I due Foscari

Posted on January 9, 2018 by operaramblings

Verdi’s sixth opera, I due Foscari, is probably not well known to many readers so a brief description may be in order. It’s a rather grim tale of injustice and revenge. Francesco Foscari is the aged Doge of Venice. His son, Jacopo, has been stitched up by the family rival Jacopo Loredano and exiled to Crete. He returns to try and clear his name but is fitted up again. This time for the murder of one Donato. Despite torture he refuses to confess and is sentenced to return to exile in Crete. The first three quarters of the opera is mostly either father or son bemoaning their fate (Francesco has already lost three sons. Lady Bracknell would be unimpressed) or Lucrezia, Jacopo’s wife, pleading for mercy to anyone who will listen. Then there’s a final scene where Francesco receives proof of his son’s innocence, closely followed by news of his death, closely followed by news that the Council and Senate are sacking him. Loredano gloats. Foscari dies. Structurally it’s very much a “numbers” opera with a succession of short scenes mostly featuring various combinations of the three Foscaris and the chorus. There are a lot of quite sophisticated ensemble pieces as well as a couple of solo arias for each of the principals. It’s musically rather distinguished in fact. The three Foscari roles are big sings. Nobody else has much to do.

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Secret cypher! Loch Ness Monster!

Posted on January 6, 2018 by operaramblings

Stravinsky LSO is a video release on the LSO’s own label of a 2015 concert at the Barbican featuring music by Berg, Webern, Ligeti and Stravinsky conducted by Simon Rattle. It opens with Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra Op.6. Rattle produces a transparent, clearly articulated and structurally coherent account of this short work.

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Puritans in Madrid

Posted on January 4, 2018 by operaramblings

I keep trying with Bellini’s I Puritani. People I respect admire it a lot but I just cannot find a way to like it despite there being, undoubtedly, some very fine music in Acts 2 and 3. I think there are, essentially, two problems and I could maybe cope with either in isolation but taken together my brain just starts to turn off. The first is plot and there are two huge problems with this piece. It’s complete garbage historically. It makes Donizetti’s Tudor operas look like Geoffrey Elton. But worse, it makes no sense in it’s own terms. It’s just a string of improbable coincidences. The second problem is emotional dissonance. Too often the emotional tenor of the music is just way inappropriate to the stage action. This is common to all bel canto of course and on its own I can deal. I just can’t take the two things together.

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Opera bunny

Posted on January 4, 2018 by operaramblings

What’s On Stage is a UK on-line magazine covering the theatre scene in the UK. They have an annual reader poll for “best of” in various categories in opera. One such is “Breakthrough Artist in UK Opera” which this year was won by Ottawa native and COC Ensemble Studio graduate Wallis Giunta for a series of roles with Opera North (who picked up a bucketload of awards) including Dinah in Trouble in Tahiti and L’enfant in L’enfant et les sortilèges. She’s not just ridiculously photogenic! I’m slightly shocked to realise it’s almost two years since I interviewed Wally by Skype from her home base in Leipzig but so it is. The interview write up is here.

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Winner for “Outstanding Achievement in an Operatic Role” deservedly went to Allan Clayton for his outstanding work creating the title role in Brett Dean’s Hamlet at Glyndebourne.

Photo credit: Tim Dunk

Sances – Complete Arias 1636

Posted on January 2, 2018 by operaramblings

sances This review first appeared in the print edition of Opera Canada.

This recording contains the solo works from Sances’ fourth book of songs plus the slightly better known chaconne Accenti queruli. They are all sung by tenor Bud Roach accompanying himself on a replica baroque guitar. The songs are strophic settings of love poetry of unknown origin, perhaps the composer himself. They range quite widely in mood from the rather doleful O perduti dilettithrough the very colourful Che pietà sperar si puòto the ironic Dove n’andrò. The poetry is less directly bawdy than some contemporary English material but the sexual allusions come thick and fast in a piece such as Rapitemi, feritemi. These songs may lie in that ambiguous area between art song and popular song but there’s no lack of musical interest here.

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Resurrection

Posted on January 1, 2018 by operaramblings

resurrection This review first appeared in the print edition of Opera Canada.

The 1994 recording of Peter Maxwell Davies’ opera Resurrection, previously released on Collins has now been re-released on the Naxos label. It’s a hugely ambitious and somewhat confusing work; even harder to get to grips with on CD than it might be with visuals. It’s an anarchic parody of establishment figures and attitudes executed via a pastiche of multiple musical styles.

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Dancing to Così

Posted on December 31, 2017 by operaramblings

Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker is a well known, rather avant garde Belgian choreographer and not, perhaps, the obvious choice to direct an opera production but that’s the assignment she took at Opéra nationale de Paris in 2017 with Mozart’s Così fan tutte which was recorded at the Palais Garner. Her approach is to double each of the six characters with a dancer and develop an elaborate, largely abstract and severely modern choreography for all twelve players though, naturally enough, with the more technical dance elements going to the dancers. The choreography, as is apparently often the case with De Keersmaeker is explicitly geometric. The stage is marked with circles and other geometric figures which inform or constrain the choreography. Much of the time this results in a lot of running round in circles or standing in semicircles swaying backwards and forwards. Indeed right up to Ah, guarda, sorella that’s pretty much all that happens though as things hot up emotionally the dancers get more to do with most of the big arias being paired with a dance solo and so on.

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Toronto Operetta Theatre’s Candide

Posted on December 29, 2017 by operaramblings

I’ve been familiar with Voltaire’s satirical novella since I was a teenager and have reread it many times but I’d not seen the Bernstein operetta/musical version until last night when it opened at Toronto Operetta Theatre with, I think, the original Lillian Hellman 1956 book though a later reduced orchestration (I’m guessing on that). I was very curious because it’s not obvious how one might turn Voltaire’s sequence of drily narrated, utterly absurd scenes into drama. The answer turns out to be to insert the author as a spoken word narrator linking scenes and play it straight though the two mile high cliffs and sheep get lost in the wash. Fair enough. It works pretty well. The whole thing is reasonably true to the spirit of the original though in places, especially in the musical number, it’s definitely tailored to a 1950s Broadway sensibility.

Elizabeth Beeler with company and Tonatiuh Abrego as Candide

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Podcasting again

Posted on December 28, 2017 by operaramblings

judgemental A couple of weeks ago Lydia Perovic of Definitely the Opera, The Globe and Mail and other sundry publications invited myself, Jenna Douglas Simeonov of Schmopera, Joseph So of Ludvig Van and Opera Canada, and Sara Constant of The WholeNote over to her place to record a podcast on our musical/operatic impressions of 2017. She has summarised it rather nicely here, where you can also listen to it or download it. It’s an hour and a quarter of controversy and, just maybe, erudition and wit.

It’s almost 2018

Posted on December 27, 2017 by operaramblings

candide 2017 draws to a close and we haven’t had a nuclear war (yet). So it’s time to look ahead to what’s coming up opera and concertwise in January 2018. But first, there’s one show still to catch in 2017. Toronto Operetta Theatre opens a run of Bernstein’s Candide tomorrow night at the Jane Mallett. It stars Tonatiuh Abrego, Vania Chan, Elizabeth Beeler and Nicholas Borg. There are shows at 8pm on December 28th and 30th and January 5th and 6th with matinées on New Year’s Eve and January 7th. For the shows on 28th, 5th and 6th you can use code CANDIDE30 to get a 30% discount. All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds!

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