Innehållsförteckning för February 2022 från Opera Now

This issue of Opera Now is, more than usual, full of sopranos. It’s a voice-type that, more than any other, demonstrates the infinite range of colour, expressive possibilities and technical versatility of the singer’s art, from the delightful soubrette who tickles the spirits with her delicate coloratura to the concentrated intensity of a Verdian lirico spinto soprano to the explosive power of a Wagnerian heroine in full battle-cry. Two names that stand in stark contrast to each other when it comes to their entire being as singers are Maria Ewing, who sadly died in January, and Renata Tebaldi, whose birth centenary we commemorate this month. These artists neatly demonstrate the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of the ‘Operatic Revolution’ that began in the 1950s and continues to this day. In her introduction…

FREDDIE DE TOMMASO Just 28 years old, Freddie De Tommaso is shaping up to be one of the great Verdi and Puccini tenors of his generation. Inspired by great singers of the past, he is learning his craft with care as he treads the boards alongside the stars of today YOUNG ARTISTS FOCUS Opera Now’s correspondents seek out promising young operatic talent of the future and discover how they are being prepared for the challenges of a 21st-century career on stage THE COUNTERTENOR VOICE Once known as ‘falsettists’, countertenors are these days respected as the genuine article in Baroque and contemporary repertoire. We meet some of the leading exponents of the day HOUSTON CALLING An interview with Houston Grand Opera’s new general director www.operanow.co.uk…

Long ago at a competition for singers in Ballarat, Australia, an ancient adjudicator fixed a young girl with his glittering eye and said: ‘You are a Brünnhilde’. As far as she was concerned he might have said she was a Brobdingnagian for all the sense it made. She did, however, conclude that it must be a good thing to be, as she had just won first prize. The girl’s name at the time was Florence Fawaz, but before making her Covent Garden debut exactly a century ago in 1922 she acted on the sound advice of the chairman, Harry Higgins, and took the surname Austral. The distinguished career which followed is a matter of history, which means of course that it is now almost universally forgotten. But she was a…

The Metropolitan Opera, New York MUSIC ★★★★★ STAGING ★★★★★ In the original myth of Orpheus, the hero’s music is so irresistible that wild animals succumb to its charms, streams briefly pause and trees lean towards him as he sings and plays. It can even move rocks. He ventures into Hell to rescue his wife, Eurydice, who has died of a snakebite on their wedding day. He sings so persuasively and beautifully that he convinces Hades, ruler of the Underworld, to return her to the living. Hades offers him a deal: Orpheus cannot gaze at her as he is leading her back to life, or she will be returned to Hell forever. But (spoiler) he can’t resist and he loses her again, this time for eternity. Matthew Aucoin (a MacArthur Fellow)…

Erato 9029660361 ★★★★★ Five years ago I enjoyed Orfeo Chamán, Christina Pluhar’s retelling of the Orpheus myth using a blend of Baroque music and South American songs to exciting effect. So I am delighted that her new offering, Alla Napoletana is just as good. I am not sure how to categorise Pluhar, and I suspect that suits her just fine – she is a soloist on guitar, lute, theorbo and other plucked instruments; she plays in ensembles; she teaches; she formed and leads the period ensemble L’Arpeggiata; and she researches music to construct programmes for the group. The word polymath springs to mind, but that sounds a touch dry considering the infectious energy and zest of the results – and so it proves here. Pluhar used her enforced lockdown time…

No sex please… The Royal Opera House is staging a new production of a Handel opera on its main stage. Hurrah! Theodora stars Joyce DiDonato and Jakub Józef Orliński. Double Hurrah!! I rush to book my seat, and just about manage to negotiate the digital quagmire that is the Royal Opera House App (top price £245 – I nearly faint! And opt for less). Only then do I get the ominous guidance: ‘This production contains scenes of explicit violence, sexual harassment, sexual violence and sexual exploitation, and contains themes of terrorism.’ Yikes! I’m as broadminded as the next (socially distanced) person, and I suppose you would hardly expect anything less from the director Katie Mitchell. But still, perhaps the artistic powers that be at the ROH might spare a thought…

Maria Ewing, who died on 9 January aged 71, was one of the most exciting and arresting opera singers of her day, known for her no-holds-barred and often idiosyncratic portrayals of opera’s most alluring temptresses. Blessed with striking looks and a temperament that encouraged intelligent risk-taking, Ewing frequently found herself the centre of attention which was not always welcome – especially during the highly publicised break-up of her marriage to the British theatre luminary Sir Peter Hall, a founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Critics noted Ewing’s ‘Callas-like qualities’ as a performer. Sir Nicholas Kenyon, while a music critic on the Observer, wrote of the ‘frighteningly intense commitment she brings to every iota of the part of Salome.’ Critics were virtually unanimous about Ewing’s virtuosity from the earliest days of…

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Literaturverlag Josefine Rosalski The ability of supreme Wagnerian sopranos to incarnate mythological deities while also communicating down-to-earth human sentiments is given to few singers. Any brief overview of dramatic sopranos who master the Wagner repertory must be elliptical. This summary personal overview by a German arts critic who also published an illustrated album about the lyric soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (Modern|Verlag; Amadeus Press), is full of individual value judgments. Favouring singers whose performances were seen by the author or abundantly documented, the book offers capsule descriptions of Frida Leider, Kirsten Flagstad, Martha Mödl, Astrid Varnay, Birgit Nilsson, Ludmila Dvorákova, Anja Silja, Catarina Ligendza, Gwyneth Jones, Hildegard Behrens, Deborah Polaski, Waltraud Meier, and Nina Stemme. Yet paradoxically, despite the focus on modern and contemporary singers, the author admits that during the golden…

English National Opera, London MUSIC ★★★★ STAGING ★★★ Richard Jones has proved in the past to be a great director of Wagner – his Meistersinger for Welsh National Opera, for example, was critically acclaimed. His new Valkyrie at English National Opera (the start of what will be a second complete Jones Ring Cycle, following his 1994 Royal Opera House staging) has fared less well. ENO’s Ring opens in a dystopian world – a vicious, contemporary tale located in a survivalist landscape of log cabins with black snow fluttering down outside. Wotan (Matthew Rose) wears a red parka, a lumberjack shirt, spectacles and corduroys. He looks like a beefy Canadian college professor, incongruously married to a Hilary Clinton-lookalike Fricka (Susan Bickley), who possibly gave the most eloquent performance of the night.…

Greek National Opera, Athens MUSIC ★★★★★ STAGING ★★★★★ Composer Giorgos Koumendakis has been artistic director of Greek National Opera (GNO) since 2017. His opera The Murderess (I Fonissa) was premiered seven years ago at the Athens Megaron and revived triumphantly at the end of 2021 at GNO’s state-of-the-art opera house at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre. It is, quite simply, a masterpiece, which contains and blends all the elements that can make an opera successful. The libretto, by music journalist Yannis Svolos, is based on another masterpiece: the novel of the same name by one of the giants of late 19th/early 20th-century Greek literature, Skiathos-born Alexandros Papadiamantis, an author with a highly personal linguistic idiom and choice of subjects. The story’s heroine is a middle-aged widow known as Frangoyannou,…

Back Stage | Spotlight YOUR MONTHLY GUIDE TO OPERA PERFORMANCES Performance runs starting in February and March 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 CARDIFF WELSH NATIONAL OPERA www.wno.org.uk Don Giovanni | Mozart FEB 18, 19, 26, 27; MAR 17 ON TOUR FROM MARCH-MAY Conductor Tobias Ringborg Stage director John Caird Lighting designer David Hersey Costume designers John Napier/Yoon Bae CAST Don Giovanni Andrei Kymach/Duncan Rock Il Commendatore (Commendatore) James Platt Donna Anna Marina Monzó/Linda Richardson Don Ottavio Trystan Llŷr Griffiths Donna Elvira Sarah Tynan/Meeta Raval Leporello Simon Bailey/Joshua Bloom Masetto James Atkinson Zerlina Harriet Eyley/Isabelle Peters Jenůfa | Janáček MAR 05, 12, 18 ON TOUR FROM MARCH-MAY Conductor Tomáš Hanus Stage director Katie…

Favourite time of day? Anytime but the morning. I’m more of a night owl, which is fine when we’re doing shows but when we’re doing rehearsals it’s a bloody pain in the arse. Favourite season? Autumn into winter – just cold, I can’t stand the heat. Crisp, snow, rain. Absolutely love it. Favourite colour? Red. I’m a very proud half-Welshman and I support Wales at Rugby and England at football and cricket. Red is also the colour of Liverpool, who are my football team. Favourite artist? Hieronymus Bosch. I went to the Prada in Madrid and you can spend hours looking at the Garden of Earthly Delights. There’s so much weirdness and extraordinary hellscapes and fish people with legs and people with nine heads… Favourite building? Anfield, Liverpool’s stadium, and…

While Britain’s heroic national companies, under their flaming banner of ‘Never again the old normal!’, have given us, er, hours of humdrum Verdi and the rest of the usual old stuff, our neglected and delightful fringe – Opera della Luna and Charles Court pantos, Gothic Opera’s Bloody Nun, Hampstead Garden Opera, Northern Ireland Opera – provided an autumn of kaleidoscopic delight, rounded off in December with two of the best so far. It is hard not to have mixed feelings about operettas, however joyous their music may be. Even the really good ones are utterly a product of their time, needing either a full-on updating or a stout forbearance on the part of the audience, willing to wallow in this sometimes peculiar form of nostalgia. Or they can be pretty…

Gothenburg Opera MUSIC ★★★★★ STAGING ★★★★★ Closing Gothenburg Opera’s Ring Cycle, which itself marks the 400th anniversary of the city of Gothenburg, is Stephen Langridge’s production of Götterdämmerung (Ragnarök in Swedish). Langridge was artistic director of this company from 2013 to 2019, before his move to Glyndebourne. This ethical, ‘green’ Ring is surely his major achievement, there or anywhere else. It is immensely satisfying on a deep level. Much like Wotan’s plans for himself and for Valhalla, things can go markedly awry, and the spanner in the works here was of course Covid. Opera Now reported on both Rheingold and Walküre live. Siegfried was streamed only – the decision made late-on to proceed. But Langridge’s vision was unstoppable. And now one can appreciate the majesty – and the humanity –…

Anima Aeterna Jakub Józef Orliński Erato 9029674390 ★★★★ Maria & Maddalena Francesca Aspromonte Pentatone PTC 5186 867 ★★★★ Macbeth Verdi Dynamic CDS7915.02 ★★★★ Die Passagierin Weinberg Capriccio C5455 ★★★★ Linda di Chamounix Donizetti Dynamic 37911 ★★★ Titon et l’Aurore Mondonville Naxos NBD0131V ★★★ CDs and downloads Jakub Józef Orliński, the Polish countertenor famous for his vocal and physical nimbleness, follows up his successful album Anima Sacra with this new release. It is the same, but different; this time the selection of sacred pieces contains duets and choral contributions as well as featuring obbligato instruments such as the paridon, or baryton, (a type of viol, particularly favoured by Haydn), as well as some world premiere recordings. The recording gets off to a flying start with a motet by the Baroque Bohemian,…