The Frosch report

Posted on July 5, 2012 by operaramblings

Casting for the upcoming COC production of Die Fledermaus, to be directed by Christopher Alden, was announced back in February with one notable exception. There has been no word on who will take the speaking role of the drunken gaoler Frosch in Act 3. This part is usually played as a buffoon by a second rate comedian(1) so Toronto mayor Rob Ford would seem an obvious choice. Unfortunately it’s a speaking part so that rules him out. Now, apparently, we can expect a ‘crisis of capitalism’ Fledermaus but I’m not sure that leaves me any the wiser.

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Ponelle’s Cenerentola

Posted on July 5, 2012 by operaramblings

There’s been a fair amount of discussion of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s film version of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito over at The Earworm so I thought it would be a good time to dig out his La Scala production of Rossini’s La Cenerentola. They have a lot in common; an obsession with statuary and heavy focus on verticality that makes the picture often seem taller than it is wide are just two. The Rossini, despite being filmed at La Scala is very filmic. It’s much more like a movie than a video recording of a staged performance. Continue reading →

Historically informed performance à l’outrance

Posted on July 4, 2012 by operaramblings

The works of the French baroque are a rather specialized taste. Some people love them, some not so much. There are also strong views on performance style. Some people favour an essentially modern treatment as in Robert Carsen’s Paris Garnier production of Rameau’s Les Boréades. Others are fans of the fantasy baroque approach taken by the likes of Opera Atelier. I’ve seen good examples of both approaches. What I haven’t seen before is a rigorous attempt to recreate a 17th century staging complete with period appropriate scenery and stage effects. In 2008 such an attempt was made at the Théâtre de l’Opéra Comique in Paris. The work involved was the first true opera in French; Lully’s Cadmus et Hermione. The results are very interesting.

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Tcherniakov’s Gambler

Posted on July 3, 2012 by operaramblings

So I finally found a way of getting the Kultur release of the 2008 Staatsoper unter den Linden production of Prokofiev’s The Gambler to work, with subtitles and all, though I had to go to my back up DVD player. As you will read below this is a very interesting and worthwhile DVD but whatever you do, don’t buy the Kultur release which is technically wonky and features sub-standard Dolby 2.0 sound. For heaven’s sake who is doing Dolby 2.0 on an opera DVD in 2008! The same recording is available on regionless DVD and Blu-ray from C-Major and in that release it features PCM 5.1 and LPCM stereo choices. There may even be some useful documentation which, as ever with Kultur, is minimal. There are also more subtitle choices on the C-Major version.

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Maria’s Carmen

Posted on July 3, 2012 by operaramblings

In 1989 entrepreneur Harvey Goldsmith followed up his Aida of the previous year with a spectacular production of Bizet’s Carmen in the amphitheatre at Earl’s Court. This is a sports stadium like venue that seats 19,000 and a cast of 400 or so singers, dancers and supers was employed. The production was revived in 1999 when It was broadcast by Tyne-Tees Television and has been available on DVD ever since. Continue reading →

For fans of singing competitions

Posted on July 2, 2012 by operaramblings

The finals of the International Hans Gabor Belvedere Singing Competition are going to get a live stream this year. If competitions are your thing there will be a feed live from the Vienna Rathaus starting at 1000 GMT on July 8th at www.belvedere-competition.com

Previous winners have included María Bayo, Stuart Skelton and Rachel Willis-Sorensen. There are more details here.

Well, grrr

Posted on July 2, 2012 by operaramblings

I finally managed to get my hands on a DVD of a Tcherniakov production. It’s a 2008 Berlin performance of Prokofiev’s The Gambler. It’s also on the usually appalling Kultur label and, true to form, it’s unwatchable. The sound is very poor Dolby 2.0, on a 2008 recording, stone the crows etc! Worse the subtitle encoding (English only) is very weird. My Blu-ray player won’t show them and nor will Apple’s DVD player. Vlc will play them but sod it it if I’m going to sit in the computer room for 135 minutes with manky sound and a relatively small screen. Not acceptable at all. Grrr!

Ice and Steel

Posted on July 1, 2012 by operaramblings

Vladimir Deshenov’s 1929 opera Ice and Steel, based (loosely) on the Kronstadt sailors’ revolt of 1921 isn’t very good but it is of some interest as one of the very first Soviet era works for the operatic stage. The libretto, by Boris Lavrenjov, is so crude it might be project work for GCSE Stalinist Propaganda. In the first act black marketeers and sundry other anti-socials are rebuked by sound workers and the political police. Next we move to grumbling factory workers who are, again, rebuked by the politically sound ones news of the Kronstadt rising reaches Petrograd and a rather dodgy looking commissar recruits the loyal workers to help put down the rising. The one character with any real individuality, Musja, a female organizer in a metal works, volunteers to infiltrate the mutineers. Meanwhile a really motley band of counter-revolutionary elements; SRs, a Mensheik, foreign agents, Tsarist officers, a çi devant aristo vamp and anarchist sailors, argue among themselves in the fortress. Musja is unmasked and tortured as a spy but as the Soviet infantry launch their famous attack across the ice she manages to blow up the key defensive position and herself. Cue heroic revolutionary tableau vivant and curtain.

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Assassinio nella Cattedrale

Posted on June 29, 2012 by operaramblings

I’ve often wondered what happened to Italian opera after Puccini because nothing much has ever come my way. That is until today when I got my hands on a DVD of Pizzetti’s 1958 piece, Assassinio nella Cattedrale which is closely based on the Eliot play. Murder in the Cathedral is, when one thinks about it and how Eliot uses the chorus, a really good basis for an opera libretto. The libretto sticks pretty close to the play and Pizzetti provides a tense, dramatic score which brings out the underlying fear and tension in the Eliot. Just occasionally, and very effectively, he becomes more openly lyrical, as in Becket’s acceptance of his impending martyrdom, but mostly it’s pretty high energy. That said, Pizzetti seems to be quite a conservative composer and the music is essentially tonal and easy to grasp. One curiosity I noted is that in the lead up to Becket’s death he interweaves the men’s chorus singing the Dies Irae with the forebodings of the women’s chorus and the setting of the Dies Irae he uses is the same as in Bergman’s Seventh Seal which came out the year before.

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Opera houses and public transit

Posted on June 28, 2012 by operaramblings

The Four Seasons Centre. The sharp eyed will be able to see the TTC logo by the entrance.

A few years ago I stopped being a car owner for the first time in twenty five years or so. I walk, I cycle, I use public transit and, for the rare occasions I need one, I’m a member of a carshare service. I figured out the other day that I can probably walk to 90% of the opera performances in Toronto without undue difficulty. If I don’t want to walk my main opera destination has a subway station under the building (and as a result has some ingenious engineering to isolate it acoustically from the subway line and the street outside which is the main route to three teaching hospital ERs and sometimes seems like siren central). It wasn’t much different when I lived in London; Covent Garden and the Coliseum are a hop, skip and a jump from the Tube. Likewise, as I recall, the opera houses in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle are all easily transit accessible and doesn’t Paris have a Metro station called Opéra? So, I was taken aback when I checked out the Michigan Opera Theater schedule to find directions from umpteen freeways but no mention of how the carless might access their house. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’ve worked often enough in Detroit and the associated sprawl to know what it’s like but it does seem an odd set of priorities for a city; an opera house but no transit.