A video recording of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex is a bit of an oddball really. It’s quite short (55 minutes) and it’s an oratorio rather than an opera. I guess it could be staged but the version recorded at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in 2022 isn’t. It’s a concert setting, in concert dress, with music stands. There’s not even minimal blocking.
It’s probably not ideal to begin the review of a new Ring cycle with Götterdämmerung but in the case of the cycle directed by Valentin Schwarz that premiered at Bayreuth in 2022 Götterdämmerung is the first to be released on video. Fortunately the generous two Blu-ray disk package includes a narrated summary (in English and German) of the whole cycle as seen by the director so it’s possible to put Götterdämmerung in context
Giordano’s Siberia is less well known than some of his other works such as Andrea Chenier and Feodora but it has been getting something of a revival recently with a production at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in 2021 (released on Blu-ray and DVD by Dynamic) and at the Bregenz Festival in 2022 which has also now been released on Blu-ray and DVD.
Acis et Galatée was Lully’s last completed opera. Like pretty much all of his work it displays in abundance the qualities that Voltaire claimed made Racine and Corneille superior to Shakespeare. How you feel about that will probably affect how you feel about Acis et Galatée, which is an elegant and classically correct retelling of Ovid’s tale of a nymph who loves a shepherd and the Cyclops who spoils the fun. It has an allegorical prologue too, which celebrates the glories of Louis XIV (natch). It also has lots of dance numbers.
Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia isn’t performed (or recorded) all that often despite being well constructed and amusing in a thoroughly silly way. Perhaps it’s just too difficult/expensive to cast? It requires a bass or bass-baritone of great flexibility plus a top notch Rossini soprano and two tenors with genuine high notes plus several other soloists. Who knows? Anyway it was given at the Rossini Festival at Pesaro in 2016 and recorded for video.
Offenbach’s La Périchole is one of his less often performed works and I think I can see why. It really isn’t as good as La Belle Hélène or Orphée aux Enfers but it has its moment and in the completely mad, over the top, utterly French treatment it got at the Opéra Comique in 2022 it’s really quite enjoyable.
I don’t often get deeply emotionally affected by an opera video. Generally it’s less immersive than a live performance in a way that diminishes emotion. That wasn’t my experience though with the 2022 recording of Handel’s Theodora from the Royal Opera. Admittedly Theodora is an opera I can get very emotionally involved in but Katie Mitchell’s production really did get to me.
My review of the Robert Carsen’s production of Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s 1630 allegorical opera Rappresentatione di Anima et di Corpo is now up at Opera Canada.
Catalogue number: Naxos Blu-ray – NBD0161V
La Vie Parisienne isn’t my favourite work by Offenbach by a long shot. The plot is absurd and the music, while not without wit (for example Bobinet;’s entrance in Act 5 is signalled by the Commendatore’s theme from Don Giovanni) and invention, mostly sounds like stuff one has heard before. I was intrigued though by a recent production in Paris that used an attempt to reconstruct the score as Offenbach and his librettists Meilhac and Halévy might have wished it in1866. As it happened a combination of censorship and the inability/reluctance of the cast (singing actors rather than opera singers) to tackle the more challenging music led to cuts throughout the rehearsal process and the virtual evisceration of acts 4 and 5. Now scholars at that most interesting organisation the Palazetto Bru Zane have gone back to the autograph materials used in that first run to try and reconstruct a “complete” version.
Eine Winterreise is a show conceived and created by Christof Loy and presented and recorded at Theater Basel in 2022. What it’s not is Schubert’s Winterreise. with or without staging. Loy describes it as a “kaleidoscopic” look at Schubert’s life through his music. So the show is a compendium of Schubert’s vocal and instrumental music with a bit of spoken text. It runs about 100 minutes but only 24 or so are music from Winterreise, of which only six of the twenty-four songs are included.
operaramblings 