Inhoudsopgave van August 2022 - Opera Now

A nation struggling to define its identity, devoid of good leadership, dismayed by the erosion of its social values and at odds with its neighbours and … I could be describing many places in today’s world, but in the context of this issue of Opera Now, I’m referring to Giuseppe Verdi’s Italy. Verdi was a galvanising figure in shaping Italian culture and national identity in the 19th century. His operas work on so many levels – expanding our insights into the human condition, holding up a mirror to society and the relationship between the powerful and the oppressed, and as vehicles for political campaigning. Shakespeare was his hero and a creative role model. And just as Shakespeare transformed our relationship with language, unlocking its descriptive powers to describe the world…

The Monnaie Opera House in Brussels has announced that it will be launching a new Ring Cycle, unfolding between 2023 and 2025, conducted by music director Alain Altinoglu and directed by Romeo Castellucci, who began his opera career at La Monnaie with Parsifal in 2012. The last time Wagner’s Cycle was staged in Brussels was in the 1980s when Gerard Mortier engaged conductor Sylvain Cambreling and director Herbert Wernicke. Bernard Foccroulle’s project with Antonio Pappano and Willy Decker fell through in the 1990s for artistic reasons. ‘It’s high time for a new tetralogy tailored to our house and in line with the spirit of the times,’ said Peter de Caluwe, who will be ending his time as general and artistic director of La Monnaie in 2025, as the new Ring…

On 27 January 1901, Italy’s greatest composer Giuseppe Verdi died of a stroke at the age of 88. La Scala shut its heavy wood doors while thousands gathered a few blocks away, outside the Grand Hotel where Verdi had been living. Straw had been placed on the street outside his window to muffle the sound of the horses’ hooves. A few days later, in La Scala’s hallowed halls, Arturo Toscanini solemnly conducted a concert of Verdi’s music with Enrico Caruso singing. As Verdi was buried, those who followed his casket through the streets of Milan to his grave site spontaneously sang ‘Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate’, (the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Nabucco) in hushed tones as his casket was slowly lowered into its final resting place. Verdi was born…

Verdi adored Shakespeare. Besides the three operas he based on his plays – Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff – he had briefly considered setting The Tempest, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet and his favourite Shakespeare play, King Lear. It was not to be, though Shakespeare’s theatrical genius and psychological insights were a constant influence in Verdi’s own creative process. By the middle of the 19th century, there were literally hundreds of operas derived from William Shakespeare’s plays (almost three hundred according to the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare). But most of them were taken only indirectly from the plays and were drawn from parallel sources or poor translations. Even Rossini’s Otello (1816) was based on a French adaptation of an Italian translation. Verdi was determined to be as true to his beloved…

Bellini’s I Puritani is not performed as often as it deserves. Opera companies are put off by the need for a cast capable of virtuoso coloratura, and a slow-moving plot absurd even by the conventions of 19th-century opera. This is a pity, as it contains some of Bellini’s loveliest music. Opera di Roma’s staging skilfully combined a modern, lowkey staging with a traditional approach to the production of a bel canto opera that put the music, sometimes literally, centre stage. Nicolas Bovey’s sets are unobtrusive in sombre shades, Mariano Tufano’s 19thcentury costumes are black and grey, Pasquale Mari’s lighting subdued. The overall effect is of restrained elegance. The performance centres on Elvira, whose white dress and veil stand out starkly, points of light against the monochrome background. In a nod…

Out of the pit and centre stage at Grieghallen the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra (BPO) conducted by Edward Gardner, along with a superb line-up of singers, gave an electrifying performance of Salome at the Bergen International Festival. The opera began in a low-key way, as if we had just dropped into the middle of a conversation between the Syrian soldiers guarding the imprisoned prophet Jochanaan. But in short order the orchestral murmur became increasingly unsettled, as did tenor Bror Magnus Tødenes (Narraboth), the love-struck guard pining for Salome (Allison Oakes). Wearing a striking bloodred dress the soprano’s seductive warmth was threaded through her vocal spectrum. This is a demanding role and she paced herself well, keeping something in reserve for the turbo-charged finale. (Both Oakes and Karin Lovelius’ Herodias were last…

Stabat Mater Jakub Józef Orliński (countertenor) Capella Cracoviensis, Jan Tomasz Adamus CD + DVD Erato 9029506070 Vivaldi’s setting of the Stabat Mater, a 13th-century Latin hymn depicting and meditating on Mary as she watches Christ dying on the Cross, is not perhaps the first film soundtrack that springs to mind. Now the Polish writer and director Sebastian Pańczyk has teamed up with countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński, conductor Jan Tomasz Adamus and Capella Cracoviensis to produce a short video which viewers may well find puzzling, but which is unlikely to leave them unmoved. As the hymn unfolds as the soundtrack, we see a carefree group of young people out for a day in the country gunned down one by one. The singer escapes, to watch a car take the bodies away.…

Shameful behaviour As an opera lover (and former Conservative voter) from a solid working-class background I was stunned at Tory MP Dominic Raab’s snobbish observations about his Labour counterpart Angela Rayner’s visit to Glyndebourne. Rayner is a strong lady who can stand up for herself [see page 8 in this issue for a full report of the incident], but I think it should be pointed out to Raab that his anti-opera remarks go against everything that the Tory party stands for. Whatever Raab thinks about the opera that goes on there, Glyndebourne is a great British business with an international reputation for excellence. It helps to support its local economy, and also draws the very best talents in their field from all over the world. For a politician to undermine…

The July/August issue of International Piano celebrates the Romantic keyboard colossus Franz Liszt with articles including: • Liszt through the eyes of his contemporaries • Paul Roberts on the pianist as actor • Exclusive interviews with Mariam Batsashvili, Alfred Brendel, Stephen Hough, Leslie Howard, Alexander Ullman and Mark Viner • Collectors’ guide for Liszt’s Second Concerto Subscribe today to receive your copy magsubscriptions.com/international-piano +44 (0)1722 716997 subscriptions@markallengroup.com…

CARLO MARIA GIULINI ‘What moves me profoundly, almost above all, is the fact that Verdi, at the advanced age of 80, after all the experience of his life, after having composed music for so many terrible, tortured characters like Iago and Rigoletto, could find in himself the purity and poetry to write music for these two …birds… [Fenton and Nannetta] in Falstaff, who are in a dream of love, on the moon! And he gave them the most beautiful, innocent music. Think of it! A very, very old man, after such a tense and turbulent life, could find that freshness and purity. Recording: Verdi Requiem & Quattro Pezzi Sacri. It’s fascinating to watch Giulini’s every gesture as he leads the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus in a classic performance of Verdi’s…

In the blithe hope that conditions in German opera houses were more or less back to normal, I made plans for an excursion, combining my thirst for rarely performed works with an interest in getting to hitherto unvisited towns. In Bonn’s modern opera house there was the first performance since the 19th-century of Meyerbeer’s Ein Feldlager in Schlesien (A Field Camp in Silesia). A journey across the country would take me to Zwickau in Saxony where I would see Ariadne auf Naxos and I would finish in the attractive Thuringian city of Gera for Lortzing’s Der Wildschütz. I was, of course, aware that there was still a risk of performances being cancelled; so I made contingency plans: for the Meyerbeer, Auber’s La Muette de Portici in Kassel; for Ariadne and…

Anthony Negus, the conductor behind Longborough’s Ring Cycles, claims that Siegfried is the least popular of Wagner’s tetralogy. It’s easy to see why. Siegfried starts off as a prequel to Götterdämmerung and ends up as a sequel to Die Walküre. If this interstitiality were not bad enough, its titular character is one of the most bumptious, noisy and repellent characters in the operatic canon. All credit then to Australian Bradley Daley – making his Longborough debut – who after a repetitive first act (entirely Wagner’s fault) created a volatile but ultimately vulnerable warrior who genuinely deserved Brünnhilde’s enthusiastic love by the end of Act III. Drenched in sweat, Daley gave this production his heldentenor all. Lee Bisset as Brünnhilde also threw herself into her role from the moment she awoke,…

When Handel, who had premiered Orlando in 1733 in London, removed this opera after 10 performances because of poor attendance, he probably guessed that he would never revive the piece in his lifetime. But he couldn’t have guessed that it would not be performed again until 1922 in his native city of Halle. And he could not have imagined that a century after this revival, Orlando would be a triumph with the audience at the opening of the 2022 Handel Festival in Halle. Its success is mainly due to the very modern production by Walter Sutcliffe, the new artistic director of the Halle Opera. He has succeeded in updating an abundantly abstruse story, (based on Ariosto’s verse epic Orlando furioso) to our time. The knight Orlando finds it difficult to…

Favourite time of day? Late morning. Coffee time. it’s the rare point of the day when I’ve got a lot of energy (he laughs). Favourite season? Spring. Favourite colour? Blue, because my mum once said to me ‘you look great in navy……’ Favourite artist? Years ago I went out to Santa Fe in New Mexico. There were lots of sculptors there, but Allan Houser was the artist we saw and loved most. He was a Chiricahua Apache, and there are some of his works out in the desert! Favourite building? St Paul’s Cathedral – though it’s not my favourite to sing in because the acoustic is terrible, just a wash of sound like an enormous bathroom. Also, the Pantheon in Rome: when we went on holiday there about 10 years…

It is rare that opera makes it into the parliamentary debating chambers of British politics, but a recent spat between the Conservative deputy prime minister Dominic Raab and the Labour deputy opposition leader Angela Rayner demonstrated that Mozart can still pack a political punch centuries after his operas were premiered. There was a strange sense of role reversal when right-winger Raab accused left-leaning Rayner during Prime Minister’s Questions of being elitist because she had a attended a performance of Le nozze di Figaro at Glyndebourne while Britain was in the grip of a rail workers’ strike over pay: ‘She talks about working people,’ Raab thundered. ‘Where was the right honourable lady when the comrades were on the picket line last Thursday? She was at the Glyndebourne music festival sipping champagne,…

FREE SPIRIT The Swiss-French mezzo soprano Marina Viotti’s eclectic musical influences, including jazz, heavy metal and classical flute, give her an unusual stylistic freedom as an opera singer. In the wake of her La Scala debut, we talk to her about her new recording exploring the world of Pauline Viardot with Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques OPERA IN FRANCE Behind the scenes with Laurent Brunner, director of the Royal Theatre in Versailles reporting on John Nelson’s latest Berlioz project in Strasbourg The view from Aix-en-Provence Best of the season. A guide to opera-going in France in the 2022/23 season PLUS John Adams composer discusses the upcoming world premiere of his Antony and Cleopatra, commissioned by San Francisco Opera Festival Reviews from Bayreuth, Salzburg, Valle d’Itria, Buxton, The Grange…

It is curious how a magnificent opera can fail to inspire the public’s affections the way lesser works can. And yet Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra falls squarely into this category. The opera is a product of his maturity, and his 20th opera; it comes next but one after La traviata and immediately before Un ballo in maschera. The revised version has close musical affinities with Otello. Yet it remains one of Verdi's less performed works, and quite unjustly so. True, the premiere in Venice on 12 March 1857 was a fiasco, but so had been that of La traviata and it went on to become Verdi's most popular opera. In fact, Simon Boccanegra was not a complete failure: some of the more perceptive critics admired it, and it had not far…

Among the most prolific opera directors active today Michael Cavanagh has taken on each of Mozart’s collaborations with Lorenzo Da Ponte several times in separate productions. But when the Canadian director (who has recently been appointed artistic director of Royal Swedish Opera) came up with the idea that all three could be staged as an interconnected ‘cycle’, it sparked the interest of Matthew Shilvock, then newly named general director of San Francisco Opera (SFO). The company committed to realising Cavanagh’s concept of a ‘Mozart-Da Ponte Trilogy’ that links the three operas by having them play out in the same location – an imposing American manor house. SFO’s multiple-year experiment began in October 2019 with The Marriage of Figaro and continued, after the pandemic disruption, with Così fan tutte in late…

As the overture scurries along, a man in a suit staggers on to the stage, red canes sticking from his back, for all the world like a novelty pencil holder. Eventually he falls, tangled in them, and is dragged away. This is the puzzling opening of a production overstuffed with allusions which the hapless viewer would need a Classics degree (or at least rather better programme notes) to understand. Damiano Michieletto’s basic premise is a good one: Cesare, for the staggering man is he, is obsessed by his own death, and symbols of mortality are ever present. Drops of blood and falling funerary ash stain the stage. The red sticks run through the backdrop, becoming the red threads of life that can be cut at any moment by the Fates,…

The audience at the Hamburg Staatsoper stared at the filmed profile of dormant tenor Klaus Florian Vogt for more than 20 minutes at the start of Tannhäuser, with the odd troubled dream flickering across his face. I began to miss the usual directorial excesses often thrown at the overture and opening scene in Venusberg. One memorable production I saw in Geneva featured a priapic porn star imported from France who got things off to a jump start. As you will discover, I really should be careful what I wish for… Vogt’s Tannhäuser awakes to find himself a Love Island dropout in T-shirt, chinos and Vans, languishing in a lush tropical paradise with the Venus of Tanja Ariane Baumgartner and a group of young girls, (whether offspring or supply is not…

Fantasies on Operas by Donizetti and Fantasies on Opera by Verdi, Rossini and Bellini Francesco Nicolosi Naxos 555502 and Naxos 555503 Sigismond Thalberg had a dual career as a composer and pianist, finding great fame as the latter. He knew Liszt, Mendelssohn, Spohr and Schumann; Berlioz was a huge fan, Chopin less so. He married the daughter of the legendary bass Lablache, who had created roles for Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi. Thalberg was firmly at the centre of European musical life in the first half of the 19th century. In fact he went further, and his tours of America in the 1850s elevated him to superstar status and raked in the cash. One of Thalberg’s specialisms was composing and perfoming Fantasies based on operatic numbers to thrilling effect, and this is…

1. Which Bibical name features in an oratorio by Handel and operas by Milhaud and Weisgall? 2. Another Handelian character also features in works by Massé and Massenet – who is s/he? 3. Fill the gap: Mav(¬--)damisto 4. The 1987 movie Aria consists of ten short films each set to music from opera. The first film shows the assassination attempt on King Zog I of Albania on the steps of the Vienna Staatsoper in 1931. Music from which opera is used? 5. I’m a bel canto heroine, found at 53.4084° N, 2.9916° W – who and where am I? 6. In the World Wide Web Consortium technical specification ARIA, what does the acronym stand for? 7. What gilded beast links Gounod to Schoenberg? 8. Multiply Verdi’s Foscari by Wolf-Ferrari’s rusteghi.…