I understand that the mission of outfits like the Teatro Donizetti is to “rescue” forgotten operas but, frankly, some of them ought to remain forgotten. I would put Donizetti’s Alfredo il Grande in that category. It premiered in Naples on 2nd July 1823 and closed after one disastrous performance not to be seen again until a run in Bergamo in November 2023 which was recorded for video.
Following on from Das Rheingold, the second instalment of Dmiti Tcherniakov’s Ring cycle; Die Walküre, recorded at Staatsoper unter den Linden in 2022, has now been released on video. We are sill in the ESCHE psychological research centre. During the Prelude we see news footage of Siegmund’s escape from the programme he is in. He staggers into Hunding’s staff apartment to find Sieglinde. Hunding, when he appears, is some sort of armed security guard. This illustrates the problems I have with this production. The psychology of the Siegmund/Sieglinde/Hunding trio works well but the back story of Wälse, Sieglinde’s forced marriage etc makes no sense at all. Oh, and Wotan seems to be watching everything that goes on.
Dvořák’s Rusalka is pretty well served on video but the latest recording has a very strong cast and I was intrigued. It was recorded at the Royal Opera House in 2023 and features, among others, Asmik Grigorian in the title role and Sarah Connolly as Ježibaba.
Throughout the history of Italian opera the long running feud between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines has provided composers and librettists with endless opportunities for pointless revenge killings and other assorted mayhem. They werer still doing it in 1907 when Frencesco Cilea premiered his short three act opera Gloria.
L’aio nell’imbarazzo (A tutor in a jam) is a Donizetti comedy that was popular in its day; both in its original version and revised as Don Gregorio. It’s now received a new scholarly edition that attempts to get back as far as possible to the original. That edition was used for a production directed by Francesco Micheli at the Teatro Donizetti in Bergamo in 2022 and filmed for video release.
The Enchantress (sometimes translated as The Sorceress) is a rather infrequently performed 1887 opera by Tchaikovsky. It got a production in Frankfurt in 2022 with an interesting cast. Asmik Grigorian plays the title character; Kuma or Nastasya, and Iain MacNeil, late of this parish, is Prince Nikita. It’s the first time I’ve come across him since he moved to Germany.
It’s pretty difficult to judge whether or not a high concept production of Wagner’s Ring cycle is going to work or not just from Das Rheingold but I thought Dmitri Tcherniakov’s production for Staatsoper unter den Linden recorded in 2022 was pretty promising. His world is a large research complex designated ESCHE for reasons that aren’t clear. The time period seems to be 1970s or thereabouts. The research is essentially psychological and the characters are variously executives, scientists and experimental subjects.
Le siège de Corinthe is a 1826 reworking, for Opéra de Paris, of Rossini’s earlier Maometto II so besides, of course, being in French it is restructured as a three act tragédie lyrique with a substantial ballet in Act 2. The plot is straightforward enough. It’s the mid fifteenth century. Mahomet II is besieging Corinth but unknown to him the king, Cléomène’s, daughter Palmyra is the girl he fell in love with during an incognito trip to Athens. Cléone has promised Palmyra to his top warrior Néoclès. After Corinth falls Mahomet promises clemency to the Greeks as long as Palmyra marries him. She agrees and is cursed as a traitor by her father. The marriage doesn’t happen for various reasons and Palmyra flees to the camp of the once again revolting Greeks. When they are defeated for a second time she commits suicide rather than submitting to Mahomet.
Davide Livermore’s production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, performed and filmed at Barcelona’s Liceu in 2018 moves the setting of the piece from the 1700s to the 1880s and includes a spoken prologue (in English). In the prologue the elderly Des Grieux is visiting Ellis Island just before its closure and is reminiscing. The meaning of this will eventually become clear but what we get from the beginning is this elderly figure as a silent spectator to the action. We may even be seeing the whole thing narrated as a flashback by Des Grieux.
Ferrucio Busoni’s Doktor Faust was left unfinished at the composer’s death in 1924 and completed by Philip Janarch. Further sketches for the work by the composer were fleshed out and incorporated into the score by Anthony Beaumont in 1982. That more complete version was performed at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in 2023 and recorded for video.
operaramblings 