HOME COMMENTARY FEATURED OPERAS A Bright and Accomplished Cenerentola at NEWS Lyric Opera of Chicago REPERTOIRE Gioachino Rossini’s La Cenerentola has returned REVIEWS to Lyric Opera of Chicago in a production new to ABOUT this venue and one notable for several CONTACT significant debuts along with roles taken by LINKS accomplished, familiar performers. SEARCH SITE La Bohème, ENO Back in 2000, Glyndebourne Touring Opera dragged Puccini’s sentimental tale of sufering bohemian artists into the ‘modern urban age’, when director David McVicar ditched the Enter Keywords Parisian garrets and nineteenth-century frock Search coats in favour of a squalid bedsit in which Rodolfo and painter Marcello shared a line of cocaine under the grim glare of naked light bulbs and the clientele at Café Momus included 31 Oct 2015 Subscribe to a couple of gaudily attired transvestites. Opera Today Receive articles and Luigi Rossi: Orpheus th news via RSS feeds or Just as Orpheus embarks on a quest for his 64 Wexford Festival Opera email subscription. beloved Eurydice, so the Royal Opera House Feature Articles seems to be in pursuit of the mythical music- Wexford Festival Opera has served up another thought- maker himself: this year the house has Email Address presented Monteverdi’s Orfeo at the Camden provoking and musically rewarding trio of opera rarities — Subscribe Roundhouse (with the Early Opera Company in January), Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice on the neglected, forgotten or seldom performed — in 2015. main stage (September), and, in the Linbury This year’s triptych, though, might have been Studio Theatre, both Birtwistle’s The Corridor 64th Wexford Festival Opera (June) and the Paris-music-hall style Little titled, in the manner of Restoration tragedy, Lightbulb Theatre/Battersea Arts Centre co- ‘Love Thwarted or, Irremediable Heartache’ A review by Claire Seymour production, Orpheus (September). (indeed, Dryden’s ‘All for Love or, the World Well Above: Mariangela Sicilia & Angelo Villari in Guglielmo 64th Wexford Festival Opera Lost’ would have served well), such was the Ratclif by Mascagni Wexford Festival Opera has served up another prevailing mood of the unalleviated romantic thought-provoking and musically rewarding trio Photos by Clive Barda of opera rarities — neglected, forgotten or misery and morbidity. Fortunately, the music seldom performed — in 2015. presented and the performances given were more than sufficient compensation for the emotional Christoph Prégardien, Schubert, Wigmore Hall London wretchedness and desolation enacted on stage. Printer Version Another highlight of the Wigmore Hall complete Schubert Song series - Christoph Prégardien Writing of Wexford’s 2012 production of Send to a Friend and Christoph Schnackertz. The core Wigmore Hall Lieder audience were out in force. These Frederick Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet, I days, though, there are young people among expressed my conviction that director Stephen the regulars : a sign that appreciation of Lieder Medcalf had ‘made a truly convincing case for the excellence is most certainly alive and well at the Wigmore Hall. theatrical presentation of a work so often dismissed as six discrete “tone poems” which lack dramatic momentum and The Magic Flute in San Francisco coherence’, concluding ‘I cannot imagine a more thoughtful and illuminating How did it go? Reactions of my neighbors varied. Some left at the intermission, others staging of this opera’. remarked that they thought the singing was good. Delius’s Koanga — the composer’s third opera (of six), which was first La Vestale, La Monnaie, Bruxelles performed in 1904, three years before the premiere of A Village Romeo and In the first half of the 19th century, Spontini’s La Juliet — is perhaps a more difficult work to pull off. Artistic Director David Vestale was a hit. Empress Josephine sponsored Agler, speaking of his 11th Festival programme, commented that Koanga is its premiere, Parisians heard it hundreds of times, Berlioz raved about it and Wagner ‘ground-breaking’ in its ‘use of African-American music and characters, the conducted it. first of its kind’. However, while it’s certainly true that Delius’s employment Shattering Madama Butterfly Stockholm of ‘local colour’ is pioneering, the composer’s sojourn on an orange plantation An intelligent updating and outstanding in Florida, where he arrived in March 1884, resulted in what Percy Grainger performance of the title role lead to a shattering described as a somewhat ‘touristy’ appropriation of negro song which is not climax in Puccini's Japanese opera that different from Verdi’s suggestion of the ‘exotic’ in Aida; and, in this Theodora, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées regard, Koanga is no less problematic than Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha, Handel’s genius is central focus to the new George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, Oscar Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones, staging of Handel’s oratorio Theodora at Paris' Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. and even Ernst Krenek’s Johnny Spielt Auf. Bostridge Sings Handel 1985 must have been a good year for founding a musical ensemble, or festival or organisation, which would have longevity. Arizona Opera Premieres Kálmán’s Arizona Lady Arizona Lady is the last operetta that Hungarian Jewish composer Emmerich Kálmán (1882- 1953) wrote. A student at the Budapest Academy of Music, he learned from the same teachers as Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. After successfully staging an operetta in Budapest, Kálmán moved to Vienna. The Met’s First Five Productions The only thing that is at all radical or even noteworthy about the current Metropolitan Opera season is its imbalance: five Donizetti operas to one Wagner. Missy Mazzoli’s Song from the Uproar at REDCAT Felix Kemp and Norman Garrett in Koanga by Frederick Delius On October 8, 2015, Los Angeles Opera presented Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s Song from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt at REDCAT, the Roy and Edna Disney Cal Arts Theater in Walt Disney Concert Hall. The opera was part of L A O’s “Of Grand Program” which features chamber works in spaces smaller than the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Koanga ’s libretto is based upon a story, ‘Bras-Coupé’, which Delius found Loft Opera Presents an Evening of Excellent within George Washington Cable’s novel, The Grandissimes. Prepared by the Ensembles, No Beer Required young novelist and Cambridge graduate, Charles Francis Keary, but Loft Opera has been hailed as the future of opera by multiple newspapers, magazines, and substantially revised by Delius subsequently, it is a highly coloured pot-boiler, blogs across the nation, and even said to be “in depicting Louisianan Creole society at the beginning of the 19th century. st the process of reinventing opera for the 21 ‘Koanga’, the hero’s name, means, in the Congo language, ‘arm’; the African Century” according to James Jorden from The New York Observer. voodoo prince-protagonist has been sold into slavery and thus cut off from his tribe, his ‘strong arm’. Set to work for the plantation-owner, Don José The Tales of Hofmann — English Touring Orchestra Martinez, Koanga falls in love with the mulatto Palmyra — the undisclosed Jacques Ofenbach’s opéra fantastique, The half-sister of Martinez’ wife, Clotilda. Palmyra, who is desired by the Tales of Hofmann, is a notoriously Protean plantation overlord Simon Perez, is a Delilah-esque figure, offered by her beast: the composer’s death during rehearsals, four months before the premiere left the opera Spanish masters to the newly arrived Koanga in order to make him in an ‘non-definitive’ state which has since led submissive and biddable. But, the jealous Perez drags her away during the to the acts being shufed like cards, music subsequent wedding ceremony and Koanga attacks Martinez, before fleeing being added, spoken dialogue and recitative vying for supremacy, the number of singers to the forest where he exercises a voodoo spell which brings disease and performing the principal roles varying, and even disaster to the plantation. changes to the story itself — the latter being an amalgam of three tales by E.T.A. Hofmann. A bloody end is inevitable: Koanga returns armed with a spear and strikes Bellini I puritani : gripping musical theatre Perez as the latter attempts to force himself upon Palmyra; the voodoo prince Vividly gripping drama is perhaps not phrase is then caught by the whites and whipped, dying with a wish for his homeland which you might expect to be used to refer to Bellini's I Puritani, but that was the phrase which and a curse upon his oppressors. Palmyra, too, yields to death. Delius framed came into my mind after seen Annilese the tale with a Prologue and Epilogue in which, one springtime evening, a group of daughters of the next generation of plantation owners ask the Strong music values in 1940's setting for Handel's opera examining madness exuberant ‘Uncle Joe’ to tell them one of his stories of slavery and the desire As part of their Madness season, presenting for freedom. He begins with the tragic tale of Koanga and Palmyra, and as three very contrasting music theatre treatments of madness (Handel's Orlando, Bellini's I Puritani dusk falls the tale becomes reality before our eyes. and Sondheim's Sweeney Todd) Welsh National Opera (WNO) presented Handel's Orlando at the As with A Village Romeo and Juliet, the external action of Koanga is Wales Millennium Centre on Saturday 3 October minimal; but Delius’s presentation of Koanga’s powerful emotional events — 2015. the conflicts, passions and dreams — seems to me less sure than in the later Bostridge, Isserlis, Drake, Wigmore Hall opera; the whites are depicted as unspeakable tormentors, while the blacks Benjamin Britten met Mstislav Rostropovich in 1960, in London, where the cellist was seem helpless despite their voodoo powers. And, there are some structural performing Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto.