Tabla de contenidos para October 2022 en Opera Now

Elena Stikhina had Aida coursing through her veins as she arrived in London to start rehearsing for Robert Carsen’s staging of Verdi’s opera. She had just sung the role at this summer’s Salzburg Festival and her next engagement was the star-studded production, conducted by Antonio Pappano, currently at the Royal Opera House. London audiences are currently being treated to one of the finest exponents of Aida of our day, bringing vocal intelligence and superb acting skills to the role. ‘Verdi really knew how to showcase the singing voice in so many different ways,’ Stikhina says, ‘with different nuances, coloraturas, high notes, cantilena and lots of other technical details. You need to understand that in Verdi, even a small rhythmical dot has a purpose. It conveys character and emotion. His scores…

PURCELL Peralada Festival Peralada Castle MUSIC ★★★★ STAGING ★★★★ It was good to see that most English of 17th-century entertainments, The Fairy Queen, performed on a steamy summer night in the grounds of a Catalan castle on Spain’s Costa Brava. Musically the audience were treated to as exemplary a performance as they could have wished for, although some peculiar staging and costumes – and one disastrous production decision – will have left them baffled as to who was singing and why. Whatever was happening on stage, the orchestral playing of Vespres d’Arnadí , directed by Dani Espasa, was a delight, the continuo section well balanced without being too rhythmically emphatic, the trumpet clear and accurate, the strings a model of elegance and sensitivity in their accompaniments. Among the singers Ana…

FESTIVAL ROUND -UP The opera festival from a baking hot Aix-en-Provence served up a gamut of delights. Just one painful experience served to throw the others into sharp relief. At the Grand Theatre director Andrea Breth saw Strauss’ Salome as an innocent teenager, blown away by her first experience of love. The staging owes much to paintings. The opening, when Joel Prieto’s Narraboth declares his love for Salome with boyish ardour, is based on a picture by Caspar David Friedrich. The banqueting hall, from which characters emerge on to the terrace, recalls Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Under the moon, whose changing colours dominated throughout, Elsa Dreisig’s Salome, a silvery-voiced waif in a white shift, turns petulantly away from Narraboth’s kiss, then offers her hand. She, too, is as changeable as…

Orlando Neuwirth C Major 760804 ★★★★★ Where to start, or more to the point, stop? Olga Neuwirth attacks Virginia Woolf ’s influential feminist novel with gusto and makes a giant spectacle out of a elegantly slim pickings. Orlando is story of a young Elizabethan nobleman, courtier and poet who lives a colourful and eventful life, at one point falling asleep to wake as a woman and live on for another few hundred years. Woolf stopped Orlando’s tale in 1928, on the day of publication: Neuwirth continues her version until today, she is nothing if not ambitious. The sprawling opera is a series of 19 fabulous scenes, performed here in Vienna, 2019, in Polly Graham’s complex production. Orlando paces energetically through the centuries against a backdrop of giant sets (Roy Spahn)…

Great Britten I’m amazed that you published the letter in your September issue insulting the townspeople of Aldeburgh. Your correspondent was so cowardly that they didn’t even give their name. Maggie Hambling’s sculpture of Britten hasn’t been embraced by all, it’s true, but that is more an aesthetic response to the work and its impact on a natural setting. To imply that this indicates a hatred of the composer and his works is plain wrong. Most people in Aldeburgh recognise the enormous benefits and privileges that the legacy of an international musical genius has brought to the town. The fact that the Aldeburgh Festival is packed each year and that Britten’s works, and his operas especially, are applauded to the rafters, shows that the composer is loved and revered in…

Madrid’s Teatro Real, one of Europe’s most important opera houses, has announced the appointment of Gustavo Gimeno as its next music director, starting in autumn 2025, when the current incumbent Ivor Bolton’s contract will end. Gimeno, a Spaniard born in Valencia, is currently music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (celebrating its centenary this year) and the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra. His musical career began as a percussionist with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, where he became a protégé of the orchestra’s music director Mariss Jansons and was appointed assistant conductor. He also assisted Claudio Abbado in Bologna and Lucerne. The 46-year-old Gimeno is known as a champion of late-Romantic, 20th-century and contemporary music, with relatively little experience in the opera house so far. His recordings for the Pentatone label…

Benjamin Bernheim is one of the most exciting tenors to emerge on to the operatic stage in recent years. He possesses an exquisitely beautiful, richly coloured lyric voice, with a warm, pleasing timbre, a gleaming sheen throughout its range, and a top that never sounds forced or dry. Fortunately, both for audiences and the composers whose roles he sings, this exceptional vocal instrument is backed and sustained by a solid and rare (as we shall see) technique. He is also an extremely sensitive, probing interpreter – athinking tenor who examines his characters in painstaking depth and in many cases, such as the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto, casts a totally fresh eye on them. There is also that elusive quality, charm, which Bernheim possesses in abundance, and which predisposes the…

The acclaimed designer takis never uses his surname and prefers not to use a capital letter in his first name. He is well known to London audiences through his fruitful co-operation with Opera Holland Park, which includes, among others, a sparkling production of Die Fledermaus, Puccini’s La Rondine, Mascagni’s Isabeau, Wolf Ferrari’s Il segreto di Susanna and Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta. He has also designed three Baroque operas for English Touring Opera and several Oliviernominated musicals including a Five Men Named Moe for Sir Cameron Mackintosh. His designs for English National Opera’s stylish HMS Pinafore last season gained him an Olivier Award nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Opera. Born in Kiato, a small seaside town on the northern coast of the Peloponnese in Greece (and named Skafidas Panagiotis), takis studied at the…

Live Reviews Bard Summerscape At Bard College in New York’s beautiful Hudson Valley, Summerscape’s mission is the staging of rarely performed operas. This summer saw a new production of Strauss’ Die schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman). A comic opera without the psychological overtones found in the composer’s previous works, Frau is an adaptation by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig of Ben Johnson’s Epicœne, or The Silent Woman, turning it into an irreverent work whose pivotal character, Sir Morosus, is a misogynist who demands Ruhe (silence) and skewers almost everyone, from priests to lawyers, musicians, actors, marriage-brokers, moralists, etc. In 1935 when the opera was first performed, there was no controversy about its gender-related irreverence; but in today’s climate, where some companies have even cancelled Madama Butterfly so as not to offend…

WALTON Lerici Music Festival Rotonda Vassallo, Lerici MUSIC ★★★★ STAGING ★★★★ The Lerici Music Festival is held annually in the Golfo dei Poeti (Gulf of Poets), near La Spezia in the Italian province of Liguria. The festival director is Gianluca Marcianò (who recently conducted a thrilling Giordano Andréa Chenier at London’s Southbank), a native of Lerici, who founded the festival in 2017. Commemorating the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who died in 1822, drowning in the waters outside the town, this year’s festival was a ‘celebration of British culture’; the castle overlooking the town is said to be an inspiration for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Walton was a fine choice, given that he spent so much time by the sea down the coast at his home in Ischia. The composer took Chekhov…

SongStudio is a programme for young vocalists, hosted in New York by the Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute under the leadership of the acclaimed American soprano Renée Fleming. Designed to renew and refresh the presentation and experience of the vocal recital, the programme brings leading musicians and other performing artists together to mentor emerging vocalists and collaborative pianists from around the world, exploring innovative approaches to both classic and current song repertoire, and inviting new audiences to engage with the art form. Young and emerging professional vocalists and collaborative pianists, between the suggested age range of 18 to 35, are invited to apply for SongStudio at Carnegie Hall that runs from 30 January to 4 February 2023. Up to 10 pairs of vocalists and pianists will be invited to New…

The Aria Borealis Bodø, north of the Arctic circle in Norway, is more than a festival. Featuring the world’s only international competition focusing on Baroque singing, this biennial event is set to be a major platform for presenting new talent in the early opera world. Following an exhaustive international search, the young singers invited to Bodø for the inaugural competition found themselves in an inspirational location. Despite the allusion to the aurora borealis in the title, at the height of midsummer when the event is held, the sun never sets on the second largest city in the north of Norway. At midnight it hovers above the horizon, bathing the jagged mountains that rise up dramatically, both on land and on many of the islands in the surrounding sea, in a…

Brno is the capital of the region of Moravia, the twin sister of Bohemia with which it forms today’s Czech Republic. Leoš Janáček arrived in the city aged 11 to become a choral scholar at the local Augustinian Monastery (whose Abbot was the geneticist Gregor Mendel). The composer lived in Brno for the rest of his life, and his extraordinary influence on the city’s music scene can be felt to this day. There are five operas scheduled to be staged in the eighth Janáček Festival Brno, which opens on 2 November. Perhaps the most intriguing is a double bill: a new production of Janáček’s last opera From the House of the Dead, coupled with a staged version of his Glagolitic Mass. Also in the programme are two productions of Káťa…

Live Reviews London’s semi-rural opera feels a good spot for Eugene Onegin, with a foot in town and country. The theatre kept last year’s model – the stage extended around the orchestra, an array of old wooden chairs fanned around the auditorium, with a few extra ranks on raised levels at the back. The sound isn’t great further back – the tent roof of the old theatre is quite high, and the City of London Sinfonia generally underpowered, with an exiguous nine violins and two cellos for Onegin – but this setup creates a nice homely feel despite now fitting in 700. With its fragile dreams, its melancholy, the butterfly happiness which one needs to grasp with very soft hands, Onegin is rather delicate, to be handled with care. There…

FESTIVAL ROUND -UP The top of a hill in barren Puglia in high summer is baking. As in most of Italy in summer, the operas in Martina Franca begin at 9pm but even night seems to make little difference to the Southern heat. In the courtyard of the Palazzo Ducale the audience who had tried to look smart quickly divested themselves of jackets and reached for fans. By Sunday midnight the thermometer had dropped to a ‘freezing’ +30 degrees centrigrade. On stage, the lights lit up a cast in full makeup, wigs and costumes of pseudo military greatcoats. It must have been hell! Even more extraordinary, then, that the acting and singing for David Pountney’s new production of Prokofiev’s The Gambler should have been so superb. The set was clever,…

Production Highlights • World Premieres • Exceptional Casts UNITED KINGDOM BELFAST NORTHERN IRELAND OPERA niopera.com La bohème | Puccini OCT 05, 06 Conductor Pietro Rizzo Stage director Annabel Arden Set designer Stephen BrimsonLewis / Nina Dunn Choreographer Philippe Giraudeau Lighting designer Tim Mitchell CAST Mimì Anush Hovhannisyan / Elin Pritchard Rodolfo Luis Gomes / Jung Soo Yun Musetta Aoife Miskelly CARDIFF WELSH NATIONAL OPERA wno.org.uk Migrations | Todd OCT 02 TOURING: Llandudno OCT 15 ; Plymouth OCT 29 ; Birmingham NOV 12 ; Southampton NOV 26 Conductor Matthew Kofi Waldren Stage director David Pountney Set designer Loren Elstein Costume designer April Dalton CAST Pero Jones Aubrey Allicock Chief Mistawasis Aubrey Allicock John Pinney David Shipley La bohème | Puccini OCT 05, 06 TOURING: Llandudno OCT 12 &…