Richard Sasanow - Page 30

From its earliest days, Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival has included opera among its offerings, although I recall no production being quite so acclaimed as Iván Fischer's DON GIOVANNI of two seasons ago. With so much to live up to, the director-conductor's vision of Mozart's LE NOZZE DI FIGARO had its work cut out for it, seen on August 13 at the Rose Theatre. More than a concert version but less than a fully staged production, this was a FIGARO that charmed the audience with some good singing and lively staging, but was somehow less than the sum of its parts.

Is Lincoln Center planning to change its summertime schedule from “Mostly Mozart” to “Basically Beethoven”? If so, they couldn't have picked a better concert to put the point across than the opening program of this year's Festival. Heard on Wednesday evening, July 31, the performance was led by Music Director Louis Langrée.

When last heard on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, mezzo Isabel Leonard and soprano Erin Morley were a couple of nuns on their way to the guillotine in LES DIALOGUES DES CARMELITES. This time around, the two women--along with tenor Stephen Costello--kicked off the Met's Summer Recital Series at SummerStage in Central Park, and it was the audience that lost its head.

The Caramoor Festival in Katonah, NY said “Bon anniversaire, Joseph Vert”--that's “Happy Birthday, Giuseppe Verdi” in French--on Saturday night, with a performance of LES VEPRES SICILIENNES, celebrating the composer's bicentenary. It offered a fine opportunity to hear an opera that followed the composer's “big three” middle works--RIGOLETTO, IL TROVATORE and LA TRAVIATA--but hasn't really found a place in the modern repertoire. It's your 'typical' opera story--boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl, and the French are massacred, set against the 13th century occupation of Sicily by France.

It's a rare occasion when a concerto--even one as brilliantly played as violinist Lisa Batiashvili's performance of Prokofiev's First--takes a back seat to the second half of the program. But the New York Philharmonic's concert performance of Luigi Dallapiccola's IL PRIGIONIERO, conducted authoritatively yet sensitively by Alan Gilbert, was such an event. By turns thrilling, soaring and sorrowful, the 50-minute opera, written in 1948, was as exciting a night at the opera as we had this season.

The regular season just ended for the Metropolitan Opera--all that's left is a series of HD rebroadcasts on Lincoln Center Plaza and a couple of low profile concerts in New York City parks--and it's time for a look back at what kind of season it was. With seven new productions and 21 other operas in rep during a season that ran from the end of September to mid-May, the Met was nothing if not far-reaching in its repertoire. And that's the way it should be. But how did its ambitions work out?

Katarina Dalayman is one of a handful of top Wagnerian sopranos in the world, but for the first act of the Met's GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG, the climax of the Met's second 'Ring' cycle of the season, she didn't seem very heroic. Neither, for that matter, did tenor Jay Hunter Morris, who caused quite a stir when he jumped into GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG's premiere season a year ago. Who knows what was wrong? In any case, they recovered vocally for Act 2 and excitingly sailed through the rest of the mammoth, exhausting work.

What would the Metropolitan Opera (and its audiences) do without its production of Francis Poulenc's DIALOGUES DES CARMELITES, which opened for the season with Saturday's matinee, May 4? As created in 1977 for its Met premiere by director John Dexter, this CARMELITES is unlike anything else in the company's repertoire--simply designed and a showcase for a brilliant ensemble of female voices. It is a reminder that opera productions can be moving, effective and, yes, thrilling in the most understated ways.

Anyone expecting vocal fireworks from soprano Nina Stemme's appearance last night at Alice Tully Hall with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, under Thomas Dausgaard, was woefully disappointed. Count me as one of them.

New York City Opera's production of Jacques Offenbach's LA PERICHOLE feels right at home at City Center, home of the 'Encores!' series, which reintroduces audiences to lesser known Broadway musicals that failed or went out of fashion despite wonderful scores. PERICHOLE doesn't have a care in the world in Christopher Alden's boisterous vision. It's a cheerful reminder of a musical style that has unjustifiably fallen by the wayside.

The groans were audible--no, powerful--when the Metropolitan Opera's General Manager Peter Gelb stepped out in front of the curtain on the second night of the company's new David McVicar production of Handel's GIULIO CESARE. They grew louder as he announced that soprano Natalie Dessay was ill and would not be singing the pivotal role of Cleopatra. But I'd bet that these same operagoers were cheering along with the majority of the audience at the sensational portrayal of the replacement, soprano Danielle de Niese, whose brilliant coloratura took the runs, roulades and trills of this demanding score with ease.

Besides singing her dream role of Violetta for the first time anywhere, soprano Diana Damrau was also RIGOLETTO's Gilda in the Met's new 'Ratpack' production that was seen by millions worldwide as an HD broadcast in February. And, oh yes, there was the arrival of her second son, Colyn, whose impending birth late in 2012 had sent the opera world into a tizzy, when Mama Damrau began cancelling performances.

I've always been a sucker for a good vampire story--and Heinrich Marscher's opera DER VAMPYR fits the bill, though I don't expect it to turn up at the Metropolitan Opera any time soon. The American Symphony Orchestra under Leon Botstein, at Carnegie Hall this past Sunday, provided an exhilarating introduction to this 1827 singspiel, sung in German with dialogue in English.

Andre Previn's operatic version of Tennesee Williams's A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, with a libretto by Andrew Littell, made its belated New York debut at Carnegie Hall on Thursday. It plays to Renee Fleming's vocal strengths, with her shimmering, lyric soprano and soaring high notes. This is not surprising since Previn wrote the role of Blanche specifically with her in mind and it shows with every note she sings. But is she Blanche? Unfortunately, she's too healthy, too sane and too much a star to be the character that Williams created, a woman clings to a false gentility--and her sanity--from the moment that she arrives on stage. It also doesn't help that she has zero chemistry with New Zealand baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes the Stanley Kowalski of the evening. Rhodes' muscular baritone carries the threat that Blanche should feel, but he might as well be playing to the Merry Widow.

Expect the unexpected from cabaret stylist Patricia Racette. Yes, I said 'cabaret.' If you've only heard her at the Met or San Francisco Opera as Tosca or Madama Butterfly, you'll probably find her performance in 'Diva on Detour' a revelation. It's 'a high-note-free zone'--which doesn't give a hint that its owner spends most of her time on some of the world's great opera stages.

With a popular opera by Rossini already co-opting the title OTELLO, Verdi momentarily thought about calling his work IAGO, after the story's villain. But then, he'd never seen Jose Cura's portrayal of the title role, which made its house debut at the Met on March 11. It's over the top, a freight train going full throttle over a cliff and totally exciting to watch.

On Sunday afternoon March 10, the air was buzzing with anticipation at the Met, before the performances by the ten singers who had made it to the Grand Finals of the opera company's National Council auditions. No, this wasn't the opera equivalent of American Idol, where the emphasis is on the judges as much as the performers. It was a grown-up affair.

The English Concert's spectacular performance of RADAMISTO had me from its first notes and swept me away to its unlikely but happy ending. Three-and-a-half hours never moved faster than it did at Carnegie Hall on Sunday. It's easy to think of Carnegie as simply the premiere venue for symphony orchestras and plush sound, but it is also an ideal hall to hear small-scale operatic works, as exemplified by this performance by these early music specialists. It was notable for clarity and an intimacy that put the music in the spotlight, with a cast headed by star countertenor David Daniels.

There used to be an ad campaign from a New York bakery company, “You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's rye bread.” Well, a similar statement could be made about Richard Wagner's final opera (or as he called it, a büenenweihfestspiel , or “a festival play for the consecration of the stage”): You don't have to be Christian to love PARSIFAL, with its themes of redemption, honor and loyalty. It is a unique experience, regardless of one's faith, because the music's the thing. And I'd follow the cast, orchestra and chorus of the Metropolitan Opera's new production anywhere. Heard at the opera's second performance of the season, February 18, they were superb.

She is a beast to an exceptional degree. She is a Don Juan among women. She is insatiable, unnatural and altogether fairly appalling. (Hotel Manager as Judge POWDER HER FACE, Act II, Scene 6: 1955)