Tabla de contenidos para Winter 2024 en Opera Now

The emotional lives of performers is something very close to my heart. Having dealt with severe performance anxiety when studying cello at music college, I have often wondered how opera singers are able to manage this aspect of their career. Just as ballet dancers have the added pressure of body image, opera singers are often encountering traumatic storylines and libretti which impact their lives, even outside of the theatre. This month’s Opera Now looks at many different elements to a performer’s inner life. We speak to Huw Montague Rendall, whose debut album Contemplation looks at the roles that have helped him through difficult times. He was also open about how roles can sometimes embed themselves into his psyche, even turning up in his dreams. Our cover star Nadine Sierra has…

London’s Wigmore Hall has announced the prizewinners of its 2024 Wigmore Hall/Bollinger International Song Competition. Following a final round held at Wigmore Hall on 11 September, 20-year-old mezzo-soprano Anja Mittermüller was named the youngest winning singer in the competition’s history, taking home the top prize of £10,000. Seattle Opera has announced James Robinson as the company’s next general and artistic director. Robinson started on 4 September and will replace Christina Scheppelmann, who takes over as artistic director of Brussels’ La Monnaie/De Munt in January 2025. Soprano Henna Mun has been named as the winner of Glyndebourne John Christie Award. The announcement was made from the stage at the Glyndebourne Opera House during Glyndebourne chairman Gus Christie’s traditional last night speech. The award includes a £15,000 scholarship and is designed to…

The inaugural Sky Arts Awards ceremony was held at London’s Roundhouse on 17 September. Welsh National Opera received the 2024 Award for Opera for its production of Britten’s Death in Venice which premiered earlier in the year. Directed by Olivia Fuchs the production was a collaboration with Cardiffbased company NoFit State, and saw a mixture of acrobatics and other circus elements interweaved throughout the opera. Opera Now’s Adrian Mourby said of the production: ‘Most major opera companies in Britain handle the music very well … so it is left to directors to turn a well sung, well played experience into something exceptional and this is what Olivia Fuchs and the NoFit State company achieved.’ Mezzo Aigul Akhmetshina, who this year has taken to the stages of Glyndebourne and the Royal…

Nixon in China seems to pop up with some frequency in this column. Back when my obsession with the opera began, I used to wonder what Richard Nixon made of it. In the 1990s, I found the very idea of an opera depicting a real person alive at the time of its premiere viscerally exciting – not to mention the seductively modern and quintessentially American sound of its music. The answer to the Richard Nixon question was probably that he had no opinion on the opera whatsoever. I can’t find any reference to him ever seeing it. Either way, what aroused my curiosity was whether Nixon would have been possessed of sufficient wisdom to receive the work as a piece of reflective art eddied by the pitch and roll of…

We’ve all done it. You meet a smooth-talking love-bomber. You fall head over heels. You agree to meet him (and crucially, you do not tell your Dad. He’s so protective. He’d only worry). Too late, you find out your man’s not quite who he said he was, and his intentions are worse. But he’s a powerful man, and you don’t know any better. Am I right ladies? Nadine Sierra knows this story well – from the stage at least. This September the American soprano, one of the art’s most dazzling rising stars, returns to a signature role, Rigoletto’s sheltered innocent, Gilda, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Though it’s a tragic tale, it’s a happy return for Sierra – she made her debut there as Gilda, nearly a decade…

The title of Bruno de Sá’s next album, Mille Affetti, means ‘a thousand emotions’. I was originally going to ask him what it was about Lindoro’s original quote, ‘In mezzo a mille affanni’ (‘amidst a thousand hardships’) that didn’t resonate with him, but the uplifting and passionate nature of Bruno de Sá was evident as soon as I joined the Zoom meeting. Of course he is no stranger to hardships, being a queer, male soprano from Brazil (where LGBTQ+ rights are legally inclusive but socially divisive), nevertheless his commitment to being and expressing himself has always come first. Whereas de Sá’s first album, Roma Travestita, was a statement, Mille Affetti is much more a vulnerable exploration. De Sá is speaking to me on one of his rare days off at…

UK Longborough Festival Opera By Gavin Dixon Wagner – Ring Cycle Wagner fanciers will need no introduction to Longborough Festival Opera. The north Cotswolds company this year celebrates its 30th anniversary, and although its repertoire is broad, it has made a speciality out of Wagner, repeatedly demonstrating that his operas are well within the reach of a small summer festival. This year, Longborough presented three full performances of its Ring cycle, the second production the company has staged, and a remarkable achievement. Just as remarkable is the consummate mastery that these performances displayed, with Wagner’s vision fully realised, and on a suitably epic scale. Director Amy Lane has devised a visual spectacle that relies more on video effects and dramatic lighting than on mechanical stagecraft. The set consists of a…

Tell us about your journey into opera I’ve always been a noisy person, even as a kid! I grew up surrounded by and engaging in all kinds of music, and for as long as I remember I have wanted to be part of something bigger, making beautiful things with other people. When I was young this manifested in me wanting to run away and join the circus(!) but when I saw an opera for the first time it really just clicked. To be surrounded by so many incredible artists and craftspeople on all sides, and to be a small part in making these stories come to life … to say that it’s now my job is a dream come true. What does your role as education artist-in-residence at Scottish Opera…

Welsh National Opera has announced a significant leadership change with the appointment of opera and theatre director Adele Thomas and creative producer Sarah Crabtree as the company’s joint general directors and CEOs, effective from January 2025. The decision follows former CEO Aidan Lang’s announcement of his retirement from the company last September. Thomas and Crabtree expressed their enthusiasm about their new roles, stating, ‘We are passionate exponents of the power of opera; the impact of the raw, unadulterated voice, its profound liveness, and its dedication to scale that enables us to tell the great stories of our time … At the heart of our philosophy is a deeply held belief in the democratic spirit in which WNO was founded and still holds today: that opera is for everyone.’ Adele Thomas…

MICHAEL SPYRES & ERMONELA JAHO Two mighty forces in the opera world come together to explore their work on Opera Rara’s Donizetti Song Project with Mark Pullinger ON SALE 21 JAN ALSO… • Doing it differently – meeting composer Philip Venables as Dutch National Opera prepares for the world premiere of his next opera, We Are The Lucky Ones • Exploring the work of the National Opera Studio and its prolific score of alumni • Meeting Albanian tenor Saimir Pirgu • David Butt Philip on the role of the Kaiser in Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten www.operanow.co.uk…

By the time Charles Villiers Stanford began work on his penultimate opera, The Critic, in 1915, he had authored no fewer than seven operas, all of which reflected not only the composer’s lifelong desire to succeed in the theatre but also his creative instinct to explore a whole range of operatic genres and styles. In his early career, he had enjoyed a degree of success with grand opera in The Veiled Prophet (Hanover 1881) and Savonarola (Hamburg 1884) even though the latter had a disastrous reception at Covent Garden under Richter (through no fault of Stanford’s) and The Veiled Prophet ended up as a victim of that lingering antiquated practice in British 19th-century opera of being performed in Italian in 1893 rather than in its original English (which Stanford ardently…

Tenor roles don’t come more complex than Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. Tempestuous and at times ferocious, Grimes is the community’s scapegoat. He is ostracised by the village and accused of murder, despite it being ruled as accidental circumstances. He eventually ends his life rather than defend himself again against a mob of people convinced of his guilt. The musical and vocal demands require entering an unsettling sound world, where dramatically the singer must create space for an unsympathetic outcast to have everything a human has. Issachah Savage, debuting the role at Dutch National Opera, has fully committed to finding nuance in this opera of extremes. He explains, ‘I played him down at first to where he was afraid of everything, even his own shadow. I started to use it as…

The board of the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestras has announced that conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner, founder of the Monteverdi Choir, the English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, will not be returning to the organisation. He has now announced the formation of a new ensemble named The Constellation Choir and Orchestra, which goes on tour in December in Europe, but not the UK. Gardiner withdrew from public music-making following an assault on bass singer Will Thomas after a performance of Berlioz’ opera Les Troyens at the Berlioz Festival at La Côte-Saint-André in France last August. Earlier this year Gardiner said in a statement: ‘August’s incident [is] something for which I have accepted full responsibility and profoundly regret.’ Over the past year the MCO considered the possibility of…

Once when I was preparing for Scottish Opera’s production of Rossini’s heroine, Rosina, a coach pointed me towards a tome containing various ornamentations and cadenzas suitable for the famous opening aria, ‘Una voce poco fa’. These, I was told, were the options available, and furthermore, as I was a soprano, if I didn’t include a sparkling top C towards the end, it would be a poor show. While I don’t discount the brilliance of Callas, Berganza and others, I remember thinking, what about my version? Do I have to repeat what they’ve done already? Rossini famously disapproved of ‘free’ ornamentation: his coloratura vocal parts were written out fully, including all the ornamentation he wanted with the insistence that performers sing his music exactly as written. Performance practice has clearly moved…

1926 Posthumous premiere of Turandot When Puccini died on 29 November 1924 in Brussels from complications following treatment for throat cancer, he had yet to solve the riddle of how to complete Turandot. Before leaving for Belgium, he had begged the conductor Arturo Toscanini, ‘Don’t let my Turandot die’. Franco Alfano was commissioned to complete the opera, but at the Teatro alla Scala premiere on 25 April 1926, not a note of Alfano’s work was heard. After the death of Liù, who kills herself rather than giving away the secret of Calaf’s name, Toscanini laid down his baton, turned and addressed the Milanese audience. ‘Here, the opera ends, because at this point the Maestro died.’ 1930 Puccini Festival established in Torre del Lago ‘I love hunting, I love cars: and…

It’s not the usual programme note structure that baritone Huw Montague Rendall’s debut Erato album, Contemplation, greets us with. A technical survey of the works sung is, perhaps, not the priority for this young singer. Montague Rendall instead greets his audience with an introductory piece of deep reckoning: ‘Who are we, what is our purpose and what is left of us when we are gone? We are but stardust, beings of cosmic origin, suspended in the vast expanse of the universe.’ ‘I wanted it to be a door to who I am as a performer, but also as a person,’ Montague Rendall tells me when I ask why he chose for the album to have this existential, philosophical leaning. We meet in Oliver Mears’ office at the Royal Ballet and…

Werther Massenet Bru Zane 1056 Massenet’s reworking of Werther for a baritone in the title role gets a rare airing. Following Werther’s premiere in Vienna in 1892, the vocal demands on its tenor meant it struggled to flourish in France, so Massenet composed a version for baritone Victor Maurel, (creator of Verdi’s Iago and Falstaff). That project floundered until Battistini sang it in 1901, after which tenors stepped up to the mark and the alternative version slumbered awhile. The composition remains essentially the same, but the baritone Werther’s vocal line contains some direct transpositions and also phrases that develop in a different direction – to sum, often tunes go down and not up. It is interesting but not exciting, not least as the thrill of the tenor timbre is missing…

HANNAH GOALSTONE – INTIMACY DIRECTOR Can you explain what an intimacy director does? An intimacy director is a movement specialist who has three main areas of focus. The most obvious is that we help to choreograph and stage moments of intimacy. We also work as an advocate for both the performer and the crew’s boundaries, and we work as a liaison between the director, the heads of departments and performers to ensure that we’re all telling the same story in a way that is safe for everybody. What’s your background? I moved to the UK from New York and acted for about 25 years, did some directing and a lot of teaching. Did you grow up in an artistic household? Not particularly. My parents are very big appreciators of theatre,…

When people think of opera, they often imagine the glamour – beautiful gowns, dazzling lights, the grandeur of the stage. It’s easy to see the final product and assume it’s effortless. The spotlight may illuminate your carefully crafted character, but it reveals nothing of the internal battle that many performers face beneath the surface. For me, this journey through opera has been a journey of discovering what courage truly means. Throughout my career, I’ve battled paralysing stage fright. Not just the butterflies we often hear about, but full-blown mental breakdowns before walking on stage. I would be shaking, physically ill, consumed by an ongoing internal dialogue of doom. I remember this vividly during one of the most significant moments of my early career – when I went on to win…