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OperaNow • January 2020

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January 2020

THE OPERA LOVER’S ESSENTIAL GUIDE

CELEBRATING 30 YEARS

BRYAN REGISTER How Wagner unlocked my inner hero Explore opera off the beaten track From sun-drenched Florida to Sardinia’s island charms

Remembering Jonathan Miller Misunderstood genius or overhyped celebrity?

Gender benders Bridging the male/female divide in opera

Anna Netrebko in La Scala’s new Tosca • Why the world needs more opera houses LIVE PERFORMANCE ROUND-UP • NEW RELEASES • WORLDWIDE LISTINGS

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Contents

FRONT OF HOUSE

16

5 EDITORIAL

What will 2020 hold for opera?

7 LETTERS

39

Your thoughts and suggestions

8 OPINION

Why we need more opera houses

11 NEWS AND NOTES

50

Cecila Bartoli to run Monte Carlo Opera. Memories of Jonathan Miller

14 LETTER FROM…

Sarasota – upholding tradition in sunny Florida

REVIEWS 50-75 LIVE PRODUCTIONS

76 CD &DVD REVIEWS

A powerful new recording of Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet.

Jakub Józef Orliński’s latest album. Comparing the latest versions of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice on CD and DVD, and more…

COVER PHOTO: SIMON ROMPAY

80-88 SPOTLIGHT

YOUR MONTHLY GUIDE TO OPERA WORLDWIDE New Productions • World Premieres • Exceptional Casts Rarities • Opera Now Choice

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DARIO ACOSTA

Tosca at La Scala (50), Donizetti Opera Festival (L’ange de Nisida, Lucrezia Borgia) (54), Ermione at the Teatro di San Carlo, Naples (58), Die Walküre at Gothenburg Opera (60), Sweeney Todd at Bergen National Opera (62), Le Nozze di Figaro at Théâtre des Champs-Elysées (64), Prince Igor at Bastille Opera (66), Death in Venice at the Royal Opera House (68), Carmen at WNO (70), Le Grand Macabre at the Semperoper, Dresden (72), Orlando at Vienna State Opera (74)

‘My friends ask me what it’s like doing Tristan. I say it’s like leading a guided meditation’

68

CONTENTS 16 YOUR SPIRIT GUIDE TO WAGNER American Heldentenor Bryan Register explains why yoga and meditation are integral to his revelatory performances of Wagner 24 CHINA’S LEAP FORWARD Cross-cultural and contemporary trends are brought to the fore at the Beijing Music Festival 29 TESTING A NEW RECIPE How OPERA2DAY challenges traditional notions of what opera means in the modern world 32 THE DIRECTOR – SAVIOUR OR SCOURGE? As a prelude to a new series on opera directors, we ask if the vogue for conceptual productions in contemporary settings is keeping opera alive or turning audiences off

35 WHEN MILLER MET MOZART Jonathan Miller’s genius way with Mozart operas is his real legacy as an artist

22 IN PROFILE Benson Wilson is a young Samoan who is taking all the top prizes in opera as he sets out on a heaven-sent career

39 ACROSS GENDERS Cecilia Bartoli with a beard?

Whatever next? Opera’s continuing challenge to gender norms 44 ON A PERSONAL NOTE Adam Spreadbury-Maher gives his audiences an unique perspective on opera in intimate spaces 46 TRAVELS IN SARDINIA Opera adds to the charm of one of the Mediterranean’s most beguiling destinations 48 FROM THE WINGS Can Puccini’s warhorse La bohème really ever speak to us afresh? Prepare to be surprised…

90 Q&A Lawyer Leslie MacLeod-Miller OperaNow January 2020

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Editor’s Note

www.operanow.co.uk EDITORIAL Phone +44 (0)20 7333 1701 Email opera.now@markallengroup.com Editor-in-Chief Ashutosh Khandekar Assistant Editor Josephine Miles Associate Editor Helena Matheopoulos Contributing Editors Francis Muzzu, Tom Sutcliffe Robert Thicknesse (UK), Francis Carlin (France), James Imam (Italy), Karyl Charna Lynn (USA), Andrew Mellor (Scandinavia), Ken Smith (Far East) Design Louise Wood ADVERTISING Phone +44 (0)20 7333 1716 Title Manager Craig Dacey, craig.dacey@markallengroup.com Group Sales Manager Alisdair Ashman Advertising Production Leandro Linares, +44 (0)20 7501 6665, leandro.linares@markallengroup.com SUBSCRIPTIONS AND BACK ISSUES Phone UK 0800 137201 Overseas +44(0)1722 716997 Email subscriptions@markallengroup.com Subscriptions Manager Bethany Foy UK Subscription Rate £70 PUBLISHING Phone +44(0)20 7738 5454 Publishing Director Owen Mortimer Director of Marketing & Digital Strategy Luca Da Re Marketing Manager John Barnett Group Institutional Sales Manager Jas Atwal Production Director Richard Hamshere Circulation Director Sally Boettcher Managing Director Paul Geoghegan Chief Executive Officer Ben Allen Chairman Mark Allen

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Front of House

Gaze into the crystal ball

I

t’s customary for magazine editors to make their predictions for the months ahead at this time of year. So, let’s hear it for 2020. For a start, I look forward to a massive new opera house on the Mexican/US border made up of remnants of Trump’s wall, a symbol of rapprochement between the two countries following the President’s impeachment. And in the UK, surely we can expect Opera North’s funding to double (at least) now that the North of England has contributed so significantly to Boris Johnson’s victory in the General Election. Europe, meanwhile, will introduce a special Opera Backstop arrangement for British opera lovers, allowing visa-free travel between all of the Continent’s opera houses, in recognition of opera’s unique status as part of a common European heritage that stretches from Moscow to Lisbon, from Oslo to Palermo, predating the EU by several centuries.

Looking further afield, opera in China will slowly but inexorably expand in its bid for global domination. The Chinese continue to invest in glamorous new opera houses in far flung cities dotted around their vast nation; and increasingly, they are commissioning new Chinese operas to be performed in these new venues, by native artists who have won their spurs overseas and are returning home to invest in the cultural future of their nation. (For more on this, read Thomas May’s report on page 24.)

Move over men! It’s finally the turn of women to become the predominant force in opera houses around the world. The signs of change are palpable. In the news pages of this issue alone, we carry reports of Ceclia Bartoli’s appointment as boss of the Opéra de Monte-Carlo. San Francisco Opera has appointed its first ever female music director, Korean-born Eun Sun Kim. In Britain, Annie Lydford takes the helm at Nevill Holt Opera, continuing the female line in the wake of the stunning achievements of Rosenna East who steps down as managing director this month. So my next prediction concerns the rapid rise of women in opera to heights that even the Queen of the Night could not have imagined.

Opera is a restless art, and Opera Now will, throughout the year ahead, keep our readers up to date with all the exciting talent, innovative projects, unmissable events and critical insights that will help you make the most of a vibrant, dynamic artform – a prediction that comes with a very high degree of probability. Happy New Year!

Ashutosh Khandekar @operanow

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Feedback

Front of House

READERS’ LETTERS Celebrating Renée

What a wonderful cover feature you ran on Renée Fleming in December’s issue. It’s good to see a great artist re-invent herself as she gets older, adapting her tremendous talents as she explores new horizons. You graciously don’t mention her age in the piece, but I saw Fleming in 1993 when she sang a glorious Armida at the Pesaro Festival as a relatively unknown 34-yearold soprano. It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to compute that she reached a ‘Significant Age’ last year, and she’s looking absolutely fabulous. So an addendum

to Helena Matheopoulos interview: Many (Belated) Happy Returns to you, Renée.

Thank you for the enormous pleasure you’ve given your fans over more than three decades of your professional career.

You really are a pro and you’re using your celebrity to raise awareness about important issues. You are a role model for the opera world.

Raisa Morozova, via email

All in the same boat

I read Benjamin Ivry’s essay on homosexuality in opera in your last issue with a certain amount of incredulity (Opinion, ON December, p8).

The assertion that the more society accepts gays, the less we need opera is of course absurd. The phenomenon of the ‘Opera Queen’ in any case is vastly overstated. The reason why gay people traditionally flock to the opera is because they can: in a bygone era in which gay people tended to be childless and with disposable income, we could afford to go to the opera and had time to do so. As society changes and gay people face the same financial and time constraints as anyone else in society, the so-called ‘Opera Queen’ seems to be in decline.

Thomas Browning, via email

Moving on…

As a long-time patron of English National Opera and as someone who agonises over the company’s future, I was so glad to read Robert Thicknesse’s astonishingly perceptive, if damning, reviews of the Orpheus season at the Coliseum (ON December, p50). Bring on the new regime.

We live in hope…

Name and address withheld

Pavarotti Prize draw

Congratulations to the winner of our Pavarotti documentary prize draw: Sarah Rees of Llanelli in Carmarthenshire, Wales.

A DVD is on its way to you.

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Šimon Voseček Composer Alexandra Lacroix Stage director

lst

Now on tour in Europe!

OperaNow January 2020

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Opinion

More opera

The world needs more opera

By Simon Mundy

T

o be a true live opera addict, the sort of person who goes to opera in the same way that a football nut follows their team home and away, it is really only sensible to live in Vienna, London, Berlin or Paris. There you can find opera in at least two theatres most days, most weeks (though Mondays have a habit of being dark all over the world). As you move away from those cities the chances diminish. Yes, there are enough opera houses along the Rhine valley to ensure that an hour on the train will find you performances galore in three countries but travel along the other great European rivers and only the Po offers you regular opera outside capital cities.

In contrast the spread of orchestras, concert halls and spoken theatre is far more even. Within the EU away from Italy and Germany, only Romania and Poland have significant opera companies in more than a couple of cities that are not the capital. Move further away and the distance between full-time companies becomes a matter of planes, not trains.

It is possible to explain this away in North America and Russia by pointing to the map and the amount of open country between major cities, but even here there are glaring holes. Boston has no company to match New York or San Francisco, LA has struggled along for 30 years without really getting into the mainstream. There are an awful lot of the 50 US states where only ad hoc ensembles exist. Canada is particularly badly served.

‘There are great chunks of the world where live opera is never or only rarely heard. The result is a democratic deficit and that leads to the sort of perception that has led to anti-arts populism’ Does this matter? I think it matters very much, both for the future of the art form and those who want to make a career in it. The first worry is political – and if politics is involved money problems follow. Throughout the world there is a growing divide between the so-called metropolitan elites and those from smaller cities, towns and rural areas. Smaller cities do not have to be very small (Birmingham, Newcastle, Winnipeg, Charleston) for them to harbour grievances against those they see as automatically getting more of the cake.

The cake may be ill defined, but in a great many eyes it can be described as that enjoyed by people 8

January 2020 OperaNow

who dress up (they think) and go to the opera. The fact that opera audiences are as much made up of genuine enthusiasts as those wanting a society night out is irrelevant. Symbolism is always more potent than fact. Ask Trump. I very much suspect his core voters have much the same idea of opera goers as those in the forgotten parts of western Greece. It is not, though, a symbolic view that extends to spoken theatre, musicals or classical music as a whole – which are seen as of minority but not necessarily elitist interest.

In Britain the image is not helped by the habit (outside London, Leeds, Cardiff and Glasgow) of staging opera for precisely that audience in country house gardens – produced in such a way that the very aim is enjoy the opera among fellows that one knows, or at least know how to dress for dinner. The singers may laugh at the antics of the Glyndebourne members but, after all, they are only staff. There are signs that both attitudes (pro and anti) are spreading.

Bregenz, Salzburg and Perelada may be wonderful experiences, but no-one could argue that they are without a frisson of snobbery.

Much of this is caused, I believe, by the unavailability of opera as part of at least the weekly lives of those who love the other arts living in moderate size population centres. Most weeks they can see a play or go to a concert. Once is a blue moon opera comes to town. For the rest of the time they can only wonder what proportion of their taxes pays for the pleasures of those better off than they are.

Kent Opera was killed off and never played in the Opera House, Tunbridge Wells. The revival of Buxton and Wexford’s opera stages are all too isolated.

Where are the opera houses of Nottingham or Southampton, Aberdeen, Liverpool or Galway (this year’s European Capital of Culture)?

Only in Germany, France and Italy has the idea that opera is equal too, but not separate from, the normal intellectual life of a proud but average sized town been preserved. Ironically it was this idea of making sung theatre more accessible that gave rise to opera in the first place; that early Baroque notion that words should be heard, casts small and plots no more complicated than they would be in the theatre.

There are great chunks of the world where live opera is never or only rarely heard, perhaps in a short festival or as a result of fringe or touring companies passing through. The result is a democratic deficit and that leads to the sort of perception that has led to anti-arts populism. The spillover argument is that www.operanow.co.uk

More opera

Opinion

Opera needs to be put on the map for everyone

opera is the drug of out of touch decision makers, plutocrats and cranks (a good dose of homophobia can creep in too). Its funding from public sources is then seen as illegitimate by large sections of the electorate which, ironically, forces opera even more into the pockets of the wealthy few.

This leads to a second and profound danger.

Opera is harder than almost anything else to perform, compose and produce well. It needs a good proportion of students to come to love opera early, to be bitten by the bug, and decide that they want to develop their voices and stagecraft through gruelling years of training. It needs directors who understand its conventions, limitations and possibilities. If the social and geographical pool from which they come is shrinking then not only will the depth of talent but www.operanow.co.uk

the range of backgrounds too, gradually confirming the view in the general population that opera ‘isn’t for us and certainly not for our children’.

The solution is not cheap but neither is it outrageous, at least in countries that still have a civic theatre tradition. It is for all those theatres that have producing spoken drama companies to host small opera ensembles, giving work to local instrumental players, increasing the supply of flexible singers capable of moving between opera and musical theatre, and two or three times per season expanding for a larger scale offering. In other words – take us back to about 1910. Composers could experiment, directors gain experience and the theatres could show that opera, operetta, musicals and drama are a normal part of any citizen’s experience. ON OperaNow January 2020

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HANDEL HANDEL

GIUL I O CESAR E GIULIO CESARE (JULIUS CAESAR) (JULIUS CAESAR) MOZART MOZART

C O S Ì FA N T U T T E C O S Ì FA N T U T T E BACH ST J O H N PASS I O N BACH ST J O H N PASS I O N 40 A N N I VE R S A RY Y E A R 40

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ANNIVERSARY YEAR

S PRING 2020 S EAS O N SPRING SEASON en g l i s h t our2020 i n g op era .org .uk englishtouringopera.org.uk

News & Notes

Front of House

PREVIEWS, NEWS AND EVENTS IN THE OPERA WORLD

NEWS & NOTES A natural innovator: Cecilia Bartoli

San Francisco appoints a new Music Director

S Bartoli to run Monte Carlo Opera

C

ecilia Bartoli has been appointed as the new director of MonteCarlo Opera, the first woman ever to hold the post at the company, taking over from Jean-Louis Grinda in 2023. The Italian mezzo-soprano made her debut at Monte-Carlo’s Salle Garnier in The Barber of Seville in 1989, and has retained close connections with the opera house ever since. The appointment marks the latest addition to Bartoli’s portfolio as an artistic director. In 2012 she became artistic director of the Salzburg Whitsun Festival in Austria, and in 2016 she co-founded Les Musiciens du Prince-Monaco, a period instrument ensemble, with Jean-Louis Grinda. She will continue to appear at opera houses and concert halls around the world after she assumes her new position.

Bartoli is known for her imaginative recital programming, bringing to the fore little-known composers from the Baroque, www.operanow.co.uk

Classical and bel canto periods.

Her recent work has thrown light on music written for castrati, taking an unflinching look at the lives of these men and the operas they inspired. Much of the original scholarship for her recital tours and recordings is her own, and she is bound to bring her intellectual curiosity and her sense of adventure to her programming at Monte Carlo’s opera house, designed, Like Paris, by Charles Garnier.

Bartoli said: ‘Taking on the leadership of Monte-Carlo Opera is a new phase in my career, but it also represents the realisation of a dream. I will be the first woman to occupy this position, as well as the first opera singer since Guy Grinda, Jean-Louis Grinda’s father.

This is a perfect illustration of my motto: “Draw on tradition and bring innovation!” I’m brimming with ideas and will take tremendous joy in placing my creativity and passion for music at the service of MonteCarlo Opera.’

an Francisco Opera has announced that Korean conductor Eun Sun Kim will become the company’s next music director in 2021. Kim will be just the fourth music director in the history of the company, as well as being the first woman appointed to the role and the first person in the post since the interregnum following Nicola Luisotti’s departure from the company in 2018.

The announcement of Kim’s appointment as music director designate was made by SFO general director Matthew Shilvock, who said: ‘Eun Sun Kim leads with great vision on the podium but also welcomes each and every person into the creative process, inviting them to do their very best work. The resulting art is spectacular.’

Kim will immediately begin participating in the planning of future seasons as well as orchestral auditions.

‘From my very first moments at San Francisco Opera, I felt this was home,’ Kim said in a statement. ‘There was an unusual feeling of open collaboration across so many facets of the Company – a real sense of professional alchemy’.

Kim studied composition and conducting in her hometown of Seoul, South

Korea, before continuing her studies in Stuttgart, where she graduated with distinction. Her experience as a composer is an important part of her musicmaking: When I study a score, I want to get into the language of a composer,’ she says. Her mentors have included Daniel Barenboim, who taught her that ‘creating sound is the art of a moment, it’s like a life.

When it’s gone, it’s gone.’

She also assisted Kirill Petrenko in Lyons in the run-up to her professional debut at Frankfurt Opera in 2012.

As the company’s music director Kim will conduct up to four productions each season in San Francisco, in addition to leading concerts and working with SFO’s Adler young artist programme. She is already scheduled to conduct SFO’s new production of Beethoven’s Fidelio, which will open the company’s 2020/21 centennial season.

Eun Sun Kim: bringing a composer’s ear to her conducting

OperaNow January 2020

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“Full of entertaining touches and striking imagery.”

– THE NEW YORK TIMES

“Nothing short of a triumph on all fronts.”

– CHICAGO TRIBUNE

A NEW CYCLE APRIL - MAY, 2020 SIR ANDREW DAVIS CONDUCTOR SIR DAVID POUNTNEY DIRECTOR

LYRICOPERA.OR G/RING (312) 827-5600 New Lyric production of the Ring cycle generously made possible by Lead Sponsor: Anonymous Donor and cosponsors Mr. & Mrs. Dietrich M. Gross, the Gramma Fisher Foundation of Marshalltown, Iowa, Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson, Ada and Whitney Addington, Bulley & Andrews, and the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional support from Robin Angly, Richard J. and Barbara Franke, and the Prince Charitable Trusts.

News & Notes

Front of House

Remembering the good doctor Miller

By Tom Sutcliffe

I

got to know Jonathan Miller partly because I was wasn’t all that nice about some of his work as an opera director. We had a long interview for The Guardian once, quite a bit of which was at his home, when I almost managed to keep up with his prodigious smoking.

In 1979, his Traviata for Kent Opera attracted a great deal of attention because of his application of his medical training to the way he staged Violetta’s death scene at the end – preventing her from

trying to get up. His reasoning was that an patient on the verge of death with ‘consumption’ would not be able to stagger around, though she might have moments of clarity and certain ability. I called it ‘a pointlessly clever stroke of medical realism … in a Traviata ‘that is in the wrong sense a travesty’.

At one stage much later, he took to phoning me on Christmas Day. That happened for quite a few years. I think he had gathered that I was a church-going Christian, while he of course was an atheist Jew unlike his child psychiatrist father who was Orthodox.

Appointments Nevill Holt Opera has announced the appointment of Annie Lydford to the role of managing director, beginning in January 2020.

Lydford will succeed current managing director Rosenna East. Described

by NHO’s artistic director Nicholas Chalmers as ‘the most dedicated partner in our endeavours to promote Nevill Holt Opera as a venue for world-class opera’, East departs after a successful five years in the role in order to work on a new venture alongside John Wilson. The crowning achievement of East’s tenure has been the building of an award-winning opera house at Nevill Holt, propelling the festival into the top league of country house opera venues.

Currently director of communications and marketing at the Creative Industries Federation, Annie Lydford’s previous experience also includes working as head

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of Communications at English National Opera.

Nicholas Till has been appointed to the new Pierre Audi chair in opera and music theatre at Dutch National Opera and the University of Amsterdam The Pierre Audi chair is named after the man who served as artistic director of Dutch National Opera from 1988 to 2018, where his productions included the first complete performance of the Ring Cycle in the Netherlands.

He left DNO last year to take up the artistic directorship of the Aix-en-Provence Festival Till will combine his role as professor of opera and music theatre at the University of Sussex, with his new professorship. He will contribute to DNO’s 2020 Opera Forward Festival in March, alongside working on an exhibition of materials from the company’s archive and a book about opera in the Netherlands.

One of his best jokes during his time as a television satirist in Beyond the Fringe was ‘I’m not a Jew. Just Jew-ish. Not the whole hog.’

Jonathan knew brilliantly how to make the best of all the openings which came his way, enabling him to do things he liked, such as directing great actors in plays and finding new angles for operas, not to mention anchoring some challenging television topics and – perhaps most rewardingly of all – running the restored Old Vic theatre in London for three years where he presented a succession of wonderful productions of neglected classic foreign plays that has perhaps never since been matched at the National Theatre. Richard Jones’s terrific productions of Feydeau’s A flea in her ear and Corneille’s The Comic Illusion and were just some of the memorable theatrical cream he provided.

I adored Miller’s English National Opera staging of Rigoletto with John Rawnsley in the title role. I have to point out, though,, that the production’s Little Italy mafiosi approach – and especially the juke box played by ‘Duke’ in the final act – quite undermined the tragic bleakness of Verdi’s sublime work. Miller’s take on The Mikado for ENO, thanks to the brilliance of the late huge Richard Angas in the title role and to the aptness of its 1930s ‘nursery’ approach to Englishness, suited Gilbert’s witty dramatic purpose and Sullivan’s marvellously calculated and memorable music absolutely perfectly.

Good artists (actors and singers) liked working with him in the theatre because

Jonathan Miller: a useful, imaginative approach to opera directing

he was awash with ideas and never short of a word.

However, if you try to place him among the great figures of postwar theatre in Britain, in my opinion, he couldn’t hold a candle to Peter Brook, Richard Jones or Peter Hall – not to mention that true past-master of subtle sensitive theatrical direction, Lindsay Anderson.

Nick Smurthwaite’s obituary of Miller in The Stage was perhaps rather hyperbolic in stating that ‘medicine’s loss was the British theatre’s immeasurable gain’. In fact in many ways Miller was the least talented four young geniuses (Dudley Moore, Peter Cook and John Cleese) who made such a justifiable and deserved impact with Beyond the Fringe. He did, however, have immense charm and was able, with his large range of interests, to get most people to take him more seriously than perhaps he merited. He was an interpreter rather than a creator – his best quality was that he enabled the performers he was directing to do full service to the work at hand. He had ideas about the meaning of works he was interpreting and their context, which were useful and effective.

And he certainly loved the world of performance which he served so well.

Jonathan Miller, 1934-2019 OperaNow January 2020

13

News & Notes Sarasota’s Opera House planted the seeds for cultural growth

Letter from Sarasota

By Karyl Charna Lynn

D

on’t be fooled by the fact that more than 700 cities in the USA have a bigger population than Sarasota. When it comes to cultural and artistic attractions and world-class entertainment, it ranks in the top 75 – a tiny cultural jewel shining brilliantly in the Florida sunshine.

Located on the west coast of Florida, with Sarasota Bay at along its shoreline, this is a region in flux. Before Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin inaugurated the Sarasota Opera House in January 1984, the area was a cultural desert downtown a wasteland. The Opera House planted the seeds for Sarasota to blossom into the cultural mecca it is today.

I have been covering the Sarasota Opera Winter Festival for more than a decade, and have witnessed the city’s

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January 2020 OperaNow

extraordinary expansion bringing life to previously derelict areas. There are new hotels, condominiums, restaurants, shops and galleries for every taste and budget sprouting up as far as the eye can see, including a smart new hotel next to the Opera House.

Sarasota seems to be removed from many of the less edifying realities of today’s America: Sarasota’s residents are primarily wealthy retirees who have created a world of their own in which to enjoy their ‘golden years’ in peace and serenity. If you ever get claustrophobic, then you can cross the bridge over the Bay to visit the Keys (St Armands, Lido, Long Boat, and Siesta), where you will find miles and miles of the finest sandy beaches dotting the Gulf of Mexico shores.

Opera in Sarasota dates back to December 1926, when San Carlo Opera staged Carmen and Martha in the Edwards Theater. New York Grand Opera followed with Aida in 1928. An opera drought then ensued until, in 1952, a tiny opera house was reconstructed inside the Ringling Museum.

Named Asolo Theater, after the Italian town where it was originally built, it was inaugurated with an unusual double bill of Pergolesi’s La serva padrona and Mozart’s Bastien und Bastienne by the New York City Center Opera.

After Asolo received its own building in 1957 the Turnau Opera Players, a traveling chamber opera troupe, began annual visits three years later. Orfeo ed Euridice, the first home-grown effort of The Asolo Opera, was staged

in 1974 followed by La voix humaine and Così fan tutte. The company adopted an ‘opera as theatre’ philosophy. Probably its most famous (notorious in the 1970s) production was Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, complete with rampant Roman orgies, creating a scandal but also making it the hottest ticket in town.

In 1979, the company purchased the Edwards Theater, renaming it the Sarasota Opera House, and spent the next five years renovating the building. Victor DeRenzi was hired as artistic director and transformed the Sarasota Opera into a professional regional company with the recently concluded Verdi Cycle pivotal to the company’s growth, its budget soaring from US $385,000 in 1984 to more than $9m today. www.operanow.co.uk

Letter from Sarasota What makes Sarasota Opera distinctive is DeRenzi’s undying belief in the richness of tradition. He sees the company as an opera museum – frozen in time, taking you on an historic journey back to a bygone era. He bucked the trend when Regietheater became the dominating factor in opera production, continuing to stage operas just as they might have been a century or two ago, following as close as possible the composers’ directions and intent. DeRenzi’s philosophy is so successful because Sarasota is a popular retirement area with an aging population and conservative tastes. It’s probably the only place in the USA where this type of company could thrive. Not that this means any lack of dramatic engagement.

Although the repertory concentrates on 19th- and early 20th-century repertoire, one of the most riveting and emotionally draining performances I’ve seen in Sarasota was Carlisle Floyd’s 1969 opera Of Mice and Men. The Sarasota Opera is only one of a dozen American companies that actually own their own venue, with the company completing a $20m renovation in 2008 that both restored its historic beauty and enhanced its capabilities for the 21st century, including a much-needed expansion of the orchestra pit to allow them to perform Verdi’s grander operas. As you enter the renovated theatre through a soaring, three-storey atrium lobby, framed by gilded Ionic columns, you can’t help but marvel at its timeless beauty.

The auditorium, saturated in a lush midnight blue, offers a striking contrast to the honey-hued plaster walls. The historic proscenium arch was recreated with engaged Doric www.operanow.co.uk

News & Notes

Timeless beauty: the Opera House’s soaring atrium

columns and a gold-fringed deep blue valance. Newly graded orchestra seating along with staggered seats offer good sightlines.

In addition to being able to attend four different operas in three days during ‘Opera Lovers Weeks,’ for more time in the sun and sand, you have a wide choice of other activities for your evenings. You could take in the Sarasota Ballet, Sarasota Symphony or Broadway musical at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall. There’s also the Asolo Repertory Theater and Florida Studio Theater for theatre-lovers. A visit to the vast Ringling Museum of Art is a must. (Sarasota was once the winter home of the Ringling Brothers Circus).

Sarasota 2020 Winter Opera Festival runs from 8 February to 22 March 2020. In repertory are Puccini’s La bohème, Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore and Catalani La Wally. www.sarasotaopera.org

Sarasota Opera’s production of L’elisir d’amore, which returns for this year’s winter season OperaNow January 2020

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Cover Feature

Meet your

spirit guide to Wagner

By Ashutosh Khandekar

ROBERT WORKMAN

Becoming a world-class Wagnerian Heldentenor was one of the last things that Bryan Register thought would happen to him. Following his latest Tristan, and with Siegfried next in line, this warm-hearted singer from North Carolina is on a remarkable journey, exploring the metaphysical aspects of being an opera singer and touching on the mysteries of his art

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January 2020 OperaNow

www.operanow.co.uk

B

ryan Register’s face is painted entirely in gold as he stands on stage dressed in flowing red robes, bathed in a radiant light that gives him the air of a Buddhist avatar in the process of becoming enlighted. We’re in Act Three of Tristan und Isolde at La Monnaie in Brussels as Register, as Tristan, in a state of delirium curses the love potion and longs for death. Register’s performance begins innig, as the Germans say, quietly taking us into the interior world of his character before unleashing its anguish in a powerful torrent.

His Tristan is a supremely spiritual creation.

I meet Register the day after this performance, looking fresh and showing no sign of the physical and mental toll that a night of singing Tristan takes on a human being. He bids me a chirpy good morning in his expressive Southern drawl. This boy from North Carolina, who grew up in a devout Christian family living at the eastern end of America’s Bible Belt, has been on a long journey of creative and spiritual development that informs his entire approach to singing opera.

The stamina that Register needs for Tristan is, in part, physical: ‘I go to the gym,’ he says, ‘but I can’t do that every day as it taxes the body too much. I can’t do an hour of physical exercise and then go and rehearse Tristan for three hours. It would kill me. But something I have to do every day without fail is yoga and meditation. I have found with these big roles that

Bryan Register

Cover Feature

yoga builds the body strength while the meditation allows me to stay emotionally and mentally relaxed even when my body is saying, “Please, please stop!”

My friends ask me what it’s like doing Tristan. I say it’s like leading a guided meditation. Or it’s like I’m doing my yoga practice in public. Just think of everyone in the audience showing up for yoga: I’m the teacher, I’m on stage and I’m gonna lead everybody in a yoga session. That’s exactly what I do as an opera singer: I’m a spirit guide.’

This psychic approach to Wagner is the key, Register believes, to digging deep within himself to release his full potential on stage and then go the extra mile: ‘You realise if you’ve trained properly, that your body can give you more than you think it can. It’s like athletes at the point of burn. When you’re running in a race, you have a lot more in reserves than you think. You’re really not going to collapse short of the finish.’

Are there times when he feels he has reached the end of his tether during a performance? ‘Oh, my God, yes! Every time. Every time in Act III of Tristan, I feel it – and it’s not always in the same place. There’s always a point in Wagner when I think, OK, this is it – it’s all over within the next 30 seconds. My voice is going to stop! My body starts trembling and I know I won’t be able to do it.’ Register pauses and slows himself down, ‘And then… I just take a breath. There’s always a place where I can breathe and reset. And then it comes back. Don’t ask me how. But it always does.’ ›

Exploring the mysteries of Wagner: as Tristan at La Monnaie in Brussels

SIMON VAN ROMPAY

www.operanow.co.uk

OperaNow January 2020

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Cover Feature

Bryan Register ROBERT WORKMAN

‘My nature, I guess, is introverted and shy – and if you’re going to be an opera singer, that doesn’t sell tickets!’

Heroic pursuits as Siegmund in Grange Park Opera’s Die Walküre

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Wagnerian singers always talk about the need to pace a role over the many hours. Register admits that he can’t completely take credit for the way he manages Tristan perfectly, so that the climaxes never sound tired or strained. ‘I think that that’s also part of the genius of Wagner. The musical and physical demands of this role are extreme, but Wagner writes it in a way that makes it all possible. So all of the sotto voce and very lyrical singing always comes straight after the great outbursts – which works dramatically, but it also works for voice.’

Speaking of pacing, Register took his time to launch himself into the Wagnerian firmament. He originally intended to study piano as an undergraduate, but during a series of musical tests in his first week of college, everything changed: ‘I went for a sightsinging placement with one of the voice teachers.

January 2020 OperaNow

Her husband was the chair of the Voice faculty. She asked me to sight-read various melodies she’d written, which I did. “OK,” she said, “Now sing the national anthem. I’ll play along with you”. So she starts playing the piano and I start singing The Star-Spangled Banner.

Bizarre! And she stopped about halfway through and she said, “hold on a second”. She goes to her desk and picks up the phone and she says, “Jim, come up.

You gotta hear this!” Then some man walks in, and the teacher says, “Can you do that again? So I start singing the National Anthem, but halfway through we stop again. And the man looks me in the eye and says, “Young man, you need to change your major!”’

Register had to rethink himself – as a singer rather than a pianist. Did it come as a complete surprise? ‘A complete shock!’ says the tenor. ‘Because growing up, I was so identified with being a pianist. That’s what I’d www.operanow.co.uk

www.operanow.co.uk

Cover Feature

One of the biggest lessons Register learnt about the power of the voice was in his student days at Manhattan School of Music: ‘I went to the Met and I saw Renée Fleming sing “Dove Sono...?” [the Countess’ aria from The Marriage of Figaro]. The experience is burnt in my mind. I will never, ever forget it. I can still feel how exciting it was when she sang the most beautiful pianissimo I have ever in my life heard. I realised then that the power of the singer is not just about the voice. It’s about something much deeper. Nobody in the audience was even breathing.

It wasn’t loud or flashy. It wasn’t any of the things that people usually associate with being impressive at all. But it was was life changing, because I thought, OK, I can learn how to do that. ›

As Lohengrin in Brussels

SIMON VAN ROMPAY

always studied. My sister was the one who took voice lessons and I would accompany her.’ To begin with, Register became the principal studio accompanist for the dean of voice in the Vocal faculty, playing piano for all the best singers at the college. ‘It was like a masterclass – mostly in art song. It really taught me the power of the voice and the importance of the text in singing.’

Apart from having to learn a whole new set of musical skills and techniques, Register says he had to change his innate personality on his path to becoming an opera singer: ‘My nature, I guess, is introverted and shy – and if you’re going to be an opera singer, that doesn’t sell tickets! As a pianist, you can be self-contained and solitary. As a singer, though, you just have to overcome certain fears and inhibitions to allow the voice to come out. You have to train yourself to know that it’s safe to be gregarious, even outrageous. Because that’s what it feels like to me when I sing: outrageous, vulgar, showing off. It’s like pole-dancing in public – unless you’re prepared to be risky, to be out there, there’s no point in doing it.’

After graduating, the next step for Register was a scholarship, funded by a patron who was anonymous at the time, to study singing at the Manhattan School of Music with Adele Addison, a soprano who had had a considerable but unconventional career as a recitalist and in oratorio in the 1950s and ’60s. To begin with, Register’s inexperience as a relative newcomer to singing seemed like a setback. ‘All of my colleagues at grad school had already done a university degree in voice. And I had only seriously started studying voice two years prior to going to Manhattan School of Music. So I was really far behind. Everybody was doing really flashy arias. I couldn’t compete with that. My audition included an aria from Bach’s Magnificat, some songs by Schubert and Tosti, and the shortest aria from Mozart’s Clemenza.’

Register was never cast in an opera while at Manhattan School of Music – which became a source of considerable angst. ‘All of my classmates, everybody was given roles in productions. But not me. So I went to Ms Addison I asked, “What do I do? I mean, I want to perform, but I feel like a complete outsider”. She told me straight off that if I really wanted to be smart, I should prepare recitals like nobody’s business. “You will learn so much art song,” she said, “that you could actually become a Lieder specialist”.’

It was good advice that helped Register find his true operatic voice – a lyrical, flexible, beautiful instrument, grounded in the subtleties of art song but with enough heft to take on Wagner’s big guns. ‘I’m a firm believer that Wagner should be approached through the bel canto style of singing,’ Register says. ‘That is what he wanted. It’s clear in all of his letters and all of his writing. If you apply that style to Wagner’s music, you’re going to get a lot more out of it.’

Bryan Register

OperaNow January 2020

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Cover Feature

Bryan Register ‘A lot of people like to talk about the voice in superficial terms – a pretty voice, a huge voice… But the voice is only the tool. Our job as singers is to sculpt emotions. We’re like “emotion magicians”, alchemists who turn emotions into sound, materialising something that can’t be seen. In the opera house, you experience with your senses something that isn’t actually palpable – the deepest human emotions.’

Register needn’t have worried about never being cast in an opera during his postgraduate studies.

Since embarking on his career, there have been plenty of opportunities to take to the stage, and his reputation as a supreme Wagnerian is burgeoning almost in spite of himself. The penny really only dropped that Wagner could become his speciality when he was accepted on The Wagner Society of Washington’s training programme, run by soprano Evelyn Lear and bass-baritone Tom Stewart. ‘Until that point I never in my life thought that I would be singing Wagner. You know, some tenors think, “Oh, it’s my dream to sing Tristan”. That was not even on my radar. I never thought I would sing Wagner, ever.’

‘As a singer, you just have

to overcome certain fears and inhibitions to allow the voice to come out’

DARIO ACOSTA

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January 2020 OperaNow

Meanwhile, there was someone in the background who had spotted Register’s potential long before anyone else – even himself. And that someone knew a thing or two about singing Wagner. Step forward the anonymous patron who funded his graduate career at the Manhattan School of Music: ‘Around two weeks before I graduated, the dean called me to his office and said, “you need to write this lady a thankyou note, because she paid for your education”. I said of course, but who do I write to? He slipped me an envelope across the table. Inside, there was a note that read Madam Birgit Nilsson, along with her address in Sweden.’

With Tristan now firmly in Register’s repertoire (he is in Bologna this month in the same Ralf Plege production as in Brussels last year), major opera houses are clamouring to sign him up for his next great Wagnerian challenge: Siegfried. It’s a role that feels absolutely right for him with its open-hearted, forthright, unaffected enthusiasm. ‘I’m very excited about Siegfried and there’s a strong interest from Brussels and from Paris for me to sing it. It’s not imminent though. It took me two years to learn Tristan.

So it’ll take me at least two years to learn Siegfried.’

Life beyond Wagner still exists, of course, though people say that stepping back from Wagner into the ‘normal’ repertoire can be problematic for singers.

‘It’s not an issue for me,’ says Register. ‘Because I approach Wagner through bel canto, I think it keeps my vocal technique healthy and flexible. One of the big roles I like doing is Enée in Berlioz’s Troyens, which is epic, like Tristan, but stylistically completely different.’ Register’s next appearance on the opera stage is as Florestan in a production of Beethoven’s Fidelio at the National Theatre in Prague. He’s also currently preparing Radamès in Verdi’s Aida along with Don Carlos. ‘It’s very important to me to be able to keep all these different roles talking to each other,’ says Register. ‘And they all connect more than you might think. For example, the extreme flexibility that you need in Verdi only enhances your Wagner singing. Actually in Wagner you can be lazy and fake it a little bit – the orchestra really helps. But in Verdi you can’t hide. There’s no lush orchestra to support the voice and you’re often left much more exposed as a singer.’

Although he resists being stereotyped as only a Wagnerian, it is Wagner’s operas that get to the heart of Register’s identity and strengths as an artist. ‘The thing about Wagner that I always find interesting is that it affects you on a very deep psychological and emotional level,’ he says. ‘You don’t know why. You don’t know what it is. You can’t identify it… But make no mistake, Wagner is working you over – and you don’t even realise that he’s doing it until it’s too late…

It’s a mystery. And we need mysteries as the world becomes more and more rational in nature. I think we need to have things that take us beyond.’ ON www.operanow.co.uk

Opera by Puccini

Once, we were all going to live forever.

PREMIERE 1 FEBRUARY 2020 RUNS UNTIL 1 APRIL Conductor KAREN KAMENSEK/ HENRIK SCHAEFER Director MAX WEBSTER Set and costume design FLY DAVIS Lighting design JACK KNOWLES Choreography ANN YEE Mimรฌ KERSTIN AVEMO Rodolfo THOMAS ATKINS Marcello LUTHANDO QAVE Musetta MIA KARLSSON Tickets at opera.se

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Artist Profile

Benson Wilson EMMA BROWN

Divine

signs

By Louise Flind

A vocal crisis almost made Benson Wilson give up trying to become a professional singer. But then he received some encouragement from on high as his career gained a new momentum

B Winning ways: Benson Wilson after his Ferrier competition success at the Wigmore Hall 22

enson Wilson has a fatalistic approach to life. It was divine intervention, he firmly believes, that caused singing to choose him.

And opera became the path along which he has channelled this gift. Whenever this path becomes rocky, he looks to God for a sign. Even when he’s received negative signs, he tells me, he accepts his fate.

New Zealand-born, Benson is an imposing fellow, built like an All Black prop forward. His demeanour is typically laidback and Antipodean, but don’t be fooled: here’s a young man who has travelled around the world to pursue a notoriously challenging profession. There’s undoubtedly fire in his Samoan belly… or perhaps a

January 2020 OperaNow

sportsmanlike playfulness – though he plays to win, as his track record in major competitions shows.

‘I grew up in a very musical family where the first thing we’re taught to sing is our prayer – our grace before we eat,’ he says. Classical music only came into his life in his teens when a friend heard him singing and said he should try for the school choir, which duly told him he should try for the New Zealand secondary students choir. He was accepted with the proviso that, being the only junior, he was to have a singing lesson once a week. ‘I had a wonderful teacher, Elizabeth Curtis. We started doing vocal exercises and then she introduced some folksong.’ www.operanow.co.uk

Benson Wilson In the meantime, Benson’s parents had split up, though they remained friends and re-married, creating a great big Samoan family. An early musical influence was his father, a massive Elvis fan: ‘I grew up singing all the Elvis tunes with Dad playing the guitar. Mum was the church pianist. I played Mum and Dad’s instruments, guitar and piano, by ear and then studied voice at the University of Auckland.’

It was at university that Benson had the luck of being taught by the British soprano Linda Kitchen (her husband Aidan Lang was running Opera New Zealand at the time and is now the new boss of Welsh National Opera). At this point he was a tenor struggling with the top of his voice. ‘Linda suggested I try Guglielmo’s aria “Non siate ritrosi” from Così fan tutte. It was from there that my voice started to feel at home with the baritone repertoire.’

His biography is strewn with formidable achievements that point to a major career; the Lexus Song Quest winner in New Zealand (previously won

by Kiri Te Kanawa), Oxford Lieder Young Artists finalist, and the winner of the Kathleen Ferrier Award in 2019. Yet in February last year, looking down the barrel of leaving the Guildhall, Wilson hit a bumpy patch. ‘I hadn’t got a place on any young artist programme and I had to really ask myself, “Who am I?” Because it wasn’t working. I’m so thankful for my religious background: I prayed to God to let me know if my time as a singer was over and done, and if I had a calling elsewhere in the world. That day I had my audition for the National Opera Studio and a competition that evening at the Royal Overseas League – and I asked God for a sign. I did my audition, then I went to the competition and I didn’t get a placing. I thought, “You know what, thank you for the sign. I gave it my best shot and now it’s time to move on”. And then the next morning I got a call from my teacher saying there’s an agent who’s very interested in you – Maxine Robertson. That same day I got an email from English National Opera saying we heard you at the NOS audition yesterday and we’d like to offer you a role in Britten’s Paul Bunyan. The following Monday, I received an email from Welsh National Opera saying we heard you at the NOS audition and we’d like you to cover John Sorel in The Consul. Then the National Opera Studio offered me a place… I was very content with that sign!’

From that moment he glided effortlessly towards graduation from the Guildhall, trumped by having both his parents, stepfather and stepsister at his grand finale performance in Così fan tutte. His proud mother told him, ‘I never dreamed that I would come and see Buckingham Palace – it was only a postcard to me. But I’ve been able to come because of what you’ve done’.

At the Guildhall, Wilson was singing Mozart and Britten roles, and his voice is certainly heading in a weightier, darker direction – towards Eugene Onegin www.operanow.co.uk

and the serious bel canto baritone roles. His greatest influence, however, bar his late auntie Ann Elizabeth Wilson to whom he dedicated his Kathleen Ferrier Award, is the Polynesian baritone Quinn Kelsey who gave him a lesson in New York. ‘We sang “Io morro” from Rodrigo’s death scene in Don Carlo in each other’s faces, and it was amazing to feel the power in his voice. Afterwards he said, “You’re definitely a Verdian baritone”. When it comes to what I sing, I will honestly just follow the voice, which is very transparent when it comes to whether it’s feeling comfortable or not.’ Indeed, further down the line, Benson Wilson does dream of singing Verdi. Let’s hope the right signs come from up above and his dreams come true. ON

Artist Profile

As Guglielmo in Bloomsbury Opera’s Così fan tutte

OperaNow January 2020

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Feature

Opera in China BEIJING MUSIC FESTIVAL

Opera –

China’s latest cultural export to the West

By Thomas May

The popularity of Western music in China continues to grow, giving a new impetus to operas by Chinese composers and works based on contemporary Chinese themes. Opera Now visited the Beijing Music Festival, where the latest cross-cultural trends in opera were brought to the fore

T

A scene from the Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Angel’s Bone by Du Yun 24

he reopening of the Central Conservatory in Beijing in 1977 marked a dramatic turning point for culture in China. In tandem with the explosive economic growth of more recent decades, and even in the face of the current trade wars, the hunger for Western music in the People’s Republic of China remains voracious. The sheer proliferation of institutions connected with classical music – performance venues, festivals, competitions, orchestras and opera houses – is astounding.

This development has also given rise, increasingly, to a view of China as the future if not indeed the ‘saviour’ of Western classical music. But what sort of future can we expect? My visit to the Beijing Music Festival (BMF) last autumn revealed some exciting directions for opera.

BMF’s rapid evolution and bold ambition in some ways encapsulate the larger cultural trends that have been unfolding in 21st-century China. The latest festival showed how opera in particular is taking hold in Chinese culture today. The festival, a venture presented jointly by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and the Beijing Municipal Government, was founded

January 2020 OperaNow

in 1998 by Long Yu and is the nation’s most expansive classical music festival. Yu, 55, is a conductor and organiser who has been likened to both Herbert von Karajan and Valery Gergiev in the West – and whose detractors have similarly drawn attention to his connections with political power. A familiar figure in the West, he now helms three orchestras in mainland China (Yu signed an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon contract with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra in 2018).

BMF’s inaugural year coincided with the spectacular and widely seen ‘on-site’ production of Turandot at the Forbidden City (produced by Beijing-based China National Opera and directed

by Zhang Yimou). The production was typical of standard repertoire that still characterises much of China’s opera industry, as well as the penchant for traditional, monumental productions.

For example, Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts – an enormous ovoid structure of which the 2,400-seat Opera Hall is just one component – typically presents such fare as Hugo De Ana’s La Scala staging of Il trovatore (with the excellent Guangzhou Symphony in the pit), which www.operanow.co.uk

Opera in China

www.operanow.co.uk

ZU QING

numbered among the capital’s competing attractions during BMF’s final week.

Yu has a special passion for opera. He launched his career, after a period of study in Berlin, by returning to his native China to conduct at Beijing’s Central Opera Theatre. From BMF’s early days, he cultivated the Festival as a platform for some of the most significant events in China’s current opera scene. For core Western repertoire, this has meant filling the Wagner gap: BMF presented mainland China’s firstever Ring cycle in 2005 (in a production by Stephen Lawless originally for Staatstheater Nürnberg) and has also introduced Tannhäuser and Parsifal.

These endeavours are, however, only one component of BMF’s opera agenda. New commissions from both Chinese and foreign composers have been at least as important. In 2010, for example, the festival presented two major new operas: Ye Xiaogang’s Song of Farewell and Zhou Long’s Madame White Snake (co-commissioned with Opera Boston), which received the first Pulitzer Prize in music awarded to a Chinese composer.

The Eurocentric tendency to think of the Cultural Revolution’s aftermath in terms of the desire to ‘catch up’ with the Western canon ignores the devastation that Mao’s policies wrought on China’s own musical heritage.

The legacy of Peking Opera and even of traditional Chinese instruments was severely suppressed, while permitted repertoire was reduced to a limited pool of heavily propagandist ‘model’ operas or ballets.

(One of these, The Red Detachment of Women, figures in John Adams’ opera Nixon in China.

Adams’ work has yet to be presented in China.)

In some ways, the return to Chinese folktale in Madame White Snake and to the milieu of Peking Opera in Song of Farewell (which draws on the film Farewell My Concubine) reflects an attempt to re-engage with Chinese traditions – even if, in

Feature

Above: Long Yu: China’s the case of Ye Xiaogang’s score, the results have been answer to Karajan and dismissed by some critics as ‘neo-Puccini’ in style Gergiev and sentiment. The recent edition of BMF included Inset: BMF artistic director a newly reworked, purely symphonic distillation of Shuang Zou: ‘There is a Song of Farewell that was quite affecting as performed huge hunger in China to by the China Philharmonic led by Huang Yi. see new things onstage’ BMF’s latest commissions are following even newer paths. In 2016, Shuang Zou joined the BMF staff as associate programme director, and Long Yu made her artistic director in 2018. Like her mentor Yu, Zou comes from a prominent musical family (her father and grandfather made their names as composers).

She studied film and stage in London, developing a passion for cutting-edge trends in music theatre that has been defining her tenure so far at BMF. ‘I realised there is a huge hunger in China to see new things onstage,’ Zou told me when we met during the recent festival. Regarding the theme she chose for this (22nd) edition of BMF, which carried the title ‘Timeless Music into the Future’, she explained that she wants to encourage Festival audiences to appreciate not just the traditional repertoire ‘but to explore new expectations about what music can do, how it can be part of our lives.’

An especially thrilling example of this was the presentation of the mainland China premiere of Angel’s Bone, the Pulitzer Prize-winning opera (2016)

by Chinese-American composer Du Yun, to Royce Vavrek’s libretto. In our conversation shortly before the first of two performances of the work at Beijing’s › OperaNow January 2020

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Opera in China

Poly Theatre, Zou acknowledged some nervousness as to how its troubling subject matter would be received: the angel protagonists become the victims of abuse and sex trafficking by the ‘host’ family where they have been offered shelter.

‘It’s unusual for Chinese audiences to see opera address real life in this way,’ remarked Song Tu, BMF’s programme director. At the same time, pride in the prestige that Du Yun (a native of Shanghai) has earned in her adopted country attracted a curious audience to what proved to be an unforgettably gripping operatic experience.

Du Yun’s brilliant fusion of hybrid musical elements (including even oblique references to musical gestures from Peking Opera) wasn’t the only music theatre work on offer that suggested an alternative to the grand opera conventions many Chinese have come to associate with the genre. In a small experimental space in the lively Sanlitun District, Michel van der Aa’s ‘virtual reality’ opera EIGHT attracted the adventure-minded. Here, the European avant-garde struck a resonant chord with China’s techno-minded young generation.

Meanwhile, the first ever Chinese performance of Handel’s Xerxes – in a semi-staged concert presentation at the Forbidden City Concert Hall – reminded me that whole areas of repertoire familiar to us in the West can strike Chinese audiences who are not used to Baroque style and sensibility as another kind of ‘new music’. The performance by the Pariswww.operanow.co.uk

based period instrument group Opera Fuoco, led

by David Stern, was delectably tasteful and pointed, though I wondered whether the more interpretively aggressive approach of a Teodor Currentzis might have engaged the audience at a deeper level.

BMF also announced a new three-year partnership, to begin in 2020, with the Opéra-Comique in Paris, with co-productions of Carmen and Madame White Snake among the ventures already in the works. Zou believes this initiative is another way to promote a new kind of dialogue: one that takes those invested in the art beyond the limitations inherent in conventional distinctions between East and West.

‘I would like the international artists who come here to think of this as an international platform and not just a Chinese platform,’ says Zou. ‘My hope is that the energy here can spread out to the West so people think differently of China today and can also benefit from what we have learned about creating energy with our audience’. ON

Feature

A scene from Madame White Snake by Zhou Long, the first Chinese composer to win a Pulitzer Prize for music

Crossing continents: Members of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra at the BMF, with composer Du Yun and artistic director Shuang Zou (centre)

OperaNow January 2020

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Love Is in the Air

THE 2020 WINTER OPERA FESTIVAL Join us for a season you will LOVE! Puccini’s

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Feb 8–Mar 21, 2020 Donizetti’s

The Elixir of Love Feb 22–Mar 21, 2020

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Romeo & Juliet Feb 15–Mar 20, 2020 Catalani’s

La Wally

Mar 7–22, 2020

Opera Lovers Weeks

March 4–22, 2020 See all 4 Winter Festival productions in as little as 3 days.

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Company Profile

OPERA2DAY

A new recipe for opera in the 21st century

By Simon Mundy

Whether it’s a Baroque pastiche, a favourite classic or something completely new, OPERA2DAY’s productions challenge traditional notions of what opera can mean in the modern world. Opera Now followed them on tour in Holland to watch the company at work

I

t is hard to think of an opera company less conventional than OPERA2DAY. Indeed it might be said to be a long running project that has evolved into a permanent organisation, rather than a company in the traditional sense – though it uses – and reuses – a team of performers and producers that has become familiar with its eccentric demands.

Based in The Hague, the company tours The Netherlands, particularly to those medium size towns that have a decent municipal theatre that almost never presents opera more than once or twice a season. They mount site-specific productions too, venturing as far afield as Buenos Aires. Most unconventional of all, it is a contemporary music company immersed in the Baroque for some of its productions, and in community participation.

Fundamentally the company has created a 21st-

www.operanow.co.uk

century recipe for opera that could almost certainly not have been imagined, let alone publicly funded, in any other era.

OPERA2DAY is a team operation, far more so than an opera house structure could support. This was driven home to me when I realised that to talk to one person on the team is neither enough nor tolerated.

When I met the team backstage in Amstelveen before a version of Dangerous Liaisons moulded to Vivaldi’s music, Argentinian music director Hernán Schvartzman was so full of fever he should have been in bed, let alone talking a couple of hours before a long performance. But there was no question that he wanted to have his say. The leadership is threepronged, with Herńan joined by artistic and stage director Serge Van Veggel and managing director Alice Gubler.

Last year’s production of Liaisons Dangereuses, as Vivaldi might have had it

›

OperaNow January 2020

29

Company Profile

Above: Devising sitespecific performances: Madhouse Fair set in a derelict asylum Inset: Michael Chance and Hannah Hoekstra in Tsoupaki’s Mariken In The Garden Of Delights

DEEN VAN MEER

30

OPERA2DAY

Serge and Hernán started in 2007 with a production of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen in The Hague, where Hernán was studying in the Early Music department at the Royal Conservatory. Hernán was conducting again when Michael Chance put together a 2009 Conservatory staging of Handel’s Venice opera, Agrippina, for its tercentenary. Chance said in the programme that they began with ‘no company, no money, no part of the necessary structure,’ but that he hoped ‘the energy, wit and passion...will inform the future work of all involved.’ A decade on it clearly has. Chance continued his association in 2015, singing the role of the Pope in Calliope Tsoupaki’s newly commissioned opera to a 500-yearold Dutch mystery play, Mariken In The Garden Of Delights.

OPERA2DAY’S first professional production was of Scarlatti’s La Giuditta. In 2013, the company received its first official structural funding. Even before that they combined with Juventus Lyrica in Argentina for Don Giovanni and performed the first Così fan tutte on period instruments there. Alice Gubler says, ‘we’ve seen how fast the Early Music movement has evolved on the other side of the world.

When we first went there

January 2020 OperaNow

we needed to take the main instrumental players with us, but now there is no need.’

In 2012, they signalled their intent to move beyond reconstructing complete works in a theatre. Dolhuys Kermis (Madhouse Fair), a series of laments and mad songs based on the Anatomy of Melancholy and the music of Monteverdi and Carissimi, was staged in NEBO Hospital, an asylum empty for 20 years, in which the audience moved through the building to find the singers acting as patients in its barren rooms. ‘It could be funny at times but it was really touching,’ says Serge. ‘It’s still our darling,’ adds Alice. ‘We’re really proud of it.’

The search for the meaning of opera in our times plus the constant search for extra funding nudged them to involve the wider community in their productions. As a prequel to Don Giovanni, they developed a Facebook opera with a storyline devised through online involvement by Dutch schools. They feel for once that the changes in political direction have done them a favour, making them see the work, as Hernán says, ‘not just as opera projects but theatre work with many different layers.’

These days, the company’s work involves local amateur theatre groups as well as schools. ‘We always wanted to work with amateurs because too often they don’t come to opera which they see as old and dusty. So we bring them in,’ says Alice, ‘of course without compromising the professional quality of the production. We search for a logical moment in the www.operanow.co.uk

OPERA2DAY dramaturgy to let them participate in an active way, sometimes in just a short scene.’ By having them on stage, for instance, as extras and sometimes even as props (the night I went to see Vivaldi – Dangerous Liaisons several were being sat on or treated as table legs) Hernán says the audience profile has changed.

As well as the youngsters from secondary schools and their parents, now the amateurs’ friends come to see them and discover opera.

‘As an example: in Vivaldi – Dangerous Liaisons, there are about 25 local participants in each city we visit,’ says Serge, ‘and we take them seriously. They spend the full day rehearsing and they are part of us, of the company. It also makes a dramatic point if the people from the town are the on-stage servants, propping up the world of the Baroque elite. Local schools also participate, making props and exhibiting them during the interval – opera workshops become exactly that. It brings us a highly involved audience.

The participants and their families and friends come to regard the opera as their very own production.’

Co-productions with other companies are an important basis of the way OPERA2DAY works.

Mostly, they partner up with specialised ensembles, like the New European Ensemble, but more and more also with other opera houses. There is the continuing collaboration with Juventus Lyrica in Buenos Aires (last year for a ‘compact’ version of Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet) and in 2019 with Netherlands Bach Society on Vivaldi – Dangerous Liasons. This January, next to their own new production Opera Melancholica, they team up with the designers of Studio Drift and Baroque ensemble La Sfera Armoniosa in a production of the Nederlandse Reisopera (Netherlands Touring Opera) for a fresh look at Monteverdi’s Orfeo, a theme they have already explored in their tribute to Charpentier, La Troupe d’Orphée. In the city of Utrecht, they even partner a restaurant for evenings of opera and fine dining.

The company does not shy back from the 19th century, as in Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet.

Contemporary music is also in the mix, such as the work commissioned from Calliope Tsoupaki and the upcoming The Fall of the House of Usher by Philip Glass. Very OPERA2DAY-like, however, they will embed the Dutch premiere of Glass’s opera in a larger project called Opera Melancholica. Whatever the genre, though, there is something infectious about the enthusiasm of OPERA2DAY and an energy that makes the occasional rough edge or mishap a consequence of justifiable experiment. There are plenty of opera houses championing pure and freshly directed productions. There is room for one, and surely a few others, that expand the possibilities. ON

Company Profile

Above: Exploring the Orpheus myth in La Troupe d’Orphée Below: Opera Melancholica: OPERA2DAY’s new psychological thriller, channelling the music of Philip Glass

OPERA2DAY’s Opera Melancholica opens at the Royal Theatre in The Hague on 29 January 2020 and will be touring The Netherlands until 18 March. www.opera2day.nl www.operanow.co.uk

OperaNow January 2020

31

Opera Directors

Feature

Are opera directors saviours or scourges?

Helena Matheopoulos introduces some of the themes she will be exploring in a new series profiling opera directors and their impact, positive or otherwise, on how we experience opera as a living, contemporary art form

ENRICO NAWRATH

Frank Castorf ’s Ring Cycle at Bayreuth got a big critical thumbsdown for its waywardness with Wagner’s storytelling

32

T

he Director in opera is a highly controversial and increasingly omnipotent beast. He (and these days she) has had, and continues to have, a colossal, hotly contested impact on the development of opera and its audiences.

‘The most bitterly fought-over aspect of opera is no longer dueling composers or rival singers, but opposing styles of direction,’ wrote the New York Times. ‘At one extreme, the traditionalists who cling to old fashioned, “naturalistic” productions, vent on Facebook pages and are quick to condemn as “Eurotrash” almost any innovation that would not be recognisable to a given work’s composer; at the other, fans of content-driven “director’s opera” who welcome radical, provocative re-interpretations that sometimes bear little resemblance to the libretto, and who dismiss traditional stagings as stodgy reenactments lacking dramatic vitality.’

Deified or vilified (sometimes deservedly so) in equal measure, The Director has contributed decisively to the ever increasing popularity of opera

January 2020 OperaNow

in the late 20th and 21st centuries, a period which has seen an exponential growth in the reach of opera.

New opera festivals mushroom every season; the hugely popular, almost always sold-out live relays from the Metropolitan Opera are seen in more than 3,000 cinemas worldwide, followed by those from the Royal Opera House. Occasions such as the last weekend in July 2016, when British opera lovers stayed home, glued to their TV sets for two days for the first ever ‘Wagner Marathon’, televised from Bayreuth on Sky Arts TV. Sadly, Frank Castorf’s hideous production, lurching from kebab van to petrol station, was judged by the weight of critical opinion to be a conceptually and visually dismal example of directorial arrogance.

Yet such popularity is not, by any means, a given.

The question is: Would opera have survived and thrived in an era dominated by cinema, TV and now digital formats that define dramatic credibility, without The Director’s crucial contribution to its modernisation? Is the director a saviour or, as some singers, conductors and many opera-goers maintain, a scourge?

Opinions differ violently. But the stage director is undoubtedly responsible for the fact that opera is now ‘hot’ enough to attract major artist figures who work beyond its confines. For example, Julie Taymor who directed the now classic Magic Flute at the Met won her spurs on Broadway and in the West End. And opera has drawn in film directors including Sofia Coppola (La traviata in Rome), Marco Bellocchio, (Andrea Chénier, also in Rome) and recently, James Gray (Le nozze di Figaro in Paris). From the visual arts, we find painter William Kentridge (The Nose, Lulu and Wozzeck at the Met and ENO) and sculptor Anish Kapoor (set designer, Tristan und Isolde, ENO).

Architects Herzog de Meuron of Tate Modern fame were the set designers for Attila at the Met. Meanwhile, fashion designers have embraced opera with a passion: Christian Lacroix, the late Karl Lagerfeld, Valentino, Miuccia Prada, Giorgio Armani, the Missonis, Zandra Rhodes, the late Gianni Versace, the Mulleavy sisters of Rodarte, and enfants terribles Gareth Pugh and Viktor www.operanow.co.uk

Feature

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a particular work. A perfect example of the humility in this respect is the distinguished Hollywood director James Gray, creator of thought-provoking blockbusters such as the recent Ad Astra, starring Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones. Gray is an avid opera lover who knows the words of many Verdi and Puccini operas by heart and whose recent staging of Le nozze di Figaro in Paris was a gem (see my review on page 64 of this issue). Asked about his approach to the work prior to the premiere, he replied, ‘My aim is firstly not to do the work any harm, to be as faithful as I can to its spirit. Nozze is a perfect opera that doesn’t need me to superimpose any manner of “concept” onto it. Am I smarter than Mozart? I don’t think so! My job is simply to service him.’

Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera (the man responsible for the Live from the Met relays) believes ‘a stage director can be both a saviour and a scourge! What I’m interested in are directors capable of moving audiences emotionally and furthering the art form. Directors capable of achieving this – even if they’re not successful all the time – are saviours. On the other hand, opera is a collaborative art form, and what makes it so thrilling is the amalgamation of theatricality, musicality and visuals. If a director feels that his slice of the cake is more important than any of the others, he is a bad stage director, he is a scourge.

And if a conductor thinks that the dramatic side is less important than the musical, he is a bad operatic conductor. There has to be a balance, and I am a mediator between these forces. I see myself as a matchmaker. I try to hire artists who will work well together: directors who respect the music and conductors who respect the stage.’ ON

BERND UHLIG

& Rolf – there is a long and ever growing list of leading artist from all walks of creative life who have been lured by the charms of opera.

None of this would have happened had the stage director not propelled opera out of its old fashioned straitjacket and into the swing of modernity – provoking plenty of attention and strong responses from audiences and in the media.

The vociferous controversy, extensive publicity and bilious social media activity generated over the most avant garde, revolutionary productions – plus the opportunities for innovations in staging opened up by new technologies – appeal not just to some experienced opera buffs who yearn for a new take on well known works (provided, crucially, that it does not violate the spirit of the composer), but also to wider, often younger, art-loving audiences, for whom the use of installations, digital projections and other up-to-the-minute visuals make opera a new and exciting experience.

In a recent interview in Opera Now, Oliver Mears, Covent Garden’s new director of opera, agrees that ‘there’s a big and rather tedious debate going on these days: Regietheater [concept-led productions] versus traditional productions, and I don’t believe it’s a useful distinction. Productions are either good or bad.

Gratuitously subversive, avant garde stagings can be as boring as some traditional productions. In my view, directors can be as bold as they want, as long as they channel the spirit and energy that made the composer write the piece – a very different thing to some totally fictitious idea of “what the composer would have wanted”. That’s the way to keep the art form alive!’

Mears is spot on in pinpointing that the ultimate criterion is the director’s motive in choosing to stage

Opera Directors

‘Deified equal m decisive opera in Moonstruck: Paris Opera’s space-age La bohème was roundly booed on opening night, though director Claus Guth’s stagecraft was judged impeccable

OperaNow January 2020

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Jonathan Miller

Opera Directors

CATHERINE ASHMORE

The man with the

Mozart touch

By Helena Matheopoulos

Jonathan Miller had a particular way with Mozart opera that resulted in a string of classic productions with top-flight artists. One of the most notorious, though ultimately successful, was his staging of Così fan tutte in collaboration with fashion designer Giorgio Armani, an unlikely coupling that worked – thanks to the timely intervention of a cat…

M

y last and longest meeting with Sir Jonathan Miller took place at his handsome house in London’s affluent Primrose Hill. He had the gift of creating instant informality and the ability to establish an immediate rapport with people. The personification of ‘shabby chic’, he would sort of amble in, usually in a long tweed coat, with a long-legged stride which always made me think, somehow, of a labrador. However, the relaxed, easy-going atmosphere at his spacious home was enhanced by the presence not of a dog but of a cat which roamed in and out from the garden at will and which, unbeknownst to him until years later, divided its time equally between him and his neighbours.

Eventually, a cat also played a crucial part in establishing instant empathy and mutual rapport at Miller’s first meeting with the world famous fashion designer, Giorgio Armani, whom he chose to design the clothes for his acclaimed 1995 production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte at the Royal Opera House. The action was set in a contemporary photographer’s studio – a place he found inspirational because of its ‘white, space-like infinity’. The two sisters, Dorabella and Fiordiligi (sung by Susan Graham and Amanda Roocroft) were involved in the fashion business and Despina was their secretary, instead of a servant. The war that their lovers, dressed in battle fatigues, were supposed to be leaving for was in Bosnia (then very much in the news) and a CNN camera was at hand to record their departure. www.operanow.co.uk

What, I wondered, inspired this fresh, sparkling, Jonathan Miller in action: rehearsing with the cast of highly inventive staging? ‘Così is a timeless story. It Così fan tutte doesn’t happen anywhere in particular, it happens everywhere. And that’s what I wanted to put across in this production. In my view the piece is not about fidelity and deception. It’s about identity, about disguise or, if you like, the danger of disguise. At the back of my mind was a story my mother wrote at the end of the [Second World] War, about how differently people behaved the moment they were in uniform.

Disguised people become someone else and do things they wouldn’t normally do… In the process, they may even discover they are someone else, someone different from the person they thought they were.’

The production, according to Sir Nicholas Payne, then the Royal Opera’s Director of Opera, came about when Miller who, after so many landmark productions at ENO, (including historical stagings of Rigoletto, Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute and The Mikado, the latter still revived this season), was finally about to make his belated debut at Covent Garden, and ‘would never have agreed to direct a revival of an old production of Così fan tutte.’ But Covent Garden had virtually no budget for a new one. So when, over lunch, Payne mentioned the figure available – barely £30,000 for both sets and costumes – he expected the answer to be no. ‘But, to my surprise and relief, after a pause for reflection he accepted – provided he was allowed to design and practically build the sets himself in our technical department, which he › OperaNow January 2020

35

Opera Directors

Above: Jonathan Miller looks on as an exuberant Giorgio Armani plants a kiss on Susan Graham on the opening night of Così fan Tutte at Covent Garden in 1995 Below: Giorgio Armani’s original designs for the Così costumes for Dorabella and Fiordiligi

36

Jonathan Miller eventually did, with the help of five assistants!’

As Così is not based on any writer or pre-existing text, ‘a modern production seems almost truer to its spirit than setting it in period sets and costumes.

Having decided on this point of view and bearing in mind the non-existent budget, the team thought, “Why not have the cast wear real clothes rather than specially designed costumes?” Jonathan suggested asking a well known fashion house, such as Armani (having passed the Emporio Armani boutique on his way to the opera house), if they would be interested in supplying the clothes. After all, a Covent Garden production would be good promotion for them so they might consider giving us the clothes for free.’

Giorgio Armani accepted the commission after long, protracted negotiations, because he felt that Miller’s concept of a modern Così in a contemporary setting was in tune with his own design philosophy and style. ‘Jonathan Miller wanted my clothes because they are considered a symbol of contemporary fashion and he wanted to do something modern, elegant, with lots of atmosphere and poetry. I felt inspired by him. It was a pleasure to work with a great director – and one who was so well dressed.’

A cat was instrumental in establishing this instant mutual sympathy between the two.

Miller remembered that when he arrived at Armani’s Milan palazzo for their first meeting, he unthinkingly flung his coat over a sofa, as was his wont.

Armani’s staff, aware that their obsessively tidy master could not tolerate even a stray hair out of place (he allegedly dictates the number of centimeters between the clothes hangers in his shops),

January 2020 OperaNow

froze and assumed that the collaboration was doomed before it even started! ‘But as luck would have it, one of Armani’s adored Siamese cats saw fit to leap onto the coat and, having approved it as a perfect resting place, settled down to a loud purr. As soon as Armani walked into the room, he pronounced himself enchanted by the pretty sight, to general sighs of relief…’

The two masters of their art worked well together.

Armani declared that he ‘believed in Miller’s genius’, while the latter relished the fact that ‘Armani’s understated style is the opposite of traditional “grand opera” style.’ He was also delighted with his cast, especially the American mezzo Susan Graham, who sang Dorabella: ‘a very special presence and an electrifyingly funny actress. In fact, one of the few opera singers who could walk straight off the operatic stage and into the movies. She belongs to the world of Diane Keaton: witty, ironic, a real New York American funny girl. Working with her was pure pleasure.’

The buzz generated by this production was incredible. Nothing like the mass hysteria in the tabloid press had been seen at Covent Garden since John Cox’s superb staging of Richard Strauss’s Capriccio in 1991, with costumes by Gianni Versace.

The Armani clothes in Così were so delectable and universally coveted, even by the singers themselves – Sir Thomas Allen, who sang Don Alfonso was eventually allowed to keep his cashmere blazer – that special security had to be deployed at the stage door to ensure they were not stolen! Armani attended the third or fourth performance, after which he gave a magnificent sit-down dinner at the elegant, atmospheric (before the House’s latest refurbishment) Crush Bar. Nicholas Payne recalls that ‘it was not the usual four-course meal, but an outstanding menu with exceptional vintage wines, which must have cost more than the entire production. I didn’t dare ask, but I bet it did!’

When a revival is planned of any production, usually the opera house’s wardrobe department brings the costumes out of storage and adjusts them to the measurements of the new cast. In this case, however, Armani’s wish was for Covent Garden to use his latest collections every time a revival was staged. He duly supplied new outfits for the first revival in 1997 (I vividly remember a fabulous purple crêpe trouser suit for Soile Isokoski, the new Fiordiligi), but then he realised that he could not realistically continue doing this indefinitely.

For the second revival, in 1998, Miller decided to use clothing from Marks & Spencer. The gesture was somehow typical of the man. Miller, who at the time of the original premiere had become irritated by the excessive publicity surrounding the Armani costumes, declared that he preferred these ‘nameless’ garments for subsequent revivals due to his fear that the costumes might upstage the dramatic side of the production. His fear proved groundless. The clothes www.operanow.co.uk

didn’t overshadow either the story or the music (as if they ever could!). This extraordinarily successful production remains the landmark staging of Così in recent times and was revived eight times until 2012.

Several years before this meeting about Così, I had encountered Jonathan Miller at an interview room at ENO to discuss his productions of The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni in 1985, which launched the international career of William Shimell, who sang the title role.

Miller’s view of Don Giovanni was as ‘a man who is intoxicated by women and who has a chronic addiction to sexuality. To join eyes with a woman or glance at a pair of legs is instantly to be drawn into some sort of contact. He is so attractive to women because he is so attracted by them. Of course, his inability to form any attachment that outlasts lust leads to a trail of injury, especially at a time when the convention of the day had it that liaisons of this sort meant that a woman would be dishonoured and so on.’ The ending in this production was unique: instead of descending to hell with an almighty yell, engulfed by the flames, Don Giovanni arrived in the other world to face a posse of women waving babies at him.

I caught up with Miller again at the 1991 Vienna Festival where he directed a vintage production of Le nozze di Figaro conducted by Claudio Abbado and starring Ruggero Raimondi as the Count and Cheryl Studer as the Countess, which later transferred to the Metropolitan Opera in New York. It was one of the

Jonathan Miller

Opera Directors

best productions of Figaro I have ever seen, classical and set within its period but with a revolving circular set that allowed the action to move at a very fast pace, thus making the audience actually experience the opera’s hectic one-day time span, the Folle Journée, most effectively.

Looking back, it seems obvious that Mozart was the backbone of Miller’s output throughout his career. Apart from the three Da Ponte operas, he also directed Idomeneo in Florence, with Vesselina Kasarova, with whom he forged a strong rapport as Idamante. He likened the Bulgarian mezzo to ‘a fresh apple and I hope she’ll always remain this way’. She in turn offered an interesting insight into his way of working with singers. ‘He was marvelous because he didn’t try to impose an interpretation, that’s not his style. He just threw ideas at me, allowed them to sink in, and let me create my own portrayal. By the time he directed me in a production of Mitridate re di Ponto, first at the Mozart Week and later at the 1997 summer Festival in Salzburg, our rapport was almost telephatic. We had exactly the same ideas about the character of Farnace, who is usually portrayed as solely bad. But he is not just “bad” but a very strong, powerful personality. Like Idamante or Sesto in La clemenza di Tito, he evolves a lot during the course of the opera. In any case, as Jonathan pointed out, Mozart characters are never black and white, good or bad, but very rich, complex, many-sided people.’ ON

The cast of Così fan Tutte dressed to impress

by Giorgio Armani

CATHERINE ASHMORE

www.operanow.co.uk

OperaNow January 2020

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Opera & Gender

Feature

Ladies, gentlemen

and everyone in-between

‘The image is a homage to the world of theatre, to all the performers who transform themselves into kings and queens, warriors, sorceresses, princes and princesses, lovers, who wear crowns, swords, helmets, beards, gowns, skirts…’ Cecilia Bartoli › www.operanow.co.uk

OperaNow January 2020

39

Feature

Opera & Gender KEN HOWARD

By Claire Jackson

With its historic traditions of cross-dressing and role-reversals, opera has always been way ahead of the curve in its approach to gender. Today, the artform continues to challenge and explore, blurring the boundaries of gender in ways that continue to surprise, amuse and delight…

D

Mezzo Jamie Barton as a thoroughly blokish Orpheus at the Metropolitan Opera 40

ressed in pin-striped trousers, a slategrey waistcoat and dark suit jacket, the grieving Orpheus in The Met’s revival of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice this season looks slick as he pines for his beloved Euridice, taken by the underworld. Director Mark Morris envisaged a Johnny Cash figure as the lovelorn lead: a brooding bloke with a guitar, set against soprano Hei-Kyung Hong’s delicate femme fatale beauty. It’s a convincing tale of lost love between a man and a woman – except in this production, Orpheus is sung by mezzosoprano Jamie Barton. Barton is comfortable evoking a conservative ideal of masculinity for this particular character: ‘I really love [Morris’s] idea of Orfeo as a man’s man – as the Man in Black was – but with a creative soul,’ she says in the programme notes.

‘That’s my kind of man!’

Casting a singer such as Barton in the role of Orpheus is not unusual: the character has been sung by the full spectrum of voice types, from countertenor to mezzo-soprano to baritone. It’s one of a number of roles that have historically enjoyed gender fluidity, a phenomenon that is on the rise in the opera world.

January 2020 OperaNow

Travesti performances have long been part of opera.

Trouser or ‘breeches’ roles have their roots in the 18th century, with Cherubino in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro the most famous example. As the count’s page, Cherubino’s lust for the countess is out of bounds, while hearing a young woman longing for a passionate encounter with another woman would have been perilously risqué. The cross-dressing element adds further complexity, and the plot takes a plunge into the meta when Cherubino (a female dressed as a man) is required to dress as a maid (a female dressed as a man, dressed as a female). A similar situation occurs in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, where Octavian (a trouser role) must also dress as a woman. As well as the story-telling on stage, the love scenes between two women (Octavian and Marschallin; Octavian and Sophie) provide the opportunity for glorious duets for females voices – and of course the famous trio for all three female characters in Act III. The role of Cherubino enjoys enduring fascination.

Jules Massenet dedicated a spin-off comic opera to the character, adapting Francis de Croisset’s play of the same name. It follows on from The Marriage of Figaro, imagining further farcical romps and Cherubino’s www.operanow.co.uk

Opera & Gender

Feature BETINA SKOVBRO

crushes on various female characters. The notorious diva Mary Garden gave the premiere at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo in 1905, delighting audiences as she/he haplessly fell in forbidden love. But in contemporary works, trouser roles are used in less titivating ways.

When Welsh National Opera premiered Elena Langer and Emma Jenkins’ excellent Rhondda Rips It Up! in 2018, their commitment to using an all-female cast and team meant that several parts required crossdressing. Top-hatted, cane-wielding Lesley Garrett was a superb besuited Emcee, guiding audiences through the real-life story of Welsh suffragette Lady Rhondda.

The opera can also be seen as a marker for how far the genre has come since Cherubino’s time, when samesex romances were treated as an erotic curiosity or used for comic effect: Rhondda Rips It Up! presents Rhondda’s relationship with journalist Helen Archdale as a romantic and supportive partnership.

Our changing views towards gender fluidity in opera reflect an art form continually in flux, stretching and adapting to the world it inhabits.

When the fashion for castrating prepubescent boys to prevent their voices from breaking was called into question in the late 18th century, female voices began to be used to perform castrati parts. By the mid-19th century, castrati were virtually non-existent, having been replaced by mezzo-sopranos who would crossdress for the stage. Historical castration remains a virtually taboo subject. In an interview to promote her BBC Two series Nights at the Opera in 2017, historian and presenter Lucy Worsley revealed to me that she had wanted to include some castration instruments she’d found, but that the topic was deemed too gruesome for the programme.

Above: Madeleine Shaw and Lesley Garrett in Welsh National Opera’s Rhondda Rips It Up! Left: Lucia Lucas, the first transgender opera singer on the ENO stage, as Public Opinion in Orpheus in the Underworld

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MARK DOUET

ezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli has been championing castrati repertoire for decades.

Her 2009 Decca album Sacrificium included 11 world premiere recordings by Antonio Caldara, Leonardo Vinci and Francesco Araia, among others. Bartoli has just released an album to commemorate the life and career of castrato Farinelli, who was one of the most famous singers of the early 18th century. Born to nobility, Farinelli was castrated at 12, having already demonstrated his aptitude for singing. He toured Europe, inspiring works such as Hasse’s Marc’Antonio e Cleopatra, where the gender for both leads was inverted: Farinelli sang Cleopatra while Vittoria Tesi, a contralto, was cast as Marc’Antonio. Bartoli’s recording Farinelli includes arias by Farinelli’s older brother Riccardo Broschi, and his teacher and mentor Nicola Porpora, including ‘Alto Giove’ from Porpora’s Polifemo.

‘Farinelli was a great artist and musician: the roles written for him show us how his talent inspired composers to create some of the most outstanding masterpieces of the 18th-century repertoire,’ explains Bartoli. ‘The vocal range of the castrati – and specifically Farinelli – was much larger than that of

other singers, so to perform arias written for the castrati requires training to achieve this extension.

Plus, castrati chests were larger, so they were able to maintain a big volume of air in their lungs, and consequently sing very long musical phrases without inhaling. These are only technical challenges, but of course there are also musical consequences: we find arias with terribly difficult coloratura passages and large intervals.’

For the Farinelli album cover, Bartoli is pictured with dark facial hair and smoky eye-liner. She is topless, protecting her modesty with crossed arms – revealing just a hint of a female chest. Dark painted nails complete the androgynous look; at a glance, this

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OperaNow January 2020

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Feature

Opera & Gender CLIVE BARDA

Manning up: Cecilia Bartoli as Ariodante at this year’s Salzburg Festival

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January 2020 OperaNow

Cecilia Bartoli’s latest album, Farinelli, is a Decca Classics release www.operanow.co.uk

MONIKA RITTERSHAUS

One of the boys: Kangmin Justin Kim as the Royal Opera House’s first countertenor Cherubino

could be Austrian singer and drag artist Conchita Wurst, winner of the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest and international gay icon. I suggest it is a bold image for an industry where the majority of album covers are still highly conservative. Bartoli disagrees: ‘Do you think I have taken any risk? It is a plain cover, no dresses, no jewels, no background – so quite simple.’ Well, yes, but what about the beard? ‘I am aware that most castrati did not have a beard,’ she says, tongue in cheek. ‘The image is much more a homage to the world of theatre, to all the interpreters, singers and actors who transform themselves into kings and queens, warriors, sorceresses, princes and princesses, lovers, who wear crowns, swords, helmets, beards, gowns, skirts, and so on.’

The end of castration led to an explosion of trouser roles, from Bellini’s Romeo in I Capuleti e i Montecchi to Prince Charming in Massenet’s Cendrillon.

Bartoli recently gave her debut as Ariodante in Handel’s eponymous opera, a love story featuring the Scottish princess Ginevra and Prince Ariodante.

Cross-dressing roles offer the singer wider opportunities, says Bartoli, and are ‘a lot of fun. I can explore a large range

of emotions, gestures, dresses, make up, hair, props, and with every new role and element I am given the opportunity to enrich my possibilities of expression.’

While society still has a long way to go when it comes to understanding – and respecting – gender fluidity and gender reassignment, the importance of exploring gender identity is on its way to wider acceptance. On a superficial level, there is a greater appetite for gender neutral presentation in areas such as fashion and children’s toys. Cross-dressing is now mainstream, with television shows such as RuPaul’s Drag Race drawing enormous ratings. Many people include their preference for gender identity on their social media accounts (‘she/her/Dr’) and those who identify as gender neutral use the term ‘non-binary’, using pronouns ‘they/them’. Non-binary mezzosoprano C N Lester has just published Trans Like Me (out now via Virago), a recommended introduction to the current conversations surrounding gender.

Our changing understanding of gender is being reflected in the opera house. Earlier this year, countertenor Kangmin Justin Kim made history when he became the first male singer to sing Cherubino at Covent Garden. Conductor John Eliot Gardiner, who proposed Kim for the role, told the Guardian that we’re seeing a ‘rather intriguing turning point’ in terms of gender politics. ‘I think Mozart would have been intensely amused.’ Similarly, baritone Lucia Lucas became the first transgender singer to perform with the English National Opera when she sung Public Opinion in Orpheus in the Underworld at the beginning of the 2019 season. (She was also the first female trans singer to perform a principal role in the US, as Don Giovanni with Tulsa Opera.)

The flexibility also applies to song repertoire outside of the usual castralto-mezzo substitution. Schubert’s Winterreise, that stalwart of tenor lieder, was recently recorded

by Catalan countertenor Xavier Sabata (Berlin Classics LC 06203). On 12 December mezzosoprano Alice Coote and pianist Julius Drake gave a recital of the same cycle, which the duo recorded back in 2014 (Harmonia Mundi). Boundaries continue to blur. Equity, the trade union that represents actors and entertainers, including some classical singers, has proposed that venues adopt gender neutral terminology when liaising with both audiences and stage crew.

It means that terms such as ‘ladies and gentlemen’ may eventually be phased out, reflecting the lack of gender division seen both on and off the stage. ON

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On a Personal Note

King’s Head Theatre

On a note SIMON WEBB

Adam Spreadbury-Maher is the artistic director of King’s Head Theatre, a small pub venue in North London which punches well above its weight when it comes to its fresh, intimate productions of opera, presented by Opera Undone

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pera Undone has a mission to attract new audiences, especially for opera. This is something to which I have dedicated myself for the past 10 years at our base at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington, a culturally lively and diverse district of London. I understand that for many, the very thought of entering an opera house can feel intimidating: the dress code, the idea of a performance in a foreign language, the cost of a ticket or exorbitant drinks at the bar, and indeed the stuffiness of the venue itself, can make opera seem impenetrable. Opera Undone opens the side door. Performing in a tiny theatre in the back room of a London pub, our shows ease newcomers into opera via a contemporary setting and a familiar tongue.

Habitual opera-goers, meanwhile, will find the same beloved story and music, but examined in a unique, intimate way.

In opera, there is a balance that needs to be struck between staying true to the authorship of a work while making it accessible to as many people as possible.

However, I don’t think any single approach to staging opera is a good thing. I certainly don’t apply this to my own work when it comes to deciding on ideas and concepts for Opera Undone. The emphasis for me falls more upon the stories themselves.

My love of music began as a child, learning to play the flute, clarinet and 44

January 2020 OperaNow

violin and then training as a soloist at the Canberra School of Music. I was also incredibly fortunate to grow up in Australia and see the wonderful plethora of work presented at the Sydney Opera House. It was during this time that I came to see opera as an all-encompassing solution for theatre. Dance, performance, music and language all amalgamate

to create something that, despite misconceptions, is entirely universal. As with the works of Shakespeare, operas are enduring. Their themes are timeless and their music takes us to the essence of the human condition, so they are infinitely open to the artistic vision of directors who want to say something about their own contemporary world.

JOSEPH SINCLAIR

Adam Spreadbury-Maher: ‘Humans have an insatiable interest in what makes other people tick. Now, perhaps more than ever before, we have the tools to excavate this’

The principals of Opera Undone’s La bohème: (back) Fiona Finsbury, Roger Paterson ; (front) Robert Barbaro and Honey Rouhani c

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King’s Head Theatre The question of text being fixed, in all senses – time, setting, language – depends upon where you place the focus and emphasis of your interpretation. With theatre and opera, the answer surely must be to consider, first and foremost, your audience. Literary theorist Roland Barthes described literature as ‘The trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.’ In other words, the intentions of an author or a composer are the starting point, not the goal, of any work of art. I think this is especially applicable to any form of theatre. A necessary part of the survival of opera is adaptation and change.

Your audience has to be integral to the production process. What do you want them to feel, recognise and understand?

Humans have an insatiable interest in what makes other people tick. Now, perhaps more than ever before, we have the tools to excavate this. Post Freud and Stanislavski, for example, we have an understanding of psychoanalysis and

theatre-practice that allows us to plumb emotional depths. So why not revisit these great works of the human condition and see what lies beneath the skin?

Opera Undone’s approach to Puccini’s Bohème or Verdi’s Tosca, which we will be performing in the Trafalgar Studios in London’s Whitehall, is to focus on the story’s universality rather than specifics such as the Italian language or its 19thcentury setting.

With Opera Undone, I want to be able to investigate the core ideas of a piece.

I feel especially steered towards the operas of Puccini, Verdi and Bizet. For me, their stories have qualities that echo a kitchen-sink drama, fixing on people in recognisable, everyday situations. Though these works lend a certain grandeur to their subjects, they tend to focus on the human rather than epic dimensions of the stories they tell. Puccini in particular has a domestic quality that makes his work so malleable to an English translation and a contemporary setting. With our upcoming

On a Personal Note

Opera Undone show, La bohème and Tosca will be paired together for a thoroughly contemporary telling of these two stories, giving us an opportunity to take a forensic look at themes that propel humanity, such as love, heartbreak and deception.

As for the next 10 years at the King’s Head, my hopes of course are to grow bigger, bolder and more experimental.

Opera Undone’s continuing success will lie in presenting work that I know will engage an audience, using the magic formula of placing a universal story into a contemporary context that will make sense to our audience, whether they are familiar with opera or not. Opera Undone will never displace traditional productions: there will always be a Royal Opera House!

However, as we flourish and reach our full potential, I believe we will certainly be a vital part of the future of opera. ON Opera Undone’s La bohème and Tosca will be playing at Trafalgar Studios from 5 February to 7 March 2020

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR A R T I SVA T I C ADNI R CE YC T O R VA C A N C Y COMMENCING 2021 ARTISTIC DIRECTOR COMMENCING 2021 A P P LVA I C AT ON N SCCYL O S E CIA 5 AT F EI O B N2 S 0 2C0L O S E A P P L I1C C O M1 M E N C I N 2021 5 F E B 2 0G2 0 A P P L I C AT I O N S C L O S E 15 FEB 2020 A P P LY

W W W. C A P E T O W N O P E R A . C O . Z A / VA C A N C I E S /

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Travel

Sardinia

Enchantment on a Mediterranean isle

By Anthony Ogus

Sardinia offers visitors a dazzling blend of landscapes, history and culture along with a lively season of opera that adds to the many charms of one of the Mediterranean’s most beguiling destinations

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One of Sardinia’s ancient nuraghes, with a dazzling view over the Med 46

had been wanting to visit Sardinia for some time. It was not just the influence of the warm and friendly Sardinian community in my local town of York, and their excellent restaurants in that city. It was also my reading of Sea and Sardinia

by D H Lawrence, surely one of the best travel books ever written. (If you are unfamiliar with it, you can download for free my audio book version from this link: bit.ly/2d0Hv9V.) A century or so later, the island may be less primitive than Lawrence describes, but it is just as characterful, the people courteous and hospitable, the food appetising – suckling pig and lobster risotto are two local specialities – and the wine very palatable. Lawrence and his wife Frieda (who throughout the book is referred to as the ‘Queen Bee’) were also impressed by the landscape. So were we: the rugged mountains in the east, the fertile plains and the dazzling views of the Mediterranean, particularly on the western coast at sunset.

Part of the fascination of the island lies in its history. Its geographical situation made it vulnerable to invasion and there are to be seen vestiges of occupation by the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Pisans and, perhaps most surprisingly, the Catalans who came across from Spain to rule Sardinia from the 13th to the 18th centuries. But, for visitors, the most striking remains are those of the Nuragic civilisation, dating from around 1500 BC. At the centre of their villages they built nuraghes, round tower fortresses, the size and complexity of which testify to the astonishing technological achievements of these people.

January 2020 OperaNow

The two largest towns, Sassari in the north and Cagliari, the capital in the south, are rewarding to visit, particularly the latter with its medieval quarter built on the hillside overlooking the port. And opera performances take place in both cities. In Sassari, at the Teatro Verdi, I caught Nino Rota’s Il cappello di paglia di Firenze. Based on The Italian Straw Hat, the French farce by Labiche and the silent film by René Clair, it is a light, zestful and tuneful piece with reminiscences of Rossini, Puccini and even Offenbach. Conceived by its composer purely as an entertainment, it would be wrong to present it any other way. But, to succeed, it does require style in performance. Unfortunately, the production by Lorenzo Maria Mucci was dull and conventional and disappointingly there was not much to laugh at. To give it some originality, there were occasional transpositions of the setting to a film studio but these sequences did not lead anywhere and were a waste of time.

Happily, the musical dimension made a stronger impression. The conductor Federico Santi offered a lively interpretation of the score, accentuating the pitter-patter rhythms of the operetta-like passages and drawing out the sentimentality of the romantic arias and duets. And there were some good voices present. As the bride who has to endure a very long wait for the nuptials, soprano Elisabetta Scano spun out some lovely soft phrases. The resonant basses, Francesco Leone and Marco Bussi, excelled as, respectively, the father of the bride and the cuckolded husband. Mezzo Aloisa Aisemberg made much of www.operanow.co.uk

Sardinia

her brief appearance as the Baroness who had only temporary possession of the straw hat.

The pivotal role of Fadinard, who has to find the eponymous hat to restore order and enable his wedding to proceed, was taken by Mauro Secci.

His bright tenor coped well with the demands Rota made of it, but – as though to epitomise the shortcomings of the evening – his stand-and-sing stage presence significantly undersold his part in the proceedings. What was needed was a Buster Keatonlike impersonation: a character overwhelmed by externally imposed adversity but able, sometimes through guile, sometimes through good fortune, to emerge unscathed and successful.

If the performance needed more punch and a sharper theatrical vision, allowances should perhaps be made for a small, provinical opera company.

Expectations were higher in Cagliari which has a long operatic tradition at the Teatro Lirico, now housed in a modern theatre which engages some international artists. So in the pit for Verdi’s Attila was the renowned conductor Donato Renzetti. From Verdi’s early-middle period, this work contains rousing melodic drive, but the forward-thrusting movement of the arias needs some nuancing in rhythm and phrasing if it is not to appear formulaic. And these qualities were lacking in Renzetti’s approach as he pushed forward in large sweeping gestures. Taking their cue from him, most of the soloists belted out the notes in an almost incessant forte, which no doubt was exciting and certainly pleased the audience but became tedious by the end of the evening. Marco Spotti in the title role was a welcome exception.

His more introverted portrayal involved dramatic reflection matched by softer musical utterances, pointed phrasing and vocal colouring. www.operanow.co.uk

The production, directed by Enrico Stinchelli and designed by Salvatore Russo, was a sumptuous show, the stage filled with a large chorus and extras including dancers, massive structures and a multitude of projected images and interesting lighting effects. But the totality was somewhat claustrophobic: as with the music, one yearned for understatement and simplicity. Moreover, the principal characters and their actions were not well integrated into all the hustle and bustle. It was as though the production had been created around them as they stood and delivered their bravura singing.

But let us not get too despondent about opera in Sardinia. Rather, we should take in the experience as part of the island’s inimitable charm. As Lawrence wrote, ‘The land resembles no other place...

Enchanting spaces and distances to travel – nothing finished, nothing definitive. It is like freedom itself.’ ON

Travel

Top: A scene from The Italian Straw Hat in Sassari’s Teatro Verdi Above: Marco Spotti as Attila at the Teatro Lirico di Cagliari

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Column

From the wings

By Adrian Mourby

What more can you do with La bohème?

Quite a lot as it happens. A young, small-scale company showed how a dependable old classic can be made fresh and modern, making perfect sense in a new context – with a little help from the surtitles

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once asked a celebrated director why he had never directed La bohème and his reply was refreshingly honest: ‘I can’t think of anything I’d want to do with it.’ La bohème is one of those bomb-proof operas. Puccini wrote it so precisely that all a director has to do is tell the singers where to stand, and to control the bratty children in Act II. In the score you can virtually hear the composer moving his characters around, footstep by footstep. For this reason, most Bohèmes look very like one another. The period may vary – and you can always relocate it to New York if you 48

January 2020 OperaNow

must – but essentially there seems to be no scope for auteurism.

La bohème in a nuclear reactor? La bohème on a lunar colony a thousand years hence? The usual directorial tricks just don’t work – as Claus Guth discovered to his cost when he set La bohème on the moon for Paris Opera.

The thing is, as a director, you don’t do anything with La bohème. You put Puccini’s late 19th-century masterpiece on stage for the audience to enjoy. At least that was what I thought until a few years ago when I saw a radical and brilliant La bohème in www.operanow.co.uk

From the wings Left: Lads on the lash: bringing La bohème into the modern age Below: Heart-wrenching: Joseph Buckmaster and Fiona Finsbury, superb in the roles of Rodolfo and Mimì

Helsinki in which the (always inexplicable and superfluous) figure of Parpignol was really the devil stalking and terrorising Mimì throughout her doomed affair with Rodolfo. It was clever – and it did work exceptionally well with the music. The equally inexplicable military band at the end of Act II were demonic figures conducted by Parpignol. And only Mimì could see them.

In the intervening years I have seen lots of La bohèmes and often shed a tear where Puccini intended to make his audience weep, but no director – from Japan to Seattle and all across Europe – has managed in my experience to reconceive the opera. That is, until director Daisy Evans got her hands on it in a converted brick church in the London suburb of Highgate.

In Hampstead Garden Opera’s La bohème, Mimì is already dead at the beginning of Act I. How had we missed this? Daisy’s production is set in 2009 with Rodolfo attending a grief support group (HGO’s eight-strong chorus). With their help he recalls being young 30 years ago in London with Marcello, Schaunard, and a denimdressing Colline. He is carrying a box marked ‘Mimì’, containing keepsakes from a woman whose death has haunted him since 1979.

There is a candle. There is a key. There is a little red bonnet.

When, in his memories, the boys all go off to Momus’ disco on Christmas Eve, Rodolfo is left alone. Straddling 2009 and 1979, he recalls Mimì so strongly that she enters through a door, reenacting with Rodolfo how they first met. Within a few minutes they are wrapped in each other’s arms, declaring how they love each other and could never love anyone else as much. What had always struck me as a ridiculous series of earnest protestations from two neighbours who have only just met, suddenly made a huge amount of sense once you realise that Rodolfo is telling Mimì’s ghost how much she has always meant to him and she, the ghost, is recreating their passion, undimmed by 30 years of grief.

Joseph Buckmaster and Fiona Finsbury were superb in these roles, she with the wide-eyed disbelief of a ghost still coming to terms with her own non-existence, and he perpetually plunging into the tears of what is still a raw and unbearable bereavement.

As Act I ended, Mimì slipped back through the door, leaving Rodolfo poignantly alone to sing the final ‘Amor’. This was one of many small liberties that Daisy Evans took with the score.

Marcello’s final cry of ‘Coraggio!’ was also cut – a shame for the excellent Peter Edge who played the painter and would have rendered it well – but it did mean that Rodolfo could be left painfully and wholly on his own with his pathetic box of memories as Puccini’s final notes died away.

Some other liberties were taken – legitimately – with the action. Mimì disappeared during the finale of Act II so the final catastrophic chords which usually accompany Alcindoro’s shock at receiving the composite bill became Rodolfo’s realisation that he was, despite his vibrant memories, still painfully alone.

The biggest liberties were taken with the surtitles, however.

Daisy Evans, who wrote them, made creative use of the fact that most opera-goers do not understand Italian, and so there were laughs to be had when the students address each other as ‘wanker’ or refer to the stove being ‘buggered’. Or indeed in exchanges like: ‘Do we need a tablecloth?’ – ‘No, use the Daily Mail.’ www.operanow.co.uk

Column

At the beginning of Act III, the scene of the chorus of dairymaids asking to be admitted to the city of Paris (Puccini delaying the action with a simple piece of local colour) became the women in the therapy group urging Rodolfo to ‘open up’.

The production certainly had a gloomy view of therapy. Over the course of the evening Rodolfo relived his experience of loving and losing Mimì 30 years ago and seemed no further through the process of grieving than when the opera began. But my goodness did the pain of that suffering hit the audience. In fact, it did so so repeatedly that the students’ horseplay came as necessary light relief rather than the level of assinity it so often achieves.

‘The period may vary but essentially there seems to be no scope for auteurism in La Bohème’ This was a bold, powerful, fresh-handkerchief-for-each-act production. Daisy Evans’ reconceptualising of Puccini’s opera made it more powerful rather than simply interesting. A bigger budget with an actual set (singers and the orchestra occupied the same empty space), and with a more complex lighting rig and some costume changes, could have made it clearer what was flashback and what was 2009, but the emotional impact would remain the same. This was a director finding in Puccini’s music things he may well not have known were there.

The 12-person orchestra under Juliane Gallant also deserves much praise. They used a reduced orchestration by Jonathan Lyness and I did not miss a single instrument. My celebrated director was wrong: there are things you can do with La bohème. I think Puccini himself might have been pleased with the result. ON

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LIVE REVIEWS Italy

Teatro alla Scala, Milan

Live Reviews

MUSIC STAGING

PUCCINI

Tosca Review by James Imam • Photography by Brescia e Amisano Taking place annually on the day of Sant’Ambrogio, the opening night of La Scala boasts unparalleled exclusivity. Yet, beamed onto 40 screens around Milan, it is also a citywide carnival to which all are invited

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taly staggers on as its economic and political crises persist, but the nation’s premiere cultural event is alive and kicking. Celebrities slipped out of blacked-out cars and fearlessly strode into a paparazzi scrum. Security men with earpieces shiftily surveyed the surrounding streets, while huddled riot police eyeballed distant protestors with loudspeakers and flares. Guests forked out up to €3,000 for tickets (those present included both halves of Dolce and Gabbana, and rock star Patti Smith).

Inside the ‘Temple to Italian Opera’, they bathed members of the new government and Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, in minutes of self-congratulatory applause.

Puccini’s ever-popular Tosca was on the playbill this year, and during the feverish build-up opera recordings were pumped through Metro stops, a Tosca-inspired graphic novel was circulated and forestloads of newspaper coverage investigated every aspect of the production and work.

Opera is, after all, a religion in Italy, and the ‘Prima’, or Opening Night, is its principal offering to the lyrical gods.

This year the stakes were especially high: this was general director Alexander Pereira’s final show before leaving for Florence’s Maggio Musicale. La Scala has been re-forged into a powerhouse of Italian opera during his tenure, and

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January 2020 OperaNow

Riccardo Chailly’s full cycle of Puccini operas in unusual versions has been a focus. Accordingly, Tosca was presented in a new critical edition, featuring the cuts the composer made before the work’s 1900 La Scala premiere.

The eight alternative passages we heard are relatively insubstantial; Chailly’s selection of the original version says

more about his commitment to musical archaeology. Stripping away the accumulated crust of performance routine, the conductor provided transparent surfaces, plastic tempi and clinical delivery of layers of honed detail to make the full complexity of Puccini’s music sparkle. By rinsing maximum colour and expression from the players, Chailly ensured the drama never flagged. www.operanow.co.uk

Live Reviews

Tosca is a high watermark for verismo precision, its music pre-empting the expressive clarity of a film soundtrack.

Crouched over his score, his arms pumping tirelessly, Chailly mined that radical vein, so that in the heady Te Deum one could almost smell the wafting incense evoked in the pit. In the extended, murkily aqueous section that follows www.operanow.co.uk

Italy

Above: Cinematic sweep: The Act I Te Deum in the recreated splendour of Sant’Andrea della Valle Right: Every inch the diva: Anna Netrebko as Tosca

Scarpia’s murder, it was clear Bergian expressionism was just around the corner.

Hideously manipulative and deliciously compelling, Luca Salsi as Scarpia invested his lines with Shakespearean intensity, › OperaNow January 2020

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Italy

Live Reviews Left: Francesco Meli (seated) as Cavardossi, under interrogation in the Palazzo Farnese Below: Luca Salsi as a compelling Scarpia with Netrebko’s Tosca almost succumbing

savouring every syllable. Anna Netrebko’s purring soprano delivered the goods, the singer drawing us in with greater containment and vulnerability than expected. A fleeting kiss hinted at genuine attraction between the two, before Tosca, pushed to the brink, almost yielded entirely.

Opting to murder her pursuer instead, before wildly staggering about as if in the mad scene Puccini’s librettist had been tempted to write for her, the red streak in her blue dress became, in retrospect, a premonition (costumes: Gianluca Falaschi).

Sets (by the architechtural design firm Giò Forma), including a sumptuous church of Sant’Andrea della Valle, a starkly-lit Palazzo Farnese and a shadowy Castel Sant’Angelo, were appropriately huge for a theatre that tends to enjoy lavish spectacle, especially on its Big Night. Director Davide Livermore provides sharp characterisations

and bright solutions to the challenges posed by the extended score. Rather than her final leap over the parapet, Tosca is suspended as if seen falling from above. In a flashback, a double with a knife re-enacts the murder.

Yet in taking the score’s proto-cinematic qualities as his stimulus, Livermore overstretches the point. Or perhaps he misses it entirely.

Monolithic scenery in constant motion was never likely to resemble convincingly camera zooms and panning shots. And, in a production clearly intended

primarily for the cinema rather than the theatre, showing detail already vividly depicted in the score (for example, Cavaradossi’s torture) risks dulling the overall impact through tautology.

Thanks to the fine musical performances, that did not happen. Tenor Francesco Meli, often full throttle in Verdi, sounded softer-grained in Puccini as he artfully negotiated shapely, pianissimo lines. The redoubtable Carlo Bosi was a sparkling Spoletta, Carlo Cigni an urgent Angelotti.

Alfonso Antoniozzi bumbled just as he should as the Sacrestan. The children’s chorus made a spirited contribution. While not famed for its interest in the opera itself, the flashy ‘Prima’ audience seemed palpably absorbed. ON

Inset: Tosca takes matters into her own hands Below: The final reckoning at the Castel Sant’Angelo

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Faust

THE 2020 FERRIER COMPETITION

GOUNOD’S

PRELIMINARY AUDITIONS

16-22 MARCH

Faust, a man hell bent upon winning his heart’s desires at any cost, even his soul...

FINAL AUDITIONS

21 & 24 APRIL AT WIGMORE HALL

Benson Wilson 2019 Winner

©emmabrownphotography

AT HENRY WOOD HALL, SE1

1st Prize £12,500 | 2nd Prize £6,000 Ferrier Loveday Song Prize £5,000 Help Musicians UK Accompanist’s Prize £5,000 Open to singers age 28 or under on 24 April 2020 who are resident or studying full-time in the UK or Eire. Full details and application forms available online.

Closing date for applications 3 February 2020.

Tickets for Semi-final and Final on sale February 2020 from Wigmore Hall.

www.ferrierawards.org.uk @FerrierAwards / FerrierAwards Kathleen Ferrier Memorial Scholarship Fund Registered Charity No 1028426

SUNG IN ENGLISH

20-22 FEBRUARY 2020, 7.30PM Roper Theatre, Upper Oldfield Park, Bath, BA2 3LA Tickets £20, £27 and students £10 Ticket hotline 01935 475219 bathopera.com Bath Box Office 01225 463362 bathboxoffice.org.uk

Italy

Live Reviews

FESTIVAL FOCUS

Donizetti Opera Festival, Bergamo Review by James Imam • Photography by Gianfranco Rota

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Angelic voices

ntil a decade ago, L’ange de Nisida, Donizetti’s mature opera, was believed lost.

That was before an Italian musicologist rediscovered it, filed in numerous boxes at Paris’ Bibliothèque Nationale. After being painstakingly stitched back together, the score was presented in a London concert performance in 2018. Now, Bergamo’s Donizetti Opera Festival has presented L’ange’s first ever staging.

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The Teatro Donizetti, Bergamo’s principal opera theatre, was chosen for the occasion. Or was it the other way round? Indeed, it was L’ange that had been selected to reopen the newly refurbished theatre. Alas, the project has fallen behind schedule, but artistic director Francesco Micheli stuck with the venue. Evidently prepared to take full responsibility for having scheduled a performance ‘in the building site of the Teatro Donizetti’, as it was ultimately billed, Micheli himself directed the production.

It seems that L’ange has been unlucky in its performance venues. Written in 1839, the opera was shelved after the Théâtre de la Renaissance, its commissioner, went into administration. The following year, Donizetti recycled much of the music for La favorite. The two operas have broadly similar plots: Leone de Casaldi, a wandering soldier, marries Countess Sylvia de Linarès only to discover she is the mistress of the dastardly Ferdinand, King of Naples. The drama culminates in Sylvia’s natural death, and the journey to the climax is sustained, if not by great narrative tension, by unflagging musical interest.

With the action taking place in the gutted stalls, the audience occupied boxes

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Live Reviews and a grandstand placed on the stage. The orchestra was positioned in the pit though the players sat back to front. That allowed conductor Jean-Luc Tingaud to keep an eye on the singers. When the chorus appeared in the lower gallery, on the other hand, audience members did not know where to look.

It was an immersive, at times delightfully disorientating performance, in which Micheli resourcefully conjured magic. The sheet music spread over a sheet on the floor – the score gestated inside the theatre’s womb, apparently – felt contrived, but stark switches in lighting, culminating in the chandelier descending at the end of Act I, were more visually effective. The moment courtiers ripped off beautiful, brightly coloured paper tunics was a real coup de théâtre.

Tingaud conducted incisively, and there were numerous interesting voices

to discover. Florian Sempey’s strapping Don Fernand effortlessly commanded the gaping performance space. Roberto Lorenzi as his haphazard servant Don Gaspar offered the dash of buffa spiritedness this work requires. South Korean Konu Kim (Leone) impressed with his ardent, soaring tone. The chief discovery, though, was the exceptional Russian soprano Lidia Fridman (Sylvia).

Eminently secure in filigree coloratura, she

Italy

also provided a vocal depth and richness belied by her delicate figure. An utterly memorable occasion.

Murder most foul

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he figure of Lucrezia Borgia has captured the imaginations of writers and dramatists throughout history. Little wonder, when the purported events of her life – the poisonings, the murder of her

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Below left: Francesco Micheli’s immersive staging of L’ange de Nisida Below: Vocal depth from Lidia Fridman Right: Carmela Remigio funnelling grief, menace and defiance as Lucrezia Borgia

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OperaNow January 2020

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Live Reviews

husband and the ‘Banquet of Chestnut’ orgies in which scrabbling courtesans were pursued by noblemen – are so salacious.

The BBC series The Borgias hinted at an incestuous relationship between Lucrezia and her brother; dramatist F M Klinger imagined an affair with Faust. And Victor Hugo, in his 1833 play on which Donizetti’s opera of the same year is based, reimagined Borgia’s dark past as a gothic thriller.

Andrea Bernard’s new production for the Donizetti Opera Festival goes back to this literary source. In his starkly-lit pseudo-medieval nowhere, Gennaro’s face-twitching cronies need little excuse to start a fight, the loutish Duke Alfonso d’Este looms over his servant Rustighello with a golf club, and black-and-white costumes comprising ruffs, skull caps and codpieces are splattered with blood. Borgia, tormented by the loss of her child, is a threat to herself and, it turns out, to others.

A panelled ceiling, rotated to represent the palace exterior wall emblazoned with the name ‘[B]orgia’, is the only real reference to time and place we get. Abstract and economical, this production focuses unwaveringly on the characters. There are some illuminating ideas. Presenting Orsini (a trouser role) and Gennaro’s Act II duet as a homosexual paean makes sense of their power relationship. Meanwhile, the recurrent symbol of destroyed cradles ensures the Oedipal dénouement is built on a tragic foundation. www.operanow.co.uk

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The success or failure of this opera rests on Lucrezia. Carmela Remigio’s soprano was perhaps a size too small and never sounded totally at ease in the coloratura. Yet she made up for it with sheer personality. She funnelled extraordinary depth of grief, menace and defiance through her focused, controlled sound. The delicious contempt with which she announced Alfonso as her third husband was a masterclass in itself.

Marko Mimica was wooden as Don Alfonso, and the Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini under festival music director Riccardo Frizza lacked sparkle. But Varduhi Abrahamyan (Orsini) deftly navigated her runs and made seductive work of brindisi.

The blazing Xabier Anduaga as Gennaro hovered between extremes of very loud and very soft, and cut a young singer still learning to control his large voice. But the voice, which is radiant and steely in equal measure, is very fine indeed.

Expect this 24-year-old tenor to make it big very soon. ON

Above: Andrea Bernard’s production of Lucrezia Borgia is full of illuminating ideas Right: Xabier Anduaga: a radiant, steely tenor with a big future OperaNow January 2020

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Italy

Live Reviews

ROSSINI

Teatro di San Carlo, Naples

Ermione

MUSIC STAGING

Review by Fiona Hook • Photography by Francesco Squeglia In a performance that clearly looked forward to Donizetti and even Verdi, and also back to Naples’ Hellenistic roots, Nikolaus Webern’s austere, uncluttered classical setting and Giusi Giustino’s atemporal 20th-century grey costumes allowed the audience to focus, as they would have done in a Greek amphitheatre, on the drama and the music

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here is no overture. Instead we begin with a chorus of Trojan prisoners behind bars, who sing of their captivity with heartfelt sorrow, clearly looking forward to Verdi’s Hebrew slaves. Elsewhere they were a Euripidean chorus, commenting on the action in a restrained and rhythmic fashion which was most effective. Jacopo Spirei’s direction, too, was a nod to Ancient Greece, with characters mostly static against a white background and a semicircular marble floor, entering and leaving without flourish, using only a limited range of gestures.

In the title role, Angela Meade’s big, Verdian soprano dripped pathos in ‘Di, che 58

January 2020 OperaNow

vedesti piangere’ with a beautiful legato, lovely top notes and pianissimi that could be heard right to the back of the theatre.

Even so, she was overshadowed by Teresa Iervolino’s Andromaca, a shining figure of probity illuminated by maternal love, played with a presence that drew all eyes to her and made her the centre of the action. Her rich, even voice, properly contralto in quality, displayed a virtuoso technique that never intruded on the music. There was one sequence of rich, bubbling downward scales that beggared belief. By contrast, John Irvin as Pirro sang so softly at times that his words disappeared, and he lacked the necessary authority, even when in defiance of

convention he invites Andromaca to sit among the nobles. Only in their duetting in the last scene did Ermione and Pirro begin to catch fire, a sad indication of what could have been. Antonino Siragusa’s Oreste was much better. Clothed in scarlet and gold to mark his foreignness, he stood out both visually and for the relaxed security of his singing.

Alessandro De Marchi’s conducting did not draw out all the 19th-century colours with which Rossini was so clearly experimenting. His tempi were rather slow, and his dynamic range limited, though he managed the typical Rossinian rhythms and the occasional long crescendo without sounding comic. www.operanow.co.uk

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Italy

L ROMANO

Clockwise from above: An exercise in classical restraint: Jacopo Spirei’s staging of Ermione; Angela Meade gives a pathos-filled performance as Ermione; Luminous: Teresa Iervolino as Andromaca; Vocally and dramatically distinctive: Antonino Siragusa as Oreste; Tenor John Irvin as Pirro

Rossini is dealing here with the big tragedy themes of love, jealousy and murder, but overall it was all rather subdued and polite, as if cast and conductor were afraid to let rip. This revival of the composer’s own favourite opera in the theatre for which he wrote it was something of a missed opportunity. ON www.operanow.co.uk

OperaNow January 2020

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Sweden

Live Reviews

WAGNER

Die Walküre

Gothenburg Opera MUSIC STAGING

Review by Colin Clarke • Photography by Lennart Sjoberg As director Stephen Langridge and environmental consultant Natalja Koniouchenkova explained in a press conference to launch this new production of Die Walküre, the core tenets of environmental care provide a continuous thread in this vision of Wagner’s epic

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he same set is used across all parts of this unfolding Ring Cycle, but in Walküre we observe a sense of deterioration. The spick-and-span sets of Rheingold have tears in them: Alberich has already plundered the ring, and therefore robbed the world of a vital resource. Passionate in her role, Koniouchenkova takes on the sustainability challenge of an opera production with a zero carbon footprint. The flames that surround Brünnhilde at the work’s close are water vapour, coloured by light – it works spectacularly well. Alison Chitty’s sets use recycled wood; some material used in Rheingold has already found its way into a school playground.

Stephen Langridge’s staging is magnificently inventive. Bringing Wagner bang up to date, the heroes the Valkyries are associated with are shown in such forms as Nelson Mandela, and indeed, as Langridge puts it, ‘Greta Thunberg is one of the heroes in our Valhalla’.

Opposing poles of ‘Freedom’ and ‘Law’ are highlighted, scrawled on the walls.

In the pit is Evan Rogister (principal conductor at Washington National Opera since 2018). He gives his all, and the Gothenburg orchestra responds beautifully, particularly the brass, a wall of sound. Rogister’s Wagner does not dawdle, but rather than feeling rushed there was an over-reaching directionality to each act. The final moments of Act 1, with Sieglinde the dominant force, sexually riding Siegfried, had a shattering impact.

Only a few passages lost impact, perhaps most significantly Wotan’s second act ‘Götternot’ crisis.

As to the singers, Elisabet Strid as a 1950s Hausfrau Sieglinde (superb costumes, again 60

January 2020 OperaNow

Chitty) effectively steals the show. Strid is a force of nature: over the coming months she takes the role to various houses, including Chicago’s Lyric Opera. She has near-perfect diction and a voice capable either of power or the utmost sensitivity. It was, in fact, Ladies’ Night. Katarina Karnéus was an awesome (in the true sense) Fricka, a reminder that behind every great God there is a great Goddess, and the Valkyries were splendidly cast. The Brünnhilde, AnnLouice Lögdlund, might not be the most imposing, but the scenes between her and Wotan worked, emotionally, supremely well.

The male contingent was less consistent.

Hunding (Mats Almgren) in particular suffered from a fast vibrato and, although clearly a man who defines himself through the control of others, was less imposing dramatically than he might be. The Siegmund of Brenden Gunnell (Loge in Gothenburg’s Rheingold) was the finest of the male roles, his voice having the edge of a Heldentenor, despite a low-voltage ‘Nothung’ moment. Which leaves the Wotan of Anders Lorentzson, perhaps on an off-day here, with a misplaced entry very late on and vocally rather under-powered.

The impact of this Walküre, however, is huge: a modern staging that speaks to all, and to the now. Magnificent. ON Clockwise from right: Mats Almgren (Hunding), Elisabet Strid (Sieglinde) and Brenden Gunnell (Siegmund); Anders Lorentzson as Wotan and AnnLouice Logdlund as Brünnhilde created emotionally gripping scenes; Ladies’ Night: the splendidly cast Valkyries; Precious resources: environmental care and sustainability are key themes running through Stephen Langridge’s staging of Wagner’s epic music drama; An awesome Fricka: Katarina Karnéus www.operanow.co.uk

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Sweden

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Norway

Live Reviews

Bergen National Opera MUSIC STAGING

SONDHEIM

Sweeney Todd Review by Susan Nickalls • Photography by Monika Kolstad For this sinister and psychologically troubling work, Stephen Sondheim created an enveloping musical landscape to heighten the drama in ingenious ways. Bergen National Opera’s new production, directed by Christopher Luscombe, was a sensory experience that catered for more than the ears and eyes…

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aving just heard the demon barber of Fleet Street and Mrs Lovett wax lyrical about the dubious contents of her pies, the audience heading to the bar during the interval of Sweeney Todd visibly hesitated when presented with trays of steaming home-made meat pies. What was inside?

A little priest, a shepherd or perhaps a salty Rear Admiral? The audience’s apprehension was a testament to the powerful and convincing performances all round. In fact, the pies were as delicious as the other little extras Bergen National

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Opera snuck into its musically sublime semi-staged version of Sondheim’s darkly comic musical.

Heading this outstanding, talented cast was Michael Mayes as Todd, his razorsharp baritone laced with just the right amount of menace, and the phenomenal Susan Bullock channelling Julie Walters in her Oscar-worthy turn as the conniving Mrs Lovett. Her ‘By the Sea’ was a poignant momentary escape from the heat of her overworked ovens. As a foil to Mayes’ steel-edged voice, the tonal warmth of baritone Lester Lynch added another layer

of creepiness to the abusive Judge Turpin, especially in ‘Pretty Women’.

But it was the captivating David Curry (Pirelli) who stole the first half of the show, strutting about with all the camp pizzazz of Strictly Come Dancing’s Bruno Tonioli to take on Todd for the shave-off.

Fellow tenor Samuel Boden as Anthony sang as sweetly as the birds admired by his romantic interest Johanna (Caroline Wettergreen), while Gillian Kirkpatrick as Johanna’s mother Lucy, Christopher Gillett as the Beadle and Peter Kirk as Tobias also excelled. Håkon Matti Skrede’s www.operanow.co.uk

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Norway

Clockwise from far left: Demonic duo: Michael Mayes as Sweeney Todd and Susan Bullock as Mrs Lovett; A close shave? Todd triumphs over Pirelli, sung by the captivating David Curry, in the shaving contest; Caroline Wettergreen as Todd’s daughter Johanna; The worst pies in London: Susan Bullock gives a phenomenal performance as the conniving pie shop proprietress

Edvard Grieg Choir were in fine vocal fettle, giving a running commentary in the style of a Greek chorus and dying with an impressive electrocuted sizzle.

Pumping out the score, the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, under the meticulous and assured baton of conductor Stephen Higgins, demonstrated www.operanow.co.uk

its considerable showbiz chops – and placing the orchestra centre stage seemed to suit Grieghallen’s tricky acoustics.

London’s dark underbelly was brilliantly evoked with shrieking piccolos, bendy clarinet notes and the sinister celeste.

Having Bullock and Gillett play the harmonium amid the acrid smoke was

another nice touch, the latter cheekily offering up Wagner’s Tristan chords.

With the entire cast singing off-book in Catherine Ahlsen’s splendid black and red costumes, and director Christopher Luscombe making good use of the spacious stage (lit by Ivar Skjørestad), BNO’s dramatic hybrid is a winning formula. ON OperaNow January 2020

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France

Live Reviews

MOZART

Le Nozze di Figaro

Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris MUSIC STAGING

Review by Helena Matheopoulos • Photography by Vincent Pontet This was one of the most eagerly awaited productions in Paris this season, the main reason being the imaginative, unexpected – and very brave – choice of director: Hollywood’s James Gray. Moreover, the show’s costume designer was top-flight haute couturier Christian Lacroix

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ames Gray’s highly individual cult films (Little Odessa, The Lost City of Z) have earned him a select group of fans worldwide. His recent selfsearching space saga, Ad Astra starring Brad Pitt, was one of autumn’s highlights.

So what could opera-lovers expect? An outlandish take on the action? The setting transposed to a different era and location?

Characters resembling movie actors?

In the event, we were given a classic production faithful to the work’s period which, with set designer Santo Loquasto’s clever use of the Champs-Elysées Theatre’s small stage, Bertrand Couderc’s subtle lighting and Christian Lacroix’s exquisite costumes, not only looked stunning but was exceptionally well cast. Most importantly, it was full of both zest and pathos. Gray guided the singers with such vivid and masterful sensitivity that one had the illusion they were reacting to each other spontaneously and making up their lines on the spot. Without reservation, it was one of the three best and most enjoyable productions of this opera in living memory (the others being Jonathan Miller’s Vienna staging and David McVicar’s current production at Covent Garden).

The cast distinguished themselves as much for their acting as for their singing. Most outstanding of all were the two male 64

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protagonists. The French baritone Stéphane Degout was a particularly hautain, unpleasant and altogether terrifying Count who sang with unflagging authority and a powerfully sonorous yet subtly nuanced sound that delighted the audience. The tall, good-looking Canadian bass-baritone Robert Gleadow was vocally thrilling with his rich, sonorous timbre. Dramatically, he was one of the most likeable and endearing Figaros I’ve seen: hyperactive, even quicker on his feet than usual, and breathtakingly cheeky in his confrontations with the Count. Standing up to him practically chin to chin, he sang ‘Io non impugno mai quel’ che non so’ so assertively that the pair seemed seconds away from a punch-up before they were rescued by the offstage orchestra playing the march.

The up-and-coming young mezzo Eléonore Pancrazi was a charming, genuinely adolescent, confused and bemused Cherubino. She delivered both her arias with panache and a fresh, youthful lyric voice. Russian soprano Anna Aglatova gave a convincing portrayal of Suzanna, both dramatically and vocally, with a pure, light lyric sound ideal for soubrette roles.

Vannina Santoni as the Countess looked exquisite, refined and aristocratic in Lacroix’s stunning 18th-century dresses, and her portrayal was both moving and sensitive in its restraint. Despite singing beautifully after some initial problems with

intonation (almost certainly due to first night nerves), her voice itself is a little dry, lacking the rich, creamy undertones of a Kiri Te Kanawa or Renée Fleming. But this thinner timbre made the Countess appear much younger than usual, and the audience loved her.

The smaller roles were cast with equal care: Florie Valiquette was a delightful, pretty and vocally perfect Barberina; Carlo Lepore a strong presence as Bartolo; Mathias Vidal a vocally subtle and more than usually snake-like Basilio; Matthieu Lécroart hilarious as Antonio and Rodolphe Briand equally funny as Don Curzio; and – a vintage touch – the American mezzo Jennifer Larmore as a far more attractive Marcelina than we are used to.

Special praise must go to conductor Jérémie Rhorer who led his period orchestra, Le Cercle de l’Harmonie, with lightness of touch and an innate sense of Mozartian style: sparkling, limpid timbre, crisp tempi, light-as-feather cushions of sound accompanying the singers’ legato passages in the most introspective moments. The rapport between pit and stage was so perfect and seamless that one surmises that Rhorer had a long rehearsal period, both with his soloists and his excellent Unikanti Chorus, composed of young singers aged 16 to 30 (80 per cent of whom progressed from the children’s chorus of the Paris Opera) and expertly coached by Gaël Darchen. ON Left: Vannina Santoni as the Countess in one of Christian Lacroix’s stunning 18th-century dresses Right, top to bottom: Stéphane Degout made a terrifying Count Almaviva; Hollywood director James Gray’s production of Le Nozze di Figaro was faithful to the work’s historical period; Breathtakingly cheeky: Robert Gleadow as Figaro with Anna Aglatova (Suzanna) and Vannina Santoni (the Countess) www.operanow.co.uk

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Live Reviews

BORODIN

Prince Igor

Paris Opera (Bastille) MUSIC STAGING

Review by Francis Carlin • Photography by Agathe Poupeney ‘Everything in this air oozes Russian soul,’ wrote conductor Philippe Jordan in the programme book. He was referring to the inclusion of Igor’s second big monologue in the fourth act but he might have said the same of the entire work. So it was a pity Barrie Kosky’s new staging, however professionally managed and acted, gave ‘soul’ a wide berth

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orodin’s only opera, unfinished at his death, is clunky and poor in character development, a static pageant begging for spectacular sets. This is hardly fertile ground for a switched-on director but Kosky claims he likes a challenge. In the event, his Paris Opera debut betrayed the spirit of the work with a Eurotrash romp featuring beerswilling warlords and sadistic henchmen in combat gear equipped with (groan) the now inevitable Kalashnikovs. No happy end either: Igor’s triumphant return was

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replaced by the mock coronation of crossdressing turncoat Ovlur.

Piling on the clichés, Klaus Braun dressed the masses in hideous, mismatching charity shop tat and Rufus Didwiszus followed suit with dreary sets. True, there are comparisons between 12th-century Russia and present times: its medieval clans had things in common with today’s oligarch gangs. But Kosky’s assertion that the French know nothing about Igor’s history and therefore have to be served up a contemporary rereading is an insult

‘Eurotrash romp’: Barrie Kosky’s unhelpful updating

to his audience’s intelligence, a fatuous excuse worthier of a bird-brain luvvie, not a director who has won plaudits for quirkily inventive, intensely theatrical productions.

A stellar cast made it all bearable amid the Paris Opera’s continuing war on intervals. (The first half lasted 75 minutes and the second clocked in at close to two hours, making the last half-hour pure agony for anyone over five-foot nothing). If we survived, it was due to Ildar Abdrazakov’s www.operanow.co.uk

The Plaza Athenée

Opera Now promotion

A favourite Parisian haunt

By Helena Matheopoulos

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henever my work for Opera Now brings me to Paris, the Plaza Athenée has always been my ‘home from home’. My relationship with this hotel started in the days when, as fashion editor of the Tatler and Daily Express, I covered the couture and Ready to Wear collections in Paris four times a year. Situated at the heart of Couture-land, in the tree-lined Avenue Montaigne, with most designer’s showrooms and boutiques conveniently nearby, it was love at first sight!

Ildar Abdrazakov as a superb Igor

superb Igor, Elena Stikhina’s Yaroslavna – wayward at first, utterly captivating in the last act – and Dmitry Ulyanov’s boisterously vulgar Galitsky. Pavel Černoch’s Vladimir was eloquently sung although he needs to lighten the voice at the top rather than muscling through. Best of all, Anita Rachvelishvili’s stunning Konchakovna blasted out chest notes like a Cavaillé-Coll organ in full throttle.

Jordan, on grand form, roused the orchestra to feats of virtuosity but took the overture, here played as a prelude to the fourth act, at an absurdly fast pace. Bestial stomping in Otto Pichler’s whirlwind choreography for the Polovtsian dances echoed Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring: energy galore and perfectly in tune with a cynical staging. ON www.operanow.co.uk

decorated, like every single balcony on the façade of the hotel, with red geraniums; or revived my spirits in its exquisite Blue Bar, with its constantly renewed variety of imaginative cocktails.

A few doors up from the Plaza are two of my favourite Paris restaurants: the quintessentially French Chez André in nearby Rue Marbeuf and the fashionable L’Avenue, ideal for people watching and feeling like the cat’s whiskers… .

When my activities switched to opera, I returned to the Athenée with equal pleasure over the years to cover performances at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, a gem of a theatre situated practically next door, or at the Paris Opera. Once, while I was the Londonbased editor-at-large of Greek Vogue, I stayed in the suite immortalised by Sarah Jessica Parker and Mikhail Baryshnikov in an episode of Sex and the City.

This year, it was my base for two days while in Paris to interview the actress Fanny Ardant and the casting director of the Paris Opera, Ilias Tzempetonidis for Opera Now and again earlier this month, when I returned for the premiere of James Gray’s production of Le nozze di Figaro, with costumes by Christian Lacroix, a made-in-heaven blend of my favourite worlds – fashion and opera.

On each visit I savoured the breathtaking view of the sparkling Eiffel Tower from the balcony of my suite, OperaNow January 2020

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UK

Live Reviews

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden MUSIC STAGING

BRITTEN

Death in Venice Review by Tom Sutcliffe • Photography by Catherine Ashmore Death in Venice, Benjamin Britten’s last opera, was always a special case – special because it was written for the composer’s beloved partner Peter Pears, but also because of the way it comes to terms with the composer’s complicated interest in boys and their voices

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ritten clearly loved boys, but never showed the slightest inclination to abuse them. This kind of incapable parental love, born from some fundamental regret, was probably the engine that powered the composer’s genius. Think of The Turn of the Screw with its closely related material and topics, handled so very differently in Death in Venice.

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Opera is a confessional artform – but not generally the composer’s confession.

Rather it depends on the wind of melody to draw from its characters the things they need to tell us about their essence – the things they care about most. What David McVicar’s production manages to do is to be completely serious about the subject matter: Thomas Mann, or his alter ego Aschenbach (a great author), facing up to www.operanow.co.uk

Live Reviews

UK

Clockwise from this image: Tim Mead as Apollo and Mark Padmore as Aschenbach observe the fascinating ballet of play-fighting lads; A Venetian interlude, with Gerald Finley providing the entertainment; Mark Padmore: ‘The crucial, still centre of this theatrical wonder’; The anatomy of desire: Leo Dixon’s stunning dancing as Tadzio

himself as he falls in illicit and impossible love with a young man, Tadzio. In this case, Tadzio (Leo Dixon, a Royal Ballet first artist) is older, bigger and more starry and expressive as a dancer than in any staging I’ve seen. And yet McVicar enables Mark Padmore as Aschenbach to confess (to us in the audience as well as to himself) and to accept the morbid hopelessness of the whole thing. Tadzio, in this wonderfully realised staging, is never really affected by being Aschenbach’s love-object any more than a beautiful horse would have been.

There is not even embryonic consent, no hint of paedophilia. Here, Tadzio is entirely his own person, physically adult, dancing like a star sportsman, sublimely capable of being separate and independent, with an objective impact that has nothing to do with sexuality. Dixon’s work is stunning and fundamental to the vision in McVicar’s brilliant piece of stagecraft (which is amazingly and breathtakingly un-camp). www.operanow.co.uk

Have there been many productions as complicated as this at Covent Garden with so many characters on stage? The sets

by Vicki Mortimer move back and forth across the stage, enclosing and unfolding spaces, reminding us of the ever-present sea and sun, giving us plenty of that vital shade which Venice demands. She even choreographs the gondola taking Aschenbach away and bringing him back, fiddly and tiresome as he is, unable to decide, the victim of this late and ultimately fatal whim.

Lynne Page, whose choreography and direction of movement is so crucial to this extraordinary production, in effect has had to invent her art. The adolescent games of the play-fighting lads flow like a fascinating ballet from scene to scene. Of course there still are the episodes involving the wonderful Gerald Finley as assorted others (fop, traveller, barber, etc etc) which provide interludes, with Tadzio absent. And

there is the vision of Apollo, powerfully sung by the heroic figure of Tim Mead, whose countertenor is more powerful and right in this role than any predecessor’s.

Richard Farnes’ conducting explores in detail and with delicacy this amazing score, which proclaims Britten’s genius perhaps more than any earlier work – now freed as he surely was by the sense of his own impending mortality. And what genius also lies in Myfanwy Piper’s extraordinary libretto. The playing and singing throughout, together with Paule Constable’s impeccable lighting, cannot be overpraised. Padmore as Aschenbach is so straight, so truthful, so pure in the way he attends to his thoughts and gives expression to ours. He is the crucial, still centre of this theatrical wonder. I have not been gripped by a Royal Opera production as I was by this for a very long time. A sellout, apparently, it must be brought back very, very soon. ON OperaNow January 2020

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Review feature

Carmen

Unlucky yet empowered in love

By Adrian Mourby • Photography by Bill Cooper Who is Carmen? A whorish and shameless gypsy, or an independent woman in charge of her romantic fate?

Opera Now charts Carmen’s transformation over the years and discovers how Jo Davies’ new production of Bizet’s opera redresses the power balances and culpabilities involved in this iconic story

C

armen has come a long way since Bizet’s opera about a decent Spanish soldier destroyed by a wanton gypsy premiered in 1875. Back then, the plot was considered too grubby for Paris’ Opéra-Comique, but opinions were quickly revised when the genius of the music overcame the immorality of the story. But this eloquent, melodramatic operetta continued for decades to be presented as a misogynistic tale. More than Prosper Mérimée’s original novella, Bizet’s Carmen was the story of a good soldier caught between the charms of virtuous Micaela, who reminds him of his mother, and a factory worker-cumsmuggler and all-round strumpet known as Carmencita. When Oscar Hammerstein transposed the story to Black America in 1943 as Carmen Jones, the casting of Harry Belafonte as virtuous ‘Joe’ confirmed what audiences had believed since 1875: Carmen was trash and if only Don ‘Joe’ José had had a fiancée with even token sex appeal, none of this tragedy need have occurred.

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More recently, the opera has been reconceptualised in an attempt to move beyond the Madonna and Whore. In 2007, Alice Coote at English National Opera played Carmen as a depressive in recovery from addiction. Other productions have tried to suggest that the usually hapless José is as much to blame as Carmen for the blood-soaked finale. But Welsh National Opera’s 2019 production with the superb, liberally tattooed Virginie Verrez as Carmen is the first I have seen that pins the blame solely on José.

Let us not forget that in Mérimée’s story the so-called ‘Don’ has fled to the army because he has committed murder.

Jo Davies’ production makes it clear early on that José (Dimitri Pittas) is bad news. Carmen should have waited for Escamillo (Phillip Rhodes): Davies quickly establishes that he is Carmen’s soulmate.

She cleans up her act. She dresses well.

She is on hand to wish him luck in the corrida de toros. The only problem is that the weirdo who let her escape from

custody in Act I, and whom she coupled up with in Act II, is now stalking her.

Carmen is more than happy to pay her debts. She is even excited to see José once he is released from regimental slammer, but then he experiences an attack of conscience when he hears the bugle calling him back to barracks. At this point we are wholly with Carmen. She’s a bit of a bad girl. She fights. She flirts. She seduces her way out of incarceration by promising José a great night of sex on the ramparts at Pastia’s if he lets her go. Then he messes up their date and, since she has already met a bullfighter who really gets her, she moves on. Sadly the opera’s inescapable plot leaves her fatally saddled with psycho José after Zuniga, his commanding officer, lurches upon their would-be assignation and wrecks his military career. Thereafter, it’s all downhill.

At WNO, Davies has reconceived Carmen for the #MeToo generation. This factory girl is entitled to have sex with whichever attractive guy she wants. She www.operanow.co.uk

Carmen

Review feature

Clockwise from far left: Jo Davies’ reconceptualised production of Carmen for WNO is set in Brazil’s favelas in the 1970s; Leading lady: the superb Virginie Verrez as Carmen; Head-to-head: Phillip Rhodes as Escamillo and Dimitri Pittas as Don José; Fighting talk: things get heated between Carmen and José

is serially monogamous. This radical dramaturgy pretty much works except in the last act, when José – now a hoodied stalker – confronts Carmen outside the bullring. In reality, Davies’ Carmen would have given him an earful and gone back to watch her true love dedicate the first kill of the corrida to her.

Unfortunately, Bizet’s music insists she hangs around long enough for José to knife her. In this production, José’s final lines, ‘You can arrest me. I was the one who killed her! Ah! Carmen! My adored Carmen!’ were accompanied by a gathering of female chorus members who shield the body from psycho-boy. Meanwhile, a distraught Escamillo rushes in from the bullring and is unable to reach his beloved due to the metal barriers protecting him from the crowd.

This was an unusually good production.

Davies occasionally made the stage too busy, with the result that one could be looking in the wrong direction at any given moment, but her great achievement www.operanow.co.uk

was to make Carmen the focal point of her own opera.

All four acts were bounded by a two-tier set that bristled with metal crowd barriers, cutting people off from each other yet also hemming everyone in, making sure the tension never dissipated. There were some telling supporting performances, most notably a camp cameo by Gregory Smith as Lillas Pastia, Anita Watson suitably boring as Micaela, and Harriet Eyley and Angela Simkin as the kind of Frasquita and Mercédès who could sexily smuggle anything past the average red-blooded border guard.

The show was set in Brazil’s favelas in the 1970s, but that hardly mattered. This was all about the bad boyfriends that one comes to seriously regret. Under WNO’s music director, Tomáš Hanus, it was raw, radical and musically exciting. The young teens in the children’s chorus could really act and there were one or two who might give Virginie Verrez a run for her pesetas in due course. ON OperaNow January 2020

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Review feature

Le Grand Macabre

Shocking behaviour

By Robert Thicknesse • Photography by Ludwig Olah Opera Now’s associate editor expresses his outrage at the poverty of ideas in Calixto Bieito’s recent staging of Le Grand Macabre at the Semperoper, Dresden

H

ow does he do it? How the hell does Calixto Bieito keep getting work? Of all the major opera directors – and Bieito’s been doing the rounds for 20 years – he is the only one (well, maybe Kosky too) who regularly produces really bad, really terrible work. It is true also (yes, many will disagree) that he can come up with pieces of genius few can match. But it’s really terribly rare. The proportion of duds is huge – between 60 and 80 per cent, I reckon, depending on taste. And yet they

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keep hiring him, and then letting him put on rubbish shows, hated by everyone.

It’s not even the relentless sameyness that grates most – the urban wastelands, the underpants and smeared brownness, the torture, the improbable sex, treating the audience as a bunch of vapouring Victorian matrons who can be shocked into… well, what, exactly? No, it’s his utter humourlessness, his blinkered earnestness, his mulish gloom. Of course, Calixto might well think he’s a funny guy: the most hilarious thing in this production was his programme note ‘Humour as survival principle’. The show itself… not so much: a parade of the usual tropes playing to a sparse low-hundreds of hardy spectators, and not one laugh for two whole hours.

Things kicked off with two big old clichés – not even Calixto’s own, though he has a stock. First, there was the fake booing/outrage/walkout from a claque (actually the chorus) in the dress circle.

Then the old gimmick of carting on Courbet’s naughty painting The Origin of the World – which remained displayed for ages, even provoking the strict Dresdeners to titters, pleasingly.

Ligeti set the opera in ‘Breughelland’, an area contiguous to Calixtoland only with more laughs. Rebecca Ringst’s stage was attractively sparse: a suspended globe (location of all manner of projections, sometimes clever, sometimes anatomical/ pornographic) against a backdrop of nighttime blackness, and a long curvy ramp like an unwound helter-skelter, for the cast to descend in symbolic manner. On the stage, the characters staggered about in the usual stages of undress – Nekrotzar (Markus Marquardt), here, a rumpled figure in jimjams ranting on like a manic loner at Speaker’s Corner, with a strong sense that the action was taking place inside his head (and maybe that of shabby drunk Piet the Pot – Gerhard Siegel – too).

Bieito had nothing much to say, just some random doodles round the edges of what

Clockwise from left: Christopher Ainslie (Prince Go-Go), Markus Marquardt (Nekrotzar); Terrible twins: Katerina von Benningsen (Amanda), Annelie Sophie Müller (Amando); Oh world… Rebecca Ringst’s attractively sparse staging; Hila Baggio as Venus/Gepopo

should be the exhilarating, absurdist ride Ligeti envisaged. This had the same level of grim earnestness that Peter Sellars brought to his Salzburg and Barbican stagings that Ligeti hated so much, though even Sellars came with a thought-out (if tiresomely teenage) scenario. The biggest intervention here was having the lovers Amando and Amanda (Annelie Sophie Müller and Katerina von Bennigsen) as twin schoolgirls, www.operanow.co.uk

Le Grand Macabre

accomplishing their erotic business by means of buckets slung round the waist.

The prince (Christopher Ainslie) had a fixation on something very like Nutella – mainly because it’s Bieito’s favourite brown colour. Occasionally the spinning globe would catch fire, or go all green, or contain a baby: eco bingo for halfwits.

Now the trouble with saying anything useful about the music is that your apprehension of it depends enormously on the mood the visuals puts you in: that’s why productions like the Fura dels Baus effort at ENO a while ago worked, with the stage wholeheartedly sharing the silliness and excess of the pit. Here, Omer www.operanow.co.uk

Meir Wellber’s orchestra was hamstrung by dourness, sounding dutiful, at times thrilling, but definitely unsmiling, despite duck-quackers, swanee whistles and the rest. Certainly Ligeti gives himself a lot of fun messing about with sound, parodying, pastiching, being as extreme as he can, generally smashing the place up; but this all felt very orderly. The cast was uniformly stalwart and took their punishment in good spirit – rosettes and bandages to Iris Vermillion, Frode Olsen and Hila Baggio.

Review feature

As the opera rose to its climax, the apocalyptic midnight approaching, chorus and musicians materialised on the balconies, creating shattering surroundsound effects and seismic textures before subsiding into Ligeti’s eerie post-cataclysm landscape. But what had happened? Not even the joke apocalypse misapprehended

by Ligeti’s cast of fools and wastrels.

Inevitably the chirpy payoff went for nothing: ‘Fear not to die! Live merrily in cheerfulness!’ – pretty much the last thing anyone felt like, after this. ON OperaNow January 2020

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Austria

Live Reviews

NEUWIRTH

Vienna State Opera

Orlando

MUSIC STAGING

Review by George Jahn • Photography by Michael Poehn The world premiere of Orlando

by Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth marked an important occasion for Vienna State Opera: it was the first time an opera composed by a woman had been staged at the house in its 150-year history

Left: Kate Lindsey as Orlando in the character’s initial incarntion as an Elizabethan nobleman; Above: Pope (Christian Miedl) with Orlando, now a woman, wearing luscious costumes by Comme des Garçons

M

an’s inhumanity to woman is delightfully chronicled in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, depicting the struggles of a young Elizabethan nobleman who wakes up one day as a member of the opposite sex. But while Olga Neuwirth’s opera of the same name is a pleasure as long as she hews to Woolf’s script, it goes off the rails once she strikes out on her own.

Woolf’s novel ends in 1928, the year it was published, with the hero more than 300 years old yet unaged, triumphantly trans in a largely misogynistic world. But 74

January 2020 OperaNow

when Neuwirth and co-librettist Catherine Filloux spin the tale into the present, the result is a 19-scene tableau that is at least seven scenes too long.

All is well up to the pause. As an aspiring poet, Orlando the man experiences love and betrayal at the hands of the Russian princess, Sasha. Once his disappointment is compounded by failure to gain recognition of his poetic talents, he finds escape by falling into a seven-day sleep from which he awakes as a woman; heart, brain and soul unchanged, but suddenly relegated to the only pleasures allowed

a woman of the age – ‘contemplation, solitude and love’.

Orlando the poet considers herself the equal of Pope, Dryden and Addison, the greatest bards of the Augustan age.

Yet she is now reduced to pouring tea for them. The Victorian era that follows compounds patriarchy, with those on stage lamenting all its sins hidden behind the façade of middle-class normality; female subservience toward the man of the house and his rampant child abuse.

But then Neuwirth and Filloux enter uncharted territory, with disappointing results. With the flagrant inequality of the sexes throughout the ages already amply illustrated, it’s clear that they have to inject new energy into the story. The result is overkill, however. Their argument for individualism beyond the societal norms defining gender threatens to be buried under a catchall of liberal causes that, though noble, often verge on tired clichés. www.operanow.co.uk

Live Reviews

Thus, bombs explode and Stuka fighterbombers turn into deep dives on the video wall to illustrate the horrors of World War II, and as Orlando chronicles the victims killed in the Holocaust, their aircraft disappear, making way for their names.

Hippies rule in 1967, their signs not only calling for ‘Equality for women’, but also ‘Drugs’ and ‘Black pride’. By the year 2000, Orlando has a child who is neither he nor she but ‘they’. Her friends are Black, Asian and Hispanic, some of them cross-dressers.

But the stage is shared by supermarket cashiers in uniform, chanting ‘work, money, work, money’ as they repetitively scan items. And it’s only a matter of time before the arrival of the ‘mutants’. It’s clear who their leader is from their chants of ‘…Great again,’ and for those who don’t get it, President Trump’s distorted voice is heard in the background.

For Orlando it’s a case of us against them, with genderism by now only part of the battle against the Establishment, and there’s nothing wrong with that – except for the banality of her lines. ‘I resent the remarks about making countries great again, and I resent the attitude that women www.operanow.co.uk

do not understand.’ Such phrases would fit someone hoping to become the first woman Democratic President of the United States more than Orlando, the revolutionary.

Musically, though, Orlando is wonderful.

Neuwirth spins a tapestry of sound that defies definition. Closely knit acoustic and digital chords and passages blend into a whole that teases the ear with its complexity. The State Opera Orchestra summed and roared under the expert baton of Matthias Pintscher, aided by on- and off-stage choirs, a rock group and noise-makers that included a punching bag with a microphone inside.

With singing rare and declamation the norm, it’s difficult to score the principals on their vocal talents. But Kate Lindsey as

Austria

Top: Transgender cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond plays Orlando’s child Inset: A rock group forms part of Olga Neuwirth’s impressive tapestry of sound

Orlando was good whether in song, word or dramatics, as were the other principals: Anna Clementi in the role of the Narrator, Eric Jurenas as the Guardian Angel, Marcus Pelz as Dryden, Carlos Osuna as Addison and Christian Miedl as Pope. Justin Vivian Bond made the best of her part as Orlando’s child, while Constance Hauman, Agneta Eichenholz and Leigh Melrose took on multiple roles with bravado.

The makeup and costumes came from Comme des Garçons: shrill, extravagant, wonderful. ON OperaNow January 2020

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Reviews

CDs & DVDs

New releases

By Francis Muzzu

Raoul Barbe-Bleu

Bluebeard’s Castle

Tristan und Isolde

Rigoletto

aparte music ap214

Chandos CHSA 5237

ABC Classic ABC 481 8518

C Major 751608 – DVD

with all regal and feudal references removed – a case of eighteenth century political correctness. It’s difficult to see how a story so blood-drenched and entrenched in female subservience and abuse could pass for a comedy in the first instance, but Grétry has a good stab, and his music is fleet and often charming, though he doesn’t produce too many killer tunes. This studio recording is based on performances at Trondheim in 2018 and the cast works homogenously under Martin Wählberg’s baton, with bad boy Bluebeard sounding suitably attractive as sung by Matthieu Lécroart.

Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle is more difficult to review – where the Grétry recording has a clear and polished sound, the Bartók is strangely engineered with the orchestra well to the fore. In one way it can be quite pleasing, as the mammoth score is undeniably fascinating.

But it does mean that the recording sounds like a tone poem with occasional vocal interventions. I have seen

both singers, John Relyea and Michelle DeYoung, perform live relatively recently and this recording gives little indication of the size of their voices, or even the timbre, though DeYoung’s top C when the fifth door is opened is certainly audible – she really belts the note out with no inhibitions.

Relyea sounds smooth and polished in his menace. But the main point of interest here is

the orchestra under Edward Gardiner, which has a whale of a time with the tonal and polytonal excitements thrown at them. Relyea and DeYoung must have had the scale to match the sound around them, but it is just difficult to tell.

So, an interesting release, but probably not that one that will knock a favoured recording off of its top spot.

The infant Richard Wagner saw a performance of Raoul Barbe-Bleu, which given the subject matter certainly explains a lot. So, appropriately, there are more family and relationship complications in Tristan und Isolde, recorded live in concert in Perth, 2018. This is an enjoyable recording, if not a great one. Asher Fisch’s conducting is well-paced, never drags, and he’s sensitive to his singers: it is not a hugely personal reading. Tristan is Stuart Skelton, who is excellent and still sounds vocally fresh and even attractive in his Act III ravings, where so many others flag. There is natural

Grétry

S

uch is the particular joy of Christmas that apparently divorce rates zoom by about 300 per cent in the New Year and divorce lawyers rub their hands with glee. So January seems particularly a pertinent time to look at two new releases based on Charles Perrault’s folktale of excessive marital discord, Barbe bleu, or Bluebeard. By coincidence, both recordings hail from Norway and they provide a great contrast, with Gretry’s Raoul Barbe-Bleu being classed as a comedy, whereas Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle is an expressionist slab of gloom and doom.

Upon closer inspection, the Grétry’s Raoul Barbe-Bleu is not as giddy as one might first assume. It was premiered in Paris in 1789, which sounds like a spectacular case of bad timing: in fact, with its openly critical portrayal of a nobleman it hit the zeitgeist.

Though not a smash hit, it did maintain its place, and interestingly a revival five years later was bowdlerised,

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Bartók

Wagner

Vladimir Stoyanov and Mélissa Petit in Rigoletto at the Bregenz Festival

Verdi

www.operanow.co.uk

CDs & DVDs

Reviews

CHOICE Hamlet Thomas

Naxos 2.110640 – DVD

L’opéra du Roi Soleil Soprano: Katherine Watson

Facce d’amore

Countertenor: Jakub Józef Orliński

aparte music ap209

Erato 0190295423384

warmth to his tenor and his involvement in the role comes across well. Likewise the Isolde of Gun-Brit Barkmin, who makes the most of the text. Her soprano is slender for this role, so cuts more through the orchestra than riding atop, but it has clarity and bite. Ekaterina Gubanova’s Brangäne is luxuriously sung, and her Act II warnings are in tune, as so often they are not.

The temperature drops for the Kurwenal of Boaz Daniel and the Marke of Ain Anger, but Fisch, Skelton and Barkmin make a fine case for a lithe traversal of the score.

Rigoletto is hardly an advert for good family relations, but at least he tries, which is more than anyone else so far. But of course it all goes wrong as the Duke gets involved and derails the father-daughter relationship for the fun of it. The opera was filmed at Bregenz last summer, and is more than just a tourist souvenir of an enjoyable evening. Philipp Stölzl’s production manages

to focus attention on the right character at the right time, not easy given the scale of the floating stage and the enormous set – for Rigoletto this consists of a giant clown’s head, emphasizing Stölzl’s circus theme, with the Duke as ringmaster. Once the idea is established the production progresses traditionally. One question – I assume that Gilda is dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, but her unfortunate blond wig leads us more in the direction of Bette Davies in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. What singers have to endure! Mélissa Petit surmounts her outfit with aplomb and sings and acts a strong Gilda – her soprano has a pleasingly old-fashioned fast tone to it. Stephen Costello sings with more panache than he emotes as the Duke, but is generally very good. Vladimir Stoyanov’s Rigoletto is wonderfully played, moving in the extreme, and beautifully sung. His baritone offers golden tone and legato that also remind

www.operanow.co.uk

The ultimate family meltdown comes with Ambroise Thomas’ Hamlet, sadly an opera oftderided. In this showing, filmed at the Opéra Comique in 2018, it comes across as a strong piece worthy of further revival. Cyril Teste’s modern-dress production is simple and elegant and imaginatively captured for the screen by François Roussillon. Conductor Louise Langrée brings a freshness and buoyancy to the score, so although the mood is somber there is a welcome delicacy of touch. Stéphane Degout excels as Hamlet, brooding and sarcastic, his baritone lithe and flexible. It is an integrated performance rather than a show star turn.

Likewise Sabine Devieilhe’s Ophélie, who, despite having a whole act dedicated to her Mad Scene, is exceptionally attentive to others. Her

one of singers of yore. Enrique Mazzola’s conducting is pacey and confident.

Two albums of Baroque arias to flag up. First, soprano Katherine Watson, whose CD offers a selection of French arias demonstrating the art d’attendir, or rôles tenders, essentially pieces conceived to inspire tender emotions in the listener. Watson is well-equipped to do this, as her soprano is bright and fluent and she is a natural communicator. Just a dash of

voice is pure, accurate and just as fascinating in moments of simplicity as when hitting the stratosphere.

Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo doesn’t really do simple, she is grand to the fingertips, but an engaging actress with a good vocal heft as Gertrude.

Laurent Alvaro (Claudius), Julien Behr (Laërte) and Jérôme Varnier (Le Spectre) all make valuable contributions, as does the chorus, with singing of remarkably refined delicacy. Meyerbeer is enjoying a successful revival and I hope that Thomas will follow. Perhaps Mignon would flourish in a production as sensitive as this Hamlet.

astringency towards the top saves the instrument from becoming saccharine.

Jakub Józef Orliński’s countertenor grows apace, and is sounding more robust and coloured in Facce d’amore, where he provides a selection of Italian arias themed around the concept of being in love. Orliński’s technique is exceptional, his line smooth, his coloratura adept, and, like Watson, he communicates with his listener. Both discs are recommended. ON OperaNow January 2020

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Reviews

New Releases

Hell’s belles

Orfeo ed Euridice

Francis Muzzu compares three new recordings of Gluck’s ground-breaking operatic telling of the Orpheus myth

T

hree new versions of Gluck’s great reform opera Orfeo ed Euridice arrive together and invite comparison. Firstly a recording of the 1762 Vienna version, as performed at the premiere for Maria Theresa, here with a countertenor replacing the original castrato; then a film of the 1774 version, Orphée et Euridice, revised by Gluck for Paris for a haut contre tenor (due to the French lack of interest in castrati); and finally a film of the 1859 revision by Berlioz, revised by him for the legendary mezzo soprano Pauline Viardot.

Which version one prefers is obviously a matter of taste. I enjoyed the bravura of the two revised versions, but all three have selling points. In these offerings I certainly feel that one recording pulls ahead of the rivals.

The CD of the original 1762 version has David Bates conducting, and he provides a bright, lively and rhythmic reading – crisp and commanding. The studio recording is, perhaps, a little overenthusiastic on the sound effects. For 1774 we have Harry Bicket leading, and his is the most traditional reading, but it should be noted that it comes from the San Francisco Opera which seats over 3,000 and accompanies a largescale production. For the 1859 production at the Opéra Comique, Raphaël Pichon conducts with extraordinary vigour and almost violence, a fascinating reading full of risks and surprises – he is not afraid of a pause stretching 78

January 2020 OperaNow

to uncomfortable silence or pushing the scoring into its underlying dissonance.

Of the two films, the Paris performance pulls ahead once again, not least by virtue of its intimate setting: San Francisco is just too enormous for a small scale tragedy. At the Opéra Comique, Aurélien Bory creates a magical world set against a vast reproduction of Corot’s painting Orphée ramenant Eurydice aux Enfers.

He utilises Pepper’s Ghost, the19th-century illusionary effect, to intrigue and confuse – who is singing, which performer is the real one? His use of choreography is equally inventive: simple but surprising, controlled but mystical.

It’s a suitably fascinating production, balancing efficiency with ambiguity. In the San Francisco film, John Neumeier attends to every aspect of the performance and while it’s slick, it is very plot-driven and overly theatrical – his Orphée is a ballet master whose beloved prima ballerina, Eurydice, is killed in a car crash, leading to his search for inner peace.

It is interesting but curiously uninvolving. His choreography, danced by the Joffrey Ballet, is skilfully performed but seems generic. It doesn’t transcend its own staginess.

Any Orfeo/Orphée is reliant on its star to make or break the performance. In the studio CDs, Iestyn Davies’ countertenor sounds very fine, with his slightly nasal quality which veers between beauty and hooty, while overall he lacks fire. This Orfeo seems sadly to have mislaid his keys

Pentatone PTC 5186 805 / Bates – CD

rather than suffered the loss of his wife. He is searching through his pockets, not the underworld. In San Francisco, the tenor Dmitry Korchak takes on the almost superhuman task of the tenor version and triumphs. His tone is not overly unique or alluring, but he thrillingly surmounts the incredible vocal hurdles, not least the punishingly high tessitura, with guts and not a little technique. He is a good actor, if not a great one, and is rewarded understandably with a standing ovation.

Which leaves Marianne Crebassa as Orphée in Paris, and who gives a phenomenal performance.

She looks androgynously stunning, sings with great technical accuracy and, above all, has a rare and calm poise. She manages to both internalise her emotions and still convey them to the audience. Her cadenza to ‘Amour, viens rendre à mon âme’ is a masterclass in how to pause your singing and have the audience hanging on your next phrase – the silence thrums… Mesmerising.

The supporting casts are solid. Davies has Sophie Bevan as a sprightly Amore and Rebecca Bottone as a spirited Euridice. Korchak is up against Andriana Chuchman’s rich-toned Euridice and Lauren Snouffer’s stylish

Orphée et Eurydice C Major 714308/ Bickett – DVD

Orphée et Eurydice Naxos 2.110638 / Pichon – DVD (and more if I could award them)

Amour. Crebassa has Hélène Guilmette as a strong Eurydice and Lea Desandre as an interestingly weightier-voice Amour than usual. Korchak’s mighty Orphée aside, the Opéra Comique comes up trumps with Bory, Pichon and Crebassa combining to create a performance of rare fascination. ON www.operanow.co.uk

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Back Stage

Spotlight

YOUR MONTHLY GUIDE TO OPERA WORLDWIDE

Spotlight January – March 2020 New Productions • World Premieres • Exceptional Casts • Rarities • Opera Now Choice Listings are in alphabetical order by city within each country heading. Dates in RED = live cinema relays.

UK

M

= Matinée

A

= Morning

Conductor James Holmes; Director Matthew Eberhardt; Sets, Costumes

The Marriage of Figaro returns to Welsh National Opera

Francis O’Connor

CARDIFF

CAST Anna Maurrant Giselle Allen; Frank Maurrant Robert Hayward; Rose Maurrant Gillene Butterfield; Sam Kaplan Alex Banfield

WELSH NATIONAL OPERA www.wno.org.uk

Les Vêpres siciliennes | Verdi 08, 15, 22 FEB

ON TOUR Llandudno, Venue Cymru 07 MAR Bristol, Hippodrome 14 MAR Southampton, The Mayflower 21 MAR

CHOICE The Turn of the Screw | Britten

Conductor Carlo Rizzi; Director David Pountney; Sets Raimund Bauer; Costumes Marie-Jeanne Lecca; Lighting

15, 18, 21, 25, 27 FEB

ON TOUR Newcastle upon Tyne, Theatre Royal

Fabrice Kebour

05 MAR

CAST La Duchesse Hélène Anush Hovhannisyan; Guy De Montfort Giorgio Caoduro; Le Sire De Béthune Wyn Pencarreg; Jean Procida Wojtek Gierlach; Ninetta Christine Byrne; Robert Gareth Brynmor John; Manfredo/Daniele Robyn Lyn Evans

Salford Quays, The Lowry 11 MAR Nottingham, Theatre Royal 19 MAR Conductor Leo McFall; Director Alessandro Talevi; Sets, Costumes

Madeleine Boyd RICHARD HUBERT SMITH

The Marriage of Figaro | Mozart 16, 21, 23M, 28 FEB

ON TOUR Llandudno, Venue Cymru 04, 06 MAR Bristol, Hippodrome 12 MAR Southampton, The Mayflower 21 MAR Conductor Carlo Rizzi; Director Max Hoehn, Tobias Richter; Sets Ralph Koltai; Costumes Sue Blane

CAST Figaro David Ireland; Susanna Soraya Mafi; Conte d’Almaviva Jonathan McGovern; Contessa d’Almaviva Anita Watson; Cherubino Anna Harvey; Bartolo Henry Waddington / Nicholas Folwell; Marcellina Leah-Marian Jones; Don Basilio / Don Curzio Richard Roberts; Barbarina Harriet Eyley Carmen | Bizet 27, 29 FEB

ON TOUR Llandudno, Venue Cymru 05 MAR Bristol, Hippodrome 11, 13 MAR Southampton, The Mayflower 19 MAR Liverpool, Empire Theatre 26, 28 MAR Conductor Tomáš Hanus; Director Jo Davies; Sets Leslie Travers; Costumes

Gabrielle Dalton

CAST Carmen Virginie Verrez / Julia Mintzer; Don José Dimitri Pittas /

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January 2020 OperaNow

CAST Prologue Nicholas Watts; Peter Quint Nicholas Watts; Mrs Grose Heather Shipp; Miss Jessel Eleanor Dennis; Governess Sarah Tynan; Miles tba; Flora Jennifer Clark

Peter Auty; Escamillo Phillip Rhodes / Giorgio Caoduro; Micaëla Anita Watson / Elin Pritchard; Zuniga Henry Waddington / John Savournin; Frasquita Harriet Eyley / Haegee Lee; Mercédès Angela Simkin; Morales Ross Ramgobin; Le Dancaïre Benjamin Bevan

LEEDS

LONDON

OPERA NORTH

ENGLISH NATIONAL OPERA

The Marriage of Figaro | Mozart

Carmen | Bizet

ON TOUR Newcastle upon Tyne, Theatre Royal

Conductor Valentina Peleggi; Director

GLASGOW

04, 07 MAR

SCOTTISH OPERA

www.scottishopera.org.uk

CHOICE Nixon in China | Adams 18, 20, 22 FEB

www.operanorth.co.uk 01, 08, 14, 19, 22, 26, 29 FEB

Salford Quays, The Lowry 10, 12, 14 MAR Nottingham, Theatre Royal 18, 21 MAR Conductor Antony Hermus / James Hendry; Director Jo Davies; Sets Leslie Travers; Costumes Gabrielle Dalton

CAST Figaro Phillip Rhodes; Susanna Fflur Wyn; Count Almaviva Quirijn de Lang; Countess Almaviva Máire Flavin; Cherubino Heather Lowe

Conductor Joana Carneiro; Director John Fulljames; Sets, Costumes Dick Bird

Street Scene | Weill

CAST Richard Nixon Eric Greene; Mao Tse-tung Mark Le Brocq; Chou En-lai Nicholas Lester; Pat Nixon Julia Sporsén; Henry Kissinger David Stout; Madame Mao Hye-Youn Lee

ON TOUR Newcastle upon Tyne, Theatre Royal

18, 25 JAN 12, 20, 28 FEB

03, 06 MAR

Salford Quays, The Lowry 13 MAR Nottingham, Theatre Royal 17, 20 MAR

www.eno.org

29 JAN 01, 06, 08M, 11, 14, 20, 22, 25, 27 FEB

Calixto Bieito, Joan Anton Rechi (Original); Sets Alfons Flores; Costumes Mercè Paloma CAST Carmen Justina Gringyte; José Sean Panikkar / David Butt Philip; Escamillo Ashley Riches; Micaëla Nardus Williams Luisa Miller | Verdi

12, 15, 19, 21, 28 FEB 06 MAR

Conductor Alexander Joel; Director Barbora Horáková Joly; Sets Andrew Lieberman; Costumes Eva Maria Van Acker

CAST Luisa Elizabeth Llewellyn; Rodolfo David Junghoon Kim; Federica Christine Rice; Wurm Solomon Howard; Miller Olafur Sigurdarson; Laura Nadine Benjamin; Count Walter James Creswell

www.operanow.co.uk

Back Stage

Spotlight Madama Butterfly | Puccini

26, 29 FEB 05, 07, 11, 13, 20, 27, 30 MAR

Conductor Martyn Brabbins / Martin Fitzpatrick; Director Glen Sheppard, Anthony Minghella (Original); Sets

Michael Levine

CAST Cio-Cio San Natalya Romaniw; Pinkerton Dimitri Pittas / Adam Smith; Sharpless Roderick Williams / George von Bergen; Suzuki Stephanie WindsorLewis; Goro Alasdair Elliott; The Bonze Keel Watson; Prince Yamadori Njabulo Madlala; Kate Pinkerton Katie Stevenson

ROYAL OPERA HOUSE www.roh.org.uk

La Traviata | Verdi

06, 08, 13, 22, 25, 25, 27, 28, 30, 30 JAN 01M, 01 FEB 14, 16, 19, 21, 23 MAR

Conductor Maurizio Benini / Daniel

Oren / Francesco Ivan Ciampa;

Director Richard Eyre; Sets, Costumes Bob Crowley; Lighting Jean Kalman

CAST Violetta Valéry Hrachuhí Bassénz / Dinara Alieva / Vlada Borovko / Kristina Mkhitaryan / Aleksandra Kurzak; Alfredo Germont Liparit Avetisyan / Rame Lahaj / Ho-yoon Chung / Frédéric Antoun; Giorgio Germont Simon Keenlyside / Gabriele Viviani / Zeljko Lucic / George Petean

NEW PRODUCTION La bohème | Puccini

10, 14, 17, 20, 23, 29, 31 JAN 03, 05, 07, 11, 13 FEB

Conductor Emmanuel Villaume / Ariane Matiakh; Director Julia Burbach, Richard Jones (Original); Sets Stewart Laing; Lighting Mimi Jordan Sherin

NEW PRODUCTION

VIENNA

La Cenerentola | Rossini

Salome | Strauss

Conductor Leo Hussain; Director Nikolaus Habjan; Sets Julius T heodor Semmelmann; Costumes

Cedric Mpaka

CAST Salome Marlis Petersen; Jochanaan Johan Reuter; Herodes John Daszak; Herodias Michaela Schuster; Narraboth Martin Mitterrutzner

WORLD PREMIERE Egmont | Jost

16, 17, 19, 21, 24, 26 FEB

Conductor Michael Boder; Director Keith Warner; Sets Ashley Martin-Davis

CAST Egmont Edgaras Montvidas; Clara Maria Bengtsson; Margarete von Parma Angelika Kirchschlager; Macchiavelli Károly Szemerédy; Herzog Alba Bo Skovhus; Ferdinand Theresa Kronthaler

VIENNA STATE OPERA

www.wiener-staatsoper.at Die Fledermaus | Strauss, J 01, 04, 06 JAN

18, 22, 25 JAN

Conductor Evelino Pidò; Director SvenEric Bechtolf; Sets Rolf Glittenberg; Costumes Marianne Glittenberg

CAST Angelina Margarita Gritskova / Elena Maximova; Don Ramiro Antonino Siragusa / Josh Lovell; Dandini Orhan Yildiz; Don Magnifico Alessandro Corbelli / Renato Girolami; Alidoro Roberto Tagliavini / Michele Pertusi Salome | Strauss, R 20, 24 JAN

Conductor Dennis Russell Davies / Mikko Franck; Director Boleslaw Barlog; Sets, Costumes Jürgen Rose

CAST Herodes Jörg Schneider / Herwig Pecoraro; Herodias Linda Watson / Waltraud Meier; Salome Ausrine Stundyte / Lise Lindstrom / Camilla Nylund; Jochanaan Alan Held / Michael Volle; Narraboth Lukhanyo Moyake Otello | Verdi

28, 31 JAN 03, 07 FEB

Conductor Nicholas Carter; Director Otto Schenk; Sets Günther SchneiderSiemssen; Costumes Milena Canonero

Conductor Mikko Franck; Director Adrian Noble; Sets, Costumes Dick Bird; Lighting

CAST Gabriel von Eisenstein Adrian Eröd; Rosalinde Laura Aikin; Frank Jochen Schmeckenbecher; Prinz Orlofsky Margarita Gritskova; Alfred Benjamin Bruns; Dr Falke Clemens Unterreiner; Adele Daniela Fally; Frosch Peter Simonischek

CAST Otello Stephen Gould; Desdemona Krassimira Stoyanova; Jago Carlos Álvarez

Hänsel und Gretel | Humperdinck 02, 05 JAN

CAST Peter Boaz Daniel; Gertrud Stephanie Houtzeel; Hänsel Margaret Plummer; Gretel Andrea Carroll; Witch Monika Bohinec

www.operanow.co.uk

Evin

12, 18, 20, 23, 25, 28, 30 JAN

www.theater-wien.at

Conductor Thomas Adès; Director Antony McDonald; Sets, Costumes Antony

CAST Alice Claudia Boyle / Jennifer France; Red Queen / Queen of Hearts Clare Presland / Allison Cook; White Queen / Dormouse Hilary Summers / Carole Wilson; White King / Mad Hatter Sam Furness / Nicky Spence; March Hare / Tweedledee Peter Tantsits / Robert Murray; White Knight / Cheshire Cat Mark Stone / Stephen Richardson; Red Knight / Humpty Dumpty Joshua Bloom / Alan Ewing

Conductor Valery Gergiev; Director Andreas Homoki; Sets, Costumes Wolfgang Gussmann; Lighting Franck

NEW PRODUCTION

TEATER AN DER WIEN

Conductor Tomáš Hanus; Director Adrian Noble; Sets, Costumes Anthony Ward; Lighting Jean Kalman

McDonald

09, 11, 16, 19 JAN

CAST Lohengrin Piotr Beczala; Elsa von Brabant Cornelia Beskow; Friedrich von Telramund Egils Silins; Ortrud Linda Watson; Heinrich der Vogler Ain Anger

Alice’s Adventures Under Ground | Barry

03M, 04, 04, 06, 06, 08, 08, 09, 09 FEB

Lohengrin | Wagner

Il barbiere di Siviglia | Rossini 07, 10 JAN

Conductor Graeme Jenkins / Guillermo García Calvo; Director Günther Rennert; Sets, Costumes Alfred Siercke

CAST Rosina Svetlina Stoyanova / Tara Erraught; Figaro Samuel Hasselhorn / Adam Plachetka; Count Almaviva René Barbera / Pavel Kolgatin

Jean Kalman

CHOICE NEW PRODUCTION Leonore | Beethoven 01, 05, 08, 11, 14 FEB

Conductor Tomáš Netopil; Director Amélie Niermeyer; Sets Alexander MüllerElmau; Costumes Annelies Vanlaere

CAST Leonore Jennifer Davis; Florestan Benjamin Bruns; Rocco Tobias Kehrer; Pizarro Thomas Johannes Mayer; Marcelline Chen Reiss; Jaquino Jörg Schneider Elektra | Strauss, R 06, 09, 12, 15 FEB

Conductor Semyon Bychkov; Director Uwe Eric Laufenberg; Sets Rolf Glittenberg; Costumes Marianne Glittenberg

CAST Klytämnestra Waltraud Meier; Elektra Christine Goerke; Chrysothemis Simone Schneider; Aegisth Norbert Ernst; Orest Michael Volle

BELGIUM ANTWERP / GHENT FLEMISH OPERA operaballet.be

NEW PRODUCTION

Der Schmied von Gent | Schreker 02, 04, 07, 09M, 11 FEB

Conductor Alejo Pérez; Director Ersan Mondtag; Sets Ersan Mondtag; Costumes Josa Marx

CAST Smee Leigh Melrose; His wife Kai Rüütel; Astarte Vuvu Mpofu; Slimbroek Michael J Scott; Flipke Daniel Arnaldos CHRIS GLOAG

CAST Mimì Sonya Yoncheva / Ekaterina Siurina / Eleonora Buratto; Rodolfo Charles Castronovo / Jonathan Tetelman; Marcello Andrzej Filończyk / Andrei Bondarenko; Musetta Aida Garifullina / Simona Mihai / Vlada Borovko; Schaunard Gyula Nagy / Alessio Arduini; Colline Peter Kellner / Fernando Radó

EUROPE AUSTRIA

Rusalka | Dvořák

30 JAN 02, 04 FEB

Conductor Tomáš Hanus; Director SvenEric Bechtolf; Sets Rolf Glittenberg; Costumes Marianne Glittenberg

CAST Rusalka Olga Bezsmertna; The Prince Piotr Beczala; Foreign Princess Elena Zhidkova; Water Goblin Jongmin Park; Jezibaba Monika Bohinec Tosca | Puccini 10 FEB

Conductor Marco Armiliato / Giampaolo Bisanti; Director Margarethe Wallmann; Sets, Costumes

Nicola Benois

CAST Tosca Evgenia Muraveva / Martina Serafin / Sonya Yoncheva; Cavaradossi Joseph Calleja / Aleksandrs Antonenko / Brian Jagde; Scarpia Bryn Terfel / Zeljko Lucic / Erwin Schrott; Angelotti Ryan Speedo Green

Leigh Melrose sings Smee in Der Schmied von Gent OperaNow January 2020

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Spotlight

BRUSSELS LA MONNAIE / DE MUNT www.lamonnaie.be

CZECH REPUBLIC

Le nozze di Figaro | Mozart

BRNO

Conductor Antonello Manacorda / Ben Glassberg; Director Jean-Philippe Clarac, Olivier Deloeuil; Sets Rick Martin; Costumes Olivier Deloeuil,

NATIONAL THEATRE BRNO

18, 25 FEB 01M, 05, 17, 21 MAR

Jean-Philippe Clarac

www.narodni-divadlo.cz

NEW PRODUCTION

Der Rosenkavalier | Strauss, R 02M, 16M FEB

CAST Il Conte Di Almaviva Björn Bürger; La Contessa Di Almaviva Simona Šaturová; Susanna Sophia Burgos; Figaro Robert Gleadow; Cherubino Ginger Costa-Jackson

The Marschallin Alžběta Poláčková; Octavian Krejčí Václava Housková; Baron Ochs Jan Šťáva; Sophie von Faninal Jana Šrejma Kačírková

Così fan tutte | Mozart

Monument | Ivanovič

20, 27 FEB 08, 10, 19, 26 MAR

WORLD PREMIERE 07, 08, 28, 29 FEB

Conductor Antonello Manacorda / Ben Glassberg; Director Jean-Philippe Clarac, Olivier Deloeuil; Sets Rick Martin; Costumes Olivier Deloeuil,

Jean-Philippe Clarac

CAST Fiordiligi Lenneke Ruiten; Dorabella Ginger Costa-Jackson; Guglielmo Iurii Samoilov; Ferrando Juan Francisco Gatell; Despina Rinat Shaham; Don Alfonso Riccardo Novaro Don Giovanni | Mozart

22 FEB 03, 12, 15, 24, 28 MAR

Conductor Antonello Manacorda / Ben Glassberg; Director Jean-Philippe Clarac, Olivier Deloeuil; Sets Rick Martin; Costumes Jean-Philippe Clarac,

Olivier Deloeuil

CAST Don Giovanni Björn Bürger; Donna Anna Simona Šaturová; Donna Elvira Lenneke Ruiten; Leporello Robert Gleadow; Don Ottavio Juan Francisco Gatell; Zerlina Sophia Burgos; Masetto Iurii Samoilov; Il Commendatore Alexander Roslavets

Conductor Marko Ivanović; Director David Radok; Sets David Radok; Costumes Zuzana Ježková

CAST Sochař Svatopluk Sem; Manželka Markéta Cukrová; Kolega Roman Hoza Don Carlos | Verdi 15M FEB 15 MAR

Conductor Jaroslav Kyzlink / Ondrej Olos; Director Martin Glaser; Sets Pavel Borák; Costumes Markéta Sládečková

CAST Philip II Jiří Sulženko / Federico Sacchi; Don Carlos Luciano Mastro / Philippe Do; Rodrigo Jiří Brückler / Svatopluk Sem; Grand Inquisitor Martin Gurbaľ / Ondrej Mráz; Elisabeth de Valois Linda Ballová / Charlotta Larsson; Princess Eboli Veronika Hajnová Fialová / Michaela Šebestová Madama Butterfly | Puccini 22, 24 FEB 25 MAR

Conductor Jaroslav Kyzlink; Director Jiří Nekvasil; Sets Daniel Dvořák; Costumes

Marie Blažková

CAST Cio-Cio-San Adriana Kohútková / Linda Ballová; Suzuki Jana Hrochová; Pinkerton Peter Berger / Magnus Vigilius / Luciano Mastro; Sharpless Daniel Čapkovič / Svatopluk Sem / Roman Janál / Igor Loškár; Goro Petr Levíček; Yamadori Igor Loškár / Jakub Tolaš; The Bonze Jiří Klecker / David Szendiuch

DENMARK COPENHAGEN ROYAL DANISH OPERA NEW PRODUCTION

Sweeney Todd | Sondheim

03, 04, 08, 14, 19M, 21, 24, 28, 30 JAN 14, 22 FEB

Conductor Ian Ryan; Director James Brining; Sets, Costumes Colin Richmond; Lighting Chris Davey

CAST Sweeney Todd Palle Knudsen / David Kempster; Mrs Lovett Susanne Resmark / Alissa Anderson; Anthony Hope Nicholas Morton / Simon Duus; Johanna Baker Cassandra Lemoine / Renate Ekerhovd; Tobias Ragg Frederik Rolin; Judge Turpin Johannes Mannov / Morten Staugaard; Beadle Bamford Jens Christian Tvilum / Michael Kristensen; Adolfo Pirelli Gert Henning-Jensen / Paul Curievici

NEW PRODUCTION Carmen | Bizet 12, 15 FEB

Conductor Paolo Carignani / Leo Hussain / Alexander Vedernikov / Robert Houssart; Director Barrie Kosky, Alan Barnes; Sets, Costumes Katrin Lea Tag

CAST Carmen Michèle Losier / Elisabeth Jansson; Don José Migran Agadzhanyan / Niels Jørgen Riis; Escamillo Kihwan Sim / David Kempster / Anatoli Sivko / Johan Reuter; Micaëla Gisela Stille / Sofie Elkjær Jensen

OPÉRA NATIONAL DE BORDEAUX

www.opera-bordeaux.com

CHOICE The Demon | Rubinstein

29, 31 JAN 03, 06, 09M FEB

Conductor Paul Daniel; Director Dmitry Bertman; Sets, Costumes Hartmut Schörghofer; Lighting Thomas C Hase

CAST Le Démon Nicolas Cavallier; Tamara Evgenia Muraveva; Le Prince Sinodal Bror Magnus Tødenes; L’Ange Ray Chenez; Le Prince Goudal Alexandros Stavrakakis

PARIS OPERA (BASTILLE / GARNIER) www.operadeparis.fr

CHOICE Il barbiere di Siviglia | Rossini 11, 14, 17, 20, 22, 26M, 29 JAN 01, 04, 07, 09M, 12 FEB

Conductor Carlo Montanaro; Director Damiano Michieletto; Sets Paolo Fantin; Costumes Silvia Aymonino

CAST Rosina Lisette Oropesa; Figaro Florian Sempey / Andrzej Filończyk; Il Conte d’Almaviva Xabier Anduaga; Bartolo Carlo Lepore; Basilio Krzysztof Bączyk L’Enfant et les sortilèges | Ravel

29 FEB 05, 11 MAR

20, 21, 22, 23, 26M, 29 JAN

Conductor Julia Jones / Thomas Blunt; Director Maria Lamont, Robert Carsen; Sets Robert Carsen, Luis F Carvalho; Costumes Robert Carsen, Petra Reinhardt

Conductor Vello Pähn; Director Richard Jones, Antony McDonald; Sets, Costumes Richard Jones, Antony McDonald; Lighting Matthew

La Traviata | Verdi 01, 11 FEB

MIKLOS SZABO

January 2020 OperaNow

BORDEAUX

Idomeneo | Mozart

CAST Idomeneo Niels Jørgen Riis; Idamante Gert Henning-Jensen; Elettra Sine Bundgaard; Ilia Margaux de Valensart

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FRANCE

kglteater.dk

NEW PRODUCTION

Royal Danish Opera’s production of La Traviata

CAST Violetta Valery Gisela Stille / Francesca Dotto; Alfredo Germont Francesco Castoro / Matteo Lippi; George Germont David Kempster; Flora Bervoix Kari Dahl Nielsen / Henrike Henken

Conductor Richard Farnes / Robert Houssart; Director David Radok, Natascha Metherell; Sets Lars-Åke Thessman; Costumes Ann-Mari Anttila

Richardson

CAST L’Enfant Jeanne Ireland; Maman / Tasse chinoise / Libellule MarieAndrée Bouchard-Lesieur; Le Feu / Le Rossignol Aleksandra Jovanović; Bergère / Chauve-souris Ilanah LobelTorres; Princesse Marianne Croux / Andrea Cueva Molnar; Chatte / Ecureuil Ramya Roy; Chouette / Pâtre Gemma Ní Bhriain; Pastourelle Liubov Medvedeva; Fauteuil / Arbre Edwin

www.operanow.co.uk

Spotlight Crossley-Mercer; Horloge comtoise / Chat Timothée Varon / Alexander York; Théière / Rainette / Petit vieillard Ki Up Lee / Tobias Westman

DEUTSCHE OPER

www.deutscheoperberlin.de

CHOICE

Les contes d’Hoffmann | Offenbach

21, 25, 28 JAN 02M, 05, 08, 11, 14 FEB

Conductor Mark Elder / Pierre Vallet; Director Robert Carsen; Sets Michael Levine; Lighting Jean Kalman

CAST Hoffmann Michael Fabiano; Olympia Jodie Devos; Giulietta Véronique Gens; Antonia Ailyn Pérez; La muse / Nicklausse Gaëlle Arquez

NEW PRODUCTION Manon | Massenet

29 FEB 04, 07, 10, 13, 17, 22M, 25, 28, 31 MAR

Conductor Dan Ettinger; Director Vincent Huguet; Sets Aurélie Maestre; Costumes

NEW PRODUCTION

A Midsummer Night’s Dream | Britten 26, 29 JAN 01, 06, 22 FEB

Conductor Donald Runnicles / Daniel Carter; Director Ted Huffman; Sets Marsha Ginsberg; Costumes Annemarie Woods

CAST Oberon James Hall; Tytania Siobhan Stagg / Jacquelyn Stucker; Theseus Padraic Rowan; Hippolyta Annika Schlicht; Lysander Gideon Poppe; Demetrius Samuel Dale Johnson; Hermia Karis Tucker; Helena Jeanine De Bique; Bottom James Platt

Clémence Pernoud

Les Huguenots | Meyerbeer

CAST Manon Pretty Yende / Sofia Fomina; Le chevalier des Grieux Benjamin Bernheim / Stephen Costello; Lescaut Ludovic Tézier; Le comte des Grieux Roberto Tagliavini

Conductor Alexander Vedernikov; Director David Alden; Sets Giles Cadle; Costumes Constance Hoffman

GERMANY BERLIN BERLIN STATE OPERA

www.staatsoper-berlin.de Falstaff | Verdi 02, 06, 14 FEB

Conductor Daniel Barenboim; Director Mario Martone; Sets Margherita Palli; Costumes Ursula Patzak

CAST Sir John Falstaff Lucio Gallo; Ford Alfredo Daza; Fenton Francesco Demuro; Mrs. Alice Ford Barbara Frittoli; Nannetta Nadine Sierra; Mrs. Quickly Daniela Barcellona; Mrs. Meg Page Katharina Kammerloher Medea | Cherubini 08, 12, 15, 21 FEB

Conductor Oksana Lyniv; Director Andrea Breth; Sets Martin Zehetgruber; Costumes Carla Teti

CAST Médée Sonya Yoncheva; Jason Francesco Demuro; Créon Iain Paterson

NEW PRODUCTION

Der Rosenkavalier | Strauss 09, 13, 16, 19, 22, 27, 29 FEB

Conductor Zubin Mehta; Director André Heller, Wolfgang Schilly; Sets Xenia Hausner; Costumes Arthur Arbesser

CAST The Marschallin Camilla Nylund; Baron Ochs René Pape; Octavian Michèle Losier; Herr von Faninal Roman Trekel; Sophie Nadine Sierra

www.operanow.co.uk

02, 09M FEB 01M, 08M MAR

CAST Marguerite de Valois Liv Redpath; Valentine Olesya Golovneva; Urbain Irene Roberts; Raoul de Nangis Yosep Kang; Marcel Andrew Harris / Ante Jerkunica; Graf von Nevers Philipp Jekal; Graf von Saint-Bris Die Entführung aus dem Serail | Mozart 07, 10, 18 FEB

Conductor Nicholas Milton; Director Rodrigo García; Sets Rodrigo García, Ramon Diago; Costumes Hussein Chalayan

CAST Bassa Selim Annabelle Mandeng; Konstanze Flurina Stucki; Blonde Alexandra Hutton; Belmonte Matthew Newlin; Pedrillo Ya-Chung Huang; Osmin Patrick Guetti Die Zauberflöte | Mozart 08 FEB 13 MAR

Conductor Daniel Carter / Stephan Zilias; Director Günter Krämer; Sets, Costumes Andreas Reinhardt

Elena Tsallagova; Graf Oberthal Seth Carico; Zacharie Derek Welton

FRANKFURT

Il Barbiere di Siviglia | Rossini

Oper-frankfurt.de

28 FEB 05 MAR

Conductor Daniel Carter / Matteo Beltrami; Director Katharina Thalbach; Sets Momme Röhrbein; Costumes

Guido Maria Kretschmer

CAST Figaro Philipp Jekal / Samuel Dale Johnson / Thomas Lehman; Rosina Vasilisa Berzhanskaya / Cecilia Molinari; Graf Almaviva Matthew Newlin; Don Bartolo Misha Kiria / Biagio Pizzuti; Don Basilio Patrick Guetti / Andrew Harris

KOMISCHE OPER

www.komische-oper-berlin.de

NEW PRODUCTION La Traviata | Verdi

10, 17 JAN 01, 12, 22 FEB

Conductor Ainars Rubikis; Director Nicola Raab; Sets Madeleine Boyd; Costumes

Annemarie Woods

CAST Violetta Valéry Nadja Mchantaf / Vera-Lotte Boecker; Alfredo Germont Ivan Magrì / Alexei Neklyudov; Giorgio Germont Günter Papendell / Jacques Imbrailo; Flora Bervoix Maria Fiselier / Marta Mika Die Zauberflöte | Mozart

09, 11, 18 JAN 02, 09, 15, 17, 21 FEB

Conductor Ainars Rubikis; Director

Suzanne Andrade, Barrie Kosky; Sets, Costumes Esther Bialas CAST Tamino Tansel Akzeybek / Jussi Myllys; Pamina Amanda Forsythe / Sydney Mancasola / Lavinia Dames / Vera-Lotte Böcker / Alma Sadé; Königin der Nacht Danae Kontora / Aleksandra Olczyk / Christina Poulitsi / Olga Jelínková; Sarastro/ Sprecher Tijl Faveyts / Jens Larsen; Papageno Tom Erik Lie / Evan Hughes / Dominik Köninger / Bartłomiej Misiuda; Papagena Georgina Melville Rigoletto | Verdi

07, 16, 27 FEB 13, 21 MAR

Conductor Ainars Rubikis; Director Barrie Kosky; Sets, Costumes Alice Babidge

CAST Tamino Attilio Glaser / Andrei Danilov / Matthew Newlin; Papageno Philipp Jekal / Simon Pauly; Pamina Siobhan Stagg / Elena Tsallagova / Jacquelyn Stucker; Königin der Nacht Flurina Stucki / Aleksandra Jovanović / Rainelle Krause / Antonina Vesenina; Sarastro Tobias Kehrer / Ante Jerkunica; Papagena Meechot Marrero / Alexandra Hutton

CAST Il Duca Di Mantova Leonardo Capalbo; Rigoletto Nikoloz Lagvilava; Gilda Hera Hyesang Park; Sparafucile / monterone Tijl Faveyts; Il Conte di Ceprano / Un usciere di corte Changdai Park; La Contessa di Ceprano / Maddalena / Giovanna / Paggio Maria Fiselier; Marullo Daniel Foki

Le prophète | Meyerbeer

NEW PRODUCTION

23, 29 FEB 06 MAR

Conductor Enrique Mazzola; Director Olivier Py; Sets, Costumes Pierre-André

Weitz

CAST Jean de Leyde Gregory Kunde; Fidès Clémentine Margaine; Berthe

Back Stage

Frühlingsstürme | Weinberger 25, 29 JAN 08, 13, 23 FEB 01, 12, 28, 31 MAR

Conductor Jordan de Souza; Director Barrie Kosky; Sets Klaus Grünberg; Costumes Dinah Ehm

FRANKFURT OPERA NEW PRODUCTION Pénélope | Fauré 11, 17, 23 JAN

Conductor Joana Mallwitz; Director Corinna Tetzel; Sets Rifail Ajdarpasic; Costumes Raphaela Rose

CAST Pénélope Paula Murrihy; Ulysse Eric Laporte; Euryclée Joanna Motulewicz; Eumée Božidar Smiljanić; Antinous Peter Marsh Radamisto | Handel 04, 12M, 18 JAN

Conductor Simone Di Felice; Director Tilmann Köhler; Sets Karoly Risz; Costumes Susanne Uhl

CAST Radamisto Dmitry Egorov; Zenobia Zanda Švēde; Polissena Jenny Carlstedt / Paula Murrihy; Tiridate Kihwan Sim; Tigrane Kateryna Kasper; Fraarte Vince Yi; Farasmane Božidar Smiljanić

NEW PRODUCTION

Tristan und Isolde | Wagner 19, 25M JAN 01M, 09M, 14M, 23M, 29M FEB

Conductor Sebastian Weigle; Director Katharina Thoma; Sets Johannes Leiacker; Costumes Irina Bartels

CAST Tristan Vincent Wolfsteiner; Isolde Rachel Nicholls; KingMarke Andreas Bauer Kanabas / Falk Struckmann; Brangäne Claudia Mahnke / Tanja Ariane Baumgartner; Kurwenal Simon Bailey / Christoph Pohl; Melot Iain MacNeil Rigoletto | Verdi

24, 26, 30 JAN 02, 06, 08, 16, 21 FEB

Conductor Pier Giorgio Morandi; Director Hendrik Müller; Sets Rifail Ajdarpasic; Costumes Katharina Weissenborn

CAST Rigoletto Christopher Maltman / Franco Vassallo; Gilda Kateryna Kasper / Alina Adamski / Florina Ilie; Duke of Mantua Gerard Schneider; Sparafucile Barnaby Rea / Kihwan Sim / Anthony Robin Schneider; Maddalena Tanja Ariane Baumgartner / Judita Nagyová

NEW PRODUCTION La gazzetta | Rossini

02, 04, 06, 08, 10, 12, 14, 16 FEB

Conductor Simone Di Felice; Director Caterina Panti Liberovici; Sets Sergio Mariotti; Costumes Raphaela Rose

CAST Don Pomponio Sebastian Geyer; Lisetta Elizabeth Sutphen; Filippo Mikołaj Trąbka; Alberto Matthew Swensen; Doralice Angela Vallone; Madama La Rosa Nina Tarandek; Monsù Traversen Danylo Matviienko; Anselmo Franz Mayer

OperaNow January 2020

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Spotlight

BRESCIA E AMISANO

Anna Netrebko is Tosca at the Teatro Alla Scala

CAST Norina Marina Monzó; Don Pasquale Nicola Ulivieri; Ernesto Maxim Mironov; Dottor Malatesta Davide Luciano

NAPLES TEATRO SAN CARLO www.teatrosancarlo.it

La Traviata | Verdi

22, 25, 27 FEB 01, 03, 05, 27, 31 MAR

Conductor Leonardo Sini / Manlio Benzi; Director Francesco Micheli; Sets Federica Parolini; Costumes Alessio

Rosati

CAST Violetta Valery Margarita Levchuk / Nina Muho; Alfredo Germont Antonio Poli / Matteo De Sole; Giorgio Germont Gabriele Viviani / Giuseppe Altomare

MILAN TEATRO ALLA SCALA

www.teatroallascala.org

CHOICE NEW PRODUCTION Tosca | Puccini

22, 23, 24, 25, 26M, 28, 29 JAN

Conductor Donato Renzetti; Director Edoardo De Angelis; Sets Mimmo Paladino; Costumes Massimo Cantini Parrini

CAST Floria Tosca Carmen Giannattasio / Monica Zanettin; Mario Cavaradossi Fabio Sartori / Migran Agadzhanyan; Il Barone Scarpia Enkhbat Amartuvshin Norma | Bellini

GREECE ATHENS GREEK NATIONAL OPERA www.nationalopera.gr

The Emperor’s Nightingale | Platonos, Lena 22, 23, 26 JAN

Conductor Michalis Papapetrou; Director Katerina Petsatodi; Sets Evangelia Therianou; Costumes Alexia Theodoraki

CAST Emperor Nikos Kotenidis; Courtier / Death George Roupas; Nightingale Marilena Striftobola

WORLD PREMIERE

Leporella or Behind the wall | Kouroupos 11, 12, 17, 18, 25, 26 JAN

Conductor Nikos Vassiliou; Director Paris Mexis; Sets, Costumes Paris Mexis; Lighting Giorgos Tellos

CAST Irini Karaianni; Artemis Bogri; Tasos Apostolou; Myrsini Margariti; Petros Magoulas; Niki Chaziraki; Evita Chioti; Vassia Zacharopoulou

NEW PRODUCTION Wozzeck | Berg

19, 23, 26, 31 JAN 02 FEB

Conductor Vassilis Christopoulos; Director Olivier Py; Sets, Costumes PierreAndré Weitz; Lighting Bertrand Killy

CAST Wozzeck Tassis Christoyannis; Drum Major Peter Wedd; Andres Vassilis Kavayas; Captain Peter Hoare; Doctor Yanni Yannissis; Apprentice I Vangelis Maniatis; Apprentice II Michalis Psyrras; Madman Panagiotis Priftis; Marie Nadine Lehner; Margret Margarita Syngeniotou

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January 2020 OperaNow

Die Fledermaus | Strauss J

07, 08, 09, 16, 19, 22, 23 FEB 05 MAR

Conductor Giorgos Ziavras; Director Alexandros Efklidis; Sets Sotiris Stelios; Costumes Alexia Theodoraki

CAST Gabriel von Eisenstein Dimitris Paksoglou / Yannis Kalyvas / Nikos Kotenidis; Rosalinde Maria Mitsopoulou / Anna Stylianaki; Frank Kostis Rasidakis / Marios Sarantidis; Prince Orlofsky Artemis Bogri / Taxiarchoula Kanati; Alfred Vassilis Kavayas / Christos Kechris; Dr. Blind Yannis Kavouras / Dionisios Melogiannidis; Dr. Falke Yannis Selitsaniotis / Georgios Iatrou; Adele Vassiliki Karayanni / Marilena Striftobola

ITALY FLORENCE OPERA DI FIRENZE

www.maggiofiorentino.com Risurrezione | Alfano 17, 19, 21, 23 JAN

Conductor Francesco Lanzillotta; Director Rosetta Cucchi; Sets Tiziano Santi; Costumes Claudia Pernigotti

CAST Katerina Mihaylovna AnneSophie Duprels; Principe Dimitri Ivanovich Nehlyudov Matthew Vickers; Sofia Ivanovna NN; Matryona Pavlovna Romina Tomasoni; Simonson Ivanovich Leon Kim

CHOICE NEW PRODUCTION Tosca | Puccini 02, 05, 08 JAN

Conductor Riccardo Chailly; Director Davide Livermore; Sets Giò Forma; Costumes Gianluca Falaschi

12, 14, 15, 16M, 18, 20 FEB

Conductor Francesco Ivan Ciampa; Director Lorenzo Amato; Sets Ezio Frigerio; Costumes Franca

Squarciapino

CAST Norma Maria José Siri / Angela Meade; Adalgisa Annalisa Stroppa / Sonia Ganassi; Pollione Fabio Sartori / Mikheil Sheshaberidze

CAST Tosca Anna Netrebko / Saioa Hernández; Cavaradossi Francesco Meli; Scarpia Luca Salsi

PALERMO

Roméo et Juliette | Gounod

TEATRO MASSIMO

15, 18, 21, 26, 30 JAN 02, 13, 16 FEB

Conductor Lorenzo Viotti; Director Bartlett Sher; Sets Michael Yeargan; Costumes Catherine Zuber

CAST Juliette Diana Damrau; Roméo Vittorio Grigolo; Frère Laurent Nicolas Testé; Mercutio Mattia Olivieri; Tybalt Ruzil Gatin; Gertrude Sara Mingardo

CHOICE NEW PRODUCTION Il trovatore | Verdi

06, 09, 12, 15, 18, 21, 23, 26, 29 FEB 06 MAR

Conductor Nicola Luisotti; Director Alvis Hermanis; Sets Alvis Hermanis; Costumes Eva Dessecker

CAST Il conte di Luna Massimo Cavalletti; Leonora Liudmyla Monastyrska; Azucena Violeta Urmana; Manrico Francesco Meli; Ferrando Gianluca Buratto / Riccardo Fassi

NEW PRODUCTION

NEW PRODUCTION

Don Pasquale | Donizetti

Il turco in Italia | Rossini

21, 23, 26, 29 FEB 04 MAR

22, 25, 28 FEB 04, 13, 15, 17, 19 MAR

Conductor Antonino Fogliani; Director Andrea Bernard; Sets Alberto Beltrami; Costumes Elena Beccaro

Conductor Diego Fasolis; Director Roberto Andò; Sets Gianni Carluccio; Costumes Nanà Cecchi

www.teatromassimo.it

CHOICE NEW PRODUCTION Parsifal | Wagner

26, 28, 30, 31 JAN 02 FEB

Conductor Omer Meir Wellber; Director Graham Vick; Sets Timothy O’Brien; Costumes Mauro Tinti

CAST Parsifal Daniel Kirch; Amfortas Evgeny Nikitin; Gurnemanz John Relyea; Klingsor Thomas Gazheli; Kundry Eva-Maria Westbroek Falstaff | Verdi

21, 22, 23M, 25, 26, 27 FEB

Conductor Daniel Oren; Director Jacopo Spirei; Sets Nikolaus Webern; Costumes Silvia Aymonino

CAST Sir John Falstaff Nicola Alaimo; Ford Alessandro Luongo; Alice Ford Roberta Mantegna / Angela Nisi; Nannetta Jessica Nuccio; Meg Page Jurgita Adamonytė; Mrs Quickly Adriana Di Paola; Fenton Giorgio Misseri / Giovanni Sala

www.operanow.co.uk

Spotlight ROME

CAST Nemorino Celso Albelo / Leornardo Cortellazzi; Adina Damiana Mizzi / Veronica Marini; Dulcamara Marco Filippo Romano / Francesco Paolo Vultaggio; Belcore Julian Kim / Marcello Rosiello; Giannetta Arianna Donadelli

TEATRO ALLA ROMA www.operaroma.it

NEW PRODUCTION

I Capuleti e i Montecchi | Bellini 23, 26M, 28 JAN 01, 04, 06 FEB

Conductor Daniele Gatti; Director / Designer Denis Krief

LITHUANIA

CAST Romeo Anna Goryachova / Vasilisa Berzhanskaya; Giulietta Mariangela Sicilia / Benedetta Torre; Tebaldo Iván Ayón Rivas / Giulio Pelligra; Lorenzo Nicola Ulivieri

VILNIUS

NEW PRODUCTION

www.opera.lt

LITHUANIAN NATIONAL OPERA

Eugene Onegin| Tchaikovsky

12, 14, 15 FEB

Conductor Modestas Pitrenas / Ričardas Šumila; Director Vasily Barkhatov; Sets Zinovy Margolin; Costumes Olga

CAST Tatyana Maria Baiankina; Olga Yulia Matochkina; Eugene Onegin Markus Werba; Lensky Saimir Pirgu; Prince Gremin John Relyea

Shaishmelashvili

CAST Alexei Dmitrij Golovnin; Polina Asmik Grigorian; General Vladimiras Prudnikovas; Blanche Ieva Prudnikovaite; Marquis Tomas Pavilionis

VENICE TEATRO LA FENICE

www.teatrolafenice.it

NETHERLANDS AMSTERDAM DUTCH NATIONAL OPERA operaballet.nl

CHOICE Rodelinda | Handel

14, 16, 19M, 21, 23, 26M, 28 JAN

Conductor Riccardo Minasi; Director Claus Guth; Sets, Costumes Christian Schmidt

CAST Rodelinda Lucy Crowe; Bertarido Bejun Mehta; Grimaldo Bernard Richter; Eduige Katarina Bradić; Unulfo Lawrence Zazzo Nabucco | Verdi

27, 30 JAN 02M, 05, 09M, 12, 16M FEB

La Traviata | Verdi

LATVIA

04, 05M, 18, 22, 24, 26M, 28, 29 JAN

Conductor Stefano Ranzani; Director Robert Carsen; Sets, Costumes Patrick Kinmonth; Lighting Robert Carsen, Peter van Praet

RIGA LATVIAN NATIONAL OPERA

CAST Violetta Valery Maria Grazia Schiavo / Francesca Sassu; Alfredo Germont Stefano Secco; Giorgio Germont Simone Del Savio / Armando Gabba

www.opera.lv

La traviata | Verdi 15 JAN 26 FEB

Conductor Normunds Vaicis; Director Andrejs Žagars; Sets Andris Freibergs; Costumes Kristīne Pasternaka

NEW PRODUCTION

A Hand of Bridge | Barber 17, 19M, 21, 23, 25M JAN

Madama Butterfly | Puccini

Conductor Diego Matheuz; Director Fabio Ceresa; Sets Massimo Checchetto; Costumes Giuseppe Palella

06 FEB

Conductor Modestas Pitrenas; Director Sofija Maslovska; Sets Eduards Vītols

CAST Bill Christopher Lemmings; Sally Manuela Custer

NEW PRODUCTION 17, 19M, 21, 23, 25M JAN

Conductor Diego Matheuz; Director Fabio Ceresa; Sets Massimo Checchetto; Costumes Giuseppe Palella

Conductor Maurizio Benini; Director Andreas Homoki; Sets Wolfgang Gussmann; Costumes Wolfgang

Gussmann, Susana Mendoza

CAST Nabucco George Petean; Ismaele Freddie De Tommaso; Zaccaria Dmitry Belosselskiy; Abigaille Anna Pirozzi; Fenena Alisa Kolosova

NORWAY OSLO NORWEGIAN NATIONAL OPERA operaen.no

Der fliegende Holländer | Wagner

NEW PRODUCTION

Conductor Mārtiņš Ozoliņš; Director Viesturs Kairiss; Sets Reinis Dzudzilo; Costumes Krista Dzudzilo

Conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson / Carlo Rizzi; Director / Sets Ole Anders Tandberg; Costumes Maria Geber

08 FEB

Bluebeard’s Castle| Bartók

Rigoletto | Verdi 05, 07, 10, JAN

David Pountney’s staging of Moniuszko’s The Haunted Manor at the Teatr Wielki

CAST Duke Bluebeard Gidon Saks; Judit Ausrine Stundyte

NEW PRODUCTION

CAST Rigoletto Yngve Søberg / Fredrik Zetterström; Gilda Lina Johnson / Sofie Asplund; Duke of Mantova Mario Chang / Atalla Ayan; Sparafucile Güneş Gürle / Jens-Erik Aasbø; Maddalena Tone Kummervold / Astrid Nordstad

CHOICE Madama Butterfly | Puccini 11, 18, 22, 30 JAN 02, 06, 11, 14, 16, 21, 24 FEB

Conductor Dalia Stasevska; Director Stephen Langridge; Sets, Costumes Alison Chitty; Lighting Chris Davey

CAST Cio-Cio-San Elisabeth Teige; Pinkerton Henrik Engelsviken; Sharpless Yngve Søberg; Suzuki Désirée Baraula; Goro Petter Moen; Yamadori Ludvig Lindström; The Bonze Jens-Erik Aasbø

NEW PRODUCTION

Eugen Onegin | Tchaikovsky

15, 18, 20, 22, 25, 27 FEB 06, 08M MAR

Conductor Lothar Koenigs; Director Christof Loy; Sets Raimund Orfeo Voigt; Costumes Herbert Murauer

CAST Eugen Onegin Audun Iversen; Tatjana Svetlana Aksenova; Lenski Bogdan Volkov; Fyrst Gremin Robert Pomakov; Olga Tone Kummervold

POLAND WARSAW TEATR WIELKI

www.teatrwielki.pl The Haunted Manor | Moniuszko 09, 10, 11, 12 JAN

Conductor Grzegorz Nowak; Director David Pountney; Sets Leslie Travers; Costumes Marie-Jeanne Lecca

CAST Sword-bearer Adam Kruszewski / Stanislav Kuflyuk; Hanna Ania Jeruc / Ewa Majcherczyk; Jadwiga Elzbieta Wroblewska / Anna Bernacka; Stefan Dominik Sutowicz / Paweł Skałuba; Zbigniew Artur Janda / Jerzy Butryn; Damazy Mateusz Zajdel / Zbigniew Malak; Skołuba Alexander Teliga / Lukasz Konieczny The Fiery Angel | Prokofiev

La serva padrona | Pergolesi

19, 21, 23 JAN

13, 14, 15M FEB

Conductor Kazushi Ono; Director Mariusz Treliński; Sets Boris Kudlička; Costumes Kaspar Glarner

Director Francesco Bellotto; Sets Massimo Checchetto; Costumes Carlos Tieppo

L’elisir d’amore | Donizetti

15, 16M, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23M, 25 FEB KRZYSZTOF BIELINSKI

www.operanow.co.uk

20, 22 FEB

Conductor Mārtiņš Ozoliņš; Director Andrejs Žagars; Sets Alexander Orlov; Costumes Kristīne Pasternaka

The Gambler | Prokofiev

Conductor James Conlon; Director Robert Carsen; Sets, Costumes Michael Levine

Fercioni

Pikovaya Dama | Tchaikovsky

NEW PRODUCTION

18, 21, 23M, 25, 29 FEB

Conductor Jader Bignamini; Director Bepi Morassi; Sets, Costumes Gian Maurizio

NEW PRODUCTION

Back Stage

CAST Ruprecht Scott Hendricks; Renata Ewa Vesin; Agrippa von Nettelshei / Mephistopheles Alexei Popov; Count Heinrich Lukasz Konieczny

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Back Stage

Spotlight

Halka | Moniuszko

11, 14, 16, 19, 21, 23 FEB

Conductor Łukasz Borowicz; Director Mariusz Treliński; Sets Boris Kudlička; Costumes Dorota Roqueplo

CAST Stolnik Krzysztof Szumanski; Zofia Maria Stasiak; Dziemba Dariusz Machej; Janusz Tomasz Rak; Jontek Piotr Beczala / Rafał Bartmiński; Halka Izabela Matuła / Ewa Vesin Die Zauberflöte | Mozart 15, 18, 20, 22 FEB

Conductor Piotr Staniszewski; Director

Suzanne Andrade, Barrie Kosky, Tobias Ribitzki; Sets, Costumes Esther Bialas CAST Pamina Sylwia Olszyńska; Tamino Yuri Gorodetski; The Queen of the Night Joanna Moskowicz; Papageno Bartłomiej Misiuda; Sarastro / Speaker Remigiusz Łukomski

RUSSIA MOSCOW HELIKON-OPERA www.helikon.ru

La Belle Hélène | Offenbach 10, 11, 12 JAN

Yulia Scherbakova; Medoro Irina Reynard / Yulia Nikanorova / Maria Maskhuliya; Dorinda Elena Semenova / Anna Grechishkina; Zoroastro Stanislav Shvets / Alexandr Kisilev / Petr Morosov

SPAIN

Conductor Marc Albrecht; Director Robert Carsen; Sets Michael Levine; Costumes Vazul Matusz

www.teatro-real.com Die Zauberflöte| Mozart

19, 21, 25, 30 JAN 02, 07, 10, 13, 15, 17, 20, 22, 24 FEB

Conductor Ivor Bolton / Kornilios Michilidis; Director Barrie Kosky, Suzanne Andrade; Sets, Costumes Esther

Bialas

CAST Tamino Stanislas de Barbeyrac / Paul Appleby; Queen of the Night Albina Shagimuratova / Aleksandra Olczyk / Rocío Pérez; Pamina Anett Fritsch / Olga Peretyatko; Papageno Joan Martín-Royo; Sarastro/ Speaker Andrea Mastroni / Rafał Siwek

NEW PRODUCTION

Into the Little Hill | Benjamin 11, 13, 15 FEB

CAST Soprano Jenny Daviet; Contralto Julia Riley

Conductor Andrew Lawrence-King; Director Georgy Isaakyan; Sets Hartmut

Schörghofer

CAST Orlando Kirill Novohatko / Rustam Yavaev; Angelica Anna Pegova / Lidiya Svetozarova /

CHOICE

TEATRO REAL

CAST Hélène Elena Semenova; Pâris Dmitry Khromov; Ménélas Dmitry Ponomarev / Vasily Efimov; Agamemnon Sergey Toptyghin / Dmitry Yankovsky; Achille Igor Morozov / Vadim Letunov; Oreste Kirill Novohatko 20, 21, 22 FEB

www.lesarts.com

Elektra | Strauss

Conductor Tim Murray; Director Marcos Morau; Sets Max Glaenzel; Costumes

Orlando | Handel

PALAU DE LES ARTES REINA SOFIA

MADRID

Conductor Vladimir Ponkin; Director Dmitry Bertman; Sets, Costumes Igor

Nezhny, Tatiana Tulubieva

VALENCIA

Silvia Delagneau

Die Walküre | Wagner

12, 14, 16M, 18, 21, 23M, 25, 27, 28 FEB

Conductor Pablo Heras-Casado; Director Robert Carsen, Oliver Klöter; Sets, Costumes Patrick Kinmonth

CAST Siegmund Stuart Skelton / Christopher Ventris; Hunding Günther Groissböck / Ain Anger; Wotan Tomasz Konieczny / James Rutherford; Sieglinde Adrianne Pieczonka / Elisabet Strid; Brünnhilde Ricarda Merbeth / Ingela Brimberg; Fricka Sarah Connolly / Daniela Sindram

CAST Klytämnestra Doris Soffel; Elektra Iréne Theorin; Chrysothemis Sara Jakubiak; Aegisth Stefan Margita; Orest Derek Welton Il viaggio a Reims | Rossini 29 FEB 03, 06, 10, 14 MAR

Conductor Francesco Lanzillotta; Director Damiano Michieletto; Sets Paolo Fantin; Costumes Carla Teti

CAST Corinna Mariangela Sicilia; La Marchesa Melibea Marina Viotti; La Contessa di Folleville Albina Shagimuratova; Madama Cortese Ruth Iniesta; Il Cavaliere Belfiore Ruzil Gatin; Il Conte di Libenskof Sergey Romanovsky; Lord Sidney Adrian Sâmpetrean; Don Profondo Misha Kiria; Il Barone di Trombonok Fabio Capitanucci

SWEDEN GOTHENBURG GOTHENBURG OPERA sv.opera.se

CHOICE NEW PRODUCTION

Die Walküre | Wagner 03, 11, 19M JAN

LENNART SJÖBERG

Conductor Evan Rogister; Director Stephen Langridge; Sets, Costumes

NEW PRODUCTION La bohème | Puccini

01, 06, 12, 14, 19, 23, 27 FEB 01, 13, 22, 26 MAR

Conductor Karen Kamensek / Henrik Schaefer; Director Max Webster; Sets, Costumes Fly Davis

January 2020 OperaNow

MALMÖ OPERA

www.malmoopera.se

CHOICE NEW PRODUCTION Tosca | Puccini

02, 05, 08, 12, 15, 18, 21 JAN

Conductor Steven Sloane / Alexander Joel; Director Sofia Jupither; Sets Erlend Birkeland; Costumes Maria Geber

CAST Tosca Lianna Haroutounian / Simge Büyükedes / Shelley Jackson; Cavaradossi Jonathan Tetelman / Dimitris Paksoglou; Baron Scarpia Vladislav Sulimsky / Anthony Michaels-Moore

NEW PRODUCTION

Orpheus in the Underworld| Offenbach 14, 21, 26 FEB 01M, 03, 06, 15M, 29M MAR

Conductor Tobias Ringborg / Jakob Hultberg; Director Elisabeth Linton; Sets Julia Hansen

CAST Orfeus Martin Vanberg; Eurydice Eir Inderhaug; Pluto Richard Hamrin; Public Opinion Rickard Söderberg; Jupiter Carl Johan Falkman

STOCKHOLM ROYAL SWEDISH OPERA www.operan.se

CAST Siegmund Brenden Gunnell; Sieglinde Elisabet Strid; Hunding Mats Almgren; Wotan Anders Lorentzson; Brünnhilde Annalena Persson; Fricka Katarina Karnéus

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MALMÖ

18, 21, 24, 27, 30 JAN

Alison Chitty

Brenden Gunnell and Elisabet Strid in Die Walküre at Gothenburg Opera

Thomas Atkins; Marcello Luthando Qave; Musetta Mia Karlsson; Colline Henning von Schulman / Ivan Dajić; Schaunard Anton Ljungqvist

CAST Mimì Kerstin Avemo; Rodolfo

NEW PRODUCTION La Traviata | Verdi

08, 15, 21, 28 JAN 01M, 05, 08M, 10 FEB

Conductor Domingo Hindoyan; Director Ellen Lamm; Sets, Costumes Magdalena

Åberg

CAST Violetta Valery Ida Falk Winland; Alfredo Germont Bror Magnus Tødenes; Giorgio Germont KarlMagnus Fredriksson Carmen | Bizet

05M, 07, 10, 13, 16, 20, 30 JAN 11, 13, 18, 20, 29M FEB

Conductor Alexander Joel / Leo Hussain; Director Johanna Garpe; Sets Per A Jonsson; Costumes Nina

Sandström

CAST Carmen Katarina Leoson; José Daniel Johansson / Jesper Taube; Escamillo Kristian Flor; Micaëla Sabina Bisholt

www.operanow.co.uk

Spotlight

Conductor Henrik Nánási; Director

NEW PRODUCTION

Michael Grandage, Louisa Muller (Revival); Sets, Costumes Christopher Oram

Candide | Bernstein

29, 31 JAN 04, 07, 16M FEB 13, 16, 18, 20, 23 MAR

Conductor Stefan Klingele; Director Ole Anders Tandberg; Sets Markus Granqvist; Costumes Lena Lindgren

Le nozze di Figaro| Mozart 15, 17, 19 FEB 06, 09, 11, 17, 19, 24, 26 MAR

Conductor Jean-Christophe Spinosi; Director, Sets Ole Anders Tandberg; Costumes Maria Geber

CAST Figaro Denis Milo; Susanna Vivianne Holmberg; Countess Christina Nilsson; Cherubino Johanna Rudström; Count Jens Persson

SWITZERLAND BASEL THEATER BASEL

www.theater-basel.ch

WORLD PREMIERE

The Tales of Hans Christian Andersen | Dvorak

CHOICE NEW PRODUCTION

Le nozze di Figaro | Mozart 18, 24, 26M, 29 JAN 02, 08, 17, 25, 28 FEB

Conductor Christian Curnyn; Director Barbara Frey; Sets Bettina Meyer; Costumes Bettina Walter

CAST Count Almaviva Thomas Lehman; Countess Almaviva Oksana Sekerina; Susanna Sarah Brady; Figaro Antoin Herrera-Lopez Kessel; Cherubino Kristina Stanek

GENEVA OPERA

CAST Coraline Deanna Breiwick / Sandra Hamaoui; Mutter / Andermutter Irène Friedli / Judith Schmid; Vater / Andervater Robin Adams / Ronan Collett; Mister Bobo / Ander-Bobo Iain Milne / Spencer Lang; Miss Spink / Andere Miss Spink / Geisterkind 1 Sen Guo; Miss Forcible / Andere Miss Forcible Liliana Nikiteanu / Katia Ledoux

NEW PRODUCTION

NEW PRODUCTION

GENEVA www.geneveopera.ch Die Entführung aus dem Serail | Mozart 22, 24, 26M, 28, 30 JAN 01, 02 FEB

Conductor Fabio Biondi; Director Luk Perceval; Sets Philipp Bussmann; Costumes Ilse Vandenbussche

CAST Konstanze Maria Grazia Schiavo / Rebecca Nelsen; Blonde Claire de Sévigné; Belmonte Julien Behr; Pedrillo Denzil Delaere; Osmin Nahuel Di Pierro

04, 17, 25 JAN

Conductor Thomas Wise; Director Philipp Stölzl; Sets Philipp Stölzl, Heike Vollmer; Costumes Kathi Maurer

CAST Hans Christian Andersen Moritz von Treuenfels; Edvard Collin Mario Fuchs; Jonas Collin Klaus Brömmelmeier; Henriette Thyberg Linda Blümchen; Louise Lind Katharina Schmidt

NEW PRODUCTION

Il barbiere di Siviglia | Rossini 11, 30 JAN 07, 19, 22, 27 FEB

Conductor David Parry; Director, Sets, Costumes Kirill Serebrennikov

CAST Count Almaviva Alasdair Kent; Rosina Vasilisa Berzhanskaya / Kristina Stanek; Figaro Gurgen Baveyan; Bartolo Andrew Murphy

CHOICE NEW PRODUCTION

Les Huguenots | Meyerbeer 26, 28 FEB 01M, 04, 06 MAR

Conductor Marc Minkowski; Director Sergio Morabito, Jossi Wieler; Sets, Costumes Anna Viebrock

CAST Marguerite de Valois Anna Durlovski; Raoul de Nangis John Osborn / Mert Süngü; Marcel Michele Pertusi; Urbain Léa Desandre; Le Comte de Saint-Bris Laurent Alvaro; Valentine Rachel Willis-Sørensen; Le Comte de Nevers Alexandre Duhamel

NEW PRODUCTION La bohème | Puccini

12, 27 JAN 16M, 18, 20, 24 FEB

Conductor Kristiina Poska; Director Daniel Kramer; Sets Annette Murschetz; Costumes Esther Bialas

CAST Rodolfo Davide Giusti; Mimì Cristina Pasaroiu; Musetta Valentina Mastrangelo / Sarah Brady; Marcello Domen Križaj; Schaunard Gurgen Baveyan; Colline Paull-Anthony Keightley

www.operanow.co.uk

Deanna Breiwick sings Coraline in Zurich Opera’s new production

CHOICE ZURICH ZURICH OPERA

Iphigénie en Tauride | Gluck

02, 04, 06, 08, 11, 16, 20, 23, 28 FEB

Conductor Gianluca Capuano; Director Andreas Homoki; Sets, Costumes

Michael Levine

CAST Iphigénie Cecilia Bartoli / Birgitte Christensen; Oreste Stéphane Degout; Pylade Frédéric Antoun Fidelio | Beethoven

21, 25, 29 JAN 09M FEB

Conductor Markus Poschner; Director Andreas Homoki; Sets Henrik Ahr; Costumes Barbara Drosihn

CAST Florestan Andreas Schager; Leonore Anja Kampe; Rocco Dimitry Ivashchenko; Marzelline Mélissa Petit; Jaquino; Don Fernando Oliver Widmer; Don Pizarro Wolfgang Koch Wozzeck | Berg 09, 12, 15, 18 FEB

Conductor Hartmut Haenchen; Director Andreas Homoki; Sets, Costumes Yulia

Levin

CAST Wozzeck Christian Gerhaher; Marie Gun-Brit Barkmin; Drum Major Daniel Brenna; Andres Iain Milne; Hauptmann Wolfgang AblingerSperrhacke; Doktor Jens Larsen

NORTH AMERICA USA

www.opernhaus.ch

CHICAGO

NEW PRODUCTION

LYRIC OPERA OF CHICAGO

02M JAN 01, 08, 16M, 29 FEB

Madama Butterfly | Puccini

Coraline | Turnage

Conductor Ann-Katrin Stöcker; Director Nina Russi; Sets, Costumes Stefan Rieckhoff

www.lyricopera.org

06, 09M, 14, 17, 21, 29 FEB 04M, 05M, 07, 08M MAR

DANIEL VOLLAND

CAST Candide Joel Annmo; Pangloss / Martin Jeremy Carpenter; Maximilian / Grand inquisitor John Erik Eleby; Cunegonde Elin Rombo; Paquette Matilda Paulsson; Old Lady Miriam Treichl

Back Stage

CAST Cio-Cio-San Ana María Martínez / Lianna Haroutounian; Pinkerton Brian Jagde / Brandon Jovanovich; Suzuki Deborah Nansteel; Sharpless Anthony Clark Evans; Goro Rodell Rosel The Queen of Spades | Tchaikovsky

15, 19, 23M, 26M FEB 01M MAR

Conductor Andrew Davis; Director

Richard Jones, Ben Davis (Revival); Costumes John Macfarlane CAST Ghermann Brandon Jovanovich; Lisa Sondra Radvanovsky; Countess Jane Henschel; Tomsky Samuel Youn; Yeletsky Lucas Meachem; Pauline Elizabeth DeShong

LOS ANGELES LOS ANGELES OPERA www.laopera.org

WORLD PREMIERE Eurydice | Aucoin

01, 08, 14, 16M, 20, 23M FEB

Conductor Matthew Aucoin; Director Mary Zimmerman; Sets Daniel Ostling; Costumes Ana Kuzmanic

CAST Eurydice Danielle de Niese; Eurydice’s Father Rod Gilfry; Orpheus Joshua Hopkins; Orpheus Double John Holiday; Hades Barry Banks; Little Stone Stacey Tappan; Big Stone Raehann Bryce-Davis; Loud Stone Matthew Grills Roberto Devereux | Donizetti 22, 27 FEB 01M, 05, 08M, 14 MAR

Conductor Eun Sun Kim / Louis Lohraseb; Director Stephen Lawless; Sets Benoît Dugardyn; Costumes

Ingeborg Bernerth

CAST Sara Alice Coote; Roberto Devereux Ramón Vargas; Queen Elizabeth I Davinia Rodriguez; Sir Walter Raleigh Michael J Hawk

NEW YORK METROPOLITAN OPERA www.metopera.org

Le nozze di Figaro | Mozart 05, 08, 11, 14, 19, 22 FEB

Conductor Antonello Manacorda / Cornelius Meister; Director Richard Eyre; Sets, Costumes Rob Howell

CAST Countess Almaviva Susanna Phillips / Anita Hartig; Susanna Nadine Sierra / Hanna-Elisabeth Müller; Cherubino Gaëlle Arquez / Marianne Crebassa; Count Almaviva Adam Plachetka / Mariusz Kwiecien; Figaro Luca Pisaroni / Adam Plachetka

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Back Stage

Spotlight

CHOICE NEW PRODUCTION Wozzeck | Berg

02, 07, 11M, 16, 19M, 22 JAN

Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin; Director William Kentridge, Luc de Wit; Sets Sabine Theunissen; Costumes

Greta Goiris

CAST Wozzeck Peter Mattei; Marie Elza van den Heever; The Doctor Christian Van Horn; Margret Tamara Mumford; The Drum-Major Christopher Ventris

CHOICE Der Rosenkavalier | Strauss 01, 04 JAN

Conductor Simon Rattle; Director Robert Carsen; Sets Paul Steinberg; Costumes

Brigitte Reiffenstuel

CAST The Marschallin Camilla Nylund / Katie Van Kooten; Octavian Magdalena Kožená / Angela Brower; Sophie Golda Schultz; Baron Ochs Günther Groissböck

NEW PRODUCTION

Porgy and Bess | Gershwin

08, 11, 15, 18, 24, 28 JAN 01M FEB

Conductor David Robertson; Director James Robinson; Sets Michael Yeargan; Costumes Catherine Zuber

CAST Porgy Eric Owens / Kevin Short; Bess Angel Blue / Elizabeth Llewellyn; Clara Golda Schultz / Janai Brugger; Serena Latonia Moore; Maria Denyce Graves; Sportin’ Life Frederick Ballentine; Crown Alfred Walker La bohème | Puccini 09, 12M, 17, 21, 25 JAN

Conductor Marco Armiliato / Emmanuel Villaume; Director Franco Zeffirelli; Sets Franco Zeffirelli; Costumes

Peter J Hall

CAST Mimì Ailyn Pérez / Hei-Kyung Hong / Maria Agresta; Musetta Olga Kulchynska / Susanna Phillips / Jacqueline Echols / Jennifer Rowley; Rodolfo Matthew Polenzani / Roberto Alagna / Joseph Calleja; Marcello David Bizic / Carlos Álvarez / Artur Rucinski; Schaunard Andrei Zhilikhovsky / Elliot Madore / Rodion Pogossov; Colline Jongmin Park / Christian Van Horn / Tareq Nazmi La Traviata | Verdi

10, 14, 18M, 23, 26, 31 JAN 03, 07, 26, 29 FEB 05, 09, 13, 19 MAR

Conductor Karel Mark Chichon /

88

January 2020 OperaNow

Bertrand de Billy; Director Michael Mayer; Sets Christine Jones; Costumes Susan Hilferty CAST Violetta Valery Aleksandra Kurzak / Lisette Oropesa; Alfredo Germont Dmytro Popov / NN; Giorgio Germont Quinn Kelsey / Luca Salsi; Flora Bervoix Megan Marino / Sarah Larsen

CHOICE La Damnation de Faust | Berlioz 25M, 29 JAN 01, 04, 08M, 12, 15 FEB

Conductor Edward Gardner; Director Robert Lepage; Sets Carl Fillion; Costumes Karin Erskine

CAST Marguerite Elīna Garanča; Faust Bryan Hymel / Michael Spyres; Méphistophélès Ildar Abdrazakov

NEW PRODUCTION Agrippina | Handel

06, 09M, 13, 17, 22, 25, 29A FEB 03, 07 MAR

Conductor Harry Bicket; Director David McVicar; Sets, Costumes John

Macfarlane

CAST Poppea Brenda Rae; Agrippina; Nerone Kate Lindsey; Ottone Iestyn Davies; Pallante Duncan Rock; Claudio Matthew Rose; Narciso Andrey Nemzer; Lesbo Christian Zaremba Così fan tutte | Mozart 15, 18, 21, 23M, 27 FEB 04, 07A, 11, 14 MAR

Conductor Harry Bicket; Director Phelim McDermott; Sets Tom Pye; Costumes

Laura Hopkins

CAST Fiordiligi Nicole Car / Jennifer Check; Dorabella Serena Malfi / Carolyn Sproule; Despina Heidi Stober; Ferrando Ben Bliss; Guglielmo Luca Pisaroni; Don Alfonso Gerald Finley

SARASOTA SARASOTA OPERA

www.sarasotaopera.org La bohème | Puccini

08, 11, 13, 16M, 19, 25, 29M FEB 03, 06, 11, 14, 19, 21 MAR

Conductor Victor DeRenzi; Director Mark Freiman; Sets David P Gordon; Costumes Howard Tsvi Kaplan

Martha Collins; Sets Peter Dean Beck; Costumes Howard Tsvi Kaplan CAST Juliette Hanna Brammer; Romeo Andrew Surrena; Gertrude Lisa Chavez; Mercutio Matthew Hanscom; Friar Laurent Ricardo Lugo L’elisir d’amore | Donizetti

22, 26 FEB 01M, 05, 13, 17, 21M MAR

Conductor John F Spencer IV; Director Marco Nisticò; Sets Roger Hanna; Costumes Howard Tsvi Kaplan

CAST Adina Adelaide Boedecker; Nemorino Geoffrey Agpalo; Belcore John Viscardi; Dulcamara Stefano de Peppo

WASHINGTON DC WASHINGTON NATIONAL OPERA www.kennedy-center.org Don Giovanni | Mozart

29 FEB 02, 06, 08, 11, 14, 19, 22 MAR

Conductor Evan Rogister; Director E Loren Meeker; Sets Erhard Rom; Costumes Jean-Pierre Ponnelle

CAST Don Giovanni Ryan McKinny; The Commendatore Peter Volpe; Donna Anna Vanessa Vasquez; Don Ottavio Alek Shrader; Donna Elvira Keri Alkema; Leporello Kyle Ketelsen

ASIA PACIFIC AUSTRALIA MELBOURNE OPERA AUSTRALIA

Otar Jorjikia; Escamillo Lukasz Goliński / Luke Gabbedy; Micaëla Claudia Pavone / Simona Mihai Don Giovanni | Mozart

24, 29 JAN 01, 06, 08, 11, 13, 15M, 17, 19, 21, 25, 27 FEB

Conductor Xǔ Zhōng / Dane Lam; Director David McVicar; Sets, Costumes

Robert Jones

CAST Don Giovanni Luca Micheletti; Leporello Shane Lowrencev; Donna Anna Eleanor Lyons; Donna Elvira Jane Ede; Don Ottavio Juan de Dios Mateos; Zerlina Anna Dowsley; Masetto Richard Anderson; Commendatore Gennadi Dubinsky

CHINA BEIJING NATIONAL CENTRE FOR PERFORMING ARTS en.chncpa.org Aida | Verdi

26, 27, 28, 29 FEB 01 MAR

Conductor Pietro Rizzo / Alessandra Panzavolta; Sets, Costumes Ezio Frigerio, Franca Squarciapino; Choreographer

Alessandra Panzavolta

CAST Aida Monica Zanettin / Xiuwei Sun; Amneris Nino Surguladze; Radames Carlo Ventre / Warren Mok; Amonasro Dalibor Jenis / Yang Zhang; Ramfis Alexander Vinogradov / Guan Zhijing

JAPAN

opera.org.au

TOKYO

La Bohème | Puccini

NEW NATIONAL THEATRE

02, 03, 04, 06, 07, 08, 09, 15, 17, 18M, 21, 23, 25, 28, 30 JAN

Conductor Carlo Goldstein / Tahu Matheson; Director Gale Edwards; Sets Brian Thomson; Costumes Julie Lynch

CAST Mimì Karah Son / Valeria Sepe; Rodolfo Kang Wang / Ji-Min Park; Musetta Julie Lea Goodwin; Marcello Samuel Dundas; Schaunard Michael Lampard; Colline Richard Anderson / David Parkin Carmen | Bizet

www.nntt.jac.go.jp La bohème | Puccini

24, 26, 28, 31 JAN 02 FEB

Conductor Paolo Carignani; Director Jun Aguni; Sets Pasquale Grossi; Costumes

Alessandro Ciammarughi

CAST Rodolfo Matteo Lippi; Mimì Nino Machaidze; Musetta Akiho Tsujii; Marcello Mario Cassi; Schaunard Kenji Moriguchi; Colline Hiroshi Matsui

11, 16, 18, 20, 22, 25M, 31 JAN 07, 12, 15, 18, 22, 24, 28 FEB

Il barbiere di Siviglia | Rossini Conductor Antonello Allemandi; Director Josef Ernst Köpplinger; Sets, Costumes

Roméo et Juliette | Gounod

Conductor Christian Badea / Tahu Matheson; Director John Bell, Constantine Costi; Sets Michael ScottMitchell; Costumes Teresa Negroponte

Conductor Anthony Barrese; Director

CAST Carmen Veronica Simeoni / Sian Sharp / Carmen Topciu; Don José Roberto Aronica / Yonghoon Lee /

CAST Mimì Anna Mandina; Rodolfo William Davenport; Marcello Filippo Fontana; Colline Young-Bok Kim; Musetta Jessica Sandidge 15, 18, 20, 23M, 28 FEB 04, 08M, 14M, 20 MAR

06, 08, 11, 14, 16 FEB

Heidrum Schmelzer

CAST Figaro Florian Sempey; Rosina Aya Wakizono; Il Conte d’Almaviva René Barbera; Don Bartolo Paolo Bordogna; Don Basilio Marco Spotti

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Why I Love Opera

Leslie MacLeod-Miller

Why I Love

L

eslie MacLeod-Miller qualified as a lawyer in Australia before moving to the UK. He has practiced as corporate counsel and legal consultant for a variety of international companies, and now combines legal and political lobbying to effect policy change in areas of social vulnerability.

He and his identical twin, Archdeacon Peter, are keen supporters of culture and opera. Leslie was a finalist in the Operalia Competition and sits on the International Opera Awards Board, the Shakespeare’s Globe International Campaign Board and the Opera Rara Board.

Why do you love opera?

It’s a rollercoaster through someone else’s life and relationships, allowing us to leap through time and space. It requires amazing discipline and a combination of talents that show a certain greatness emanating from a human soul.

When and how did you begin to love it?

Who are your favourite operatic characters and why?

Rigoletto and Onegin – there’s something basic about getting it wrong and living with the consequences. Tosca because of the huge range of interpretations.

Who are your least favourite operatic characters and why?

Ping, Pang and Pong from Turandot because if Puccini hadn’t wasted time on that tiresome trio, he could have finished the whole opera before he expired! And Papageno – a life without real ambition...

What are the most fabulous operatic productions you ever saw?

What are your favourite operas?

Who are your favourite operatic stage directors?

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January 2020 OperaNow

Hearing Lauris Elms with Geoffrey Parsons; Sutherland in Trovatore; and again Ermonela Jaho.

La Scala opening night.

Who are your favourite operatic conductors?

Verdi for the drama, frequent brutality and frustration that mirror contemporary life.

What were the most unforgettable operatic experiences in your life?

Who are your favourite opera singers?

What was the first opera you saw and where?

Who is your favourite operatic composer?

My brother and I will always love Sydney – we used to queue for the best seats in the house for $8. Opera Holland Park because it’s the new home for astonishing singers and a lesson in good management.

What is the most awful production you ever saw?

Our grandmother giving me and my twin brother Peter a guided tour – via long-playing record – of Madama Butterfly, telling us the story and highlighting the dramatic bits!

Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde for the immense vocal palette and heroic voices such as Rita Hunter. The Britten operas for their tormented emotional gymnastics.

Which is your favourite opera house?

Traviata in the pouring rain for Sydney’s 1982 Opera in the Park starring Dame Joan; Ermonela Jaho in Suor Angelica and Anna Patalong in Salon Opera’s Tosca directed by Ruth Knight – magic!

Fritz Wunderlich, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Stuart Skelton and the incredible Justin Kim. Rita Hunter, Joan Sutherland, Shirley Mills, Maggie Teyte, Magda Olivero, Danielle de Niese and Gemma Summerfield.

Tosca with Marilyn Zschau and Joan Sutherland at the Sydney opera house.

with other forms of entertainment. So it has to engage, but not at the expense of great voices and brilliant conducting.

Richard Bonynge, Reginald Goodall, Simone Young.

Barrie Kosky, Paul Curran, Robert Carsen.

Is the current emphasis on the dramatic side of opera a good or a bad thing?

Opera needs to be the whole package and we have to recognise that it’s competing

Aida at Paris Opera in 2016.

Where can you find the best dressed audience at the opera?

And the worst?

Peter and I in the 1980s!

What direction would you like opera to go in the future?

Making equal priorities of the composer and audience through explorations of local, national and international themes.

Less focus on celebrity. More transparency about public funding at board level.

What would be the best way to attract new audiences?

Public and private funding for opera need to be part of a bigger conversation. The role of the Arts Council and the Culture Secretary might be a good place to start.

Opera can demonstrate a powerful message of unity in a confused world. ON

www.operanow.co.uk

Georg Friedrich Händel Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Messiah Scenic oratorio in three parts, in Hungarian, with Hungarian and English surtitles

Music revised by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Original, English-language libretto compiled from biblical passages by Charles Jennens Libretto translated into German by Christoph Daniel Ebeling, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock Hungarian text Ádám Nádasdy Set designer Gergely Z Zöldy Costume designer Mónika Szelei Choreographer Marianna Venekei Chorus director Gábor Csiki Conductor Gergely Kesselyák Director Ferenc Anger Premiere 21 December 2019, Erkel Theatre Further dates 23, 25 and 28 December 2019; 17 and 20 May 2020, Erkel Theatre

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