954, Himih’s artistic practice has gone from strength to strength. Winning the Turner Prize in 2018 she became the first Black woman to do so. The exhibition at Glyndebourne will draw on her private memories of listening to opera with her stepfather together with experience of seeing live opera. What does love sound like? will be available to view by all ticket-holders to the 2023 Glyndebourne Festival between 19 May and 27…

From the waxing and waning of the moon to the autumnal pull of new stationery, life is made reliable through its cyclical nature. At granular level, it’s the morning coffee routine; in a commercial realm, it’s the division into tax years. For the opera fan, we might describe the situation thus: season announcements, country-house opera summer festivals, season openings. Our year begins when the trees are newly in leaf – an oddly unsettlingly calendar, for just as we’re reaching the peak of a particular venue’s current programme, our eye is caught by something shiny in the distance. And so it was that the ink had barely dried on thoughts about Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence, the 2018 opera that recently made its much-anticipated UK premiere after opening at Festival D’Aix-en-Provence in 2021,…

UK The Dead City Korngold remains a composer more discussed than performed: the triumphant child prodigy, the move to Hollywood, film scores, commercial success, critical condescension, two Oscars. Die tote Stadt was premiered simultaneously in Hamburg and Cologne in 1920, when Korngold was already an old hand of 23, and was an immediate hit. It is still a relative rarity, with just seven productions worldwide this season as opposed to La traviata’s 168. With just two popular arias that stand alone, ENO describes it as a ‘cult classic’, which sums it up perfectly. Annilese Miskimmon’s production plays things relatively safely, with its simple post-war decor, an elegant wood-lined room with ceiling and back wall that open and close to reveal characters and the foggy streets of Bruges. Likewise, the fireplace…

Belgium La Monnaie, Brussels MUSIC ★ ★ ★ STAGING ★ ★ ★ Sometime it really is best to leave well alone, no matter the temptation. Director Olivier Fredj and conductor Francesco Lanzillotta have spent the last few years creating two operas based on the life of Elizabeth I: a Donizetti mash-up. They drew inspiration and most of the music from the composer’s Tudor operas: his first great success, Anna Bolena, about Elizabeth’s mother, then on to Maria Stuarda and Roberto Devereux, with some reference to a rare earlier work, Il castello di Kenilworth (an optimistic gloss on the story of the doomed Amy Robsart). Audiences of the time were fascinated by the sweeping romance and grim twists and turns of British royal history, and the obsession seemingly continues as acting…

New Releases Recordings Roméo et Juliette / Cléopâtre Berlioz Erato 5054197481383 ★ ★ ★ ★ Strauss – Four Last Songs Rachel Willis-Sørensen Sony Classical 19439921722 ★ ★ ★ Strauss – Letzte Leider Kammerchor Saarbrücken Rondeau ROP6241 ★ ★ ★ Ariadne auf Naxos Strauss Dynamic 57970 ★ ★ ★ CDs and digital Roméo et Juliette / Cléopâtre Berlioz described Roméo et Juliette as ‘neither a concert opera or cantata but a choral symphony’, but also wrote, ‘It is an orchestra performing an opera!’ You decide, but this release makes a companion piece to conductor John Nelson’s other Berlioz offerings, notably the stunning Les Troyens from 2017. He uses the same Strasbourg forces here, on remarkable form as before, and also has his Didon, Joyce DiDonato, as contralto. (She also performs the…

As an Opera Now reader, you probably remember your first time. I certainly remember mine. It was weeks in the planning. I had special permission to step beyond the heavy iron gates of my boarding school and walk 15 minutes down the hill to the Bristol Hippodrome, where I watched Giles Havergal’s production of The Marriage of Figaro courtesy of Welsh National Opera. My mum dropped me back at school 10 minutes after curtaindown, and then drove the two hours back to Plymouth. That was 1995. After the game-changing round of decisions made by Arts Council England last November, it’s fair to say Britain’s operatic landscape has been transformed more in the last six months than in the entire 28 years before them. WNO’s ability to tour to England has…

Igreet soprano Véronique Gens with ‘Happy Birthday’ when I meet her via Zoom, and ask her if she’s celebrating. ‘It’s a bit early for Champagne!’ she laughs; she has a point as it’s 9am. But we’re off to a cheery start as I ask her about her recent work and forthcoming recital at the Leeds Lieder Festival. Earlier this year her recording of Poulenc’s voix humaine was released to much acclaim. Based on Cocteau’s monodrama focusing on a woman’s final phone call to her departing lover, it puts singer and audience though the emotional wringer. ‘It’s an Everest,’ Gens exclaims, ‘psychologically really hard, with no stop for over 40 minutes or to rest the voice or brain.’ She says she prepared for the recording ‘with a lot of work and…

UK Pegasus Opera Company Pegasus Opera Company presented an unusual pairing at the Susie Sainsbury Theatre of Philip Hagemann’s The Six of Calais and Ruth. The former a George Bernard Shaw play based on The Hundred Years War, where we see King Edward III offer to pardon six prisoners from being hanged. The comedy factor seemed a little lost and confused, much like the music sadly. Very strong performances though came from Bernadine Pritchett playing Queen Philippa and Dominick Felix as Peter Hardmouth in a rather challenging work still managing to deliver vocal excellence. Ruth, however, totally eclipsed the first act. The role was written for Alison Buchanan (director of Pegasus) by Hagemann and told a story offinding love in unexpected places, along with the burdens of womanhood and motherhood…

USA The Metropolitan Opera, New York MUSIC ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ STAGING ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Awarm welcome greeted the Met revival of Robert Carsen’s witty and wise 10-year old production of Verdi’s Falstaff. Nobody was happy to see Franco Zeffirelli’s true-totime-and-place production replaced, but there were no complaints when Carsen’s was unveiled. And indeed, it is a delight. Updating the opera to England in the 1950s somehow makes perfect sense – the middle/ merchant class outwitting the fauxaristocracy is a fine fit. Sir John, penniless, holds to his fading privilege while living in a gigantic wood-panelled room at the Garter Inn, lazing about in his huge bed in his dirty underwear, ordering people around. Tables with dirty dishes and empty glasses are all over and the room…