The latest release from Deutsche Grammophon in their collaboration with the Bayreuth Festival is a video release of the 2024 Tristan und Isolde. It’s interesting both as a production/performance and for some technical innovations.
Zoraida di Granata is an early serious opera by Donizetti. It’s set in Muslim controlled Granada in 1480. The city is under siege by the Spanish and the usurper Almuzir is in control and wants to marry Zoraida, daughter of the former king, but she’s in love with Abenamet, leader of the aristocratic and warlike Abencerrages. Almuzir makes Abenamet commander in chief of his army and entrusts him with a sacred flag. If he returns victorious and with the flag he gets Zoraida but if he loses the flag he’ll be executed as a traitor. Naturally Almuzir has arranged for his sidekick, Ali, to betray the flag to the Spanish. The victorious hero is going to be executed but Zoraida promises to marry Almuzir if he spares Abenamet. Then the lovers meet secretly and after the statutory rowing about Zoraida betraying him Abumet exits. But Ali has overheard the conversation and gets Zoraida sentenced to death for treason. Only a knight showing up to defend her in trial by combat can save her (that again!). Of course it’s Abenamet in disguise and he beats Ali who fesses up. The clan want to kill Almuzir and Ali but Abenamet forgives them and in return gets the girl.
It’s taken from late July 2022 to move from 600 video disk reviews in the archive to 700 (though how many of the 700 are actually still available is anyone’s guess!). That’s almost exactly 3 recordings per month which sounds about right. So it’s picked up again after a slowdown during/after the pandemic.
Rossini’s early opera seria Tancredi is set in Syracuse in the early 11th century and turns on two rival families coming together in the face a threat from both Byzantines and Saracens. The hero is the knight Tancredi, secretly in love with the daughter of one of rival families. Jan Philipp Gloger’s production filmed at Bregenz in 2024 updates it to the present with the families being rival drug gangs and the “threat” the police. There’s a further twist. Tancredi is a mezzo role and always sung by a woman. Here Tancredi is played as a woman pretending to be a man; at least to everyone except her lover Amenaide.
Vincent Boussard’s production of Vedi’s Un Ballo in Maschera staged and filmed at Barcelona’s Liceu in 2017 is dark. Basically there’s a light box in which the characters at front of stage can be seen while others lurk in the darkness. According to the notes Broussard is using light and shadow to bring out the themes of illusion and truth, duty and betrayal. That sounds to me like cleverness masquerading as a production concept and bar a few striking visuals this is hardly a production at all.
Gluck’s Orpheus opera; in either Italian or French guise, is usually presented as a short and cheery “love conquers all” with an uncomplicated happy ending. Pierre Audi in his production of the 1774 Paris version of Orphée et Euridice, recorded at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in 2022 takes a different tack. Here Amour, who is on stage 100% of the time, forms a love triangle with Orphée and Euridice and while she’s happy to work to reunite the lovers Orphée gets in a snit in the last act when he realises that her interest isn’t entirely altruistic and comes close to violence when the two girls show more interest in each other than in him!
How does one do (if one does at all) a propagandistic Russian opera in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. Dmitri Tcherniakov and Vladimir Jurowski’s approach to Prokofiev’s War and Peace, filmed at Bayerische Staatsoper, is radical, complex and controversial. See my full (and ridiculously long) review at La Scena Musicale.
Rossini’s Adina was written in 18i8; two years after Barber of Seville, but wasn’t premiered until 1826 in Lisbon, after which it pretty much disappeared. It’s a bit difficult to see why it fell out of favour, unless it’s because at 90 minutes or so it was considered too short, because it’s a pretty classic Rossini comedy with a silly but amusing plot and enjoyably frothy music.
For many years Bavarian State Opera used a production of Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus that was created by Otto Schenk and Carlos Kleiber back in the 1980s. It was replaced in 2023 with a new production by Barrie Kosky and Vladiimir Jurowski which was issued on video.
Tim Albery’s show; Garden of Vanished Pleasures, about Derek Jarman and his Kent coast garden was supposed to figure in Soundstreams 2020/21 season and we know what happened to that! So, it was reengineered as a film and streamed in September of 2021. I reviewed it at some length for Opera Canada. Now director Tim Albery has recreated it as a live show at the Berkeley Street Theatre.
operaramblings 