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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Rossini’s Tancredi isn’t performed particularly often but it was Stendhal’s favourite opera and it’s not hard to see why both these things are true. It’s got some really lovely music but the plot is pretty thin and it’s hard to cast. It needs a very versatile low mezzo/contralto for the title role and a crackerjack soprano and tenor too. I watched it in a well cast 1992 production from the Schwetzingen festival and enjoyed it despite some frustrations with the staging and the implausibly drawn out plot of the second act. Continue reading
The COC board reviews ticket sales data
Broken down by age and sex – that’s what they say happens to statisticians over time but this one retains his fascination with data and will happily torture it in search of a conclusion or three. In this case the data is contained in an interesting round up of the Canadian Opera Company’s 2011/12 season.
Being an opera lover would probably be easier if I liked Puccini more, given how much air, DVD and stage time his works get, but I really struggle with him. I think it’s that concepts like “subtlety”, “elegance”, “verisimilitude” and “cultural sensitivity” completely passed him by. In an Italian setting his bombast and melodrama are somewhat made up for by the catchy tunes but move him to China or Japan or the United States and my ability to override my reality chip fails me. Which is a long winded way of saying Turandot is not my favourite opera.
The Gramophone Guide describes the 1992 Ludwigsburg Festival production of Die Zauberflöte as a “life-enhancing experience” so I thought I’d take a look. I think the folks at The Gramphone Guide are rather over-egging it but it is a pretty decent production. It’s very much geared to Ludwigsburg’s small stage and limited scenery handling capacity but it makes good use of the space and clever lighting, including a willingness to black out the stage, and some deft stage craft make up for the limitations. Continue reading
There a quite a few operas that are too short to make up a full evening’s entertainment. Most of these are one acters but there’s the occasional on that’s not such as Dido and Aeneas. In any event they pose the problem of what to combine with what. For example, I’ve seen Gianni Schicchi paired with Zemlinsky’s A Florentine Tragedy, Rachmaninov’s The Miserly Knight and even with Salome as well as with its original partners in Il Trittico. I suppose there are a few almost canonical combinations like Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and Erwartung but mostly I think the shorter works get neglected because it is hard to find good combinations that make aesthetic sense and are marketable. So that’s my question for today; what combination of shorter operas would you like to see at your local opera emporium?
My contribution would be Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Golijov’s Ainadamar. I’ve never seen either staged and both interest me musically a lot.
