Tabla de contenidos para December 2023 en Opera Now

At a traditional time of year for taking stock I am reflecting on the past year of operatic achievement, excitement, tragedy and loss. Few years have seen such stark contrasts as this one. BBC Singers whiplash, English National Opera confusion and cuts to the Welsh National Opera have left UK singers with huge insecurity. Yet, new exciting projects are still abundant. Collating the worldwide Critics’ Choice reviews was a moment of pure bliss, reading about the varied productions that had touched our experts in such personal, different ways. But at the forefront of my mind remains the wellbeing of singers as the year winds down and achievements are stocked. Some years are certainly more fruitful than others and it can be easy to take a year out of the context…

Mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly has joined the Royal College of Music’s Vocal and Opera Faculty this month and will commence one-to-one teaching in September 2024. An RCM alumna, Dame Sarah Connolly’s connections to the London-based conservatoire with spans many decades. She was made a Fellow of the College in 2008 and has given masterclasses to vocal and opera students as well as performing as a soloist with the RCM Symphony Orchestra. Speaking of joining the staff of the college, Connolly said: ‘I am thrilled to be back in the arms of my Alma Mater, the Royal College of Music as a vocal professor. I remember too well the anxieties around achieving high standards as a student and I look forward to encouraging my students and starting exciting new journeys.’ Nick…

Flautist Elizaveta Ivanova has received first prize at the Concours de Genève flute competition in Geneva, Switzerland. St Petersburgborn Ivanova, who is cosoloist in the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra, receives a cash prize of CHF 20,000 (£17,973). She was also awarded the competition’s Arts Society Prize and the Souffle Prize both of which offer significant performance opportunities. Finalists of the Concours de Genève also receive two years of career management, personal coaching and concert opportunities from Sartory Artists, partner agency of the Concours de Genève.…

At the end of a recent performance of The Magic Flute in Copenhagen, the curtain calls were interrupted by the Royal Danish Theatre’s chief executive Kasper Holten, who strode on stage to congratulate one singer in particular. Palle Knudsen, who had just sung Papageno, stood in his canary yellow costume as Holten handed him a wreath to mark his 25 years as a member of the company’s ensemble of soloists. Knudsen would soon be withdrawing from the stage, we learned, to take a management position looking after that very ensemble. Knudsen is a model ensemble singer: versatile, charismatic and apparently ageless. Audiences in Denmark will have seen him sing everything from the title role in Sweeney Todd to Kovalyov in The Nose, and that’s just in recent seasons. Fixed in…

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It was a wonderful performance last night. There was really good applause, and then afterwards a lady who had seen it stopped me in the street asking if I had just sung in the performance, and I said, “Yes”. Then overcome with emotion, she took my hand, saying she just had to reach out and tell me how much she enjoyed it. It was humbling.’ Mark S Doss is talking about a performance of La traviata, in which he was performing the role of Germont for Welsh National Opera. ‘It’s the second time I’ve sung the role. The first was in Tokyo eight years ago, so when I’ve finished this run I’ll have sung Germont 20 times. It has a real flow to it and I really pushed to keep…

Happiness is an elusive shape shifter, reinventing herself in passing moments. She slips in-and-out of sight, moving through minds like a friendly cumulus. Our desire for her company is unsatiated; a life-long quest that few complete, though many – as we are reminded throughout Picture a day like this – give an outwardly different impression. George Benjamin’s new opera follows a bereaved mother as she searches for a happy person from whom she can ‘cut one button from their sleeve’, which she has been told will return her child to life. As she meets the seemingly successful candidates, hope evaporates – spoiler alert: even the rich, artistically recognised and those in love are not necessarily truly content. The libretto is by Benjamin’s long-term collaborator Martin Crimp (Into the Little Hill,…

Samuel Barber: His Life and Legacy by Howard Pollack University of Illinois Press What makes an opera composer? Does America’s Samuel Barber qualify as one, even though his legacy is limited to Vanessa (1958), Antony and Cleopatra (1966), and the exceedingly brief A Hand of Bridge (1959) which has been deemed ‘possibly the shortest opera that is regularly performed’? This empathetic, wisely judged new biography by Howard Pollack, who has previously written perceptively on George Gershwin, implies that categorisations are unproductive for a talent like Barber’s. By age 10, Barber had already written an operetta, with some coaching from his mother, to a libretto by the family cook. At age 21, he set Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach (1931) for string quartet and baritone; and later created Knoxville: Summer of 1915…

Production Highlights • World Premieres • Exceptional Casts Performance runs starting in December and running to January 2024. 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 LONDON ROYAL OPERA HOUSE roh.org.uk Hänsel und Gretel | Humperdinck DEC 16, 19M, 20, 23, 24M, 30, 31M; JAN 06, 07M Conductor Mark Wigglesworth Stage & Set director Antony McDonald Lighting designer Lucy Carter Choreographer Lucy Burge CAST Hänsel Anna Stephany Peter Darren Jeffery Gertrud Susan Bickley Gretel Anna Devin Die Knusperhexe Rosie Aldridge Sandmännchen Isabela Diaz LINBURY STUDIO Wolf Witch Giant Fairy | Little Bulb DEC 11, 12,, 15, 16, 17M, 19M, 20, 21, 21M, 23, 23M, 24M, 30M, 31M; JAN 02M, 03-05, 06M Musical Director Dominic Conway Lighting…

Tell us about your journey into opera. I have always loved performing and telling stories. For me, the most exciting part of a performance is how we communicate with the other musicians and actors on stage. Opera is the most complicated and demanding musical game, but when it works it’s magic! My first experience of opera was in the chorus of Britten’s Billy Budd at the St Endellion festival in Cornwall. I have a vivid memory of Roderick Williams singing Billy’s farewell, the only sound left at the end was the sea. After that I was hooked… Is there a dream role you’d love to sing? My dream role has to be Rigoletto, but not for a few years. In the meantime a loveable rogue will do! Malatesta from Don…

Garsington Opera has announced the line-up for its 2024 summer season. Running from 29 May to 31 July the festival will present five operas, opening with Rameau’s Platée and followed by Verdi’s Un giorno di regno, Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro and Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A new community opera, A Trip to the Moon by American composer Andrew Norman will see local school children perform alongside the Garsington Youth Opera. The Royal Opera House’s Songs for Ukraine Chorus will celebrate the festive season with a Christmas concert in the Royal Opera House’s Paul Hamlyn Hall on 17 December 2023. The concert will reunite Ukrainian singers displaced or impacted by the war with the Royal Opera Chorus, singing traditional Ukrainian Christmas songs alongside popular Christmas carols. The Chorus also…

Hattie Butterworth, Editor Glyndebourne Festival Opera Poulenc – Dialogues des Carmélites A collection of Southern Rail cancellations, a shared taxi ride with some delightful strangers and running through the heat in our finery takes me back to the opening night of Glyndebourne’s Dialogues des Carmélites in June. My first time at Glyndebourne was punctuated by what many agree was one of the greatest operatic achievements of the decade in Barrie Kosky’s Carmélites. Hugh Morris Oscarsborg Operaen Brøske & Meløy – Kommandanten In August, a friend dragged me along as a plus 1 to Kommandanten (The Commander), a new commission by Oslo’s Oscarsborg Operaen from Trygve Brøske and Marianne Meløy that celebrated 25 years of the company. Across a whole afternoon and evening, the island of Oscarsborg (a coastal fortress in the Oslofjord)…

Alessandro who? That is probably the reaction of most people on hearing the name Alessandro Stradella. Once one of the Italian Baroque’s most successful opera composers, he is now a largely forgotten figure – the victim of an early (and violent) death, of rapid changes in operatic fashion, and of the loss of much of his music. It is a situation that Andrea De Carlo, director of the annual Alessandro Stradella Baroque Festival in Italy’s Lazio region, is keen to reverse. For him, the composer was a man of unique invention and originality. He points to the fact that Stradella invented the concerto grosso form more than a decade before Arcangelo Corelli – who played the violin in a performance of one of Stradella’s oratorios in Rome – gave it…

ROBERT PLANQUETTE Rip Van Winkle For its fifth season Gothic Opera has taken another buried work, Robert Planquette’s operetta Rip Van Winkle, and staged it in the intimate Hoxton Hall – somewhere not unlike the Victorian Music Halls where operettas of this era would be performed in. It was easily filled with the boisterous energy of the ensemble, a group of settlers jovially mocking the monarchy, with moments of comedy, bawdiness and occasional tenderness created between each of them, under the detailed direction of Evangeline Cullingworth. Robert Garland fully embodied the work-shy dreamer Rip, with levity and ease, whilst Béatrice de Larragoïti created a sincere depiction of his exasperated wife, with a pure and nimble voice. It blended playfully with Garland’s, particularly for the charming Canoe Song. Stephen Whitford, an Act…

DANÍEL BJARNASON Brødre Tunnelfabrikken, the gigantic shell of an old factory, occupies an industrial wilderness on the edge of Copenhagen. One day in the not-so-distant future it will form the cultural hub for a new district of the city. Back in the here and now, it’s marooned between transport links and frustratingly difficult to find – though for a few days in August, you could follow the bikes. The building lured hoards up from the city to see Daníel Bjarnason’s 2017 opera Brødre (‘Brothers’), the big ticket of Copenhagen Opera Festival (COF) 2023’s opening weekend. COF exists to take the art form out of the capital’s two opera houses and into parts of the city where it might surprise, ambush or be revitalised. It has presented full-scale opera in concert…

BEYOND Jakub Józef Orliński Erato 5419772645 Cardillac Hindemith BR Klassik 900345 La princesse de Trébizonde Offenbach Opera Rara 9293800632 The Sound of Movies Jonas Kaufmann Sony 19658811552 Persinette Fries Belvedere/Wien Staatsoper BVE08061 Königskinder Humperdinck Naxos NBD0171V CDs and digital BEYOND I’m taking you BEYOND the limits of a classical concert or musical concept on a journey of discovery,’ announces countertenor Orliński in the blurb for his new album. But a glance shows it to be another album of Baroque rarities with some world premiere recordings, in this instance loosely based around pieces by Giovanni Cesare Netti (d 1686). It starts with something more familiar, an aria from Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, and includes Caccini and Barbara Strozzi, verging on mainstream these days. Netti features three times, and the scene from…

British conductor and music director of the English National Opera (ENO) Martyn Brabbins has stepped down, following the news of cuts facing the company’s orchestra. Announced after the final performance of its production of Britten’s Peter Grimes ENO announced that its orchestra would be reduced, cutting 19 jobs and employing the remaining musicians on a part-time basis. Its statement read: ‘Whilst the ENO remains grateful for the Arts Council’s revised support and financial investment … rising fixed costs and a requirement to develop work across more locations …[means]we are having to reevaluate our employment levels across every part of the organisation.’ Brabbins announced his resignation on 15 October, expressing regret for the ENO’s decision: ‘As Music Director of English National Opera for the past seven years, and Head of its…

Without doubt, the most exciting part of my job is working with young singers. It is such a privilege to meet talent from around the world, to help them to discover their artistic voice and to witness how their training with Royal Academy Opera (RAO) can unleash their musical and artistic potential. Our processes for nurturing operatic talent have been carefully honed over the years and they are tailored to suit each individual artist’s path. It’s so important that we cover the breadth of skills and experiences which our students need for a successful and satisfying opera career – and these continue to evolve with the profession. I am proud of the breadth of our training, at the heart of which is delivering a full programme of staged operas and…

What makes a year successful in the life of a musician? Certainly for tenor Nicky Spence, 2023 has felt like a year of significant recognition. In June he was awarded an OBE as part of the King’s first Birthday Honours. Prior to that, April brought an announcement from the Independent Society of Musicians, electing Spence as its president, in the position from April 2024. Now, as the year comes to a close, he and his husband – pianist Dylan Perez – have announced that they are expecting a baby in 2024. These celebrations reflect the breadth of Spence’s multifaceted career – though one where opera and family are at the centre, hand-in-hand. Speaking to me just days before the opening night of Romeo Castellucci’s Das Rheingold at La Monnaie in…

This year is the 400th anniversary, or Quatercentenary, of the ‘First Folio’, the collection for the first time of nearly all William Shakespeare’s known plays. Two hundred and seventy operas based on stageworks by Shakespeare (1564-1616) are the rough total suggested by The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (MacMillan. 1992) and there have been a good many others since. Shakespeare-related compositions have existed since before 1700, as early Baroque composers spotted their dramatic potential. However many of these, from Pelham Humfrey, Purcell, Arne, Boyce, to Balakirev, Kabalevsky and above all Mendelssohn, opted for incidental music. Shakespeare overtures (like Dvořák’s) or symphonic poems (like Tchaikovsky’s) abound. Our concern here, of course, is with the operas. We can all reel off – and marvel at – Verdi’s Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff, or…

The UK opera fringe is a treasurable part of the operatic scenery, and one I merrily visit year-round. It makes a characterful change from the pomposities of full-scale opera, and comes into its own during the summer months. It goes without saying, of course, that despite Arts Council England’s words, the sector has received no extra (or indeed any) support beyond a very few lucky companies like OperaUpClose. This year there were fewer car parks than pubs, to be honest, and I spent less of the time travelling to exotic spots, but still, the capital was covered from side to side (Blackheath to Dalston to Royal Oak) if not exactly top to bottom. A high-profile performance (Out of her Mouth) of three short Biblical cantatas by the early 18th-century French…

Opéra de Rouen Normandy MUSIC STAGING Opera fans allergic to dust mites may have approached Opéra de Rouen’s ‘new’ Carmen with caution. In collaboration with the indefatigable Palazzetto Bru Zane, the house staged a production based on the sets, costumes and stage libretto of the original 1875 premiere. But director Romain Gilbert’s hypoallergenic response proves to be no dusty archaeological exhumation. For a description of the production, simply read Meilhac and Halévy’s libretto. Antoine Fontaine bases his attractive sets on early sketches and photographs: the action of the outer acts places us firmly in Seville’s public squares; Lillas Pastia plays host in a two-tiered tavern; and Act 3 plunges us between rocky mountains. They are beautifully lit by Hervé Gary – the nocturnal scenes are suitably dark – and Christian…

Christmas from Norway Lise Davidsen, Soprano Decca Classics 4854358 Having hit the big time, Lise Davidsen sailed through the curse of ‘the difficult second album’, dreaded by artists of every persuasion; now she faces the Christmas album, perhaps dreaded by everyone else. One aim of Christmas from Norway is to honour previous Decca artists’ Christmas recordings, a cleverly self-perpetuating ploy which opens a Pandora’s box of the good, the bad and the ugly. And no reference to Joan Sutherland is surprising, surely one of the few festive releases to have surmounted the genre’s limitations with its joyous vocalism. But, as one would hope, Davidsen is worth a listen. The obvious hits – ‘The First Noel’ and ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ receive the full onslaught of festive camp, the latter…