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.
Nielsen’s Maskarade is a comic opera to a Danish libretto based on an 18th century play. The version given in Frankfurt in 2021, and recorded for video, updates it to contemporary times and uses a rather racy German translation by Martin Berger. It’s really rather fun!
So you are Christof Loy, it’s early 2021 and your production of Fedora in Frankfurt can’t go ahead due to… you know. So what are you going to do with a set that basically consists of a lavishly decorated, multi-purposable drawing room? Loy’s answer is to create a narrative around twenty four Tchaikovsky songs and some of his piano/chamber music and stage and film it in an empty theatre.
Domenico Cimarosa’s 1788 piece L’Italiana in Londra is not performed very often. If you wanted to see it this year your only option would be a revival of the 2021 Frankfurt production which was recorded and is the subject of this review.
Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1894 opera Christmas Eve is based on the Gogol short story The Night Before Christmas which also formed the basis for Tchaikovsky’s The Tsarina’s Slippers. We are in a small village in Ukraine just before Christmas. Basically the smith Vakula is in love with Oksana, the beautiful daughter of the rich farmer Chub. To complicate matters Vakula’s mother, Solokha, is a witch who is (in the words of the subtitles) “having it off” with every prominent male in the village including Chub plus the Devil. Vakula shows up unexpectedly at his mum’s where she has been hiding successive lovers in sacks as the next (unscheduled) one arrives. Vakula “tidies up” the sacks but then runs into a big party of villagers where the contents of the sacks are revealed (except for the Devil). Oksana teases Vakula and says she will only marry him if he brings her the Tsarina’s slippers as a Christmas gift. Vakula vows never to be seen in the village again and sets off with the Devil in his sack.
The Royal Opera House Covent Garden has started posting very high quality full length opera and ballet videos on its Youtube channel. So far there’s the 2012 production of Britten’s Gloriana, a 2010 Così fan tutte which, as far as I can tell, is not available on DVD and Handel’s Acis and Galatea directed and choreographed by Wayne McGregor which is definitely worth a look. There’s also several ballet productions.
Oper Frankfurt has also been posting Lieder recitals “zu Hause” though so far none of their contingent of Canadians has featured.
Peter Eötvös’ 1998 opera Tri sestry is based on the Chekhov play and was recorded live at Oper Frankfurt in 2018. It takes fragments of the original Russian play and recombines them in a non-linear way to create a prologue and three “Sequences” from the points of view of Irina, Andrei and Mascha repectively. The recombination is complex enough for the accompanying booklet to contain a table mapping Chekhov’s scene order to Eötvös’. There’s no libretto in the CD package so even flipping between the (fairly detailed) synopsis and the track listing it’s hard to figure out who is singing or about what. No doubt this was much clearer when watching the stage production.
Matters are not made any easier by giving all the female roles to male singers. The sisters and Natascha are given to counter tenors while the nanny Anfisa is sung by a bass. This is fine except that a non-trivial amount of text is spoken and counter tenors sound just like any other male when speaking which further increases the difficulty of keeping things straight, especially with a cast of thirteen characters! Non-Russian speakers are unlikely to be able to follow much of the text anyway as singers sing over each other for most of the first two Sequences. It does get a bit more open and sparer in the third sequence and someone with a strong knowledge of the language will likely pick up nuances there that I missed.
operaramblings 