Richard Sasanow - Page 20

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.

Audiences at the New York Philharmonic have been known to come for the soloists and then slip out for the symphony. There didn't seem to be a lot of that at last Thursday's performance led by maestro Manfred Honeck, which began with a wonderful Beethoven Piano Concerto #1 in C Major from Inon Barnatan and grew to a masterly Mahler's Symphony #1.