The question remains -- what do they use? Eine kleine Nachtmusik? The finale from Nozze di Figaro? The Piano Concerto n. 20 (which version is the pig's favorite? Uchida's? Or Buchbinder's?). The obvious choice -- K626, maybe de Sabata's super disqueiting wartime version? -- seems actually out of the question.
Maestro, a new BBC2 reality TV show that premieres tonight in the UK, seems to have a huge potential for the lulz0rz:
I am sitting in the front row at St Cyprian's Church in Central London
watching a rehearsal for this new series, which begins tonight. A group
of celebrities, all mentored by professionals, have gathered to
practise conducting the Covent Garden Orchestra through three demanding
pieces: Brahms's Academic Overture, the First Movement of Beethoven's
First Symphony and the Third Movement of Tchaikovsky's Fifth. Despite
the challenging nature of the work, the trainees are having the time of
their lives.
Opera Chic's advice: if you realize that you simply suck at conducting, just say that you created a historically-informed performance, and you might save your unmusical, tone-deaf a$$.
In the photo above, comedian Wilhelm "Big Willy" Furtwaengler, winner of the 1918 "Krazy Dirigent" reality radio show on "Radio Free Deutschland".
Today's Corriere della Sera -- not online -- in a review under the headline "The Two Abbados Mesmerize Pesaro With Ermione" -- cheers Roberto Abbado's conducting of Rossini' Ermione at Rossini Opera Festival -- the awesome Pesaro musical institution -- the other night.
Conductor Roberto Abbado earns a "bravissimo" from Corriere's critic and his cousin Daniele Abbado (Claudio's son), the director, adds, in Corriere's words, "a pinch of madness" to the production. Ermione gets relocated to Weimar-era Berlin with a bonus -- a final "procession of masks, a chaotic, Dyonisian humanity". Propsicles to the lead, Sonia Ganassi, to Marianna Pizzolato and the unsinkable Gregory Kunde ("even if he has shown signs of fatigue towards the end", writes the paper).
Opera Chic -- a Rossini lover who could easily spend the rest of her life without going to see another Barbiere -- Marinuzzi's old veto still makes a lot of sense -- has a weakness for Rossini's opera seria, and it's really lame that such a genius of tragedy has been sentenced by Fate to be remembered as opera's silly funnyman -- it's a shame that many works, written in Italian, that gave scholars a better understanding of Rossini's opera seria achievements -- works, among others, by the essential Bruno Cagli and by Paolo Isotta -- have never been translated into English.
Anyway, patriotic as always, OC is happy to report that the USA answered to this Italian invasion of Rossini scholarship with an all-American heavy hitter -- thank heavens for our dear Uncle Philip Gossett aka Il Professore aka The Dark Knight Of The Critical Editions -- he's Cavaliere di Gran Croce of the Italian Republic, yo. His "Divas And Scholars" latest book is a constant -- as authoritative as it is massive -- presence on Opera Chic's desk, right next to her pile of magazines (the latest issues of Vogue Nippon and Russian Elle & vintage copies of Egoïste for reference), her framed portrait taken by Terry Richardson, her Pettinaroli personalized stationery and her MacBook Air.
Anyway, enjoy one of OC's favorite Ermione, the smoky Bulgarian sultriness of Alexandrina Pendatchanska:
Dreadlocks? Flaming font? Black leather bustier? Bloody splatter? Bloody heyll!! If opera is as cool as what was hott in 1995, let's get jiggy wit it & if you got a prob, you can talk to the hand with a bag of chips. Boo ya!
New Zealand's Southern Opera presents Verdi’s Il Trovatore with the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra next month, boasting an eye-catching campaign. Stride la vampa!
In this .pdf file kindly made available to the public by Her Royal Jessness, Pinchy Zukerman tells Jessica Duchen -- in The Strad magazine -- all about his klezmer father, his 1742 Guarneri del Gesù (for you gearheads out there, we know you're there), and the sound of DNA.
La signora Dawn Upshaw -- mystical Unitarian, corageous survivor, proud disciple of the Upshaw Family Singers, radio DJ, polite endurer of dense journalists, friend of the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and soprano assoluto of magical wonders -- with dancer Michael Schumacher will perform the New York premiere of La Passion de Simone at the 2008 Mostly Mozart Festival next Wednesday. Kaija Saariaho’s "musical journey in fifteen stations" (as in "stations of the cross") is directed by Peter Sellars, with text by Amin Maalouf.
True genius -- as opposed to the abundantly present knockoff version of it -- is in short supply, these days: it is with sadness that we salute the passing of a man who had been granted by the Muses generous helpings of true genius (if sadly drenched in booze and cigarettes).
RIP Simon Gray, playwright and diarist of merciless, astonishing gifts (whose life has been inextricably linked to another giant of the postwar era, Alan Bates): Opera Chic has always loved that Gray's most famous character (together with the immortal Butley) has one impossible dream (that makes this commemoration more at home in an opera blog such as this one): to be able to spend an afternoon listening to an opera -- his brand new LP box set of Parsifal -- quietly, in his favorite chair.
Among the very many cool things related to our spending the Summer back home in the US -- family & friends, Starbucks, Montauk, 24 hr. everything -- there's a big minus: Opera Chic will not be able to attend the insanely awesomeness of the Rossini Opera Festival, that begins tomorrow night in Pesaro (the program).
Among the gems, two new productions -- "Ermione" (conducted by Roberto Abbado and directed by Daniele Abbado) and "Maometto II" -- and then "L'Equivoco stravagante", a recital by el mejor tenor ligero de la historia, Juan Diego Florez, then Carmela Remigio, Lawrence Brownlee and Opera Chic's dear Ciofolina, aka Patrizia Ciofi; "Il viaggio a Reims" with the cool kids from Accademia Rossiniana.
With a only a tiny fraction of Salzburg's budget, and its PR pull.
The awesome Sarah B., the world's foremost authority on everything theatrical -- knows everything you need to know -- if you really have to -- about cla$$ical mu$ic arti$t$ appearing at the Beijing Olympics.
Among them:
The Divas are Renée Fleming, Angela Gheorghiu and Sumi Jo, with special guests divos Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Marcello Giordani, Salvatore Licitra, Ramón Vargas and Jonas Kaufmann. The first concert was last night with Angela Gheorghiu at the National Grand Theatre.
On Monday the 11th, Sumi Jo will also perform at the National Grand
Theatre. On the 13th, three tenors Marcello Giordani, Salvatore Licitra
and Ramón Vargas are up at the Great Hall of the People. Each are under the baton of Emmanuel Villaume. On Thursday the 14th, Renée Fleming, Sumi Jo, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Jonas Kaufmann and Chinese singer Zhu Jiali are conducted by Nicola Luisotti
at the Great Hall of the People. The final concert, at the National
Grand Theatre, is on Saturday the 16th with Renée Fleming and Jonas
Kaufmann, conducted by Nicola Luisotti. The China National Opera
Orchestra will accompany each evening.
Words of wisdom re: the Schrott/Rosenblatt food fight from the Guardian's Tom Service (who's also nice enough to link us, thanks!):
Who knows, maybe Rosenblatt's action will mean singers discover new
resources of bravery and stamina in the face of being threatened with
court action. Or maybe there's another, simpler lesson: make sure you
don't cancel a concert put on by a lawyer.
All hail the awesomeness of maestro Renato Bruson who, tomorrow night at Teatro Greco di Taormina, will be Scarpia for the 150th time in his career: the 72-year-old veteran still has it -- replacing the obvious loss of vocal sheen and power with depth, and intelligence, and a charisma rarely matched on today's stage.
Barring a last-minute settlement, opera star Erwin Schrott's next big performance may not be at his favourite Covent Garden, but in court.
The Uruguayan-born baritone, whose fiancee, soprano Anna Netrebko, is expecting their first child, is being sued for breach of contract by music promoter Ian Rosenblatt.
It follows Schrott pulling out of a performance in Chelsea's Cadogan Hall after some 800 tickets had been sold and the Philharmonic Orchestra was booked to accompany him.
Despite an offer to forget the matter if Schrott made a donation to charity, Rosenblatt, who was forced to refund 300 tickets, heard nothing. Now he has issued High Court proceedings.
"He's a fool. He refused to explain why he was cancelling. Now he's hiding from me, but I'm going to hunt him down," storms Rosenblatt, who spends £500,000 a year on the recitals featuring the likes of tenors Jose Cura and Juan Diego Florez.
But seen from the editor's seat one could readily understand why US
city newspapers were starting to cut back on classical coverage.
As editor, try explaining to your chief executing why you
are holding a full staff job to report on an art that never makes news,
an art that plays the same old music, year after year, with the same
parade of expressionless faces on the platform. An art whose audience
is greying and unattractive to advertisers. An art whose music director
is an absentee European and whose few glamour soloists will only agree
to talk about their new record or hair makeover.
(...)
It's not the newspapers that are to blame but the orchestras that
over two decades failed to make enough news of any wider relevance to
enable editors, many with the best intentions, to retain their music
critics. Symphonic stasis is not the sole reason that music criticism
is being extinguished across America, but if anyone is pointing fingers
the first cause must surely be the stultifying complacency of American
orchestras in recent years.�
I serve on the board of a small local chamber music ensemble and we
confront this issue every year. For example, the musicians want to play
Elliot Carter, the audience doesn't enjoy Elliot Carter's music, and
the board is told by musicians that if we only would learn more about
what Mr. Carter is trying to do and the theories behind his music, we
would enjoy it. I respond: Why is this material unenjoyable to anyone
not primed by a professional musicologist?
The Hamilton City Council has deemed its latest scheme to reduce alcohol-related crime in the CBD as a resounding success.
Nightclubs are playing classical music like Mozart and Andy Williams around closing time as a way of dispersing the crowds.
Inner city streets have also been closed as a way of preventing cars hitting pedestrians.
Hamilton Mayor Bob Simcock says the behaviour has improved greatly since the trial started.
“Fiesta” is kind of a throwback to the hi-fi spectaculars of the late
’50s, only instead of Russian or Spanish, the music is Latin American.
There are a few familiar items (“Sensemayá” by Revueltas, the dances
from Ginastera’s “Estancia” and Leonard Bernstein’s “Mambo”) but also
four substantial works by 20th century Venezuelan composers not
heretofore much recognized, by us northerners at least. The music of
Inocente Carreño (born 1919), Antonio Estévez (1916-1988), Aldemaro
Romero (1928-2007) and Evencio Castellanos (1915-1984) is thoroughly
European at its base (a baby step away from Ravel and Falla), but also
marked by a melodiousness and warmth — Latin traits, so we’re told. On
initial acquaintance Romero’s “Fuga con Pajarillo’ (1990), an ingenious
interweave of folk dance with formal fugue, would appear to be the gem,
but all are gripping, lush and entertaining.
A conductor of the people, for the people, by the people!
Terry Teachout gives a sneak peek into next summer's The Letter, that he wrote for Paul Moravec and will be unleashed at Santa Fe Opera 2009:
Taking his cue from the fact that Paul Moravec and I have lately taken to calling The Letter an "opera noir," Mark Tiarks, the Santa Fe Opera's head of planning and marketing, wrote the following blurb for this year's souvenir program:
(...)
That's a knowing and clever school-of-Chandler pastiche, and I was pleased to see it on the poster announcing the Santa Fe Opera's 2009 season. On the other hand, I wouldn't want anyone to get the idea that The Letter is, in the oft-quoted phrase with which Joseph Kerman amusingly (and wrongly) dismissed Tosca, a "shabby little shocker."
Whatevs, Max Steiner's score wasn't half bad either.
To force one's voice is risky: tackling a repertoire that's too heavy for one's voice provokes a loss of flexibility, unstable emission, harshness in the acuti and the problems become evident when one comes back to lighter, higher roles.... history is full of tenors who ruined their voices by pushing them too hard. Alfredo Kraus, perfect specimen of lyric-light tenor, advised caution with Verdi and complete abstinence from Puccini and Verismo composers. But agents, opera houses, record companies, they all want Verdi and Puccini. As Pavarotti used to say, that's the repertoire that makes a tenor famous.
PS Do you know how much it costs to hire Juan Diego for a recital? 110,000 euros (US $170,000).
And speaking of raging hormones, Simon Russell Beale then proffered
a letter from the young Mozart suggesting that infatuation and marriage
were somewhat confused in his mind, prompting Papageno and Pamina to
contemplate domestic bliss from their different perspectives in the
delicious Act I duet from The Magic Flute.
It
was that sort of evening – poetry and song leading us in a gentle dance
through the ramifications of a true love that never did run smooth.
Mozart understood how fragile a thing it was and the richness of his
response ensured that for the best part of 20 musical numbers he never
once repeated himself.
Whoever put together this entertaining
confection – and I am assuming it was Ian Page of the Classical Opera
Company – made shrewd choices. The juxtapositions were deliciously apt.
How touching to have Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 – "Shall I compare thee to
a summer's day" – segue into Tamino's first glimpse of Pamina's
portrait, "Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd".
One of the many cool things that you're exposed to once you've moved to Italy is the sheer unabashed genius of Italian national icon Alberto Sordi -- the late Roman actor's films, mostly unknown to American audiences, get constant, heavy airplay on Italian TV.
A personal favorite of Opera Chic is Bravissimo, a very thin but very funny 1955 comedy about a dirt-poor schoolteacher who very reluctantly takes custody of a small child whose father eneded up in jail.
The child, of course, due to a set of abnormally large tonsils (yeah ok) turns out to be an opera prodigy, a five year old who sings with a deep, thundering baritone. The child can of course quickly rise to become an opera star.
Hammy hilarity ensues. (Italian friends of OC have in fact just txt'd her pointing out it's been rerun for the millionth time this afternoon on Italian TV. Those of us -- currently, in OC's case -- away from Italian airwaves can resort to YouTube and join in the fun: no subtitles but they're not really needed for this short clip).
Please pardon my French, but the you-must-not-vibrate-ever-ever-ever
movement is a load of utter bollocks. I don't know how people have been
duped by it for so long. Has everyone forgotten that the cut-down
forces of the misleadingly-named 'authentic' movement in the 1980s
coincided beautifully with political funding slashes which meant fewer
musicians could be paid? Or that Leopold Mozart in his mid-18th-century
treatise provides exercises for practising something that any Grade V
violin pupil would recognise as vibrato (yes, he calls it 'tremolato'
instead, so what?). LM complains about the application of
indiscriminate 'tremolato' - the implication being that in the mid
18th century string players didn't use no vibrato: they used too much! That does not
mean 'you mustn't use any'. Most irritating of all is that audiences
who lap it all up in good faith have been swindled. Enough, already!
The Italian and the Austrian President were among the lucky duckies that last night in Salzburg cheered the incandescent conducting (as Opera Chic's .aiff file can testify) by Riccardo Muti of Verdi's Otello.
36 years after Salzburg's most recent Otello, conducted by Herbie Von K., Muti whipped his Wiener into an orgiastic frenzy of sound, dark and burnished, feverish and relentless -- creating such unruly excitement in the audience that even famously mild-mannered Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, a classical music lover, told the media after the performance that he considers the Boito/Verdi work to be superior even to Don Giovanni! (in the President's defense, we have to remember that, in Salzburg, the other day ,Don Giovanni had been conducted by a very limp De Billy).
Muti's ovation wasn't apparently matched by the feeble cheering and occasional boos for the tenor (young, heavily made-up in an orangey glow -- everything's better than the old blackface, but still it looked pretty weak) Aleksandr Antonenko, hand-picked by Muti for that monster of an operatic role) and the director, Stephen Langridge (Phil's kid) who chose to create a single set, a stylized rusty vision of the castle that, at least in photographs, doesn't exactly look like much). Marina Poplavskaya, Carlos Alvarez (Jago), and our boy Stephen Costello elicited applause from the many VIPs and generally wealthy in the audience (Anna Netrebko in super-preggo state, her Ervino, and Gerard Depardieu, whose belly was apparently almost as prominent as Trebka's).
There was also among the VIPs an especially delighted US-educated Italian gentleman, dottor Francesco Ernani, GM of Opera di Roma who cannily managed to convince Muti to bring this very Otello to Rome on Dec. 6, exactly 24 hours before the prima at la Scala (Daniele Gatti's Don Carlo, with Giuseppe Filianoti and Barbara Frittoli and Ferruccio Furlanetto). Muti will also conduct an opera per season in Rome for the next 4 years.
Well, Juan Diego has "postoponed", ie canceled for the foreseeable future, his Madrid commitment and, perfectionist that he is, will not be singing in Rigoletto for quite a while. It is indeed a heavier role, much heavier and more potentially voice-damaging than expected. If he's not comfortable going ahead, and he clearly isn't -- the Lima tryout was just that, a tryout in a tiny venue, so the true test came in Dresden -- he's better off leaving the Duke alone for a few years.
For all the corporate pressure that he's under to tackle the heavier, more popular stuff -- not just the Duke... Rodolfo? even, may the Lord forbid, Alfredo? -- Juan Diego and Maestro Palacio are very right in erring on the side of caution and of vocal longevity. Too many examples -- even in very recent months -- of very bad choices made simply to appear in a heavier, popular role not right -- or not yet 100% right -- for one's voice.
OC enjoyed the live broadcast from Dresden, but she endorses our lamby prince's decision 100%.