Lucie de Lammermoor is Donizetti’s reworking of his Scottish opera for a smaller, non-subsidised Paris theatre. It’s not just a translation. Some scenes are rearranged and minor characters are pruned leaving only six in the cast plus chorus. Donizetti also incorporated what had become performance practice in Italy, substituting an aria from Rosmonda d’Inghilterra; “Que n’avons nous des ailes”, for “Regnava del silencio”. Otherwise the plot is much the same.
Bohislav Martinů’s The Greek Passion is a 1961 opera based on the novel Christ Recrucified by Nicos Kazantzakis. The English language libretto is by the composer. It was staged in the Felsenreitschule in Salzburg in 2023 in a production directed y Simon Stone and recorded for video.
Krysztof Warlikowski’s production of Verdi’s Macbeth; recorded for video at Salzburg in 2023 is certainly not short of ideas. Whether it all hangs together is another matter. There seem to be two main ideas in play. We are in a 1940s-ish fascist state with party armbands and so on. This gets more explicit as the piece develops. On top of this there’s a foregrounding of Lady Macbeth as the real driving force of the drama coupled with the idea that what’s driving her is her inability to provide an heir. For example, she’s clearly the one being crowned after Duncan’s murder and babies are a recurrent visual motif.
The first video disk review in Opera Canada in a while is now up on that site. It’s a review by me of a production by L’Opéra Royale de Versailles of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. There’s plenty of Cancon with Robert Gleadow as the Don, Florie Valiquette as Donna Anna and both Marshal Pynkoski and Jeannette Lajeunesse Zingg involved.
I understand that the mission of outfits like the Teatro Donizetti is to “rescue” forgotten operas but, frankly, some of them ought to remain forgotten. I would put Donizetti’s Alfredo il Grande in that category. It premiered in Naples on 2nd July 1823 and closed after one disastrous performance not to be seen again until a run in Bergamo in November 2023 which was recorded for video.
Dvořák’s Rusalka is pretty well served on video but the latest recording has a very strong cast and I was intrigued. It was recorded at the Royal Opera House in 2023 and features, among others, Asmik Grigorian in the title role and Sarah Connolly as Ježibaba.
Throughout the history of Italian opera the long running feud between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines has provided composers and librettists with endless opportunities for pointless revenge killings and other assorted mayhem. They werer still doing it in 1907 when Frencesco Cilea premiered his short three act opera Gloria.
L’aio nell’imbarazzo (A tutor in a jam) is a Donizetti comedy that was popular in its day; both in its original version and revised as Don Gregorio. It’s now received a new scholarly edition that attempts to get back as far as possible to the original. That edition was used for a production directed by Francesco Micheli at the Teatro Donizetti in Bergamo in 2022 and filmed for video release.
The Enchantress (sometimes translated as The Sorceress) is a rather infrequently performed 1887 opera by Tchaikovsky. It got a production in Frankfurt in 2022 with an interesting cast. Asmik Grigorian plays the title character; Kuma or Nastasya, and Iain MacNeil, late of this parish, is Prince Nikita. It’s the first time I’ve come across him since he moved to Germany.
It’s pretty difficult to judge whether or not a high concept production of Wagner’s Ring cycle is going to work or not just from Das Rheingold but I thought Dmitri Tcherniakov’s production for Staatsoper unter den Linden recorded in 2022 was pretty promising. His world is a large research complex designated ESCHE for reasons that aren’t clear. The time period seems to be 1970s or thereabouts. The research is essentially psychological and the characters are variously executives, scientists and experimental subjects.
operaramblings 