Operatic Magic

There are moments in opera when the genius of a composer melds with the inspiration of singers who visually and vocally transform it into theatrical magic. Francesco Cilea‘s, (an opera composer, little known) genius is apparent in Adriana Lecouvreur, which premiered in 1902, two years after Puccini’s Tosca. Puccini, of course, is an operatic titian of many work. Cilea is the inspired creator of one, Adriana Lecouvreur, an opera that depends heavily on its interpreters to float it to the top of the operatic firmament.

Rightly so, Adriana is generally produced when a soprano of importance demands to plum the juicy role of the supreme French actress of her day, Adriana Lecouvreur. There have been numerous divas who have drawn on its calling…Olivero, Tebaldi, Sutherland, Freni, and Caballe to name a few. They have often been partnered by great tenors,  for it takes a team to make it extraordinary;  it takes a miracle to make it sublime.

When Covent Garden announced  Adriana earlier this year for Angela Gheorghiu, it was dubious that she could live up Adrianas of yore. The voice is on the small side and perhaps not dramatic enough for the supreme actress. When Jonas Kaufmann was announced as her lover, Maurizio, it crossed my mind that the opera should be renamed Maurizio, much as many thought  Carmen with Kaufmann should be renamed Don Jose.

By whatever name one calls it, this Adriana was definitely an EVENT; operatic EVENTS are few and far between these days, so I was excited that one of the performances was being broadcast live by the BBC. I was able to listen to that live broadcast (not with great sound),  and I was impressed. Recently, a number of the scenes from that performances have been posted on You Tube.

In this final scene of the opera, Adriana has been poisoned by Maurizio’s lover, a rich Princess who provides him with the perks of wealth, power and fame.  His heart belongs to Adriana, a great actress. Having discovered Maurizio’s betrayal, Adriana has withdrawn from life and the stage and is dying.

In true operatic form, Maurizio and Adriana reunite to express their love in one of the most beautiful death scenes in all of opera. Kaufmann and Gheorghiu transform this into something so personal, we are almost embarrassed to intrude on their most intimate, private moments… add Cilea’s score and the package is sublime.

Gran Dio!

Gran Dio!  It’s been 5 months since I’ve posted to my opera blog. Thanks to all of you who have written with various questions, comments, and kind words saying you’ll miss me in the Fall.

As many of you know, I am taking a year off from teaching;  so far it’s been great to become just another opera fan, with nary a thought of what I’d like to teach and delighted at how much there is to learn & enjoy from today’s great Opera singers and artists.

In the past months there have been an awful lot of operatic “headlines” forthcoming, so I thought I’d just outline a few that come to mind.

The New York City Opera, after 75 years,  is on the brink of collapse. This is an epic story that dates back to a Golden Age when Opera and its star Singers garnered their own headlines to current times where those of little talent,  manipulate  and corrupt this  classical art form and create box office by being booed at final curtain having insulted many of the very hands that feed them.  If you haven’t kept up with the City Opera saga, you’ll  get a great overview by  Googling the following Headline in  The New York Times on 7/14/11.  Arena Opera, Mortier Style by Times music critic, Zachery Woolfe. It is both fascinating and disheartening…

Technology just keeps amazing.  Last week, I watched on line  a live performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio from the Munich Opera staring Jonas Kaufmann and Anja Kampe in a Eurotrash production that ignored Beethoven (what did he know?),  had a costume budget of $1.25, and basically required  poor Kaufmann to body mop  the stage (for which I hope he got paid extra) for a good deal of the 2nd act. In spite of it all,  both principals sang gloriously and acted with self generated inspriation.  The production was booed on opening night,  so it was a box office success and the directors will strike again. Oh by the way, I almost forgot : It does feature a scene with both Kaufman and Kampe disrobing and dressing into fancier duds!

Last minute switcheroos by San Francisco Opera:  Francesco Meli, tenor is out and Michael Fabiano, tenor is in as Gennaro in Lucrezia Borgia with Renee Fleming in October.  Now this is at least  interesting, if not a headline.   Fabiano was the  young, disgruntled tenor who was a  winner of the Metopolitan Opera’s Young Artist competition and featured  in the documentary film, The Audition, which was shown a few years ago at the Rialto. It will be a great coup for Fabiano to sing with Fleming and raises  interest in the Opera a notch, which up until now solely rested on Fleming’s draw.  Another reversal of concern  is the switch out of star tenor, Ramon Vargas as Foresto  in Verdi’s Attila next summer, for Fabio Sartori. Who?

Future Seasons at the Met

It’s always fun to visit Brad Wilber’s Met Futures Page   ( http://bradwilber.com/metfuture/ ) to see what the Met has up its sleeve all the way through to 2015. Wilber has an uncanny ability to get the scoop long before the Met announces what they are doing and who is singing.  He updates it regularly and is generally right on.

Here’s my outstanding picks of operas and singers from the his List:

2011-12 Season

Anna Bolena (Donizetti) with Netrebko, Garanca and Stephen Costello

Faust (Gounod) with Kaufmann and Gheorghiu

Manon (Massenet) with Netrebko, Paulo Szot

2012-13 Season

Maria Stuarda (Donizetti) with Joyce diDonato, Elza Van den Heever

Parsifal (Wagner) with Kaufmann

Otello (Verdi) with Jose Cura, Fleming

2013-14 Season

Werther (Massenet) with Kaufmann and Elina Garanca

Norma (Bellini) with Sondra Radvanovsky

Lohengrin (Wagner) my wish is for Kaufmann of course…Brad doesn’t yet report

2014-15 Season

La donna del Lago (Rossini) with  Juan Diego Florez.

Next Villazon?

A few years ago,  the subject of my  Passion for Opera class was:   The World’s Greatest Singers, and I included those current greats and those up and coming.  One of those up and coming tenors I featured was young Stephen Costello, and the selection I shared with the class was Stephen as the Duke in Rigoletto in a student production at Academy of Vocal Arts.

The reaction of the class to Costello was electric, and most were seized by the beauty of his voice as well as his passionate singing;  a few were concerned with his vocal health. Stephen made his Met debut several years ago and is scheduled to open the 2011-12 Met season as Percy in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena opposite Anna Netrebko and Elina Garanca (that’s a starry line-up).

He sings regularly in San Diego and will be featured in Faust there this spring.  So how’s he doing?  Is he still as ardent as he was a few years back…is his performance still electrifying? Voice still beautiful? Is his voice still healthy?

I happened upon this YOU TUBE of a performance Stephen gave just 2 months ago in New York.  He’s in a church, so the acoustics are echoey,  but I just wonder…. Why isn’t he singing at San Francisco Opera?  What do you think?

Move over Gustavo Dudamel…

Complete Joy!!!

Dame Margaret Price

I was completely sadden to hear that Margaret Price, the incomparable Welsh Soprano, passed away recently at age 69.  When I think of all of the beautiful soprano voices I have heard,  the two Prices are at the top of my list (Leontyne being the other).

Margaret Price had a gleaming,  pure tone that always reminded me of an other worldly sound that couldn’t possibly emanate from a mere human. I first encountered her,  by chance, in Paris around 1982, when I happened upon an afternoon recital of lieder she was presenting. I was completely hooked and for years envied those in San Francisco who heard her regularly in her greatest operatic roles.

I finally heard Price at the Met where she made her debut, I believe, as Desdemona opposite Placido Domingo in Verdi’s  Otello in 1985.   I treasure, beyond all my recordings,  a radio tape I made a week later of that performance.  The Act 3 confrontation with Otello showed her, not only as a legendary voice but also a vocal actress,  who left one drained after such a performance.

I was pleased to watch,  yesterday,  an interview with her from Wigmore Hall (after she retired at the height of her career in 1999).  It further confirmed what an intelligent, dedicated singer she was to her art.

There is a You Tube of an Otello she sang with Domingo in 1976,  when both were just taking on these roles.  The sound isn’t great, but that doesn’t keep one from recognizing the she was and still is the greatest Desdemona of her era and to date.

But first listen to what she has to say about opera and the art of singing in  her interview and then watch the clip.

Interview video of interview with Margaret Price ( please copy and paste):

http://www.classicaltv.com/v943/dame-margaret-price-in-conversation

You Tube:  Dio ti giocondi, o sposo.  Otello Act 3, 1976

Jonas Kaufmann in Concert

Jonas Kaufmann sings German Arias.  43 minutes of elegance and beauty!!

Sibyl Sanderson

The Sibyl Sanderson Story is not a particularly fetching title for a book.  Perhaps it was the subtitle: Requiem for a Diva that made me reach for it in a pile at a used book store on Gough St. in San Francisco.  Somewhere in the recesses of my mind,  far too cluttered with opera trivia, Sibyl Sanderson lurked as a name….a soprano who seemed to blitz on the opera scene in the early days of Puccini…a name  I recall as one of some importance in opera…but more than that …a blank.

Over the next couple of weeks I became absorbed with a world that begins in 1864 with Sibyl’s birth in Sacramento and  ends in Paris in 1903 with her death,  just shy of age 40.  In between,  I am in Paris and the great opera centers of a gilded age,  caught in a story of intrigue, obsession, rapture and tragedy as great as any Opera of its day.  Sanderson was a fascinating woman and artist of attractive appeal, perhaps falling short in any one category,  but inhabiting a package that was irresistible.  Her story made  me relish every page.

I imagine the author,  Jack Winsor Hansen, is as interesting as his subject. He is a man who has seemingly devoted a good deal of his life collecting minutiae on a woman for whom he is obviously obsessed.  Sanderson’s story is as compelling as she must have been in real life.

This is the best opera biography I have read in years.  It makes me yearn for a similar account of the life of  Claudia Muzio,  one of the greatest sopranos ever, whose life remains shrouded in mystery and tears and awaits unfolding.

Sondra Radvanovsky and Tosca

Last night I settled in to listen on Sirius to the first Tosca of 2011 at the MET featuring the wonderful American soprano,  Sondra Radvanovsky in her debut in the role of the iconic DIVA at least at the MET.  There was a bonus to the performance  with the announcement that Roberto Alagna, tenor had been intercepted in a taxi on his way to Little Italy.  He was rushed back to the Met a couple of hours before the performance started  to step in for Marcelo Alvarez, who had decided late in the game that he was to ill to sing  Cavaradossi. All of this, of course,  just adds to the drama of opera;  but it is strange how fate sometimes plays its hand.

The Met has not yet lived down nor done much about their ridiculous  and inappropriate new staging of Tosca by Luc Bondy, so any singer is going to have to adjust to a fair amount of absurdity from the start.  The passion of the story must play through, however, no matter the staging.

I have been very impressed by Radvanovsky in the past.  As Leonora at San Francisco Opera in Trovatore in 2009,  she proved that she is a real Verdi soprano with a beautiful rich voice and a distinct sound.  Verdi is not Puccini, however,  and Bel Canto/Romantic opera is not Verismo opera;  yet Radvanovsky sang Puccini last evening….as Verdi.   There was little passion in an otherwise beautifully sung performance,  and what emotion was there was monochromatic.  That does not a Tosca make.  Perhaps, Radvanovsky  should shelve Verismo for a while and focus on the numerous Verdi roles for which she is in demand all over the world.

Tosca’s  wonderful aria of self pity,  Vissi d’arte,  is on You Tube with Radvanovsky;  it is a stunning piece of singing but lacks interpretation.   It tells us little about Tosca’s state of mind at this moment which must be swirling with  fear, anger, desperation, humiliation, love & loathing.    Would I  go to hear Radvanovsky live in this role?  In a hearbeat!!  She is an incredible artist making, in this instance, an inadequate stab at a role that all sopranos long to sing.  I will follow her progress and hope that  she improves with every try.  She may very well.

The triumph of the evening went to Alagna, who sang  with impassioned outpourings. He sounded as wonderful  as I’ve ever heard him.  The adrenalin rush that must accompany  stepping into a Met performance with no rehearsal was clearly evident last night,  and I and the Met audience gobbled it up.

Check in with Sirius,  for there are 7 more performances of Tosca at the Met with Radvanovsky and  Alvarez as scheduled;  meanwhile,  Alagna opens as Don Jose in Carmen this Thursday,  1/20,  which you can also hear broadcast  on Sirius.

Sondra Radvanovsky,  Vissi d’arte…2009

Maria Callas, Vissi d’arte 1958

SABBATICAL !

After 12 straight years of teaching A Passion for Opera at SRJC,  I have granted myself a one year sabbatical with full pay, travel and wonderful benefits!!  I announced this at the end of the 2010 Fall Class to my students,  some of whom  have been in every class I have taught!  The support, encouragement and appreciation that so many have expressed over the years  has been absolutely wonderful.

There is nothing more gratifying to me than to have 200 students in the auditorium, listening to an opera selection of my choice and falling completely silent while breathing with the music.  I’ll never be a singer or a performer, but I think I know what opera singers mean when the speak of  connecting with an audience. It’s the magic of Opera.

It is always wonderful that  wherever there is opera  (San Francisco Opera, New York, the Met in HD, Berkeley recitals)  I run in to many of you,  who stop and tell me they are now hooked on opera,  and it is my fault!  What a  compliment!  That has been my intention all along!

For those of you who attend my classes,  fear not.  I shall return and am determined in 2012 to offer   something that is very different and exciting!  In the meantime,  don’t be shy! Send me ideas of what you’d like to hear, or what kind of opera event you’d jump at the chance to be a part of.

For now,  I’ll continue to see you wherever there is opera and certainly  let you know via this blog what I hear,  see and recommend.  Stay tuned!  There are fascinating times ahead!

Frost & Gheorghiu: A Most Intelligent Opera Interview

I feel like I am back in the 70′s listening to an interview with an Opera singer that is highly intelligent and focuses on Art rather that sensationalism and gossip. Angela Gheorghiu is arguably the “greatest soprano in the world” (according to Sir David Frost), but there is no doubt that hers is one of the most beautiful and distinctive voices ever.  She is one bright and amazingly articulate artist even though English is probably her 7th language or so.