Opera Chic

Benjamming with Britten at the Aldeburgh Festival

 

Wanna tell the whole Wagner/Verdi 2013 bicentennial onslaught to suck it? Then head to the Suffolk Coast this summer for the 66th edition of Benjamin Britten's Aldeburgh Festival.

On June 7, Britten's centenary will commence with sixteen days of concerts and performances, like Peter Grimes and the complete Church Parables across Snape Maltings and Aldeburgh beach. Over 20 new works by composers such as Harrison Birtwistle and Magnus Lindberg, which have been commissioned by the Britten-Pears Foundation and the Royal Philharmonic Society, will premiere.

The festival will also celebrate works by Jonathan Harvey and Elliott Carter and includes performances by Ian Bostridge, Mark Padmore and Christian Zacharias. You can also get Britten swank like an iPhone cover.

Tease yourself with the awesome "A Time There Was...A Profile of Benjamin Britten" documentary (above) that includes rehearsals with the Maestro ("Don't let it flower into a Tosca-like sound"), interviews with Britten's siblings, the opening of the hall in 1967 by the Queen and vignettes from his personal life, like the photo below.

Opera Chic & Grazia.it: Peter Grimes at Teatro alla Scala

Were you lucky enough to be there last Saturday night? OC was. Between Robin Ticciati's shimmery spider webs, John Graham-Hall's grounded lyricism and Richard Jones' dynamic panoramas, La Scala cranked out a Peter Grimes hit. Read all about it here, in Italian, on Grazia.it. (Photos Teatro alla Scala & Brescia and Amisano)

Cold Killing It, Peter Grimes Style: Ticciati's Britten at La Scala

Sometimes we go to the opera theater because we crave -- like a clean Céline cabas or a Marchesi, porcelain-cupped caffè macchiato or a sedimenty Castello dei Rampolla -- a shot of live music, unamplified bliss to spirit us away for three hours from taxes & whorez & second-hand smoke. And sometimes we get to the theater and the sad, sixth replication of some cranked out classic with ill-fitting costumes & a time-beating tyrant doesn't really cut it. 

And then there are nights like last's at Teatro alla Scala for the opening of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, thanks to Robin Ticciati's brown curls and six, shiny buttons bouncing to the tempo of his quicksilver baton, leading the orchestra through every eye-watering shade of Britten's score, cinematically-shimmering and more nuanced than Stieglitz's portraits of O'Keeffe's hands, which matched Richard Jones' Duane Hanson-esque production. Lead John Graham-Hall -- who we last saw in March 2011 for Britten's Death in Venice with the unforgettable Edward Gardner, opera's RPattz, in Tom Pye's clean production -- was commanding and grimy, true class.

Full(er) review coming this week for Grazia.it. Radio can't replicate in-house, but Rai5 will broadcast the May 24th production direct from La Scala, 7:50pm Milan time.

Edward Gardner Polishes Britten's Death in Venice to Brilliance at la Scala

For young British conductor Edward Gardner, Benjamin Britten has been the harbinger of premieres, the late English composer ripe with initiations for one of opera's bright stars. The Eton-Cambridge schooled conductor inaugurated his high-profile May 2007 Music Director appointment at the English National Opera with Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice in Deborah Warner's evocative production, which had never been staged in ENO's history. Earlier this month, Gardner made his Italian and La Scala debut with the same production of Britten's last opera. This kid brings the freshness (we interviewed him here in 2009 in case you missed it).

La Scala took a gamble on Britten, as they do here for most works composed to English texts, but Gardner's masterful conducting, Warner's compelling production, and John Graham-Hall's intelligent read of the protagonist converged into a trifecta of aweseomness that made for a stellar night at Milan's Il Piermarini, a packed house greeting Britten's work. The knockout cast and production, solid and seamless, was a perfect marriage of opera's and theater's most enthralling aspects. 

Click the link below to keep reading!

Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream @ la Scala: Came for Carsen, Stayed for the 20" d1ldo. Viva Shakespeare!!!

There are conductors who, for some reason, get that most disheartening slur branded on their baton -- "workingman conductor". Or, as they like to say here, "routinier". Appropriately, the slur ends up being attached to the undeserving names of perfectly fine conductors. Because the same people who like to badmouth a masterpiece of elegance, grace and subtlety like L'Elisir d'Amore (everything they told you about L'Elisir -- or Don Pasquale for that matter -- is wrong, but this is the topic of a future post) like to slam perfectly fine, if definitely non-flashy, maestri.

Andrew Davis is one of those conductors -- more often than not your usual alleged connoisseur of opera who doesn't really get it will roll his (generally beady) eyes sighing some sort of dismissive remark about Sir Andrew. Who in fact, as he so often demonstrates whenever he steps on the podium, and as he showed last night at la Scala conducting A Midsummer Night 'sDream -- is a very gifted conductor. He has the gift of music -- he engages the listener. He's wary of the corny effects, understands deeply his scores, and some composers -- Britten, for example -- he simply gets it.

All due respect to a mostly excellent cast, last night's success is in large part Davis's work.

Anyway: as the curtain dropped on last night's Teatro alla Scala premiere of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, it was obvious, even before the numerous curtain calls and tonsil-busting "bravi", that the night had been a rousing success for all involved (even Robert Carsen himself, the director, showed up, and this is a vintage production, like from the Bush years -- Bush the Father years). When the cast and chorus eventually disappeared backstage for good and all the applause in the audience stopped, a riotous, congratulatory roar exploded from backstage and echoed around the theater -- a little backstage impromptu party, the singers in their hidden, not-so-private victory lap.

Carsen's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream was seen for the first time at Scala last night, though it's ages old, already shown from Aix-en-Provence to Barcelona's Liceu spanning over two decades, and was released on DVD a few years ago (you can get the DVD here)

The libretto (written by Britten and bff Peter Pears) is indeed packed with love and lust. Carsen's production -- he's possibly our second-favorite living Canadian, after Alice Munro -- goes unexpectedly sexual without discretion. Throughout the course of the opera, we witness an explosive orgasm (Tytania from Bottom's prosthetic), a cat fight (between Helena and Hermia), and let's be frank...what more can be said about an opera that mentions the word "cock" or "love juice" in some form or another half-a-dozen times? Opera Chic wouldn't have been surprised to hear some "bukkake" interpolation in the libretto.

But then, Carsen somehow kept a detached, straightforward interpretation of the overt erotic themes (Opera Chic still recalls the hotness from his Semele and Traviata orgies and his Salome striptease -- he's a director who likes his gangbangs, and more power to him for that). And yes we'd be remiss to not mention Matthew Rose's 20" strap-on that would make Dirk Diggler blush [link NSFW], though you'll have to keep reading to hear about that!