Richard Sasanow - Page 7

Ricky Ian Gordon and Michael Korie, in their new opera for New York City Opera and National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene, weren’t the only ones to be inspired by the famed 1962 novel THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS (IL GIARDINO DEI FINZI CONTINI) by Italian Giorgio Bassani. The film version, by Vittorio De Sica, won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1970, running half the time of the opera. Still, it is the novel that excited them all.

Can we talk—about live opera in New York and elsewhere on the East Coast in the coming months?

When I saw the George Grosz-ish curtain that introduced us to the new Barlett Sher “Weimar-inspired” production of Verdi’s RIGOLETTO at the Met on New Year’s Eve, I was excited about what lay ahead. Combined with Verdi’s great score, it seemed bound for success. What followed was disappointing, despite some creditable singing and smooth, involved orchestral playing under Daniele Rustioni, with much blame I thought, going to the Sher production.

What is there to say about Puccini’s TOSCA that hasn’t been said in the last hundred-plus years since its premiere in Rome (to echo the locations in the opera)? It is a marvel of brevity, with librettists Illica and Giacosa shaving locations, characters and action from the original play, written by the French dramatist Victorien Sardou for the legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt, without sacrificing its impact. It has a gorgeous score, but for a grand opera, it is also quite intimate, with the action mainly revolving around three characters who carry their emotions on their sleeves and interact like their lives depend on it.

Talk about ‘spoiler alerts,’ there was a big one for me early in the opera, EURYDICE, by Matthew Aucoin to a libretto that he and Sarah Ruhl fashioned from her play of the same name, which had its Met premiere last night. Eurydice tells Orpheus “Don’t look at me,” which to me mirrored the scene at the end of the piece in the Underworld when Hades tells him that he can take her back to the land of the living if he doesn’t look back at her…which, of course, he does.

In Rossi's L'ORFEO at Juilliard, but director Birnbaum explores the idea that “destiny happens to you whether you like it or not, and no matter how much humans try to have control over their environment and future.” Or, as the popular expression goes, “Man makes plans and God laughs.”

Every time I head to a performance of Puccini’s LA BOHEME, I can’t help but think of Bette Davis’s famous line from “All About Eve”: “I detest cheap sentiment.” But then I actually get there and, more likely than not, I feel genuinely moved, swept away by the mood that the composer and his librettists (Illica and Giacosa) have conceived through what seems like an endless array of gorgeous melodies in the Franco Zeffirelli production.

There are so many things to like about the season’s revival of Gershwin’s PORGY & BESS, which was new in the 2019-2020 season, before Covid became the “song” that no one wanted to hear. PORGY on the other hand, is the music that everybody can take a liking to, with its fluid combination of opera, Broadway musical and versions of spirituals and Gullah folk music that nobody ever heard before. It has been best known for its songs, which have become “standards” in the Broadway songbook. The stylistic shifts in the complex, yearning, comic score are handled mightily by the Met’s game orchestra under David Robinson.

Oh, sure, give us Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly, Laura Kaminsky, Kevin Puts, Terence Blanchard, Paul Moravec, Huang Ruo and all the other fabulous composers at work today. But let’s talk about Rossini--and it’s hard for anyone who attended the concert the other night at New York’s 92nd Street Y not to. With tenor Lawrence Brownlee, (bari)tenor Michael Spyres and pianist Myra Huang presenting us with a dizzying array of what Brownlee called “barnburner pieces, back to back,” there was not much more to do than stand up and scream for more.

Nobody goes to see the Met’s TURANDOT for subtlety and, from that standpoint, the audience got what it paid for at the opera’s first performance of the season. That is, except, perhaps from soprano Christine Goerke in the title role, who gave a finely nuanced performance when the production didn’t get in her way (and a steely one when it was called for).

The opening lines of Jonas Kaufmann’s lieder concert at Carnegie Hall Saturday night, weren’t exactly ones that fill the heart with joy: “My songs are filled with poison—why shouldn’t that be true? Into my budding manhood, you poured your poison through.” But to have Kaufmann back in New York was a wondrous thing. And he gave us plenty to be thankful for.

The Lady or the Tiger? In this case, both are Mussorgsky’s BORIS GODUNOV—just different versions of it. Which is the preferred one? (Or, more properly, “the preferred one of several,” including one that the composer’s friend, Rimsky Korsakov, fiddled with after his death.) The Met chose Mussorgsky's original, and shorter, version for its revival of the composer's most famous opera this season.

It’s been a long 18 months since the last opera on the Met’s stage. The Terence Blanchard-Kasi Lemmons FIRE SHUT UP IN MY BONES roared into Lincoln Center to let the audience know what it has been missing.

For one of the most popular operas in the traditional repertoire--ABC in the opera world means AIDA, BOHEME and CARMEN--the work by Bizet has had to have more lives than the proverbial cat to get there. The version, now called THE THREEPENNY CARMEN, by the Atlanta Opera’s General and Artistic Director and frequent stage director Tomer Zvulun--now available as a film with subtitles, from Zvulun and filmmaker Felipe Barral. It is current proof that opera doesn’t have to stand still like a statue in an art museum to show that it is alive and well and, this time around, living in Texas.

Though the Met’s season doesn’t technically start till the end of the month, the company started off with a pair of what French chefs might call “amuses bouches”—sort of tastebud teasers. The first was Mahler’s Second, which was done in the open air; the second was its first inside the hall:The Verdi Requiem, which was broadcast (and which I saw) live last Saturday on PBS.

There are a number of parallels between the two operas I saw in Santa Fe (NM) this past weekend: The Benjamin Britten/Peter Pears treatment of Shakespeare’s A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM and the world premiere of the John Corigliano/Mark Adamo THE LORD OF CRIES. The first was, for me at least, an all-around, marvelous success, while the other was a disappointment.

Pre-Covid, to quote an old groaner, people were dying to get into Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery for the Angel’s Share concert series spearheaded by Andrew Ousley, producer of “Death of Classical.” The latest concert, on June 25, starred violinist Gil Shaham and The Knights ensemble in a sparkling 'pocket edition' of Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D.

Any of the wonderful mezzos who appear on the NY Festival of Song’s “How About Those Mezzos!” gala could easily be called “a girl singer” --as in “the females who used to sing with the Big Bands in the ‘40s”--as well under their usual hats as opera singers. The proof: There wasn’t an aria to be heard on the program (which will be available on demand through the end of the month), co-hosted by NYFOS chief Steven Blier and mezzo Rebecca Jo Loeb, an up and comer to watch. (Blier also supplied the piano accompaniment on a half dozen entries.) They sang everything from Edith Piaf, Reynaldo Hahn and Alberto Ginastera to Antonio Carlos Jobim and Irving Berlin, all in styles that sounded little like anything you might hear at the Met, Covent Garden or the Wiener Staatsoper. There were songs in French, English, Brazilian and Spanish, with the singers at home in everything they sang

On Sunday afternoon, the winners of what had been the Met’s annual National Council Auditions now, the Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition (charmingly emceed by Ryan Speedo Green), were named. This year’s Fab Five were Korean soprano Hyoyoung Kim (the Birgit Nilsson Award), soprano Raven McMillon (the Faith P. Geier Award), tenor Duke Kim (the Dominique Laffont Award), mezzo Emily Treigle (the Alton E. Peters Award) and mezzo Emily Sierra (the Noreen Zimmerman Award).

With nary a “Ho-yo-to-ho” to be heard, the Met’s “Met Stars Live in Concert” series brought four eminent Wagnerians--sopranos Christine Goerke and Elza van den Heever, tenor Andreas Schager and baritone Michael Volle--together from the dazzlingly Baroque Hessisches Staatstheater in Wiesbaden, Germany, live on May 8. This “Wagnerians in Concert” will be available from the Met’s website until just before the witching hour on May 21.