Opera Chic

Modena Honors Pavarotti on the 6th Anniversary of his Death

Modena will hold a free event in its Piazza Grande on September 6 to commemorate its hometown hero, Luciano Pavarotti, on the 6th annivesary of his death. Called "Vincero", it's hosted by Italian actor Michele Placido who will perform a work comprised of anecdotes curated by Bolognese writer, Grazie Versani.

Also on an anecdote kick is Big Luciano colleague, Katia Ricciarelli, who rolls out a variety extravaganza called 'Altro di Mi' on August 6 based on her 2008 autobiography. She'll be speaking about her career and relationships between opera-lite arias and showtunes such as 'Memory' and 'La Vie en rose'.

No Country for Old Men: Michieletto's Salzburg Falstaff Homage to Milan's Casa Verdi

(Photos: Silvia Lelli)

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

So begins the second stanza of Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium, an old man's journey as a dying animal into twilight years -- and if he's lucky, immortality through fortune, fame or family -- latent preoccupations that are routinely tethered by good health and under-40s vitality, which is why it's so incongruous that young Venetian opera director Damiano Michieletto glorifies such a forgotten census slice through his latest production, a new Falstaff for the Salzburger Festspiele.

Michieletto -- who just deflected the leaflet-thrown vitriol of La Scala's cranky loggionisti at the premiere of Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera -- purges Anglophilia from The Merry Wives of Windsor and sets Falstaff inside the eclectic neo-gothic chambers of Milan's Casa di riposo per musicisti Giuseppe Verdi, a rest home for retired opera singers and musicians since 1902, conceptually established by Verdi six years prior.   

Located in Milan's Piazza Buonarroti (in the same neighborhood as Maria Callas' bourgeois Milan apartment), it was designed by Italian architect, Camillo Boito, brother of Verdi's frequent co-collaborating librettist, Arrigo, crowned by a Verdi statue in the piazza's roundabout.

After 111 years, it offers its guests (with a median age of 85) 33 single rooms, four mini apartments (for couples) and seven double rooms. There are music rooms, a physical therapy studio and a library and an in-house crypt holds the bodies of Verdi and his second wife Giuseppina Strepponi. Famous benefactors include Wanda Toscanini Horowitz, who left six million euros to the private foundation.

Here's Michieletto’s statement on his new production -- which opens on Monday night with Zubin Mehta and the Vienna Philharmonic and Ambrogio Maestri in the title role -- interiors complete with the famous Giovanni Boldini oil portrait of a jaunty middle-aged Verdi (OC’s translation, k thnx bi!):

I set the opera in the Casa di riposo per musicisti Giuseppe Verdi di Milano, which was designed by the architect Camillo Boito during the same period that his brother, the writer Arrigo Boito, had written Falstaff alongside Verdi. The composer had wanted this retirement home for, 'old artists who didn't have the chance in life to have the virtue of saving up' which is what made me think of Falstaff as an old retired singer of the past who wasn't well identified, more or less glorious, surrounded by the characters who needed him and incited him continuously to be Falstaff. In the opera, the themes of melancholy, of getting old and of death constantly emerge. The protagonist lives in a condition of remembrance, because his reality is the imperfection of waiting around for death.  And the whole episode unfolds a bit like a memory, a dream or a joke: Falstaff in a single moment watches his entire life flash before his eyes.

We were at La Scala in February for Robert Carsen's youth-obsessed Falstaff and although we thought it was brilliant, Michieletto's Casa Verdi billet-doux would have been significant in such an important anniversary year. We're already touching our Hermès silk scarves to our eyes at Michieletto's gesture, a (hopefully non-exploitive) testament to those old maestri who’ve scarified themselves to the muses of art and music, tucked behind Casa Verdi’s thick walls -- passed over, but no longer forgotten.

The (Tuscan) Hills are Alive With the Sound of Music: Incontri in Terra di Siena

There's just one small problem with summer getaways in Tuscany: with its rustic stone fortresses, crumbling abbys, neon sunflower beds and rolling fields scarred by old carriageways, each town offers breathtaking views. So how do you choose?

For us, it was easy: ancient, cypress-lined Sinalunga in the province of Siena -- because at night when the humidity creeps over the curving hills and turns paper to pulp, there's live music, sometimes under the heavens. Every summer for the last twenty-five years, the annual chamber music festival, Incontri in terra di Siena, fattens Val d'Orcia's charming landscapes with classical music sustenance.

And like the most enduring Made in Italy legacies, it's a family affair, founded in the memory of Antonio Origo and his Anglo-American wife Iris in 1988 (the same year of her death) by the couple's daughter, Benedetta and her Argentinian violinist husband Alberto Lysy. The family's matriarch, best known for her autobiographical chronicle of wartime Italy, War in Val d'Orcia, had a great love of music and procured musical friends such as Yehudi Menuhin, and in fact, Benedetta met Alberto through Menuhin, who was a former student of the American violinist (who later co-founded the International Menuhin Music Academy in Gstaad). The couple's cellist son, Antonio Lysy, is the festival’s artistic director.

Last Friday, we arrived in Sinalunga under rolling summer thunderstorms for the opening night concert with conductor Francesco Cilluffo, soprano Cinzia Forte and the small but mighty Orchestra della Toscana's Wagner, Verdi and Prokofiev. It was held at La Locanda dell'Amorosa, an idyllic, ancient hamlet of chapels and farmhouses ringed by stone arcades that's been manicured as private villas. Referenced in maps and frescos since the 16th century but boasting Etruscan roots, we stayed in one of Amorosa’s ample, century-proof stone villas decorated in terra cotta floors, hand-plastered walls and exposed-wood beam ceilings.

With genre-spanning composers and soloists, the festival hops the churches and piazzas of neighboring towns such as Montepulciano, Chiusi and Pienza, but the star venue is Villa La Foce, the heart of the Origo family's Tuscany roots, with its manicured gardens and a little medieval castle overlooking Val d'Orcia. When the Origo family bought the 15th century, three-level former wayside tavern in the early 1920s, it was a crumbing, neglected estate, but through massive renovations, it’s been polished into a tidy gem. The villa’s large gardens thrive with lavender, roses and wisteria, framed by fountains and cypress trees and a small travertine chapel that’s the final resting place of Iris and Antonio Origo.

As swallows skimmed the Locanda dell'Amorosa’s tile roofs and birds cheered dusk in song, Incontri in Terra's 25th anniversary season bowed an open-air concert in the gravel-bedded courtyard. With an honorary committee represented by Vladimir Ashkenazy, Charles Dutoit, Hans Werner Henze and Maurizio Pollini (among others), music making isn’t frivolous.

Cinzia Forte slipped into Violetta's Traviata arias -- Act I 'E' strano' and Act III 'Addio del passato' – with more polished pronunciation and dramatic heft than smooth line while Orchestra della Toscana bowed precise strings and tight brass in masterful measures. Between Verdi, conductor Francesco Cilluffo warmed up with the Siegfried Idyll and closed with a lighthearted Prokofiev 1st symphony.

Before the concert ended to a gala dinner on the tented terrace, Forte sung a heartfelt 'O mio babbino caro', which Cilluffo humbly dedicated to his father, an intimate gesture that wasn’t out of place in such a familial atmosphere.

Later, over dessert, Benedetta wound around banquet tables in a humidity-proof coiffeur and a jacquard evening coat and graciously greeted donors and patrons -- a mixed crowd of Americans, British and Europeans, crisp  buttondown shirts and navy blazers on elegant men and perforated laces and legacy jewels on smart women. It didn't matter that OC was a first-timer -- for such a culturally-devoted family, a stranger's pilgrimage under the gesture of music is enough to earn their hospitality.

Chiara Muti Swans in Fendi for La Scala's Swan Lake

Her father may have had a thorny past relationship with Teatro alla Scala, but it doesn't stop Chiara Muti from enjoying Milan's historic opera house. The Italian actress showed up for the opening night of La Scala's Nureyev Swan Lake last week in a Fendi total look, sadly without either of her ridiculously hawt brothers, Domenico or Francesco.

Saddam "Nabuchodonosor" Hussein at Macerata

A Babylonian despot takes the Jews into captivity. Rebuked by God, he releases them.

It seems simple enough, but it hasn't stopped opera directors from tweaking Verdi's transitional masterpiece set in 6th century BC towards modern analogies.

For director Gabriele Vacis at this year's Macerata Opera Festival, Nabucco is set in a parched Jerusalem desert where water is the most precious commodity and Babylonian walls are panels of 8000 plastic bottles. Nabuchodonosor is reincarnated as a pre-2003/Operation Red Dawn Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Levites are Guantanamo prisoners in orange jumpsuits and white yarmulkes. Add heat-packing suicide bombers and a horse.

While most directors exault patriotism and liberty of oppressed, displaced populations, Vacis focuses purely on conflict:

"Not to reductively modernize Verdi's masterpiece, but it's one way of making it contemporary, like today where we see the eternal struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed."

The last time Italy tussled with bearded fundamentalists reappropriated as opera protagonists was in 2011 for Graham Vick's Mosè in Egitto at Pesaro with the title character as Osama Bin Laden. It didn't go over so well.

Two Masterpieces, One Winnable: Montblanc Meisterstück & Opera Now Magazine

 

Thank you Milan for teaching OC about understated elegance, streamlining,  paring down to the essentials and tapping into the classics. If it's not bespoke, like with accessories, we dip into legacy designs, right down to our vintage Montblanc Meisterstück, so when we have to sign those super-lame or delicious contracts (it's always binary, isn't it?), at least we can do it in style.

Opera Now Magazine lets you bypass the Meisterstück club guest list with a chance to win one of its ‘Signature For Good’ LeGrand Ball Point models. All you need to do is submit a 350 word anecdote about your favorite opera experience before August 30th. In addition to the Meisterstück, your story will appear in its November issue. More details here.

OC & Auditorium Magazine: Ballo at La Scala & Rigoletto at Opernhaus Zürich

There's an old expression (extrapolated from Greek granddaddy Aesop) that postulates, "Don't judge a book by it's cover."

Haaaaa. C'mon.

The other day as we were reading the July/August double-issue of Auditorium Magazine with its mixed media, artfully-commissioned cover (inspired by Siegfried's Nothung fetish -- "stiff and firm it is, masterful the hard steel: soon it will draw hot blood!"), we looked up from the pages and there was Cartier ice around our neck, statement Nikes on our feet and Madonna's masseuse docked her iPod to vintage Massive Attack and offered us tantric massage. That never happens when we read The Economist!

With the launch of its English edition in April, Auditorium brings magazine milieu back to an era that merited back-edition archives as collectibles. We discovered it in April at the ROH gift shop when we visited London (it's also stocked in NYC at the 57th Street Rizzoli) and we were charmed by its glossy covers and thick-as-thieves matte paper stock in large format, but we stayed for its cutting-edge graphic design, genre-killing content and juicy exclusives/collaborations. Between editions, we're hooked on editor-in-chief Desmond Chewyn's postcards from the world's most covetable performing arts venues.

And now, as proud contributor, we point you to a couple reviews that we've recently penned.

Men Behaving Badly: From Zürich, we loved Tatjana Gürbaca's youthful, new Rigoletto at Opernhaus Zürich's Zürcher Festspiele -- modulated, modern and faithful to the libretto with Fabio Luisi's meticulous packaging and Saimir Pirgu's stellar Duke.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: From La Scala, we endured Un ballo in maschera under Daniele Rustioni's anemic baton, much in need of beef & iron, in Damiano Michieletto's (dramaturgically patriotic) update, which was wrathfully-contested by Milan's public.

Muti University: Full-time Maestro, Part-time Professor

In interviews with singers, we like to ask (at times, off the record) which conductors they've worked with who rank the most honorably: the maestro who invariably rounds out the top three slots is Riccardo Muti for his scholarship, musicianship and his almost anti-establishment disregard for time card punching while grooming singers and musicians in rehearsals for the stage, which sadly, is an artifact of our parent's generation (modernity should offend our parent's generation, not ours.)

Muti, whether digging up heretofore extinct,  Neapolitan School manuscripts or writing books on the elevation of Italian arts and culture in the post-1945 era, uses his influence for humanitarian aims, so last week, the Neapolitan maestro cultivated an audience of 2000 kids and spoke for two hours on Verdi's underwhelming legacy, particularly under Italy's regressive arts funding drought. He asked the audience of university and conservatory students and musicians from all over Italy to reevaluate Verdi and his musical valor and to reassert Verdi's foothold of Italian culture to the country's arts-insouciant aristocracy, gatekeepers of funds.

Muti's poised to open Nabucco at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma this week in the same Scarpitta production that premiered in 2011, used as an impropmtu protest of Italy's deep arts funding cuts. Referencing the opera's patriotic undercurrents, specifically the choral work Va' Pensiero, he's against the popular meme to turn it into Italy's unofficial national anthem: "Some would like to turn it into a national anthem, but it's the song of a population who cries out because they're in exile and want to return to their promise land -- it has to be a song that's sung slowly, gravely and sotto voce. Does that seem like the characteristics of a national anthem to you?"

BBC's Prom Pr Prom Prom Prom

(Image from the BBC Proms Team Twitter)

Sisqó never rapped about the BBC Proms but there's still a theme song in there somewhere for Britain's come-one-come-all classical music festival that opened last night at the Royal Albert Hall with sea-vocative Britten and Vaughan Williams' massive Sea Symphony under Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo.

Spanning two months of nonstop music and events, the Proms 88 concerts includes a summer-weight weave of Wagner's Ring Cycle under Barenboim, the concert-form cast plucked from Teatro alla Scala's Cassiers' staging in Milan last month. BBC Radio 3 is on streaming duty through the Last Night on September 7 with Joyce DiDonato under Marin Alsop.

[Update] We just found this awesome Prom Guide graphic on Sinfini Music, here for bigger!

 

My Mother Explains the Ballet to Me

Jesse Eisenberg for The New Yorker on watching (and getting escorted out of) the ballet.

Ballo Premieres at Scala, Loggionisti Get Pissed and Throw Stuff

Earlier tonight at La Scala, steely guardians of Busseto homeboy Giuseppe Verdi's legacy came prepared. With leaflets.

At the premiere of Damiano Michieletto's new staging of Un ballo in maschera, loggionisti traditionalists, in protest of the young Italian opera director's modern spin and election-themed update of Verdi's melodrama, boos were hurled, shouts of "sacrilege" boomed from the upper decks and leaflets were tossed following applause at the conclusion of Act I. (For the record, we've been in the house twice when leaflets were tossed from the loggione -- no biggie.)

Written complaints, all in Italian, registered as "Giuseppe Verdi, please forgive them because they don't know what they're doing" and "This is a sacrilege". A longer screed was composed of five different laments, written in cursive hand as a bullet list with meeting minutes:

• "A director or a stage designer shouldn't offend tradition and good taste."
• "Those who offend and go beyond the limits of respecting art deserve only contempt."
• "Those who don't respect the art aren't worthy of calling themselves artists."
• "The serious and prepared public is nauseated by the artistic slaughter that is being staged for these immortal masterpieces"
• "It's impossible to be offended by a traditional staging and a traditional production of the immortal works of Giuseppe Verdi."

Although keen to update cobwebby stagings, Damiano Michieletto's not (yet been labeled) a provocateur. His La Bohème for last year's Salzburg was set in an American shopping mall and a Trittico from last year was set in an industrial warehouse. In tonight's premiere, Milanese maestro Daniele Rustione led Marcelo Álvarez as Riccardo, Zeljko Lucic as Renato, Sondra Radvanovsky as Amelia, Ulrica was Marianne Cornetti and Patrizia Ciofi as Oscar.

Barnstorming in Moutier for Festival Stand'été's Giulio Cesare

We've been to plenty of opera in sacred spaces. Now for the profane.

Last week in the Bernese Jura region of French-speaking Switzerland, way up north where late June evening lows predicate dignity (via a Chanel mini leather jacket), OC left miasma-wreathed Milan for gluttony, absinthe, silence, precision and early curfews. And painfully good hair days, thanks to abated humidity.

While exploring the arcadian little towns, castles and battlement walls on three blue lakes -- Morat, Neuchâtel and Bienne -- cities described by natives as being evocative (color wise) of butter or slate or beaver tail, we dropped a few days into Moutier to take in the city's Festival Stand'été, a two-week festival of jazz, opera, folk and theater (Mumenschanz!?)

Sure, the big Swiss cities flush with CHF can get the big names and bigger egos (in fact, we followed-up our French Swiss tour with a bit of luxury casting at the Zuercher Festspiele, reviews forthcoming), but we wanted to check out the smaller, younger, cheekier festivals in grit-free air and guilt-free fondue.

So off to Moutier, founded by St-Germain around 640AD, to visit friends and take-in a classic (but snipped) Giulio Cesare with the Orchestre Musique Des Lumières, flogged into Haendelian submission by conductor Facundo Agudin in stoic effort that ran a bit heavy on legato but was brightened up by harpsichord.

Tickets in hand, we rolled up to the club, but the club was a wooden barn with ambitions, a former shooting range and livestock shelter during inclement weather. At 8pm, Act I in medias res, an adjacent church's bells pealed through the venue, an incongruous mix of the countryside and Baroque opera, bird semaphore and crepuscular insect songs passing through light-leaking slats. There was magic here. Or maybe we were high on crisp, thin mountain air. Whatevs. During the second act intermission, festival organizers dropped fleece blankets onto chairs as the mountain winds slid through wood into the musty (we're just gonna say it), livestocky air (this city girl isn't nimble with country adjectives). Blankets at the operahouse? F**k yeah. Fastball up & in, slider low & away. The only thing missing was s'mores.

Confronted with the venue's rustic challenges, director Vincent Scalbert and his creative team gave it their best DIY glamour, via video projections such as falling snow or careening butterflies, quite atmospheric but it exorcised the libretto's noble, heroic undercurrents. The young cast (frankly none of whom aside from Lisandro Abadie's skillful, firm Cesare were stylized Haendelian singers nor counter-tenors for this edition) made up in passion for what they lacked in style: Hot-blooded Italian soprano, Raffaella Milanesi was a ravashing Cleopatra (we'd like to see her as an uncomplicated Puccini heroine or in Verdi's lighter lyric roles), Carine Séchaye brought fits of Sesto hysteria and Mélodie Ruvio gave a prim, proper Cornelia.

The festival closed today with a recital by hometown hero, Swiss-Italian pianist Olivier Cavé in Johann Sebastian Bach tracks from his new CD "Nel gusto Italiano", the same delirious ones we heard him play on an enchanted January night at La Fenice, Venice -- not that Haendel in a barn was any less enchanting...

Ballet Personal Brands Rock Out to British Bands

Exhibit A: Kennan Kampa, the first America ballerina to join the Mariinsky Ballet's prestigious corps, with across-the-barre awesome rep: Raymonda, La Sylphide, Giselle and Swan Lake. Along with Sergio Pizzorno (guitarist and backing vocalist of British band Kasabian), the 23-year-old Virginian's the new face (and body) of denim brand G-Star's Autumn/Winter 2013 campaign, which will exit across all media on August 12.  

Exhibit B: Blue-eyed Irish/Inception heartthrob, Cillian Murphy, makes his directorial debut for Manchester-based band MONEY with a ballet-inspired video for track 'Hold Me Forever'.

AngelaGate: Gheorghiu Yanks Her Social Media Profiles [Updated: Alagna Fires Back]

In the wake of allegations that ex-husband Roberto Alagna was physically abusive during their rocky marriage, Angela Gheorghiu has deleted her social media profiles on Facebook and Twitter, frequently-used platforms for personal photos from private parties and post-performance dinners.

Fallout is a byotch, especially when it comes on the eve of an opening night, as the Romanian soprano sweats through her final hours before the premiere of Magda in Nicolas Joël’s 1920s Parisian-spun La Rondine that opens tomorrow night at the Royal Opera House.

UPDATE: Alagna responds, through his lawyer, posted on his Facebook.

Les accusations de violence conjugale publiées dans un article récent paru dans l'édition de the Independent de mardi et qui ont été largement reprises par ailleurs, sont sans fondement et diffamatoires. Désormais cette affaire est entre les mains des avocats.

The allegations of domestic violence published in a recent article which appeared in Tuesday’s edition of the Independent, and which were subsequently widely republished elsewhere, are without basis and are defamatory. Lawyers have been instructed both in France and in the UK.

Brendel's Piano Lover's Reader

Austrian Pianomania pianist Alfred Brendel publishes extracts from his September-launch book,  A Pianist's A-Z: A Piano Lover's Reader, for The New York Review of Books:

On the piano:

A glance at the scope and wealth of piano literature makes us realize: this instrument works wonders. But the piano must be an instrument, not a fetish. It serves a purpose. Without the music, it’s a piece of furniture with black and white teeth. A violin is, and stays, a violin. The piano is an object of transformation. It permits, if the pianist so desires, the suggestion of the singing voice, the timbres of other instruments, of the orchestra. It might even conjure up the rainbow or the spheres. This propensity for metamorphosis, this alchemy, is our supreme treasure.

You've Lost That Loving Feeling: Gheorghiu Claims Domestic Violence

In a rare break from recitals and Mimis, Romanian soprano Gheorghiu prepares for a(n incidentally not-even-close-to-being-sold-out) ROH La Rondine in a couple days, which includes advanced press to trusted journalists. On one end, Gheorghiu speaks through cake bites to BBC4's "Food For Thought" (TMI mic'ed-up mastication) and on the other, she alleges domestic abuse at the hands of former husband and onstage partner Roberto Alagna (trigger warnings all around, especially in the lingering shadow of the Charles Saatchi/Nigella Lawson AbuseGate papshots that rocketed the couple to the top of hits-for-hits trending feeds last month).