Tabla de contenidos para November 2021 en Opera Now

How confident are you about going to the opera these days? The past couple of months have seen a burst of activity in opera houses, with live operas finally becoming the norm again in many theatres around the world. We are, however, far from back to normal. Rehearsals and performances are still taking place with masks and social distancing rules in place. The singers I’ve been speaking to have been describing the challenges of performing at their best while still having to follow a raft of regulations backstage in opera houses. You only have to look at some of the images that we’ve printed in this issue, of masked performers rehearsing at English National Opera (page 10) and at the Met (page 30), to understand the difficulties they still face…

ON SALE 23 NOV CECILIA BARTOLI Cecila Bartoli has re-invented our notion of an operatic icon, breathing life into lost repertoire with her own meticulous research and launching an extraordinary series of international tours featuring repertoire recovered from the mists of time. In addition to her extraordinary vocal prowess, she is an inspirational artistic director, as evidenced in her work for the Salzburg Easter Festival. We meet this dynamic diva as she releases a new album – Unreleased! NORTHERN POWERHOUSE Opera North bounces back from its pandemic confinement with a vengence this season, with the launch of a new £18.5 million Opera Centre. Robert Thicknesse travels to Leeds to find out what’s on CHRISTMAS CHEER Where in the world to go to have the best Christmas at the opera ON…

‘Sono l’umila ancella del genio creator’ (‘I am the humble servant of the creative genius’), sings the heroine in Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur. Albanian-born Ermonela Jaho, one of the most brilliant sopranos in today’s operatic firmament, is about to sing the role at Covent Garden. The line could not be a more apt description of Jaho as an artist. For she is not only the possessor of a beautiful lyric voice and total technical mastery, but also one of the most moving, emotionally committed singing-actresses on stage, very much in the mould of Maria Callas who is her role model. Her portrayals of fragile heroines, such as Violetta and Cio-Cio San in Madama Butterfly certainly reach a Callas level of febrile identification, tearing the heart with the immediacy, pathos and truth…

This was an exciting prospect: a new staging of Verdi’s shocker to replace David McVicar’s brutally strong but rather passé production of 2001. And the ROH’s director of opera, Oliver Mears, finally getting to direct his own show here after much excellent and quirky evidence of his talents in Northern Ireland and elsewhere. It started with a punch, Verdi’s Hammer Horror intro followed by a great tableau nicked from Caravaggio – the first of several art references – then the Duke’s cattle-market party: none of your mortifying McVicar orgies but a sensually choreographed minuet of elegant ladies shot through with distressing vignettes of cruelty and the blithe inhumanity of the Duke of Mantua’s ‘Questa o quella’, very elegantly sung by tenor Liparit Avetisyan. This all augured excellently. As did the…

There is no stage inside The Warehouse, a former Victorian industrial building a stone’s throw from Waterloo Station and the home of this year’s London Festival of American Music. Audience, cast and ensemble sit on the same level within the high-ceilinged space, a string quartet at one end, three chairs at another. We’re inches away from the action – when baritone Simon Wallfisch opens Laura Kaminsky’s As One with a solo recalling a childhood paper route, members of the front row hurriedly tuck their legs out of the way as he takes up one of the ‘reserved’ seats that we had assumed were for late-comers. As Wallfisch, playing ‘Hannah Before’, sings of stealing a blouse from a neighbour’s washing line, mezzo soprano Arlene Rolph, ‘playing Hannah After’, joins him in…

At the turn of the 20th century, Russia fever swept through Italy. Newly translated versions of the nation’s great novels, especially those by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, captured the imaginations of Italians. Umberto Giordano was evidently enthralled. Five years after writing Fedora, with its second act set in St Petersburg, the composer drew on Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection for his new opera, Siberia. The result was a verismo thriller with a pungent Russian twist. Giordano described Siberia as one of his favourite operas, but the work receives only rare outings today. It is little surprise that Maggio Musicale superintendent Alexander Pereira is the man to revive the work in Italy – he is a big Giordano fan. In his former role as superintendent of La Scala, he staged the composer’s Andrea Chénier…

Andreas Bauer Kanabas – bass Oehms OC490 This release is akin to seeing a unicorn–I cannot remember the last time I came across a new release of arias sung by a bass. Andreas Bauer Kanabas is not a household name (what bass is?) but since 2013 he has been a member of the ensemble at the Frankfurt Opera, where he has sung a wide range of roles: it is a nurturing environment that produces excellent artists. He has also made some forays abroad as a guest artist–the Vienna State Opera and Royal Opera feature on his CV, and he received glowing reviews for both voice and presence in Die Zauberflöte at Covent Garden in 2019. For a bass I have not heard live in the theatre and of whom I…

The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon claims that the number of surefire box office attractions presented by opera houses has been shrinking. If so, it is all the more timely to consider how best to make what is familiar into something new. And what opera could be more overfamiliar than Bizet’s Carmen? Yet books authored and coedited by the able English musicologist Richard Langham Smith (see list below) show us previously unconsidered sides of the seductive cigarière, first described by French author Prosper Mérimée. Smith’s Carmen Abroad reminds us that the Lisbon premiere of Carmen was in 1885, sung in Italian by an Italian cast. The Portuguese felt strong affinities with the opera’s Andalusian setting, insofar as its plot occurs in Seville, which is closer to Lisbon than Madrid.…

The two main productions we will stage this upcoming season are La Traviata by Verdi and Die Walküre by Wagner in collaboration with the Iceland Symphony and Reykjavík Arts Festival. Our production of La Traviata from 2019 sold out 6 performances in a hall of 1,500 seats which is quite remarkable given that there are only 120,000 people that live in the capital city of Reykjavík. The production has a timeless poetic quality that matches the content. It is directed by Oriol Tomas and features many of Iceland’s most prominent singers, soprano Herdís Anna Jónasdóttir in the role of Violetta, a performance that earned her the Singer of the Year prize in 2019. This will be the very first time in Iceland that Die Walküre will be staged–a historic moment for…

Favourite time of day? Mornings. I really love it when we do matinees. Favourite season? I love autumn. I played soccer growing up so spent a lot of time outside and remember feeling the cosiness of autumn starting to set in – I don’t love it when the clocks change and but I love the colours and the smell of the air and people making fires in the homes. Favourite colour? I would have to stick with the one from childhood: purple, anything I could get that was purple, anything I could wear, purple purple everywhere – that’s the colour that makes me happiest. Favourite artist? In my 20’s when I was studying in Vienna I was quite obsessed with Egon Schiele. His work is quite raw and slightly disturbed…

Today’s battles Your correspondent Elizabeth Morgan’s letter in your October issue (Battle of the Sexes, page 6) makes for interesting reading in the light of the growing awareness of violence against women in society. Her contention that ‘few sane people would recognise the sex-war battlefield [Lindy Hume] describes’ is clearly out of touch – the battle is sadly very much raging, as every news tragic bulletin during the past few weeks has reminded us. So it’s quite right that Hume, as a talented director who perceives art through the lens of modernity, should put an emphasis on how traditional operas can enlighten audiences of our own time. Morgan disputes the idea that racism and sexism are ‘inherent’ in opera – or indeed in society. But nevertheless, such things continue to…

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The Atélier programme at Verbier this summer culminated in Puccini’s La Bohème, the festival finale 2021. The description of ‘semi-staged’ seemed generous – demi- or hemi-staged, perhaps. And bravo to the singers for knocking at pretend doors (while stamping their feet); and to Mimì for remaining precariously perched between two chairs as she expired. This was the apex of the ‘Academy’ programme, in which around 40 performers participate in masterclasses, all of which are open to the public. I met Welsh tenor Dafydd Jones, co-winner of the Thierry Marmod Prize, who told me about the huge variety the Festival offers young singers, from one-to-one coaching to masterclasses to recitals and even a Cole Porter concert. The previous evening, 31-year-old Korean tenor Sungho Kim had been awarded the Yves Paternot Prize.…

Have you noticed that, while Carmen has all the big tunes, the radiant music in Bizet’s opera all goes to Micaëla and José? They get the ecstatic harmonic shifts, the shimmering orchestrations, the shivery subtleties, while Carmen is stuck with her tourist-trap castanets and flashing eyes. It’s the starting point for Edward Dick’s new staging at Opera North: everything Carmen sings is a show-tune, not the living-through-singing of true opera. It is a valid point in a production that is otherwise not entirely a roaring success. But what production of Carmen ever is? It’s the hardest show to pull off (and Opera North hasn’t had much joy with it). Dick’s approach sets it in a strip-joint in some dusty (I guess US/Mex) border town with nice period clothes. Carmen and…

After what happened in 2020, the UK’s small urban summer festivals insisted the show go on this year come hell or high water: some with socially-distanced indoor productions, and some, like Grimeborn in the ever-decreasingly gritty London borough of Hackney, with a covered outdoor space next door to the Arcola Theatre, where the joy of performance was only marginally palliated by sirens and the chatter of people queuing for the club next door (you’d have thought the strains of Handel would entice them in, but, somehow, no).The highlight here was an Alcina which excitingly promised to reveal ‘sexual harassment, sexual fluidity, addiction and toxic behaviour…’ So a pretty good description of some of what Handel wrote, then. Hilarious that contemporary PR believes its job is to highlight the least interesting…

Once upon a time, Andris Nelsons sat at the back of Latvian National Opera’s pit as its orchestra’s principal trumpet. The conductor’s links with this beautiful theatre, where he was later music director, surely helped pull some of the strings that saw Riga Jurmala Festival lure the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra out of its own pit for the culmination of its 2021 edition – a sell-out concert at the LNO. Nelsons isn’t the only musician who worked as music director in Riga before drawing attention elsewhere. A certain Richard Wagner did the same, though the Riga City Theatre, where the composer was Kapellmeister for two years from 1837, pre-dates the current opera house which opened in 1863. The Latvian National Opera was fully restored in the 1990s and is a gem…

Performance runs starting in October and November 2021. Listings are in alphabetical order by city within each country heading. Comprehensive Worldwide Listings are available at www.operabase.com UNITED KINGDOM CARDIFF WELSH NATIONAL OPERA www.wno.org.uk Madama Butterfly | Puccini (SEE TOUR DATES) Conductor Carlo Rizzi/James Southall  Stage director Lindy Hume Lighting designer Elanor Higgins  Set designer Isabella Bywater CAST Cio-Cio-San Joyce El-Khoury/Alexia Voulgaridou/Meeta Raval Pinkerton Leonardo Caimi/Peter Auty Suzuki Anna Harvey/Kezia Bienek Sharpless Mark Stone Goro Tom Randle Uncle Bonze Keel Watson Prince Yamadori Neil Balfour Kate Pinkerton Sian Meinir ON TOUR The Mayflower, Southampton NOV 02, 03, 04 New Theatre, Oxford NOV 09, 10, 11 Venue Cymru, Llandudno NOV 30; DEC 01 The Barber of Seville | Rossini (SEE TOUR DATES) Conductor Tomáš Hanus/Frederick Brown Stage director Giles Havergal Lighting designer Davy…

With no printed programmes, no bars open and a barely quarterfull dress circle, it was something of an anticlimax going back into the theatre for Verdi’s Falstaff, Scottish Opera’s new co-production with Santa Fe Opera. Furthermore, with an empty pit there was no anticipatory thrill as the orchestra tuned up. That said, once the curtain rose on Verdi’s Shakespearean mashup, the opera was hugely enjoyable. Director and designer Sir David McVicar placed an impressive double staircase centre stage–ideal for the energetic shenanigans of the errant knight and his pursuers. As Falstaff, Roland Wood’s comic timing and resonant baritone voice helped soften the edges of his character’s pompous vanity. In this battle of the sexes Jamie MacDougall (Bardolfo) and Alistair Miles (Pistola) as Falstaff’s duplicitous sidekicks, along with Phillip Rhodes (Ford)…

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Gustav Holst may be well known for The Planets and perhaps the choral piece Hymn of Jesus but, though he wrote nine operas, only a few gained any serious recognition. His earliest efforts were operettas influenced by Arthur Sullivan; then came a couple of unperformed pieces resulting from his obsession with Wagner. Eventually, just before the First World War, he changed tack and acquired a personal voice for the stage with small-scale works. However, even these are not widely performed and the ever-enterprising Northern Opera Group have earned our gratitude by presenting three of them at their annual Leeds Festival. Savitri reflected Holst’s interest in Hindu literature and philosophy. The libretto written by himself is derived from the Mahābārata and is a fable of a wife’s struggle with a personification of…

CDs and Downloads A new remastering from BR Klassik gives us the opportunity to hear a legendary performance of the Verdi Requiem from Munich, 1981; Riccardo Muti conducts the Chorus and Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks in the Herkulessaal in Munich’s Residenz. The hall is not huge and the effect must have been overwhelming when experienced in situ, and thankfully the thrill still comes across on this recording which was caught on tape and is excellently engineered. Muti’s conducting is crisp and authoritative, with great attention to dynamic detail, and although he unleashes some mighty sounds it is an unexaggerated approach with balanced tempi. There is a cool, almost analytical approach to the drama without losing the inherent theatricality of the piece; perhaps it is best described as white hot. Orchestra…

Knowing Britten By Steuart Bedford With Christopher Gillett Bittern Press Everybody needs to feel secure, not least composers. And Benjamin Britten was well-known (if not notorious) for gathering around himself a tight-knit family of musicians who made him, his music and his Aldeburgh Festival a major focus of their lives – supplying what the poet W H Auden once disparaging called a ‘nest of love’ to wrap protectively around him. Nearly all these people are now, sadly, dead, closing what seems today a mythically alluring chapter in the history of English music. And the most recent loss has been Steuart Bedford, a conductor so closely associated with Britten’s output – especially the operas – that his other achievements get forgotten. He died, aged 81, in February this year after a…

OperaVision is an online site which streams performances of opera, dance and performing arts-related events from major theatres around the world. The site brings together 29 partners, including opera companies and festivals, from 17 countries, streaming new and classic performances, subtitled and on demand. It also offers an extensive digital library that includes synopses, background material and articles. Supported by the EU’s Creative Europe programme, the site is free for visitors to browse and explore. COMING SOON… 12 NOVEMBER Rusalka | Dvorák BERGEN NATIONAL OPERA Malin Byström sings her first Rusalka. Her prince is the Czech tenor Ladislav Elgr. Hege Høisæter sings the witch Ježibaba, Jongmin Park is Vodník and Allison Cook is the Foreign Princess. Eivind Gullberg Jensen conducts the Bergen Philharmonic in his first outing as general and artistic…