more streaming intertubes

Elektra, with Christine Goerke in the tr, opens tonight at the Met. Catch the audio stream here, or on SiriusXM, at 8pm ET. (NYT puff piece as YNS turns conducting into an Olympic sport here.)

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Just a reminder that the opener for the new Met Rosenkavalier will be streamed on the Met website on Thursday, April 13, starting at 7pm ET.

While you wait, here's Boston's Handel & Haydn Society doing the Monteverdi Vespers at the Temple of Reverb Dendur.



Or there's one of Eliza Carthy's big band projects live in Hull, with a rather killer opening set from Olivia Chaney, right here.

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The LA Times has a profile of Patricia Racette on the eve of her Salome at LA Opera.

What's that you say? Rhiannon Giddens has a new album out? Why yes she does, and you can listen to the whole thing right here courtesy of NPR First Listen. (Quick while NPR still exists.) Then you can go buy the album from the ever-awesome Nonesuch.

nota

This is just to remind ourselves that this is happening and we should probably do something about it.

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BayStaats livestreams its Ariadne this afternoon at 2pm ET, with Amber Wagner, Brenda Rae, and Alice Coote, right here.

The BSO's barnburning Elektra, with Christine Goerke in the title role, should be archived here sometime this week. You all should give it a listen.

And BBC 3 has Sarah Connolly's recital (or goodly bits thereof, anyway) from last May's Göttingen Festival.

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Jonas Kaufmann's new Puccini album is posted in its entirety here for the moment. It's earned Lucy's seal of approval, so I'm guessing it's worth a listen. UPDATE: It's turned into a pumpkin, so now to your noise purveyor of preference.

The Monteverdi operas from this year's Boston Early Music Festival will be posted up at WCRB's website for on-demand streaming (audio only), starting with Orfeo, which is already there. I assume they'll post up one a week as WCRB runs them on their Sunday opera program.

If you missed Stemme's Elektra from Vienna, Sveriges Radio's got your back.

Finally, Met Opera has their free audio streaming schedule up on their eye-catching but slightly aggravating new website. The festivities begin September 21 at 6:30pm ET with that most metal of all operas, Otello. Will it be the barn-burner it's supposed to be? I saw the Maestro yesterday, he was looking a little dubious.

Inadvertent Theseus: Ariadne @ Glimmerglass, part 3

After all the discussions about women on the podium that have cropped up in the last few years, props to Glimmerglass for putting Kathleen Kelly at the wheel. Even working a reduced score with scaled-down orchestra (this theater’s pit being only so big), it’s a monster piece of noise-making that must be tricky for that size a house. Apart from a couple of points where the balance skewed a bit, Kelly kept the orchestra’s sound in shape, surfed the score’s nuances, and let the singers be heard. More big conducting gigs for her, please. 

Finally, in keeping with director Francesca Zambello's chosen setting, and presumably also as a way of heightening the divide between "high" art and "low" as represented in the work, everything is performed in English except for the Ariadne opera seria. As with last year's King for a Day (and next year's Magic Flute), the job of translating Hofmannsthal's not uncomplicated libretto fell to Kelley Rourke, Glimmerglass's dramaturg and supertitles ninja. Rourke manages to write singable verse, adhere to the intentions of the libretto and of the score without being slavish, and make it come out both musical and funny (when it needs to be), and contemporary as the production’s premise requires. (“It is quite obvious to me / that you’ve gone off your meds,” sings the Wigmaster at the Tenor in the Prologue.) At times the German/English juxtapositions play off each other, as in “Too many nights alone can really take a toll!”/”Toll, aber weise….” Clever. 

Inadvertent Theseus: Ariadne @ Glimmerglass, part 2

Christine Goerke, who was a Glimmerglass Young Artist once upon a time, and who is also wicked funny, by now has the Diva moves down. (It probably helped that the audience gave her big hand just for showing up on stage.) But she also managed the nuance of an artist going from not expecting much to finding herself drawn in to the Composer’s art. (The Prima Donna seems a little stunned at the huge applause she gets for Es gibt ein Reich, and looks over at the Composer with a combination of surprise, admiration, and gratitude.) At this point, coming off a tremendous success in Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Met, Goerke has a voice that can more than fill Glimmerglass’s 800 seat Alice Busch Theater. It was fairly clear that she was reining in the volume at times, but we like an Ariadne with power to spare.

Ariadne no. 5 tonight. Have to sing it with Jessye Norman in the audience. #NoBigWhoop #OhMyGOD #NoPressure
— Christine Goerke (@HeldenMommy) August 8, 2014

Seriously, if she sang it like the performance before, no problem there.

Rachele Gilmore has pretty quickly become one of the go-to sopranos for the role of Zerbinetta, and with good reason. She had one of those insane Halo jump short-notice Met debuts subbing in the role of Olympia for Kathleen Kim. So it was no surprise she tossed off Zerbinetta’s coloratura without a hitch. Zerbinetta being something of a Strauss/Hofmannsthal combo of Despina and Don Giovanni, she works her way through the guys’ applications, has a brief thing with Harlequin, but it’s the Composer who turns her head. As the opera progresses, you can see her thinking maaaaaybe she’s done with the old gods.

Catherine Martin has a lush, muscular voice, and she captured the Composer’s comic lows and poignant highs in a way that makes me hope we won’t have long to wait for her Octavian.

Likewise the three nymphs, Naiad, Dryad, and Echo, seem to be a gateway to bigger things, although most of what they do in this opera is sing cosmic harmonies. Jeni Houser, Beth Lytwynec, and Jacqueline Echols were nicely aethereal together, and we’ll look forward to hearing them again individually (in Echols’s case, next year as Pamina).

On the mundane side, what the four clowns – Carlton Ford’s Harlequin, Brian Yeakley’s Brighella, Gerard Michael D’Emilio’s Truffaldino, and Andrew Penning’s Scaramuccio -- may lack in otherworldliness they made up for with Eric Sean Fogel’s fairly intricate choreography.

Strauss’s evident hatred of tenors notwithstanding, Corey Bix, oar in hand, made it across the high seas of Bacchus intact. No mean feat.

Actor Wynn Harmon was appropriately officious and dismissive as the Major Domo (“I leave it to you to work out the specifics” is probably his mantra) and Matthew Scollin’s Farmhand looked as perplexed by it all as my Montgomery County farm-owning boss when I try to explain to him that I’m blowing off work for an opera out beyond where even he lives.

Inadvertent Theseus: Ariadne in Naxos @ Glimmerglass, part 1

Francesca Zambello’s new production of Ariadne at Glimmerglass draws on two key features of upstate New York: first, that at some point early in its history, the people responsible for naming municipalities in the state of New York went on a Classics binge, which is how Syracuse got associated with college basketball and Ithaca with granola progressivism, Attica with prison riots and Utica with whatever Utica is associated with. The second is that, much of upstate having been since the Gilded Age a summer getaway land for wealthy, art-appreciating New York City people, a lot of art gets done in the hinterlands, not least an opera festival way out in Otsego County, in a little semi-gentrified farming town surrounded by more semi-gentrified farming towns.

So the conceit for this production is the entirely plausible idea that a wealthy estate owner has decided to have a summer entertainment put on in his barn, and to accomplish this has imported the talent to the sticks somewhere NNW of New Paltz. The barn has a fairly unreliable map of New York State painted onto it, and head shots of the principles in the scheduled opera seria pinned up next to the doors, which slide open to reveal a vintage tractor and a piano amid the hay bales. Also there are goats and a chicken. Later there will be a stage.

The Diva arrives, as we know somewhat disconcerted by what it turns out she’s being asked to do, more so in this production by where she’s being asked to do it.

Christine Goerke as Prima Donna in The Glimmerglass Festival's 2014 production of
Strauss' "Ariadne in Naxos." Photo: Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival.

Then Zerbinetta’s troupe arrives, looking a bit like a Brooklyn punk cabaret act lured up the Thruway from the Bard Festival’s Spiegeltent.

L to R: Carlton Ford as Harlequin, Brian Ross Yeakley as Brighella, Rachele Gilmore as Zerbinetta, Gerard Michael D'Emilio as Truffaldino, Andrew Penning as Scaramuccio and Wynn Harmon as Manager of the Estate in The Glimmerglass Festival's 2014 production of Strauss' "Ariadne in Naxos." Photo: Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival.

Chaos ensues, you know the spiel.

In keeping with the general drift of women being in control of the creative process in this production within a production (the Prima Donna, the Comedienne, the Director, and the Conductor), Zambello has tossed out the Composer as trouser role and just made the Composer a woman in trousers.

Catherine Martin as Composer in The Glimmerglass Festival's 2014 production of
Strauss' "Ariadne in Naxos."
Photo: Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival.

SPOILER: The Composer gets the girl, and so does Zerbinetta.

Monday Posting from the Ministry of Noise

Last week's BSO concert performance with Gun-Brit Barkmin and Evgeny Nikitin, and Andris Nelsons behind the wheel.

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Culturebox has Théâtre du Châtelet's Einstein on the Beach from last week archived here for a good long while. 

Some cool concert stuff is housed on Trinity Wall Street's website, including this hour with BEMF regulars Robert Mealy (baroque violin) and Avi Stein (harpsichord and organ). 

Bard Summerscape's 2014 opera will be Weber's Euryanthe. Details will no doubt materialize somewhere around here at some point. 

This Digital Theatre thing is pretty excellent, in a Where have you been all my life kinda way. 

In that same vein, having had a fair success with streaming opera (we imagine), the Guardian now ventures into streaming theater: Howard Brenton's Drawing the Line, about the partition of India, is up live this Saturday at 2:30pm ET. Reviews from Guardian and Arts Desk.

For those contemplating a road trip to Glimmerglass this summer, Induction Weekend at the Baseball Hall of Fame is July 25-28.  Don't pick that weekend if you need a room or restaurants within forty miles. Oh wait, they're inducting Joe Torre...make that eighty miles.

lenten entertainments

The next free audio webcast from the Met is Monday's L'Elisir d'amore, with Damrau, Florez, Kwiecien and Corbelli, 7:30pm ET at the usual place.

The grapevine also says that Violetta Urmana is out for Saturday's Met Aida, so sub Latonia Moore will be making her Met debut. Read Anthony Tommasini's review of her in the 2000 Met Council Auditions concert here. (Not that she hasn't done other stuff since then.)

  

Last Saturday, while the rest of the world was distracted with the Ernani HDcast, Renée Fleming was testing out her Ariadne in the provinces (Baden-Baden), with Sophie Koch as the Komponist, Jane Archibald as Zerbinetta, and Robert Dean Smith, who survived Bacchus pretty well.  Up on medici.tv for free another month or so, I b'lieve.

The next fun thing up on medici.tv will be the Harmonic Convergence, or Match Made in Hell, or both, of Robert Wilson and Pelléas et Mélisande on March 16th at 1:30pm ET. It's likely I'll be on some fabulous painkillers that day, which can only enhance the experience.

Es gab ein Reich

Not to be like the prophets of opera doom, but this is one scene I really do miss: