Tabla de contenidos para Decemeber 2022 en Opera Now

There are rare occasions when a single chance meeting alters the trajectory of a life. Such was the case in early September 2017 when I sat down to enjoy a Prom at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The elderly gentleman sitting next to me was dressed in a suit of striking green tweed, a collarless baby-blue shirt and iconoclastic orange shoes. He spotted the unmistakable yellow cover of a Eulenburg score poking from my jacket pocket. During the interval he leaned over and asked, ‘What piece have you there, young man?’ I responded that it was Saint-Saëns. ‘Ha!’ he cried, ‘when someone asks you that, you must always answer “Ligeti”!’ In that moment a friendship was born. Though he was already afflicted by emphysema, John Whitfield (founder of Endymion,…

In adilapidated room, a shotgun hangs on the wall. There is an inevitability to its presence; but still it invokes fear and anticipation. Occasionally, the central character Blake fingers the weapon, holds it across his body, hoists it upon a shoulder. Sometimes, it points, restlessly. There are no surprises in the plot of Oliver Leith’s new opera Last Days, commissioned by the Royal Opera House and staged at the Linbury Theatre. Based on Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film of the same name, the opera is a fictionalised account of the 1994 suicide of Kurt Cobain, lead singer of the cult band Nirvana. But everything else is unexpected, from the non-singing (and virtually non-speaking) lead role, whose mumbling and muttering appear as surtitles, to Leith’s exquisite score and grunge-chic costumes by…

The Metropolitan Opera, New York MUSIC ★★★★★ STAGING ★★★★★ The Metropolitan Opera opened this season with Luigi Cherubini’s 1797 Medea. I dare say that most of the audience was unfamiliar with it; and I dare say further, that those who knew the opera knew it through one or more of Maria Callas’ recorded performances of it from the 1950s. (Recorded performances – some private – by Magda Olivero, Sylvia Sass, Leonie Rysanek and Gwyneth Jones all exhibit how difficult the role is.) Medea was particularly suited to Callas – hurt, angry, ambitious, utterly feminine but vicious. Indeed, her teacher, Elvira de Hidalgo, said that Callas was the only singer she had ever heard whose voice could register hatred, which is Medea’s eventual stock-in-trade. The opera itself is far from a…

Festival Verdi 2022 (FV2022) emerged from the shadows of Covid as an international event once again, drawing artists and audiences from all over the world to celebrate Verdi’s close associations with Parma and its surroundings. La Forza del destino inaugurated this year’s Festival at the Teatro Regio amid protests. Flyers (‘Take your hands off the Regio!’ ‘Go back to Bologna!’) were hurled from the loggione at the music director Roberto Abbado. Local pride had been wounded because Bologna’s Teatro Communale Orchestra and Chorus, rather than the forces of Parma’s Teatro Regio, were in the pit and on the stage. By the third performance of Forza, which I attended, peace reigned once more. Director Yannis Kokkos set this dark-hued work against a timeless, minimalistic, gloomy set with striking projected backdrops and…

Production Highlights • World Premieres • Exceptional Casts Performance runs starting in November and running through to December 2022. Listings are in alphabetical order by city within each country heading. M = Matinee performance. Comprehensive Worldwide Listings are available at www.operabase.com UNITED KINGDOM CARDIFF WELSH NATIONAL OPERA wno.org.uk La bohème | Puccini Oxford NOV 30; DEC 01, 03 Conductor Pietro Rizzo Stage director Annabel Arden Set designer Stephen Brimson Lewis / Nina Dunn CAST Mimì Anush Hovhannisyan / Elin Pritchard Rodolfo Luis Gomes / Jung Soo Yun Musetta Aoife Miskelly EDINBURGH/ GLASGOW SCOTTISH OPERA scottishopera.org.uk Coming soon: Scottish Opera will be presenting an Opera Highlights tour in February, featuring scenes and arias from Verdi operas. David McVicar's production of Puccini's Il Trittico will open at Glasgow's Theatre Royal…

Agala concert at the splendid Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb proved to be much more than a showcase for one of the world’s great tenors. The evening, on 18 September, was an occasion for the theatre’s new artistic director, Iva Hraste-Sočo, to introduce herself to her public and set out her plans for Croatian National Theatre during her forthcoming four-year term, expanding on its role as an international house as well as a company that nurtures local operatic talent. An opera singer, university lecturer and social activist with a PhD in Musicology, Hraste-Sočo officially took up her new role on 1 September this year. The 18 September opera gala opened the 2022/23 season with some spectacular musicmaking from the celebrated Polish tenor Piotr Beczała along with the renowned Croatian conductor…

The date is an iconic fixture in Italy’s operatic calendar: 7 December, the feast day of San Ambrogio – St Ambrose – the patron Saint of Milan, marks the inauguration of the new season at the Teatro Alla Scala. This year, the curtain goes up on Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. Although planned long before this year’s turbulent events in Russia, it is unarguably a highly topical choice. This is not the first time La Scala has chosen to open its season with this dark, powerful and extremely moving opera. Its 1979/80 season was inaugurated with a sensational yet controversial (in those days) production of Boris, in its 1872 revised version, directed by the famous head of the Taganka Theatre in Moscow, Yuri Lyubimov, and conducted by La Scala’s then music director,…

Royal Opera House, London MUSIC ★★★★ STAGING ★★★ Is Aida actually that good an opera? It has many good bits, obviously; but really, if the director isn’t prepared to go to town with the ceremonial episodes (and thereby stop people noticing that their music is a tiny bit standard) then there could be a problem: it will start to look like a good, concise, strong story interrupted by pointless, rather long episodes of inaction with inappropriately glitzy film-type music. That, in short, was the problem with Robert Carsen’s ponderous new staging, whose serious intent was never interesting enough to overcome a slight feeling of resentment from those who remembered that Aida was always supposed to be the enjoyable opera, however meretricious the fun was. For an opera that has slipped…

Rossini in Wildbad Festival MUSIC ★★★★★ STAGING ★★★★★ How does Rossini find himself at the centre of attention in Bad Wildbad, a small spa town in the Black Forest? Until the last century even his biographers ignored the fact that Gioacchino Rossini spent several weeks in 1856 in Bad Wildbad to take cures for his various health problems. The treatment succeeded, allowing the aging composer to finish his Péchés de vieillesse, his Sins of Old Age. But it was not until some resourceful music lovers drew attention to the architecturally precious and slowly decaying Königliches Kurtheater and the acoustically wonderful Wildbad Trinkhalle (pump room) that a process of restoration took place. The bel canto opera festival celebrating Rossini’s visit to Wildbad, and the new lease of life he discovered there,…

Teatro La Fenice, Venice MUSIC ★★★ STAGING ★★★★★ Stepping in for an indisposed singer at short notice can be a nervewracking, career-defining moment. So hats off to tenor Andrew Staples, who took on the title role of Peter Grimes in Paul Curran’s production for La Fenice to replace an indisposed Brenden Gunnell. Staples had apparently sung the role only once before, 20 years earlier, when he joined rehearsals in Venice two weeks before the opening night. Having heard Staples sing early choral repertoire many times, I wondered how his intensely lyrical voice would cut through the more robustly scored sections of the music, but he easily moved up a vocal gear and his fine tonal clarity was not dissimilar to that of Peter Pears, for whom Britten wrote the opera.…

Opera fans have long memories and even today the ghost of Callas looms over many roles. There is a sense of tradition being passed down the generations, of guarding the flame, a sacred fire tended by divas who themselves may subsumed by it. ‘Io son l’umile ancella del genio creator,’ announces Cilea’s actress Adriana Lecouvreur – ‘I am the humble handmaid of the creative genius’ – who with even her dying breath gasps, ‘Melpomene son io’: the muse of tragedy herself. Of course, most singers balance the remarkable with the mundane, but a fascinating new film by Jan Schmidt-Garre, Fuoco Sacro, takes us into the private artistic lives of three sopranos known for their intensity of performance: Ermonela Jaho, Asmik Grigorian and Barbara Hannigan. When we speak, Hannigan tells me…

Acting like the Roman Emperor in the arena of old, Sir Nicholas Serota, the chairman of the Arts Council, gave his verdict on the Arts Council grants for the next three years. For the ENO it was a thumbs down and thus the Arts Council has signed the death warrant for the venerable 90-yearold company. There has been an undercurrent for a considerable time from some of the north of England council members, that London does not need two opera houses and that the roughly £12m grant per annum given to ENO could be better spent elsewhere in England. And so, with the wave of a hand, the bells tolled, and ENO’s future was dismissed. This dastardly act gave no care for the 600 full- and part-time employees, nor the…

Restricted vehicle access around Westminster, where the recently deceased Queen Elizabeth II was lying in state, meant that Oxfordshire-based Bampton Classical Opera’s zingy performance of Fool Moon – an English version of Haydn’s 1777 comic opera Il Mondo della Luna – was presented semi-staged in costume in St John’s Smith Square. The narrative gaps were filled in by designer and director Jeremy Gray’s charming narration. Sparse scenery, the pillared background, and above all the cast’s fizzing energy gave it the feel of a particularly polished and unusually wellacted school play. Briefly, the miser Buonafede wants his daughters to marry well, but mouthy Clarice loves the smooth-talking bogus astronomer, Ecclitico; sensible Flaminia is drawn to the impoverished noble artist, Ernesto; while his savvy servant Cecco is keen on his maid Lisetta.…

Musik Theater an der Wien, Vienna MUSIC ★★★★★ STAGING ★★★★★ ‘Laughter mixed from tears.’ This was Leoš Janáček’s description of his muse Kamila Stösslová; and it could have been the inspiration behind Stefan Herheim’s delightful production of The Cunning Little Vixen which opened in Hall 6 of Vienna’s Museumsquartier, currently Musik Theater an der Wien’s base during renovations to its home. Joy triumphs by the end of Janáček’s exploration of a world riddled with conflict, with the Forester’s ode to nature’s constant renewal. But the verve, vibrancy, and colour of Herheim’s first production as Intendant of Musik Theater an der Wien begins as soon as the curtain is raised. Workers are busy assembling a giant dragonfly and other props. The backstage scene seems incongruous. But it is the first of…

Mozart | Don Giovanni John Fulljames’ staging of Don Giovanni (revived in Athens by Aylin Bozok) is a co-production between the Greek National Opera, the Royal Danish and the Gothenburg Opera in Sweden. Transposed to a modern-day luxury hotel, it is amusing, fast moving and thoroughly well thought out. It also looks good, with the hotel supplying a background subtly and suggestively lit (by Fabiana Piccioli) for the different scenes. The set, by Dick Bird, uses all the locations of a chic hotel – corridors, lifts, bedrooms, bar, reception desk, ballroom, back entrances – extremely cleverly and helps maintain the hectically fast moving pace so essential to this adrenaline- and testosterone-charged opera. Costumes, by Annemarie Woods, are simple modern-day clothes in the main, with extravagant touches for the colourful, garish…

There is much panic as Mexican tenor Javier Camarena and I attempt to get together via video to discuss his new album, Signor Gaetano. The link fails to connect us; but suddenly his face lights up the screen, unflaggingly friendly and obviously champing to discuss the project, a collection of tenor arias, often virtuosic, by Gaetano Donizetti. His enthusiasm is infectious. ‘Donizetti’s emotions are not expressed just through the extreme vocal range,’ he says. ‘He is not just using incredibly high notes like Rossini and Bellini. There’s more freedom in the vocal line to express emotion. Not that I have a problem with the high notes!’ he laughs. Indeed he does not, as audiences well know, particularly at the Met where he has given encores in three different roles, a…