Stanisław Moniuszko’s Halka is sometimes regarded as Poland’s national opera. It’s one of those mid 19th century works that tries to create some kind of national idiom broadly within the framework of the musical style of the age (the composer was conservatory trained in Berlin). It’s really quite good but rarely performed outside Poland so it’s interesting to look at it, especially in a rather good production by Mariusz Treliński that was given and recorded at Theater an der Wien in 2019.
As written, Hans Abrahamsen’s The Snow Queen is a fairly dark piece that cleaves pretty closely to the original Hans Christian Andersen story. The production at the Bayerische Staatsoper (in an English version adapted by Amanda Holden from the original Danish) and recorded in Munich in 2019 takes it to a new level of complexity and darkness. Director Andreas Kriegenburg has added additional avatars of the children Gerda and Kay to the scene creating three Gerda/Kay pairings. There are the children as children played by actors. There’s an adolescent pair played by mezzo-soprano Rachael Wilson as Kay and an actor, Anna Ressel, as adolescent Gerda and a forty-something couple played by soprano Barbara Hannigan as Gerda and actor Thomas Graßle as Kay.
I’m really not sure what to make of the recent recording of Giodarno’s Siberia made at the Maggi Musicale Fiorentino in 2021. It’s certainly a rather weird experience. It’s partly that it’s a bit of an oddball of an opera, partly Roberto Andò’s production and partly that it was recorded under COVID conditions with the chorus masked and blocking that seems, if rather inconsistently, to be designed for social distancing.
Donizetti’s three “Tudor Queen” operas; Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda and Roberto Devereux (of which, despite the title, the real star is Elizabeth I) are often seen as a sort of trilogy and have occasionally been performed as such with a single soprano starring in all three. It’s a feat Sondra Radvanovsky managed at the Metropolitan Opera in the 2015/16 season. It’s not particularly surprising then that she should have been sought after by Lyric Opera of Chicago to star in a show featuring the final scenes of each opera which was recorded live at the Lyric in December 2019. Continue reading
The latest release in the CD/book series from the Palazetto Bru Zane is Saint-Saëns’s 1893 opéra comique, Phryné, loosely based on an incident in the life of the famous 4th century BCE courtesan. It’s a two-act piece lasting about 65 minutes. The original was given with spoken dialogue, but as so often with this genre, recitatives (here added by André Messager in 1896) have been used in this recording, as they were in most contemporary performances.
The plot is straightforward enough. Dicéphile is a rather pompous magistrate and has just been honoured by the city with a bust. His nephew/ward Nicias is in love with Phryné, but also broke and about to be arrested for debt. With the help of Phryné’s servants, he beats up the officials sent to arrest him and hides in her house, where, after the usual confusion, she admits to being in love with him. Dicéphile shows up to find that his bust has been disfigured with a wineskin and remonstrates with Phryné, who quickly changes the subject to her upcoming trial on a charge of impiety. Dicéphile is overcome by her (obvious) charms and agrees to drop the charges. He also agrees to share his fortune with Nicias and all live happily ever after. Continue reading
My review of Sunday’s performance of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa is now up at Opera Canada.
The current offering from Operavision on Youtube is the 2020 production by Opera North of Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins livestreamed from Leeds Playhouse in November 2020. It was Pay to View then but now it’s available for free until October.
Confluence Concerts returned to live performance last night at Heliconian Hall. The concert, curated by Patricia O’Callaghan, was titled A Simple Twist of Fate and featured an eclectic mix of music either on the topic of Fate or that was entwined with the fates of the performers.
The Royal Conservatory of Music did a partial reveal of their classical and jazz programming for Koerner Hall in the 2022/3 season. It’s a pretty typical mx; heavy on piano, strings and chamber music, but there are a few interesting classical vocal concerts. Here are the highlights:
Found Frozen is a new CD from Centrediscs featuring songs by Jeffrey Ryan. The centrepiece of the disc is his Miss Carr in Seven Scenes. It’s a setting of extracts from Emily Carr’s notebooks for mezzo-soprano and piano performed here by Krisztina Szabó and Steven Philcox. I’ve heard them do the piece twice live, including the premier, and I really don’t have much to add to what I wrote then. It’s a terrific piece.
The first set on the disc though is Found Frozen. It’s a setting of three poems by Helen Hunt Jackson about Death and Remembrance. It’s scored for soprano and piano and sits quite high much of the time. The piano part is busy and somewhat minimalistic. It’s sung by Danika Lorèn with Steven Philcox again at the piano. It’s very good singing indeed. There are long sustained notes that are navigated with aplomb and her diction is excellent, even in the very high passages.
operaramblings 