Table of contents for May 2022 in Opera Now

TOSCA Puccini | Dudamel, Bortolameolli | Audi LA CENERENTOLA Rossini | Matheuz | Gallienne DIE ZAUBERFLÖTE Mozart | Manacorda, Di Felice | Carsen I CAPULETI E I MONTECCHI Bellini | Scappucci | Carsen */SALOME Strauss | Young | Steier CARMEN Bizet | Gabel | Bieito LE NOZZE DI FIGARO Mozart | Langrée | Jones LA FORZA DEL DESTINO Verdi | Bignamini | Auvray TRISTAN UND ISOLDE Wagner | Dudamel | Sellars IL TROVATORE Verdi | Rizzi | Ollé */PETER GRIMES Britten | Mallwitz | Warner LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR Donizetti | Shokhakimov | Serban */HAMLET Thomas | Hengelbrock | Warlikowski */NIXON IN CHINA Adams | Dudamel | Carrasco */LA SCALA DI SETA Rossini | Verdier | Neyron */ARIODANTE Handel | Bicket | Carsen LA BOHÈME Puccini | Mariotti | Guth */ROMÉO…

Dressing down As much as I greatly admire your cover artist in April, Joyce DiDonato, and though she has given me a huge amount of pleasure over the years in the opera house and on record, I do find her self-invention as a ‘campaigning artist’ rather painful. Yes, music is transformative – it does things to the soul that we can’t begin to understand. But to dress up in absurdly theatrical clothes and daub oneself in garish make-up is, I think, an odd way to represent the power that is inherent in great art. Dressing in costume to create a character in an opera is one thing; on the concert platform, however, too much display merely detracts from the power of the music and from the very message that DiDonato…

As soon as Baroque specialist Carlo Vistoli, 34, sings it’s obvious he’s Italian. The diction is perfect, but the evidence comes from the evenness of his long legato lines, and a certain passion and engagement with the music. He’s glad to be revisiting Gluck’s Orfeo, a role he loves, in Berlin in July with director Damiano Michelietto. The way he approaches the character changes with each staging. ‘In Rome with Robert Carsen, it was simple and touching. Probably the production I keep in my heart.’ (Carsen’s staging is revived in Paris in September with Jakub Jozef Orlinski in the title role). There’s also a tour in prospect next year with Les Arts Florissants. Unusually for a countertenor, he started out taking lessons as a tenor in Lugo, his home town…

For devotees of Wagner, Bayreuth (25 July - 1 September) of course comes first. This year, the Festival has Tristan und Isolde (Stephen Gould and Catherine Foster in the title roles), Lohengrin (Klaus Florian Vogt), Flying Dutchman (Tomasz Konieczny with Oksana Lyniv conducting) and Tannhäuser: Stephen Gould again – he is going to be a busy man, since he is also singing Siegfried in Götterdämmerung. The new Ring Cycle is being staged by Valentin Schwarz and the conducting is entrusted to Pietari Inkinen, more usually to be found with the German Radio Philharmonic Orchestra in Saarbrücken. If you want to warm up with something even more comprehensive, the city of Wagner’s birth, Leipzig, is taking on the whole gourmand menu: the operas gathered together from Leipzig Opera’s house productions, in…

Teatro La Fenice, Venice MUSIC STAGING This stripped back, no-frills production of Giorgio Battistelli’s new Fenice commission, Le baruffe, with its abrasive percussion-rich score and rapid-fire vocal lines, made for a riveting and enjoyable hour and 40 uninterrupted minutes of opera. This was despite director Damiano Michieletto managing to wring a lot of the absurdity out of Carlo Goldoni’s popular 1762 comical farce, Le baruffe chiozzotte (Brawling in Chioggia), on which the opera is based. The story is set in motion by a piece of hot pumpkin. A fisherman, Toffolo (Leonardo Cortellazzi), flirts with Lucietta (Francesca Sorteni), who is engaged to another boat-owner Titta-Nane (Enrico Casari). He gives her and Madonna Pasqua (Valeria Girardello) some roast pumpkin. Checca (Silvia Frigato), who fancies Toffolo, immediately becomes jealous and when Tita-Nane along…

Greek National Opera Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre, Athens MUSIC STAGING Robert Wilson’s production of Otello – a co-production with the Baden Baden Festival in Germany – was one of this season’s highly awaited events in the Greek capital, where Wilson has a dedicated public, and it was undeniably a considerable and highly popular move by Greek National Opera to include it in its first full post-Covid season. As expected, this was Wilson’s Otello, full stop, and offered everything that his admirers have come to expect: his highly idiosyncratic view of opera as an art form; his original concepts about its interpretation; and stunning visual effects. What it did not offer was a glimpse of the red-hot passions that define and permeate Verdi’s masterpiece: from the supreme eroticism of the…

The advantages of performing Debussy on instruments appropriate to the time of the work’s genesis are writ large in this important new recording from Harmonia Mundi, with conductor François-Xavier Roth. The orchestra is Les Siècles, whose recent work in this field has been so significant – for example, performing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring as it would have been heard in 1913. The sheer transparency of the orchestral contribution is what is so telling here. In no way does this detract from the atmosphere or the profundity of Debussy’s work; instead, it enhances it. The Parsifal references that Debussy works into the score only make one wonder what Les Siècles would bring to Wagner. Interestingly, Roth in a booklet interview states that Pelléas and Tristan are inseparable. Rarely has the…

Production Highlights • World Premieres • Exceptional Casts Performance runs starting in May and June 2022. Schedules are subject to changes and cancellations due to Covid restrictions. Comprehensive Worldwide Listings with regular updates are available online at www.operabase.com UNITED KINGDOM FESTIVALS GLYNDEBOURNE FESTIVAL OPERA glyndebourne.com The Wreckers | Smyth MAY 21, 25, 28; JUN 01, 04, 07, 10, 16, 21, 24 Conductor Robin Ticciati Stage director Melly Still Lighting designer Malcolm Rippeth Costume & Set designer Ana Ines Jabares-Pita Video Akhila Krishnan Choreographer Mike Ashcroft CAST Pascoe Markus Bruck Thirza Clementine Margaine Lawrence James Rutherford Avis Lauren Fagan Mark Rodrigo Porras Garulo Tallan Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts Jack Marta Fontanals-Simmons Harvey Donovan Singletary Le nozze di Figaro | Mozart MAY 22, 24, 27, 29; JUN 05, 09, 12, 17, 19, 23, 26, 30…

*/ALAN LUCIEN ØYEN */MAYERLING Liszt | Yates | MacMillan */KONTAKTHOF Bausch SWAN LAKE Tchaikovsky | Pähn | Noureev GEORGE BALANCHINE Ballet imperial | Who Cares? TRIBUTE TO PATRICK DUPOND */BOBBI JENE SMITH Sibelius, Oram | Carneiro | Smith ÉCOLE DE DANSE Demonstrations | Annual production Special evening – Claude Bessy MAURICE BÉJART L’Oiseau de feu Le Chant du compagnon errant Boléro THE DANTE PROJECT Adès | Dudamel, Adès | McGregor PEEPING TOM Guest company MANON Massenet | Dumoussaud | MacMillan SIGNES Aubry | Carlson, Debré * / NEW PRODUCTION Demonstrations | Annual production Special evening – Claude Bessy MAURICE BÉJART L’Oiseau de feu Le Chant du compagnon errant Boléro THE DANTE PROJECT Adès | Dudamel, Adès | McGregor PEEPING TOM Guest company MANON Massenet | Dumoussaud | MacMillan SIGNES Aubry…

JUNE 2022 ON SALE 23 MAY OPERA IN ITALY AND SPAIN How the opulent inNaplespicturedabove) is restoring its reputation as one of Europe’s leading operatic centres In-depth reports from the inMadridandthe inBarcelona Bel canto singing’s role in Italy’s cultural heritage WAR MUSIC Ukrainian opera singers tell their stories of struggle and survival CELEBRATING THE COLOSSAL ARTISTRY OF CLARA BUTT We remember a legendary and larger-than-life British contralto on the 150th anniversary of her birth JOYCE DIDONATO: OUR FAVOURITE RECORDINGS www.operanow.co.uk…

Up-and-coming alto Key’mon Murrah’s career took a somewhat winding path. ‘I was a soprano until I was 18, and didn’t transition to tenor until I was at the University of Kentucky. I used to go home and mimic my favourite singers, Leontyne Price and Maria Callas. I missed the joy part, so I switched to arts administration. I saw John Holiday singing Xerxes and I thought: ‘This is a real thing and people gonna take it seriously?’ He encouraged me. I sent a tape to the Red River Artist’s programme, and ended up cast as Tolomeo. It felt like home.’ After that his ascent has been rapid. In 2020, he was a Young Artist with the Glimmerglass Opera Festival and a semi-finalist in the Metropolitan Opera’s National Council Auditions. At…

The stories in grand opera are not much less blood soaked than the spectacles originally staged in the gladiatorial arenas of southern Europe – the difference being that in opera there’s a good dose of love interest and psychodrama before one gets to the violence and, naturally, the singers do not resort to truly slaughtering each other at the end, whatever the secret wishes of the critics. Other than that, the arenas, amphitheatres and stages borrowed or copied from the Romano-Greek world give the biggest figures (I use the term advisedly) from the opera world a chance to strut their stuff without considering theatrical veracity too carefully. Spectacular is the only real adjective required. Verona has been putting on these shows for 109 years and tried and tested is trusted.…

The Metropolitan Opera, New York MUSIC STAGING There were three firsts at the Met this spring: managing director Peter Gelb’s call for a moment of silence in honour of devastated Ukrainians; the singing of the Ukrainian National Anthem by the Met Chorus; and the first-ever Met performance of Verdi’s Don Carlos, the original five-act French Grand Opera, first heard at the Paris Opera in 1867. The opera is Verdi’s most broadly painted canvas, with great depth to both personal and political situations, musically and textually. Here, it came across as the masterwork it is. The use of French was wedded to conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s reading. With a sharp, native French-Canadian ear, the maestro played on French’s vowels, longer than Italian’s (which are more abrupt, often final), and his orchestra adjusted…

Gothenburg Opera MUSIC STAGING Bertil Malmberg’s libretto for Gösta Nystroem’s 1959 opera, Herr Arnes Penningar (Sir Arne’s Treasure) is a fine ‘translation’ in itself from page to stage. The libretto is based on Selma Lagerlöf’s 1904 novel of the same name. Only the scene in which the ghost of Elsalill’s foster-sister takes a job at a hostelry loses some of its impact, referenced in retrospect here by the Innkeeper at Marstrand (excellently sung by Katarina Giotas). The whole setting has a pronounced local flavour – an account of the event that inspired the novel was found in a chronicle from Bohuslän, a coastal province near Gothenburg. However, the story itself has more of the atmosphere of dark fairy tale. Sir Arne is murdered – along with most of his household…

As the opera world in Germany is quite imposing and extraordinarily diverse many young international singers want to carve out a career there. Hildesheim, a town of just 100,000 inhabitants and just 20 miles away from Hanover, is a prime example of the high artistic standard at opera houses in medium-sized towns. In order to be different from the bigger neighbouring cities – Brunswick is not far away – you have to come up with something special. That is why at the Theater Für Niedersachsen, Hildesheim the ‘trilogy concept’ has been developed: A theme is highlighted from three different perspectives. The first trilogy dealt with Friedrich Schiller’s Die Räuber, Saverio Mercadante’s I briganti and a ballet about this same subject. This year the Medea myth is in focus: Giovanni Pacini’s…

This is a recording of a performance that celebrates the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s Lucio Silla. Written at the tender age of 16, the opera is a powerhouse of an opera seria. It requires the finest singers. For many years, the go-to recording was the 1975 Leopold Hager DG all-star recording which featured Auger, Donath, Mathis and Várady. Harnoncourt (always an acquired taste) put his hat in the ring, as have the likes of Adam Fischer, Minkowski and Tomáš Netopil, while a DVD from Madrid’s Teatro Real conducted by Ivor Bolton is directed by Claus Guth boasting a cast including spectacular contributions from Patricia Petibon. In terms of audio-only, Laurence Equilbey’s Silla is now the performance of our time. Equilbey performs with her period instrument Insula orchestra, an ensemble that…

Favourite time of day? If I’m in our house in Greece it’s a late lunch with friends which has no end and time stops completely mattering. If I’m here in the UK I’ve always thought I was an evening person but I actually love early morning just after dawn and I’d have to be outside London in the countryside. Favourite season? Every time there’s a new season, I think oh, this is my favourite season. I’d say winter – I love snow. I love the crispiness of a sunny wintry day with the promise of spring just round the corner. Favourite colour? A lot of yellows are garish but there’s one that’s got a bit more lemon in it which I find very appealing, something quite Scandinavian. Favourite artist? Vermeer…

War takes a lasting toll on everyone. Images in the news of bombed-out opera houses in the Ukrainian cities of Kharkiv and Mariupol, both in the front line of the Russian invasion, are clear examples of what is at stake in times of conflict. These buildings are centres of culture, entertainment, social interaction, education – places that allow the human mind and spirit to expand. Reducing them to rubble is an assault on the civilised values built up over centuries and the creative inspiration that lends depth and purpose to our lives. That the opera house in Mariupol was evidently being used as an air raid shelter for civilians at the time of the attack makes the act of destruction especially depraved. In Italy, where the importance of opera houses…

Pauline Viardot travelled widely, but I don’t suppose she ever made it to the depths of rural Dorset in the west of England where her bicentenary has just been marked (delayed by 12 months thanks to Covid) in the picture-book village of Oborne: an idyllic but unlikely setting for a weekend celebration on a scale, and of a substance, that was quite remarkable. Called Viardot200, this was a venture by Opera Cameratino: a consortium of music-loving people in finance who put up the cash for projects that catch their eye. They seem to like offbeat ideas, and Viardot was a classic instance: maverick but meaningful, and staged by artists of real calibre. Artistically overseen by Susanna Stranders, former head of music at Garsington and now with the Royal Opera, it…

Like Mahler, Janáček, Bruckner and Ives, Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) is no longer a ‘cause’. His works have been widely recorded, his importance and genius recognised and lauded, and his operas are regularly performed – in France and Germany at least. Britain still has some catching up to do when it comes to Rameau, but rehearsals are well under way for the British premiere of the original version of Castor et Pollux, which will be performed in Oxford this month. The director’s cut By Guido Martin-Brandis Since not one person had mentioned Rameau up to that point in my very British musical education, discovering Rameau’s music while at university felt like uncovering a secret world of sensuous delights – the endless originality and vitality of his melodic invention and harmonic exploration, the…

‘Our festival is older than independent Finland itself,’ Jan Strandholm, who runs Savonlinna Opera Festival, says proudly. Finland declared its independence from Russia in 1917. ‘The Savonlinna Festival’s first year was 1912.’ The setting is even older: the courtyard of Olavinlinna Castle, which claims to be the mostly northerly castle in the world still standing, albeit without a roof – ‘except for when we use it in the summer,’ Strandholm points out). It was built in 1475 on an island in the region’s largest lake to defend the then Swedish border against Russia, a necessity all too current. The castle has ‘wonderful acoustics and the good news is that this year there will be new seats, so people will be more comfortable too’. Looking at this year’s programme, Strandholm is…

Guildhall School of Music & Drama MUSIC (performance) STAGING The Guildhall School of Music & Drama has become expert in more than one opera per evening, be it a remarkable quintuple bill or the recent double-bill of Bizet’s Le docteur Miracle and Viardot’s Cendrillon (both covered by Opera Now). While the quintuple bill offered some variety in standard of music involved, it remained an invigorating and stimulating evening; the Bizet/Viadot coupling was simply inspired. So what’s happened? While the production expertise and high level of singing remained, this coupling of Menotti and Weir was a dire miscalculation. Menotti’s The Telephone is brilliant, short and sweet (of which more soon); the Weir is a faceless waste, reminiscent of the thousands of contemporary operas that disappear into oblivion. To happier things first.…

Hungarian State Opera, Budapest MUSIC STAGING Hunyadi László is rarely, if ever performed outside Hungary. even though it has the distinction of being the first truly national opera by the Hungary’s first great opera composer, Ferenc Erkel (1810-93). Premiered in 1844, the work musically and dramatically resembles early Verdi. It tells the story of a 15th-century Hungarian nobleman, László Hunyadi, who is destroyed by his vacillating namesake, King László V, Duke of Austria. In order to make the story more operatic, librettist Béni Egressy recast the boy king László as an adult, so as well as moving against the Hunyadi family as rivals to his throne, King László is also after Hunyadi’s fiancée, Mária Gara. It is a classic theatrical 19th-century approach to re-interpreting history so that statecraft is also…

Figaro? Si! Florian Sempey Alpha 791 Rivales Sandrine Piau & Véronique Gens Alpha 824 Die Zauberflöte Mozart Warner Classics 9029643782 La forza del destino Verdi Dynamic 37930 Halka Moniuszko Unitel 805804 Francesca da Rimini Zandonai Naxos 2.110711 CDs and Digital Florian Sempey offers a rarity in Figaro? Si!, an album of buffo arias for baritone, plus a couple of duets. Onstage Sempey has presence, and thankfully this also comes across in the recording studio – there is no lack of personality here. As is the fate of most baritones of this ilk, his signature role is Figaro in Rossini’s classic, and here he despatches it with bravura. He has bags of chutzpah but there are more tricks up his sleeve than just a vocal nudge and a wink – the…