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What do Daniel Harding, Alma Mahler and Amilcare Ponchielli have in common? (besides the fact that Alma, may the Lord bless her skanky heart, would have soooo organized a threesome with them)
It's their birthday!
Today the young conductor (and Manchester United striker) turns 32; Alma, 128; good old Amilcare is today a massive 173 years old (but his music is still so amazing).
Buon Compleanno a tutti!
The peculiar thing about the dread Three Tenors project, is that it is both the most profitable and the most shameful chapter in the careers of three wonderful artists, who will thankfully be remembered by music lovers for scores of great non-3-tenors-related performances.
And Spanish tenor José Carreras yesterday received a well-deserved honorary degree of the University of Pecs, Hungary. When asked about his ailing friend Pavarotti, Carreras, a cancer survivor himself, said that "Luciano cannot be replaced by anyone else" in the lineup of The Three Tenors.
Mercifully so. But we get the intent of JC's words, and we appreciate it -- OC was recently listening to a vintage Pavarotti singing Nemorino (Pavarotti's Duca di Mantova is another fave), and really, the beauty of that sound, the clarity of that incredibly powerful voice, the effortless precision of the diction make Opera Chic think that the likes of him, we may never see again.
Sometimes, under attack from so many directions, from the need to make classical music relevant at all cost, to make it cooler, from the pressure exerted by the recording industry to use younger, sexier musicians, from so many opera house managers willing to bend immortal works to the will of incompetent directors more interested in fisting than in Da Ponte's peerless writing and sense of structure, sometimes we kind of forget that classical music is supposed to be classical, too.
Bernard Haitink, that sweet laconic man, is one of those conductors who always remembers us that so important fact: he's a classical conductor of classical music. If Opera Chic were a conductor, she'd sell her soul on eBay to gain Haitink's simple, lean, monstrously effective gesture, and his deep scholarship, and the precision he manages to extract from the greatest orchestras.
He's just been strutting his stuff at the Proms.
There are times when the music seems weirdly abrupt, such as those strange passages where a massive fortissimo suddenly vanishes, leaving 60 strings shimmering in pianissimo, or the numerous startling changes of tempo. But the Concertgebouw gave these sudden reversals just the right soft-edged exactness to make them seem epic rather than eccentric.
After the stern opening, the mood lightened in the Scherzo. Haitink didn't smile, but the music did, and the feathery harp decorations had a lovely, tender grace.
One of the coolest things about Beethoven -- there's like millions of them, obviously -- is the totally off tha hook metronome markings that make us lawl with joy and make conductors kinda go all like, "whatevs let's pretend it sez somethin else k rite thx".
But still, even if Opera Chic is an avid jogger, "Beethoven 5K Run", a Kentucky institution, leaves us kind of baffled.
Inaugurated in June 1997, the event is pure KSO, mixing great music - in this case, Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 - with an outdoor activity that appeals to a wide-ranging, contemporary audience.
At 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the band shell in Covington's Devou Park, KSO music director James R. Cassidy's downbeat will signal simultaneously the opening of the world's best known symphony and the beginning of a 5-kilometer (3.2 mile) run through the park. The object is to beat Beethoven by crossing the finish line back at the band shell before Cassidy and the KSO reach the work's majestic C-major conclusion. If there are any stragglers, Cassidy can have fun by drawing out Beethoven's already drawn-out ending.
As a Metgoer and a New Yorker -- well, half-expatriate -- Opera Chic suffers from the syndrome of most -- if not all -- New York classical music lovers: a tendency not to thank the heavens every day for the existence of James Levine. We kind of take for granted that humble giant, that wonderfully intelligent maestro.
And smart Europeans see his now increasingly rare tours overseas as a "concerto imperdibile", a concert you must not miss -- check out the BSO and Levine's European tour program.
A lucky ducky friend of Opera Chic was in Lucerne the other night, and was elevated to a few inches off of that Swiss-made auditorium floor listening to our dear Afro'ed maestro conduct the BSO in Duke Bluebeard's Castle and in Brahms 1. How multilayered, how deep, how amazingly beautiful was the maestro's interpretation, we are told by our extremely tasteful -- almost snobbish -- friend.
Classical music is a field where way too often hype and arrogance and sheer BS manage to turn half-charlatans into supposed giants; with Levine we have, instead, the real deal. He is, quite literally, a maestro -- one who teaches.
And we are privileged to listen.
Opera Chic is a girl who's seriously pwnd by her Xbox360 Elite, her GTA IV and her Bioshock and often fondles the polymeral secksiness of the Elite's black matte surface -- and she is so thirsty for Halo 3 that she's even considered buying a bottle of the horrible Mountain Dew.
But what really surprised her -- and mad props to our Japanese friends -- is that the best-selling 360 videogame in all of Japan has Frederic Chopin as its lead character.
It's Trusty Bell: Chopin No Yume (in the rest of the world it'll be called Eternal Sonata)
On October 17, 1849, Frederic Chopin, one of the most influential composers for the piano, succumbed to sickness and died at the young age of 39. Three hours prior to that, in the world according to this RPG, Chopin saw a dream of a fairy-tale land populated by people with incurable diseases but also magical powers. Eternal Sonata takes place in this dream world. Chopin comes into contact with Polka, a young girl who resides with her mother in the village of Tenuto. Polka is near her death, and Chopin, Polka, and her young friend Allegretto as they look for some way to make use of Polka's great powers to help save her.
Now, isn't that corny, but how simultaneously cool that the Japanese are madly chugging Chopin instead of the usual, 14,008th episode of the insane Tom Clancy videogame series?
And the composer as videogame hero is a concept that Opera Chic would love to develop for any interested videogame company -- we're already thinking of a driving game where great composers of the 19th Century chase each other thru the streets of old London, Milan, and Berlin driving crazy steam-powered muscle cars, like a GTA for the classical music lover with Verdi in a leather helmet and a big roasted ham in his lap; Bellini grabbing the steering wheel with silken gloves, a hawt woman at his side; Wagner dressed as the Nazi guy in The Producers, driving while singing creepy Norse hymns.
We'd also like to script a WWII game where Bruno Walter and Erich Kleiber and Paul Kletzki and all the other great exiled musicians team up with young Lenny Bernstein and Arturo Toscanini to fight to the death, Shaolin-style, Karajan, Furtwaengler, Knappertbusch and Mengelberg. Now wouldn't that be cool?
It's almost here, October 3, in New York. Be there, dear readers. Seriously.
The recent Lucerne performances totally rawked our Fogal tights. Whether it's Beethoven or Mahler, Abbado is the one who shows you how it's done.
There must be somebody out there left cold by Giacomo Puccini's "La Bohème." But who?
-- Tim Page
*raises hand*
No, seriously, we love Tim Page almost as much as we love our neighbor Puccini, and la Bohème rawks, and it makes coughing up big fat chunks of one's lungs look really stylish (not as much as Traviata does, but you cannot beat Michael Jordan in a slam-dunk mortal kombat can you, so you cannot beat Verdi at tragic-death) and we really dug the Santa Fe Bohème, too.
But sometimes, sometimes, one pines for a work that has not been done like, to consumption as much as Puccini's catarrhal masterpiece has (not to mention, it isn't even Puccini's best work, by far).
Having said that, we're looking forward to next season's Bohème at la Scala, conducted by our dear Duderino, il giovane maestro Gustavo Dudamel. And kudos to signor Page for giving a deserved shoutout to Gian Carlo Menotti's beautiful staging of that opera.
Natalie Dessay, Anna Netrebko and Nathan Gunn will perform at a Sept. 16 tribute to Beverly Sills at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.
Met music director James Levine will play the piano, and speakers will include Placido Domingo, Henry Kissinger, Carol Burnett and Barbara Walters.
We hope la Netrebka shows up, but Dessay alone is worth listening to (and by the way, how excited are you by her imminent Lucia on Sept. 16?). And our dear sweet Jimbo will play the piano, so it's all good. Among the speakers, bafflingly, Sills's buddy Henry Kissinger; who of course, never heard Sills perform (because he was too busy smiling gratefully whenever Richard Nixon called him "my Jew boy" to his face), but he really really liked Sills anyway.
Down in the pit with il maestrino inglese:
'You spend too much time talking about music," said Daniel Harding, as he prepared to conduct The Marriage of Figaro at the Salzburg Festival. "Why don't you come and see at first hand how musicians make it work?" Not many music-lovers are granted such a golden opportunity, no matter how long they live. And that is how I found myself this week in the pit at the Haus für Mozart, sitting next to members of the great Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra as Harding, the 31-year-old Englishman, took them through Mozart's masterpiece. "Wear something dark," said Danny, "sit behind the violins, and don't applaud."
"Danny?"
In a very funny interview with Corriere della Sera, Thomas Hampson, who just rawked Bolzano Festival Bozen with a Richard Strauss-Mahler program, gives a shoutout to Leonard Bernstein and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, "who taught me to love music completely, without boundaries", and explains that he loves Kurt Weill and Cole Porter as much as he loves Wagner and Mozart and that,
"with the only exception of Gilbert & Sullivan, I'm open to everything, rap included".
Since the hawt mess of Salzburg 2007 has seen a record number of singer cancellations -- for all kinds of reasons, OK, from bad diplomacy (Shicoff) to bad larigintis (Anna Niet), from bad planning (Garanca) to just bad luck -- poor Jurgen Flimm, that sweet punching bag of a man, has wisely decided that since singers are such unreliable fellas, he might as well give all teh powah to conductors. In this case, wisely, Flimm has chosen to rely heavily on Riccardo Muti. Who, after bagging that sweet official/unofficial guest conductor gig at the NY Phil has been silently promoted Kaiser of much of the good stuff that Salzburg is planning.
Next year, besides conducting Verdi's Otello, in Salzburg he'll conduct the event of the festival, the celebration of Herbert Von Karajan's 100th birthday -- for the occasion, Muti will conduct Brahms's German Requiem (a first, strangely, for the 66 year old conductor).
But what's really awesome is that Muti, in 2009, will be in charge of the commemoration of the bicentennial of Franz Joseph Haydn's death. The program has not yet been made public, but it is very likely that, besides the Creation -- a work that Muti has conducted in the past with amazing results -- the Italian maestro will also conduct a Haydn opera -- the title that has been in play, amazingly enough, is Il mondo della Luna.
Opera Chic has missed Salzburg this summer, regretfully -- for noble reasons: nostalgia for the US, other commitments, Santa Fe, the Barney sale @ Santa Monica Airport, shopping at Kitsons -- but we are so going, if not next summer, in 2009.
Dunno: with a totally maxed-out credit card?
Wae Aere vaery praeud tae aennounce thaet thae yaerly Faenol Faestival aes haere:
so let's all cheer the Welsh awesomeness (aka BrynFest) with our dear Big Bear of a bass baritone.
"It was like being in a cross between Springtime for Hitler and Carry on Camel."
More words of wisdom from Mr. Ball:
"The fact is I love musicals because it's one big song after another. You can wait for hours in opera and nothing happens. In New York I was taken to an opera. Bugger me what was it? Cappuccino? No, Carpaccio?" Perhaps Capriccio, Richard Strauss's sublime last opera, its plot so distilled that virtually nothing happens?
"Yeah, that's the one. I was sitting there thinking, 'Jeez! Let's have a tune' and silently yelling 'Go on, snog her, snog her'. It was driving me insane. Interminable. Oh Christ!"
Carpaccio?
But to be fair, Kismet truly suXXor'd, Mighty Jessica Duchen, who is always right, had already said so.
After the season opens on Sept. 24, 50 discounted tickets will be set aside for senior citizens who will no longer have to elbow out brawnier contenders for the Metropolitan Opera's $20 seats.
In a program started last year and paid for by Agnes Varis, a friend of the singer and a Met board member, 200 steeply discounted orchestra seats are set aside for every show, Monday through Thursday. (The discount isn't available for certain performances, such as galas and opening night.)
Even if OC would like to see some sort of program to make opera more popular and more freely available to young people -- unless we want it to be extinct in about 20 years, and that would suXXorz because then we wouldn't know what to do with our time and with our Internet connection, without teh opera -- OC wishes to thank the generosity of la signora Varis, and kudos to her attention to the opera oldskoolers needs.
The 28th edition of Pesaro's Rossini Opera Festival has closed with a record attendance: 20,000 tkts sold for a total of 1,100,000 euros -- the Festival never had it so good. And 18 shows of Otello, Turco in Italia, Gazza ladra, Viaggio a Reims, Edipo/Nozze and Petite Messe Solennelle sold out. 70% of visitors came from abroad -- Rossini Opera Festival has been invited to tour Japan with two productions in late 2008.
Next year, ROF will take place from August 9 to 23, with two new productions: Ermione (directed by Daniele Abbado) and Maometto II (Michael Hampe). A Juan Diego Florez recital will open the Festival on the 9th.
Ah to be in beautiful Stresa tonight, eating some delicious pesce di lago at Opera Chic's favorite little restaurant on Lake Maggiore after the performance of superhawttie Barbara Frittoli, who'll bust out some Lied awesomeness with il maestro Gianadrea Noseda, that underrated, talented conductor -- OC so wishes she was there.
And next Saturday, in Stresa, Frittoli will be Vitellia.
*checks Alitalia schedule*
Miriam Wagner as Helena, and Wagner and Joerg Pohl as Lysander in William Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' at the Salzburg regional theather.
Recently, Opera Chic has been favorably impressed listening (via .mp3) to young tenor James Valenti's Alfredo, and we hear that his Rodolfo is pretty cool, too. Valenti sings tonight in San Francisco with Patricia Racette, and we're looking forward to his performance in Bohéme next year at la Scala, conducted by our dear Dudi.
We're less impressed by Valenti's shirt, though.
