off the clock

The Met streams the opener of its new production of La Traviata this Tuesday, 12/4, at 7:55pm ET, with Diana Damrau, Juan Diego Flórez, and Quinn Kelsey, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. You can check it out here if they remember to put the player back up.

Montserrat Caballé 1933 - 2018

new regime

Mr. Nézet-Séguin said he was excited to mount several operas that have never or rarely been performed at the Met, including Handel’s “Agrippina” and “Alcina”; Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” in the original French (the company has only performed the Italian version); Cherubini’s “Medea,” in Italian; and Prokofiev’s “The Fiery Angel.”

Read all about it... ...except for the casting, so place your bets.

Only *Girls* Fight With Swords These Days

Your audio link to the Bastille Don Carlos, courtesy of francemusique



addendum: we so heart the French versions of this score, they are so fantastically weird.

Schiller Time

The Special Envoy asked this week about the difference between work time and what she termed "Schiller time" -- by which she means the difference between wage slavery and the stuff one is really supposed to be doing. The stuff, that is, with meaning.

But since the internet loves brevity and youtube videos may stand in for discourse these days, I suppose the response is a bit this



Before the experts weigh in, yes, this is not a particularly canon (in the nerdy superhero flick sense of that term) bit of the opera. Schiller's Elisabeth de Valois has been dropped at the Spanish court alone, an isolated person in a play of isolated people, so she doesn't have the luxury of bidding farewell to a homie, only to one of the people she refers to in weaker moments as her jailers. All the more impressive, in a way, that the prisoner stands up for the prison guard, the servant of an authoritarian narrative whom Authority has just ruthlessly decontextualized. If the libretto of the opera loses a bit in the change, Verdi makes up for it in that final chorus. It's the punctuation of Elisabetta's vocal line and its final three note descent that turns them from onlookers to witnesses. Say what you will about the man as a composer, when it came to adapting canon works for the opera stage, his musical shorthand was second to none.

Meantime, after a lengthy hiatus, here's your Random Don Carlos Trailer of the Week, courtesy of Salzburger Landestheater, wherein the salient metaphor appears to be ice cubes.

Kill the overmediated visual and listen

old skool diversions

DtO reminds us on Twitter today that there is good stuff to be had on francetv's Culturebox. Among the points of interest for Old Skoolers is a production from La Fenice of Stiffelio, Verdi's (at the time) failed experiment in bringing ambivalence -- Breaking: Accused Soprano Actually Guilty! -- to the 19th century opera stage. Written between Luisa Miller and Rigoletto, with a libretto by Piave, it suffered a complicated fate, and more or less disappeared for the next hundred and forty years. It had its Met premiere in 1993.

I haven't seen all of this video yet. At first glance, production-wise, it doesn't appear all that interested in challenging performance conventions -- nothing says "Verdi opera" like a long wooden conference table with books strewn across it -- but since for this opera there really aren't any performance conventions, it's not much of a crime to cleave to the standard, at least while the focus is on the score. The key thing is, unlike other works from this period of Verdi's career, this one hasn't had decades of performance history with every great singer under the sun, so, if you'll forgive the baseball metaphor, it has yet to pitch a perfect game. Which makes every production worth a listen in...for anyone into this kind of thing.

addendum: and while you're there, if you are one of those people, and if your French is pretty good, you have a little time yet to check out the source material for the aforementioned Luisa Miller.

indian summer

Among the Yay! things from the present administration of Glimmerglass can be counted the restoration of its opera broadcasts. We may be mulling cider today, and roasting squash to heat the Republic, but we'll have July and August from the speakers.

Today's Macbeth boasts Eric Owens and Melody Moore, both in role debuts, and you can catch it at 1pm ET on WQXR or at 2pm on KUAT, plus a bunch of other places. (Check their schedules, though, I'm not sure how old this list is.)

Melody Moore, Eric Owens/photo Karli Cadel

more of the same except less of it

Just back from Met HD Il Trovatore (2015) encore . Opinion hasn't changed since the last time.*

Oh, and **

*except we're using walnut hull-based cat litter now, so the concrete effect was just about concrete, and about as interesting as it is possible for concrete to be without doing something interesting with it.

** If you're going to insist on identifying Dmitri Hvorostovsky as "the baritone with a brain tumor" (NYT, I am looking at you) as opposed to more traditional descriptors like "the baritone with the voice like X" or "the baritone with the Hair", then the end result of the blood oath for some in the audience will be to ponder the Count di Luna's platelet levels when we're supposed to be focusing on the dust-up in the nunnery. It is not the lede of this story. You are not the NY Post. Resist the temptation, you ghouls.

noise ordnance

The Met kicks off its 2015/16 season tomorrow with the new production of Verdi's Otello at 6:30pm ET, audio livestream here. The plan at the Noise Ministry is order a ton of Indian food and hook up the big speakers. Wakey!

sundry items

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.

Indiana Jones & the Paris Opera Basement

Andrew Porter has died at the age of 86. Obituaries here and here. Some of us of A Certain Age™ may remember skipping the cartoons and going straight to his reviews in The New Yorker (he was Alex Ross's predecessor there). We may also remember his intermission lectures on the Met Opera broadcasts, back when they did that kind of thing. For an opera-obsessed teenager, he was a big part of the cultural landscape. For a kid trying to learn how to write, his was the voice of accessible scholarship. (Not that any of those skills were ever acquired, of course, but it was a level to which one could aspire.) 

His singing translation of the Ring, picked up for Wagner class in freshman year, is still here, thumbed through often times enough that it is now held together by rubber bands. Notes in the margins contain corrections -- it does take a certain amount of geeky attitude to be a teenage Wagnerite -- but not without recognizing the translator's mas ninja skills in getting the lines to match up with the beats, and the words to match up with the leitmotifs (yikes), all without the English side gnarling up into some ungodly, unsingable mass. 

Most of all, though, every time we talk about a five act Don Carlo -- or Don Carlos -- which we do a lot here in our corner of the blogosphere, we're talking about his work. We're talking about him in the basement of the Paris Opera, prising apart pages that hadn't been seen since Verdi himself was in the room with them, and reconstructing a score from parts rejected not because they weren't any good, but because the demands of mass transit are immovable. 

That story will be in every obituary of Andrew Porter, because it was the centerpiece of a career more eventful than most. This was evident two summers ago, at Caramoor's Verdi in Paris Day. After a lengthy roundtable discussion in a hot stone courtyard on a 96° afternoon, he was still charmingly open to being button-holed by people as enthusiastic as he still clearly was about the complex history of this opera. I joined the klaatsch half way through, and it isn’t exaggerating to say that his eyes were filled with the memory of it, and he spoke about it as if he were there right then, in the Paris Opera archives, old volumes in hand, and not standing in the shade of a tree near a portable water cooler in the hinterlands of Westchester.

Then, because my mas ninja skill is in ending conversations before they’ve begun, I asked him a question he couldn't answer. Ten points to Gryffindor!

Do not allow this man into your discourse...or your country.

YA

Young Artists, that is: Theo Lebow, Deborah Nansteel, Hunter Enoch



Deborah Nansteel was a Glimmerglass Young Artist, too, not long ago, and iirc did kind of a killer O don fatale at the Young Artists recital that year. She and Theo Lebow return to Seattle next month as part of the alternate cast for Semele, and we should probably all go.

Annals of Pop Culture Opera Reference

sundry items of livestreaming

Via La Cieca, Whitebox Art Center will be video streaming its Alcina performance/installation tonight and tomorrow (9/20 & 21) at 7pm Eastern.

Indiana University Jacobs School of Music has started its video streaming of student performances this weekend with L'Italiana in Algeri. Tonight's performance starts at 8pm Eastern.

And of course the Met season begins on Monday with Richard Eyre's new production of Le Nozze di Figaro, audio streaming on SiriusXM and from the Met's website, festivities beginning at 5:45pm Eastern, followed by SiriusXM-only webcasts of Boheme on Tuesday and Macbeth on Wednesday.

Off to the races...

Catone Approximately Thirty Miles Southeast of Utica (As the Crow Flies)

Wasting no time whatsoever, Glimmerglass has announced its 2015 (and 40th anniversary) program here. Psyched for the return of baroque opera, the return of Eric Owens, the return of Melody Moore, and the return of John Conklin. Also psyched for the opportunity to hear more from Jacqueline Echols, and reasonably enthused for the idea of getting The Magic Flute lost in the woods.

Total Doom and friends

From the Great Tanglewood Swap-Out of 2013, audio of the Verdi Requiem, with Kristine Opolais, Lioba Braun, Dmytro Popov and Eric Owens (subbing for Ferruccio Furlanetto), conducted by Carlo Montanaro (subbing for Andris Nelsons).  Performance begins at 30:00 (so drag to there if you wish to skip the woeful tale of Nelsons' gig-squashing encounter with a door, and a recording of the end of Suor Angelica as sung by la Opolais). Montanaro does some cool things with tempo and dynamics and, as previously stated on Twitter, Eric Owens is Total Doom.

was heisst hier alles: Verdi's Don Carlos @ Caramoor 7.20.13

As presented at Caramoor as part of its Verdi in Paris program, Don Carlos was the proof of a thesis:

Resolved: The opera is better in its original French than in any iteration of its Italian translation.

By curtain time this argument had been proposed and well-supported in the afternoon's sessions of discussion, lecture and performance, more on which later. But it could be summed up by conductor Will Crutchfield's point that, contrary to popular assumption, there never was an Italian-language libretto for which Verdi wrote music (except for one scene Ghislanzoni contributed for the 1871 Naples version, later discarded).

Even the four act version, with the Fontainebleau scene excised, was originally written to a French libretto, and that was the version given last Saturday night. Indeed, unlike, say, the Chatelet recording, with its patchwork of earlier drafts, there was nothing in this semi-staged concert performance that would be unfamiliar to anyone well-versed in the now-standard four act version, except the libretto.

For all that afternoon's discussion of the finer points of relationship between text and score, the performance itself was, in terms of the drama, fairly standard. This wasn't unexpected, given how seldom any performance of this opera escapes the carapace of mannerisms that tend to cleave to it (and to Verdi performance in general), even in full productions with reasonable stage rehearsal time. But if there wasn't much earth-shatteringly revelatory on the vocal front, either, then at least its standard was a very high standard.

Caramoor's marketing hook for this performance was mezzo Jennifer Larmore's first Eboli, and she did in fact turn out to be the standout. I tend to associate her with baroque opera, and she brought to the coloratura passages in the Veil Song a Handelian's understanding of how to make a lot of rapid ornamentation signify. Also, she's a good actress. If her voice isn't quite the rock-solid (read monolithic) instrument we often hear in the role these days, her Eboli was multi-dimensional and interesting, and she would bring a lot to a fully-staged production, o opera house casting people.

Everybody else turned in solid performances. James Valenti went wide on a few exposed notes, and his Carlos is a bit textbook, but he filled the space of that role better than many. He did, in the final scene, have a way of gazing off into the distance like a Constructivist model beholding a bright future full of Five Year Plans, but never mind, they all do that. Jennifer Check's Elisabeth was a little reedy toward the beginning but warmed up nicely. I rather liked how she got all up in Philip's grill in the King's Study confrontation, and my hastily scribbled note for the final scene says "JCheck has this in the bag. ttly." Not the most eloquent phrase, I admit, but 'twas true.

Christophoros Stamboglis stands up well in a crowded field of Philips who are mostly Ferruccio Furlanetto right now.  He has a lush bass well-suited to Verdi, and his performance was nicely balanced if a fairly traditional interpretation. His Elle ne m'aime pas was beautifully nuanced. He's gone on record now for being in favor of the French libretto, so hopefully he'll have many more opportunities to prove Maestro Crutchfield's point.

Stephen Powell has a respectable baritone, sometimes water, sometimes wood, and did a creditable job with Posa, but didn't bowl me over. Mikhail Svetlov has an appropriately sinewy thousand-year-old Grand Inquisitor voice, but couldn't quite be still enough to represent the Rock of the Church. Nor was he helped by wearing a white jacket / black pocket handkerchief to contrast with Le Roi Philippe's  black / white ensemble. I get the point, but it sort of inadvertently said "Call me Cardinal Vegas."

Maestro Crutchfield, finally, leading the Orchestra of St Luke's, made some keen-edged interpretive choices that popped out the score a little here and there, and kept things from lagging in the way they can under less skilled (or interested) but probably higher-paid batons. Man knows how to shape some Verdi sound, and St Luke's gave him a lot to work with.


Stay tuned for our next installment, which will probably have something to do with this:

McVicar in Concrete: an interlude

Can't remember why I missed it the first two times, but just took in the encore encore of 2011's Met Il Trovatore HDcast. I have only two things to add to whatever it was people wrote about it way back then: first, David McVicar's set had me thinking I needed to remember to buy cat litter on the way home. Second, we need a new cliche for the swearing of blood oaths. Gratuitous palm-slashing is so last ten centuries. How about face-stapling? [addendum: Okay, I see nobody's quite getting on the bus with this, but it has the benefit of demonstrating Unhinged Commitment to an Idea and yet being directly referential to the circumstances of first-world existence in the 21st century. Wasn't it the Duke of Wellington who said "Only girls fight with swords these days!"?... What if we say Di quella pira was rock n' roll, and along came the Sex Pistols in the form of... Okay I grant this idea either needs some work or a quick plastic bag over the head. I return to my corner.]

Guardian @ Glyndebourne 2013

The Guardian has posted its Glyndebourne video webcasting schedule here. Three previously recorded, three live, all starting with Ariadne auf Naxos live on June 4. As in previous summers, performances are archived for a week for those of us with lives / day jobs / problematic time zones.