Tosca at La Scala

Posted on April 17, 2012 by operaramblings

This 2000 La Scala recording of Puccini’s Tosca is straightforward and rather good. It’s a revival of Luca Ronconi’s 1996 production which I’m somewhat astonished to read was regarded as controversial. Sure, the sets are sort of fractured and feature some weird angles but everything else seems to be “by the book” down to the smallest details like the candlesticks and cross. Regietheatre this isn’t. In this performance the acting is OK, if tending to the “stand and wave your arms about” default Italian mode. The stand out exception is Leo Nucci’s Scarpia. He doesn’t have the physical presence to be brutal in the way that, say, Bryn Terfel can be but he manages to project a very nasty securocrat indeed. This is a Scarpia who would be good at making Powerpoint presentations to his bosses detailing how many women and children his unmanned drones had killed today.

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Some help from my American friends?

Posted on April 16, 2012 by operaramblings

I believe in new opera. I think it’s vital to the survival of the genre and I like quite a lot of it. Most of what I like has come from European or British composers or John Adams. I love Reimann’s Lear and Birtwistle’s The Minotaur and Sariaaho’s L’Amour de Loin. I’m equally impressed by Nixon in China and, maybe to a lesser extent, Doctor Atomic. All of these, it seems to me, lie within the range of idiom of contemporary symphonic or chamber music. I’ve had much less luck finding contemporary American opera, Adams aside, that I enjoy or even find interesting. I loathed A Streetcar Named Desire and five minutes of Adamo’s Little Women had me reaching for the barf bucket. It’s a combination of cloying sentimentality and music that sounds like South Pacific minus the good tunes. It’s certainly not the sort of music one could imagine hearing at a symphony concert. Am I missing something? What should I try to see if I want to see intelligent, musically interesting contemporary American opera?

Patchy Figaro

Posted on April 15, 2012 by operaramblings

There are, I think, eighteen DVD versions of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro currently available so there needs to be something very special about a recording for it to stand out. Unfortunately Stephen Medcalf’s 1994 Glyndebourne production doesn’t really despite having a strong looking cast. It’s a pretty traditional looking production with breeches and crinolines and sets which look a bit like a giant doll’s house. The Personenregie is well thought out and the stage picture often artfully composed. The acting is almost uniformly excellent. It’s a good solid production but with nothing original in the least about it. Continue reading →

One can rob a bank or use a bank to rob others

Posted on April 12, 2012 by operaramblings

I don’t really know whether the collaborations between Brecht and Weill deserve to be called operas but some of them at least are sung by opera singers and produced in opera houses so I think they are legitimately within the ambit of this blog. Arguably the best known of them all is Die Dreigroschenoper which premiered in Berlin in 1931. I’ve seen it a couple of times in English translation and, like most people I guess, I’m familiar with the music (in both English and German) through recordings by people like Lotte Lenya, Ute Lemper and Robyn Archer. With that background I was very interested to take a look at the 1931 film of the work directed by GW Pabst. Continue reading →

de Bello Gallico

Posted on April 5, 2012 by operaramblings

Bellini’s Norma is a tale of illicit love between two Gaulish priestesses (can women be called druids?) and a Roman tribune. In this 2006 production for the Bayerische Staatsoper director Jürgen Rose has set the piece in the present day in a vaguely Middle Eastern setting. Within that framework the story is told quite straightforwardly and there’s no attempt to project some kind of agenda. The designs are very striking. Blue figures a lot. Norma’s home is an underground bunker. When the Gauls arm for war they put on ski masks and supplement their spears with assault rifles. It all looks really good. The acting is also excellent and we get some real intensity in the Norma/Pollione/Adalgisa love triangle and in the tension between Norma and her father Oroveso. It works as drama.

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Adieu to Jacqueline

Posted on April 4, 2012 by operaramblings

At lunchtime today, in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre, Jacqueline Woodley gave her final recital as a member of the COC Studio Ensemble. In the two years she has been in the programme Jacqueline has given me maybe more pleasure than any other Ensemble Studio singer (stop sniggering at the back). What’s become clear in that time is that she’s an exceptional talent when it comes to interpreting difficult modern and contemporary music. Realistically I doubt we’ll see her sing Verdi at La Scala but few people who do that could do what Jacquie does with works by composers like Golijov, Saariaho and Sokolovic. Perhaps no surprise then that she chose a recital programme that was 100% art song. Continue reading →

Don Giovanni – choices and futures

Posted on April 4, 2012 by operaramblings

This is a continuation of a discussion of how Martin Kušej treats sex in his Salzburg Don Giovanni. The first installment, dealing with Act 1, is here.

At the conclusion of Act 1 the cycle of, at least apparently, consensual kinky sex has been broken by the first clearly non-consensual action; Zerlina has been hunted down by Don Giovanni and forcibly borne off by the sisters of Persephone. Where is this going? Continue reading →

Don Giovanni – delusion and collusion

Posted on April 3, 2012 by operaramblings

This is a follow up to yesterday’s review of Martin Kušej’s Salzburg production of Don Giovanni. What I want to explore here is how Kušej treats issues of collusion, consent and delusion as it applies to sexual relations.

There are some real problems in updating Don Giovanni. After all, central to the plot is the death in a fight/duel of a man fighting to defend his daughter’s “honour”. Since the notion that female “honour” is a simple matter of pre-marital chastity and post-marital fidelity makes no sense in the setting Kušej has chosen something else has to be seen to be happening. Continue reading →

Don Giovanni in the 21st century

Posted on April 2, 2012 by operaramblings

After a week of nostalgia wallowing in ancient “productions” from the met and the COC it’s back to Regietheater with a vengeance for the 100th DVD review on this blog. The subject is Martin Kušej’s Salzburg production of Don Giovanni which premiered in 2002 but was recorded in 2006 as part of the M22 project.

For a start there’s nothing giocoso about this dramma. It’s a very bleak and complex production with lots of ideas; some of which work and some of which are more problematic, and it’s provoked more discussion at the Kitten Kondo than just about any other recording we’ve watched recently. Rather than write a 3000 word review I’m going to write a normal length review and follow it up with one or more posts on aspects of the production that seem particularly worth exploring. Continue reading →

Joan Sutherland on form

Posted on March 31, 2012 by operaramblings

A while back I reviewed the train wreck that is the CBC recording of Joan Sutherland in Norma. Three years later the Canadian Opera Company and the CBC tried again with a recording of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena. As a recording and a production it has its limitations but it’s not a disaster and is enjoyable in many ways.

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