Opera Chic

MiddleMarch Opera Round Up

This past week, the Ides of March blew some throbbingly-awesome stories our way, which go perfect with ●bullet ●points *bang bang bang* so let's do this.

• At the ROH's new season announcement, Everyone Loves Anthony [Pappano] backhandedly criticised the work ethic of opera's new generation. A few took the bait, but Rupert Christiansen's piece in The Telegraph was pure class.

• Hugo Shirley roundtabled with rumoured-Milan-bound Alexander Pereira, Salzburg's current intendant for April's Opera Magazine on fund raising, festival projects and the death of shock-&-awe Regietheater: "In Germany we have seen all these people running on stage and making pissy in the corner. [ed: lol x lol x lol] I think this is over and we are demanding that the stage directors are telling the story -- in a modern or traditional way, I don't mind. At the end of the day, there's only a good production or a bad production."

• David Remnick omitted nothing in his The New Yorker piece on the Bolshoi Ballet scandal.

• In Naples, Neil Fisher broke mozzarella with Maestro Nicola Luisotti during his San Carlo Verdi Requiem about his upcoming ROH Nabucco for The Times. Said the maestro on live music vs. the distilled experience: “Music has to be live. You sit in the opera house with somebody else and you live an experience. It’s like love — you can’t make love by phone or internet. Well, you can, but in bed, with a person, is better.” Which reminds us of OC's 2009 interview with Matt Poland for Splice Today, when grilled about our insistence of live opera over HD simulcasts/CDs: "The unamplified voice -- nothing like it, ever. YouTube and HD simulcasts have created this impression that opera is best enjoyed from afar, it's not true, the true visceral experience is there in the opera house, and it always will be. It's the difference between having sex and watching a porno. It's sad that one has to point this out."

Sir Tony Meets the Prince

Congratulations to a morning-jacketed Sir Pappano for his knighthood at Buckingham Palace two days ago where he was honored for his achievement in arts and media.

Tony's William: Pappano Does Tell in London

If only OC could be in London -- not just for the martinis at Dukes Hotel or the cream tea at The Lanesborough -- but for Tony Pappano's William Tell Rossini ball buster (in concert performance) for the Proms with Orchestra di Santa Cecilia

The affable Italian-American conductor spoke to Corriere della Sera's Sette and said he'll be in Salzburg in 2013 for Don Carlos, Berlioz's Troyens at Covent Garden and the Proms next year and then for Scala in 2014.

As MD of Rome's Orchestra di Santa Cecilia and London's ROH, he spoke about the difference of the two cities: "In London the offers are vast. It has to conquer the audience. Also the highest level of work in Rome. In Italy, however, the world of classical music has to change a lot."

Meet Daniele Rustioni, Pappano's Hawt Assistant (Yeah, Sure, he Also Conducts)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. On behalf of the entire crew, I'd like to thank you for flying Air OC. In just a few moments we'll be beginning our descent into Hawtville. Temperature: Scalding. Population: Daniele Rustioni.

If OC was Antonio Pappano, that's how she would start each morning with her brooding young Milanese conducting assistant, Rustioni. Although he'd definitely become my Starbucks-fetcher -- for the record, Daniele, I take my coffee Miranda Priestly style: tall latte with two raw sugars.

Class of 1983, the 28-year-old Italian has already been performing at Italy's biggest houses -- La Scala, La Fenice, Bologna Comunale, and Verona's Arena after studying at Milan's Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi and Accadamia Teatro alla Scala and assisting the great Gianluigi Gelmetti (like one of OC's other favorite young hawt pieces, Alessandro Cadario) and Gianandrea Noseda of Torino's Teatro Regio. He's currently Antonio Pappano's assistant in London at the Royal Opera House, where he'll be making his house debut in April with David McVicar's Aida.

He's been living in London since 2006, long enough to affect a sexy British accent which he probably uses to seduce his Italian violinist girlfriend, Francesca Dego, class of 1989. His mom's a contralto in Milan's excellent LaVerdi chorus. But don't get excited over the "Bunga Bunga" slang in the Vanity Fair article title: it refers to Mark-Anthony Turnage's February Anna Nicole opera which Rustioni oversaw as Pappano's Short Round.

So is there lots of competition between all these fine young conductors? Rustioni answered: "There's also a sort of fellowship, it's not true that we're all distrustful of each other. I'm totally tied to Pappano and Noseda, and I'm all about Dudamel. There's just so much to learn from others. Yeah, there's jealousy: but those who you thought of immediately already come with that reputation. But I can calm everyone down -- I'm not the son of anyone famous, i have no agenda. I've had the fortune to be sustained by so many great conductors who i've already assisted, and they've all helped me."

Royal Opera House's Anna Nicole Opera in Photos

Mark-Anthony Turnage's Anna Nicole opera opened earlier tonight at London's Royal Opera House and as we sit back and wait for the reviews, here are some photos. Richard Jones directed and Antonio Pappano conducted a cast of Eva-Maria Westbroek as Anna Nicole, Alan Oke as J. Howard Marshall and Gerald Finley as Howard K. Stern.

The Royal Opera House live tweeted the event, including all of the celebrity sightings from Yoko Ono to Vivienne Westwood.

[UPDATE: February 18! The Daily Mail has new photos and a "review" (c'mon -- it's a tabloid)]

 

 

Antonio Pappano Goes Back to His Roots for an Italian Opera Road Trip

BBC Four's new opera documentary, Opera Italia, aired their first installment the other night with host Antonio Pappano, who took the audience on a tour around London, Mantova, Venice, Naples, and Pesaro. He traced the roots of Italian opera via Monteverdi, Händel, Mozart, and Rossini with the help of Juan Diego Florez and a handful of singers (including Mezzo Sarah Connolly who said "bewbs" on camera!)

It's been uploaded to Youtube (embedding disabled) so here's the linkage:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Tony the Tiger's Last Stand for Santa Cecilia

 

The 2010/2011 symphony season for Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia was announced earlier today in Rome. The season opens on October 16, 2010 in a concert version of Rossini's last opera, Guillaume Tell. Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley sings the lead under Music Director Antonio Pappano's measures.

The season highlights are many and include works by Chopin and Schumann, both in their bicentenary birth years, to be performed by Lang Lang and Maurizio Pollini. The Orchestra di Santa Cecilia will play 28 concerts running through June 7, including a Christmas concert with Honegger's Christmas Cantatas and Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker. In January 2011, Pappano will conduct all of Mahler's symphonies on the double occasion of the Austrian composer's birth and death anniversaries. In March, a special program to honor Liszt will celebrate the bicentennial of his birth.

The season concludes with Brahms' German Requiem and a new commission by Ivan Fedele. It also ends the contract of Pappano, which had started in 2005. Music Director at the Royal Opera House, the 50-year-old Italian-American Brit recently told The Times vaguely that he'd be staying in London until 2013-14 season, but you never know which way the wind blows. 

For tons of details on the new season including instrumental and vocal soloists go here for the details.

Pappano Takes La Scala With Puccini & Berlioz

Antonio Pappano, coming soon at la Scala for the season opener of the symphonic season with the Filarmonica, will conduct two operas there in 2012 and 2014. "Manon Lescaut" directed by Liliana Cavani in '12, and in '14 "Les Troyens", a co-production with the ROH.

Pappano Takes the Gold!

Maestro Antonio Pappano was at Rome's villa Medici to collect his Medal of Honor of the French Academy. Director of Académie de France à Rome, Frédéric Mitterrand (yeah, yeah, those Mitterrands -- he's the nephew), was also on hand for the presentation. Congrats to Pappano!

(More Antonio after the jump!)

Muti & Pappano BFF&E: The Two Maestri Bury The Hatchet, Muti to Guest Conduct @ Santa Cecilia

Antonio Pappano and Riccardo Muti didn't have much of a relationship  until a few days ago -- in fact the two maestri had never met, and there had been problems between them since  2004, when Muti pulled out of a Covent Garden Forza del Destino because he disagreed with the ROH changes in the Scala staging realized by Hugo de Ana.

Now all is forgiven: Pappano -- music director of Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, invited by Muti to one of his Otello performances at Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, has actually been introduced to Muti at the end of the night. And Pappano has invited Muti -- who is about to become a constant presence at opera di Roma, with four more operas planned over the next three years, and probably more to come since there's a new member in the Opera di Roma board, Italy's most powerful TV journalist Bruno Vespa, a big fan and ally of Muti and someone who wields about the same amount of power the late Tim Russert did in the US -- Pappano we said invited Muti to guest conduct the Santa Cecilia orchestra (in Opera Chic's view, it's probably Italy's best orchestra, all in all  -- la Scala still flaunts the best string section, but as a whole Santa Cecilia has an edge, lately).

Hungry Hungry HipPappano

Antonio Pappano tickled the ivories and tucked into some grub to raise money for Arca Italia Onlus (an org for handicap kids) at a private reception in Rome. He was joined by violinist Grazia Raimondi and cellist Luigi Piovano.

~*~

~*~

~*~

~*~

[All images via]

Villazon's Don Carlo: So Bad That It Made Pregnant Netrebko Drink

(photo via オペラ三昧イン・ロンドン)

The utter bores up at the Mayo Clinic have this piece of advice for pregnant women:

"One drink isn't likely to hurt your baby, but no level of alcohol has been proved safe during pregnancy. The safest bet is to avoid alcohol entirely."

"Consider the risks. Mothers who drink alcohol have a higher risk of miscarriage and stillbirth. Excessive alcohol consumption may result in fetal alcohol syndrome, which can cause facial deformities, heart problems, low birth weight and mental retardation. Even moderate drinking can impact your baby's brain development."

"If you're concerned because you drank alcohol before you knew you were pregnant or you think you need help to stop drinking, talk with your health care provider."

Admittedly, the Mayo Clinic is not a Russian institution.

And anyway if you're a star soprano you don't need to listen to no doctors. That is, if the yellow liquid photographed in pregnant (second to third trimester) Anna Netrebko's hands at the Covent Garden the other night was indeed alcohol, which we don't know -- you decide. More Drinking Pregka photos (very dark, they require a bit of levels work in Photoshop as we did with the photo above) at the Japanese site linked above, found via Intermezzo.

Anyway, what was the reason for Anna's need for a stiff one?

The beautiful tendency to live beyond one's means that has historically plagued so many opera singers seems to be going on at full blast (as we all know, la Scala, for their Daniele Gatti-conducted Don Carlo that will open the new season on Dec. 7, has decided to replace Marcelo Alvarez with Giuseppe Filianoti, not exactly the first name that comes to mind when thinking of the Don) AND Covent Garden, for their Pappano-conducted Don Carlo, has chosen Rolando Villazon, less than six months after Rolando's comeback from his sabbatical due to "exhaustion".

The Times:

"Villazón certainly radiates the aura of unstable volatility that Carlo needs, but his grainy voice sounds more and more pressurised."

The Guardian:

"The casting of Rolando Villazón in the title role attracted much of the advance publicity, but the glitzy tenor is the only disappointment. Some of his singing is outstanding but there's never a hint of emotional engagement and with an acting style that begins and ends at his eyebrows, mixing in a few semaphore-like flailing arms for good measure, Villazón reduces the character of Carlo to little more than a stroppy, lovesick adolescent, hardly hinting that there is also a political dimension to his personal tragedy."

Bloomberg:

"There was more superb singing, with Verdian panache. Then the problems started. Villazon began to wobble on his top notes, and a little catch appeared in his voice. The anxiety in the audience was palpable."

Look, now we need a drink, too.

Or Maybe, Just Maybe, The New York Guy Simply Isn't As Good As The Chicago Guy

Tony Tommasini, possibly confused after too much partying to celebrate his survivor status in a vastly downsized department, ignores the obvious answer in a baffling comment re: the Muti/CSO thing:

And Mr. Muti would have been all wrong for New York. I, for one, could not be more hopeful about Mr. Gilbert’s potential. But I thought that the Philharmonic players all would have shared my enthusiasm.

Now, the quite evident answer to the mystery that leaves Tony Tommy baffled, ie the reason why the NYPhil don't seem to share TT's unabashed enthusiasm for Gilbert may be, quite simply, that... Gilbert may not be as good a conductor as Muti.

Let us be clear here: OC likes Gilberto, and she thinks that he'll do just fine, and anyway he's got his back covered because all the New York critics are totally in the tank for him and he'll certainly commission a lot of new stuff that'll spread jobs and much-needed benjis among a lot of otherwise underemployed people.

But there is indeed a list of the Big Five when it comes to conductors, too -- the list of the top five conductors in the world.

Opera Chic's, strictly in alphabetical order is this:

Claudio Abbado

Mariss Jansons

James Levine

Riccardo Muti

Antonio Pappano

(your list may be slightly different, but in all seriousness not that different: maybe you can replace Pappano with Barenboim or Jansons with Haitink, but Claudio, Jimbo & Riccardo solidly belong in that list).

The fact Tommasini chooses to ignore is that Gilbert, however interesting and refreshing a choice, cannot be reasonably included in that Big Five list, by all means. Muti can. And indeed he is in very many people's Big Five list -- including, one suspects, a lot of CSO musicians'.

Luca Francesconi + Antonio Pappano = Hard Pace: New Music At Santa Cecilia

With Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, this coming Saturday, Antonio Pappano will unveil with Orchestra dell'Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome a new work by cool-as-the-proverbial-cucumber Italian composer Luca Francesconi (former student of Stockhausen and Berio, Berio's assistant for many years, Mac user).



The new work in question is Hard Pace, a new trumpet concerto that will come to life thanks to (magic trumpet man and friend of Greatest Living Composer Hans Werner Henze) il maestro Hakan Hardenberger & Santa Cecilia Orchestra, under Tony's baton.

The concert is a double bill, with Francesconi and, playing second banana to the Italian d00d, an emerging German composer, one Ludwig Van Beethoven (the Ninth Symphony; more info here)

Bullish On Opera: Birtwistle's Minotaur Scawes London

Tony Pappano introduced a bovine new hero of the opera in London last night.

Hilarity ensued.

Rape, massacre and the consumption of the Minotaur's half-dead sacrificial victims, the Innocents, by the greedy Keres, vulture-like harpies: all were to follow

And:

Ten half-dead bodies spew their guts all over the stage. The killer, a grotesque man-bull, staggers around in bloodlust. A gloating chorus bays from the tier of a gore-smeared bullring.

The orchestra lurches into a macabre dance of death, propelled by jagged percussion blitzes and searing woodwind discords. Screeching harpies swoop on the bodies and rip out their hearts.

See also:

Primeval violence and ritual sacrifice shape the drama, punctuated by the sex-starved longings of Ariadne, fearsomely portrayed by Christine Rice, who sets her gaze on Theseus, sung by the excellent, lithe Danish baritone Johan Reuter. It is his destiny to enter the labyrinth and kill the Minotaur, the climax of the opera.

More on Birtwistle here.

ROH: We Know Drama. Pappano And The ROH Present Their 2008-2009 Cancellation-Prone Roster

Bryn Terfel (his son's once-broken finger permitting), Rolando Villazon (his voice and general state of health permitting), Anna Netrebko (baby-feeding duties permitting), Juan Diego Florez (if he doesn't eat any more fish), Roberto Alagna (if they don't boo him), Aleksandra Kurzak (who has already pulled out of Berg's Lulu), Deborah Voigt (if she can hold down her lunch), Renee Fleming, Joyce DiDonato, Danielle De Niese and Dmitri Hvorostovsky are among the singers supposed to appear for the 2008-2009 season of the Royal Opera House.

Antonio Pappano is in teh haus and will conduct six operas. The ROH season will flaunt eight new productions -- among them the potentially-deadly but extremely interesting La Calisto, a Cavalli surprise -- and Haendel's Acis and Galatea. Other new productions include Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel, Rossini's Matilde di Shabran and, in a fit of modernism, Lulu, by the composer otherwise known as Carlos Kleiber Sr.           

      

Weekend Bonus! Antonio Pappano Shares His <3 of Wine

How To Spend It...like it's 2007!!?? The Financial Times tells you "How To Spend It" in their special B0NUX issue from Friday, February 8, "2007" -- hmmm, maybe it's a new retro thing? How did this go to press? Fire the editors! OMG I just lost $500 on the Chicago Bears. Freaking COLTS R TEH SUCK! Let me install my brand new Windows Vista on my PeeCee. Hannibal Rising sucked! omg el oh el....this is exhausting.

ok ok, let's pretend it didn't happen. This Friday's "How To Spend It" has a feature on vino called, "Me and My Favourite Wine", asking four accomplished and varied personalities to share their most prized wine. One of the quartet is Antonio Pappano, musical director of the ROH and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. He opens with:

"My taste in wine, like my taste in music, is extremely eclectic. But given my Latin roots, my first love is Italy. Not surprisingly, most great Italian wines that I've drunk tended to be the Super Tuscans, which I still adore and collect. More recently, though, I've been increasingly drawn to great barolo from Piedmont. My particular favorite is Cappellano."

He goes on to describe a Cappellano 2001 Otin Fiorin Pie Rupestris, which he calls, "a contradictory mix of perfume and truffles. It's a very musky, sexy bouquet but at the same time scented, fragrant and pure." Hmmm. Now we know how he flows. We'd cozy up to Pappano with some Cappellano anytime. And his wife, too. L'chaim!