Richard Sasanow - Page 19

On Site Opera's (OSO) new production of THE SECRET GARDENER--better known to Mozart aficionados as LA FINTA GIARDINIERA--debuts in New York, as part of the New York Opera Alliance's New York OperaFest, in Manhattan's Westside Community Garden on Thursday May 11 for three performances. It was created and produced in conjunction with the Atlanta Opera, which present it in the Atlanta Botanical Gardens next week, marking the start of a series of “beautiful friendships” for the spunky New York company, which is known for its unique, immersive, site-specific productions of often-unfamiliar works.

I first heard tenor Roberto Alagna in the days when he was being touted as “The 4th Tenor”—chutzpah that only a record company could come up with, placing him in the hallowed company of Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti. Fast forward more than 20 years and he's still here. As Cyrano, the soldier-poet with a nose that embarrasses him, in Francesca Zambello's attractive production, Alagna was wonderful—perhaps the best I've ever seen him.

Erstwhile weatherman and Today Show personality Al Roker caused a hurricane of his own after he touted his snoozing during DER ROSENKAVALIER at the Met, saying on Instagram, “So I napped a little last night during intermission at @metopera performance of #derrosenkavalier and 1st act...ok and in the 2nd act. Alright, 3rd act, too. C'mon! It was #fridaynight.”

Harry Bicket and the English Concert returned for its just-about-annual Handel-fest at Carnegie Hall with a concert performance of the well-loved ARIODANTE by Handel, starring the even better-loved mezzo Joyce DiDonato. The result was some awfully fine singing--particularly from DiDonato in fine dramatic form--although the pretty disastrous casting of one of the principals (at least from my point of view) brought the production down from the lofty heights it could have attained.

Baritone Joseph Lattanzi and mezzo Laura Krumm didn't originate at the roles of Jack and Jackie Kennedy when JFK--the new opera by David T. Little and Royce Vavrek--premiered in Fort Worth a year ago. But they certainly owned them in the excerpts presented in the most daring of the four excellent works represented in the “ALT Alumni: Composers and Librettists in Concert” at New York's Morgan Library & Museum last week.

The audience was there to be thrilled on Tuesday, when the Met's new Music Director, Yannick Nezet-Seguin, took on Wagner's DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER (THE FLYING DUTCHMAN) and they weren't disappointed. It was a musically glorious performance with the Met orchestra in peak form under its new maestro, the company's great chorus both charming and energetic, and the cast of principals marvelous, led by baritone Michael Volle in the title role and soprano Amber Wagner as Senta.

For a new production that was supposed to mark a farewell for soprano Renee Fleming to a role (the Marschallin) if not to staged opera performance in general, Robert Carsen's version of Richard Strauss's DER ROSENKAVALIER at the Met seemed more of a farce and less a tale of regret about passing time than usual. And the “star” role seemed more of an aside than the center of it all.

Last year's premiere of JFK by David T. Little and Royce Vavrek at the Fort Worth Opera caused some big-time foot-stomping in the Lone Star State. New Yorkers will have a taste of the work--which will have its next full-scale production at the Opera de Montreal next January--on April 23 at the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan.

Richard Tucker Music Foundation named soprano Nadine Sierra as winner of 2017 Richard Tucker Award; simultanously, it announced its roster of study and career grant recipients.

It's getting near the end of the season at the Met in New York and it's nice to see that they're still bringing out their “A” game, with a splendidly cast run of Tchaikovsky's EUGENE ONEGIN, with the wonderful Met orchestra under the sensitive baton of Robin Ticciati, music director at the Glyndebourne Festival. The Met's chorus, under Donald Palumbo, was also in fine fettle.

ANGEL'S BONE, by Du Yun with a libretto by Royce Vavrek was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music. The opera--a bold work that that integrates vocal and instrumental elements and a wide range of styles into a harrowing allegory for human trafficking in the modern world--debuted on January 6, 2016 at the Prototype Festival, 3LD Arts and Technology Center in New York.

Beethoven's only opera, FIDELIO, was the last of three operas this season at the Met to take place in Seville, after CARMEN and BARBIERE DI SIVIGLIA. Third time definitely wasn't the charm.

I must admit that I entered LoftOpera's performance of Rossini's take on OTELLO with some trepidation. Besides having a particular affection for the Verdi version, my experience with 'alternate universe' adaptations of famous operas has been iffy at best. But this OTELLO, predating Verdi by over 70 years, seemed a horse of a different color--with LoftOpera making a strong musical case for it, especially in his treatment of Desdemona, Otello's beloved, sung sensationally by soprano Cecilia Lopez.

No one can accuse the Met of skimping when it put together its current revival of Mozart's opera seria IDOMENEO. Yes, the production's 35 years old, but with this cast, it hardly mattered: tenor Matthew Polenzani in the title role, elegant and Mozartian to the nth degree, the suave and poignant mezzo Alice Coote as his son, Idamante, and the pristine, gorgeous soprano Nadine Sierra as Ilia, the captured Trojan princess, under Music Director Emeritus James Levine. But it was the fourth of the leading players, the full-bodied lyric soprano Elza van den Heever, as Elettra, who blew the roof off.

In our time, IDOMENEO is the earliest of Mozart's operas regularly done, its full title being IDOMENEO, RE DI CRETA OSSIA ILIA E IDAMANTE--or IDOMENEO, KING OF CRETE, OR ILIA AND IDAMANTE. “Ilia” of the extended title is the daughter of Priam, the king of Troy. (“Idamante” is Idomeneo's son.) At the Met starting this week, Ilia is being sung by the skyrocketing young American soprano, Nadine Sierra.

Don't ever underestimate the importance of chemistry when it comes to pulling off an opera performance--and there was animal magnetism galore in the Met's revival of its Willy Decker production of Verdi's LA TRAVIATA. From the moment tenor Michael Fabiano came on stage, at Friday's performance of LA TRAVIATA at the Met, everyone perked up--even the evening's Violetta, Sonya Yoncheva, who had already been giving a strong performance as Verdi's “Lost One,” suddenly seemed to have a gleam in her eye that wasn't present before.

The last time soprano Diana Damrau and tenor Javier Camarena appeared together at the Met, they reinvented the deadly Mary Zimmerman production of Bellini's LA SONNAMBULA and made it into something wonderful. This time around, while the duo tried their hardest, they still couldn't quite bring the company's elderly production of IL PURITANI (also by Bellini) back to life, although they came pretty close, using all the considerable star-power they could muster.

Monteverdi's L'INCORONAZIONE DI POPPEA--THE CORONATION OF POPPEA--is considered the oldest opera in existence, but the version performed by Concerto Italiano at Carnegie Hall the other night, as part of the La Serenissima Festival (celebrating all things Venetian), showed it is also one of the freshest. It also couldn't be more timely, with an egotistical emperor, spiteful goddesses and servants happy to serve the most powerful people in the land (and get what they can out of it).

Tenor Vittorio Grigolo always seems most at home on stage when he's living close to the edge--portraying a character who's losing control (or about to) of his emotions. It was true earlier this season as Romeo, in Gounod's ROMEO ET JULIETTE at the Met opposite Diana Damrau and, in 2015, as Chevalier Des Grieux in Massenet's MANON, also with Damrau. (Might as well add Offenbach's Hoffmann to the mix.) Well, Massenet's back at the Met with WERTHER, also starring the gorgeous, sultry-voiced mezzo Isabel Leonard and all should be well with the world, with Grigolo as the poet who's losing his head (and mind) over a woman who can't (or won't) reciprocate. And yet…

A funny thing happened on the way to Emperor Claudius' death scene: He didn't die. At least, that's what happens in Handel's opera AGRIPPINA, setting the convoluted plot in motion and giving the young singers of Juilliard Opera and its Juilliard415 period-instrument ensemble a heck of a ride, directed by Louisa Proske and conducted by Jeffrey Grossman.