September starts the slow ramp up to the new season. The first thing in my calendar is Mysterious Barricades on September 14th from 1pm to 2pm in Walter Hall. This is a series of coast to coast, dawn to dusk concerts in aid of Suicide Awareness. Russell Braun, Monica Whicher and Nathalie Paulin are all involved. It’s free but ticketed. Check the link for details.
Beatrice Cenci is an opera by Berthold Goldschmidt; a composer who moved from Germany to London in the 1930s for the usual reason. Beatrice Cenci was written in 1950 but the orchestral style sounds rather earlier. Comparisons with Mahler have been made though I don’t really see that. Richard Strauss or Korngold perhaps? In any event the work didn’t get performed at all until the 1980s and had to wait until the 2018 Bregenz Festival for its first fully staged production directed by Johannes Erat. Curiously, though originally composed with an English libretto it was given in German in Bregenz.
This summer Against the Grain Theatre and UoT Opera have been collaborating on an Intensive focussed on modern opera. Last night saw the culminating show; This is Prophetic, featuring staged scenes from twelve post 1950 operas. Since there were one tenor, one baritone and nineteen assorted sopranos and mezzos selecting the scenes must have been quite a challenge. Unsurprisingly perhaps there was nothing from Billy Budd.
Alasdair Campbell & Morgan Reid (Gloriana)
The line up for Voicebox: Opera in Concert has been announced for the 2019/20 season. There are four shows:
All shows are at the Jane Mallett Theatre.
The 2019/20 line up for the noontime free concerts in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre has been announced. Vocal highlights are as follows:
Yesterday I saw the culmination of the project that I had seen in rehearsal earlier in the week. The Ukrainian Art Song Project Summer Intensive presented 21 songs in a linked narrative about losing and regaining inspiration. It was staged in the round in the Temerty Theatre with the piano in the middle of the room and the action taking place all over. Pavlo Hunka directed. Albert Krywolt and Robert Kortgaard shared piano duties and there were eight young singers from Canada, the US and Ukraine.
I’ve learned not to dismiss Romeo Castellucci’s work on first watching because it has a nasty habit of starting to make sense on reflection. His 2018 production of Richard Strauss’ Salome for the Salzburg Festival may be a case in point. Castellucci seems determined to destroy any preconceptions we have about the work and Franz Welser-Möst in the pit is a willing accomplice.
The Ukrainian Art Song Project’s summer intensive has a concert in Temerty Hall on Sunday at 3pm. It’s possible to sit in on the creation/rehearsal process so I went along yesterday to take a look. I last went to one of the UASP’s concerts a couple of years ago and it was presented as a standard voice/piano recital in Koerner Hall. This is going to be quite different. The songs have been ordered in a way that creates a kind of narrative described as “A poet, having lost their inspiration, retraces their life, striving to reawaken in themselves the passion that once allowed them to create great works of art”. Also, it’s all being staged “in the round”. I got to see the crew work on four or five numbers yesterday and I was impressed by the commitment and the high standard of the singing and acting as well of the sheer speed with which the singers picked up on the ideas thrown at them by “circus master” Pavlo Hunka. It’s dramatic. There’s even an orgy.
Out of town, up in bear country, Highlands Opera Studio has shows this month. Puccini’s Suor Angelica is paired with two short contemporary opera’s; Maria Atallah’s The Chair and Kendra Harder’s Book of Faces. That’s this coming Thursday. Then on the 22nd, 24th, 25th and 26th they are doing Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos with two different casts. Full casting and box office information is here.
So a few weeks ago I asked readers to help me better understand how they viewed opera on video via a short survey. The results follow though heavily caveated by the fact that only 22 people responded.
Most people use multiple methods to watch video with 86% using Youtube, 82% DVD, 59% Blu-ray, 50% free video streams and 28% subscription streams. but only 14% (not very surprisingly) using 4K video.
The primary method results are more interesting: 45% use the Internet, 54% use some kind of disk. The former is dominated by Youtube. On the latter DVD tops Blu-ray 2 to 1.
operaramblings 