Tabla de contenidos para August 2023 en Opera Now

Welcome to August’s issue of Opera Now, celebrating the remarkable talent, creativity and history of opera in the USA. The issue began by sitting down with cover star mezzo Jamie Barton to explore more of her inner world. 10 years have elapsed since I remember watching Jamie win the 2013 Cardiff Singer of the World Competition – and the last month has seen another Cardiff Singer competition full of excitement, deservedly won by Italian bass Adolfo Corrado. But competitions are something that bring up complex emotions, especially for those trained in performing. They can lead to feelings of inadequacy, comparison and failure as artists find it difficult to accept others’ opinions of their musicianship. But for others, it can offer a platform and profile that they might never have achieved.…

A survey of freelancers in the theatre industries has revealed that the average earnings for freelancers are 17.5% below the UK national average salary with a gender pay gap between the male and female workforce of 37.4%. The 2023 Big Freelancer Survey, 'Underpaid, Undervalued, Under Pressure', made in collaboration between Freelancers Make Theatre Work and the University of Essex, was answered by 1156 industry freelancers. It revealed the mean income for female respondents was £20,400 and £32,600 for male respondents, suggesting a gender pay gap of 37.4%. 18.1% of respondents fell with within the £50k-£100k pay range, but while this included 14.8% of male respondents, it included only 3.3% of female ones. Practitioners in the industry with over 21 years of experience, exposed a gender pay gap of 47.7% -…

Two newspaper articles from the weekend lingered heavy in my mind on the Monday morning I sat down to write this month’s column. In a canny piece of reporting for The Times, Richard Morrison had looked into the existential threat facing Welsh National Opera following the reduction by 35 per cent of its grant from Arts Council England. Morrison had managed to glean that ACE has offered WNO ‘transition money’ (a cash parachute which will land you on the same treacherous financial ground but make the experience seem a little less painful) on the proviso that it axe a quarter of its orchestra and a third of its chorus. A raft of opera stars including Kiri Te Kanawa had subsequently signed an open letter to The Times claiming ACE was…

‘I hear America singing, the varied carols hear,’ declared Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass. ‘More operatic than opera itself,’ as the composer and conductor Matthew Aucoin puts it, Whitman discovered in opera a class-bridging, inherently democratic form of art that profoundly influenced his sense of mission as ‘a self-appointed national cheerleader’, according to Aucoin, who chose the great American poet as the protagonist of his first opera, The Crossing (2015). While the United States is often perceived as a purveyor above all of popular culture, opera in fact has deep roots in American history that are intertwined with the complex and continually shifting role of immigrants. There exists no single narrative to account for the emergence of opera in North America: rather, a variety of patterns and competing priorities…

Production Highlights • World Premieres • Exceptional Casts Performance runs starting in August and running to September 2023. Listings are in alphabetical order by city within each country heading. M = Matinee performance. Comprehensive Worldwide Listings are available at www.operabase.com UNITED KINGDOM LONDON OPERA HOLLAND PARK operahollandpark.com La bohème | Puccini AUG 01, 03, 05 Conductor George Jackson Stage director Natascha Metherell Set & Costume designer Madeleine Boyd Lighting designer Charlie Morgan Jones CAST Mimì Katie Bird Rodolfo Adam Gilbert / Joseph Buckmaster Musetta Elizabeth Karani Marcello Ross Ramgobin Schaunard Harry Thatcher Colline Barnaby Rea Benoît / Alcindoro Henry Grant Kerswell Parpignol Phillip Costovsk Ruddigore | Sullivan AUG 09-11, 12M Conductor David Eaton Stage director John Savournin Set & Costume designer Madeleine Boyd CAST Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd Matthew Kellett…

How did you discover conducting as a career option? I grew up singing in youth choirs and I eventually took up the organ. During my undergraduate degree organ scholarship, I was always itching for the services where I could come down from the loft and work with the singers! It was at university that I was given my first opportunities to conduct orchestras and, eventually, opera singers. I quickly realised that, in conducting, I’d found where I felt happiest and most inspired. No two singers ever look at a score in the same way, and that’s what I find fascinating. What’s one thing you want audiences to know about being a conductor? I’m often asked whether it would actually make any difference to a performance if I wasn’t there! People…

Italian bass, Adolfo Corrado has been announced as 2023 Cardiff Singer of the World. In the final on 18 June, celebrating 40 years of the competition at St David’s Hall in Cardiff, Corrado was one of four finalists for the main prize. His programme of arias included those from Le Nozze di Figaro, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, and I Lombardi alla prima crociata, accompanied by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Ryan Bancroft. Finalists for the main prize alongside Corrado were Scottish mezzo Beth Taylor, South African soprano Nombulelo Yende, Welsh soprano Jessica Robinson, and South African mezzo Siphokazi Molteno, the jury comprising industry professionals Aidan Lang, Bernarda Fink, Errollyn Wallen, Rosemary Joshua, and Sir Brian McMaster. Following the presentation of the award, Corrado said: ‘I’m full of…

For my first article under Hattie Butterworth’s editorship, I decided on an ambitious expedition to Sweden and Poland. All started well: a trouble-free flight to Copenhagen and train across the Sound to take us to a wonderful museum-like hotel in Malmö. Then disaster. As I neared the opera house for the performance of Janáček’s Makropulos Case, I saw notices on the theatre doors and that could mean only one thing: cancellation. But within a day, I was on the way up the Swedish coast to Gothenburg. This, the largest port in Scandinavia, justifies a visit for several reasons. Its Old Town is full of character, containing interesting buildings and monuments. It is a lively place, more so than the often stuffy and stately Stockholm, and it has cultural attractions, not…

Il Boemo -Original Soundtrack Various Warner Classics 5419723814 ★★★★ Rising Lawrence Brownlee Warner Classics 5419756371 ★★★★ Serse Handel Linn CKD 709 ★★★★☆ Springtime in Amsterdam Christof Loy Naxos 2110757 ★★★ CDs and digital Il Boemo is a film released last year, a fictionalised account of the life of 18th-century Czech composer Josef Mysliveček, not least because he remains a shadowy figure; he is generally defined by people he knew, such as the young Mozart, rather than for his own talents. The film seems to have flopped commercially, raking in just one tenth of its cost, so how far it will raise Mysliveček’s profile is uncertain, but hopefully this soundtrack will help as it is strong. It feature arias from eight of the composer’s 20 operas, and the baroque orchestra Collegium…

Favourite time of day? Morning – having a nice breakfast, seeing the sunlight through the window and looking forward to the start of a new day. Favourite season? I like the summer, except mosquitoes. But I love being on the beach and studying outside in the hot air. The summer in Glyndebourne was really magical because it’s not too hot, but also not too cold. It’s like a beautiful springtime in New York. Favourite colour? I love blue. The painter Yves Klein created a particular blue colour himself which is very powerful and very calm at the same time – and passionate also. I think that represents my personality. Favourite artist? If I have to pick only one person, even though it’s so cliché, I would say Maria Callas. If…

Roger Wright CBE will step down as Chief Executive of Britten Pears Arts after the 75th Aldeburgh Festival next summer, 2024. After 10 years with the organisation, the former Director of the BBC Proms said the decision ‘feels like the right time to move on and enjoy a more flexible life for the first time in almost fifty years’. The English National Opera has received the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Opera for its production of Wagner’s The Rhinegold, directed by Richard Jones. The annual South Bank Sky Arts Awards recognises British achievements in the arts, and was hosted on 2 July at London’s Savoy Hotel. The Royal Opera House has announced a free exhibition in celebration of Maria Callas’s centenary. Featuring exclusive images of Callas ROH performances from…

When Jessye Norman died in 2019, the New York Times called her a ‘diva in the best way’. And the various ways to be a diva, good or otherwise, feed into a new exhibition at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum that surveys what the word has meant through history – though at the same time it’s an excuse for the display of some extraordinary frocks worn by the likes of Adelina Patti through to Shirley Bassey. Looking beyond opera for material, it takes in theatre, cinema, contemporary pop … but opera is the starting point. You’re given headphones and immediately hear Callas singing (what else?) Casta Diva. And the exhibition opens with the legendary female singers of the later 19th Century who were the first to be called ‘divas’ –…

Five minutes into my conversation with Jamie Barton and I have somehow forgotten that the open, effervescent woman I’m speaking to is one of the world’s most celebrated mezzo sopranos. Our conversation has moved jovially between homesickness for her cat, River, to how she finds being in London and her new safehaven – the cat cafe near to her sub-let. ‘Kitties who are in a cat cafe are certainly a little touch-inundated, so they’re not exactly gonna want to cuddle with you. But it’s just nice to be around a little furry monster!’ Her open-heartedness is, equally, unsurprising. I’ve followed Barton’s social media for many years, often comforted, elated, amused and connected by the unapologetic world she shares with her audience. I almost sense I know her already. ‘She is…

Who is given a second chance? Who isn’t – and pays the price with their lives? That question is at the heart of Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s 2000 opera Dead Man Walking, opening the Metropolitan Opera’s new season. But it has also been weighing heavily on bass-baritone Ryan McKinny, starring in the production as death-row prisoner Joseph De Rocher. For six years, McKinny corresponded with Terence Andrus, a gifted poet and painter who was on death row in Texas, in a facility north-east of Houston. Earlier this year, Andrus took his own life, two months before his 35th birthday and six months after the Supreme Court declined to review his case a second time. What that original double murder case, in 2012, had not accounted for was that Andrus…

LEGENDARY SINGERS In 1961 Grace Bumbry made her Bayreuth debut at age 24 as Venus in Tannhäuser, the first black artist to perform there in its 100-year history. Though the Festival Opera House received letters that Wagner would ‘turn in his grave’ and this appointment was a ‘cultural disgrace’, she received a 30-minute standing ovation and no fewer than 42 curtain calls. A report by Claude Loursais for French TV called this a ‘small revolution at Bayreuth’. In an interview he asks Bumbry if she knew, and how she feels about it. She responds, in French, that she does, and is happy about it. He then asks her why she feels that way, and she replies, simply ‘It’s my character’. In a later interview reflecting on the controversy at the…

★★★★★ RECORDING OF THE MONTH Spontini enjoyed a huge hit with the premiere of La vestale in Paris in 1807. He was championed by the Empress Joséphine, who attended the opening night (Napoleon was away on a killing spree). It is perhaps difficult for us to appreciate why the work had such an impact, but as well as large-scale stage effects to thrill the crowd they also had a tenor character defending the oppressed and standing up to official religion, bang on trend for the times, and a new musical style that looked both back and to the future. Spontini’s work was famously influenced by Gluck, and he obviously understood the French aversion to vocal effects for the sake of showing off, allowing his singers great moments of declamation and…