Here, I post my reviews and document my love of opera. I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to comment on any of my posts or contact me if you wish to.
Have a nice stay!
David Buchler
First staged as a double bill in New York in 1893, these two operas have been part of the standard opera repertoire as a duet ever since. Geneva Opera provides us with two very contrasting productions, which made for a varied but interesting musical evening.
La Traviata had a somewhat complicated beginning. This opera – The Fallen Woman – is a Verdi opera in three acts, adapted from the novel La Dame aux Camelias by Alexandre Dumas. It opened in 1853 at La Fenice in Venice. Despite the Composer’s wish for a contemporary setting, the local authority insisted that the action be set in the early 18th century and it wasn’t until the 1880s that a more contemporary production was staged. In the original production, the acclaimed soprano singing the lead of Violetta was booed because she was considered to be too old (at 38) and too overweight to credibly play a young woman dying of consumption!
Gosh, how depressing! Leos Janacek wrote his opera, From the House of the Dead, in the year of his death in 1928. The opera is effectively a play within a play, set in a Siberian prison, where individual prisoners narrate episodes of their lives.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, the opera composed by Benjamin Britten was set to a libretto, adapted by both the Composer and the Singer, Peter Pears, from the play by William Shakespeare. It was premiered in 1960 at the Aldeburgh Festival.
What does a leading English and Scottish solicitor with three music diplomas in piano, singing and organ, do on his 70th birthday? He puts on a concert of course!
One of Gilbert and Sullivan’s great successes, Iolanthe opened at the Savoy Theatre in London at the end of 1882 and ran for just under 400 performances.
Tear up the rule book! The Australian opera Director, Barry Kosky, is in town and gives us a new take on Carmen, quite unlike anything you will have seen before.
This incredible opera written by Philip Glass had its world premiere in 1980 in Rotterdam and its UK premiere in Bath in 1997. Its main commissioning in the UK was an incredible production at the English National Opera in 2007, in conjunction with the Metropolitan Opera New York, with the Director Phelim McDermott and his Improbable team in charge.
If this is how the Royal Opera House is starting 2018, then we are in for a vintage year.
Oscar Wilde’s original French play Salome, translated into German all in one Act, is just under 2 hours of intense brutality and unyielding musical brilliance, built on a theme of eroticism and murder. It was first performed in Dresden in 1905 and Gustav Mahler himself wanted to conduct the opera in Vienna, but in fact the censors refused consent and did not relent until 1918. It was initially banned in London until performed at Covent Garden under the baton of Thomas Beecham in 1910.
If the French had anything to do with it, Rigoletto would never have been performed. Based on Victor Hugo’s play ‘Le roi s’amuse’, where Verdi described the subject matter of the play as ‘immense’, it was highly controversial as it depicted the King of France as an immoral and cynical womaniser. As a result, the opera had to undergo many changes before the censors allowed it to be performed, opening at La Fenice in Venice in 1851. Even though the King of France was deleted from the opera – he was converted to the Duke of Mantua – the opera was banned in France and not performed there until 1882.
It is difficult to know where to start with this outrageous performance of La Boheme, which included a dead Mimi, an invisible coat, a mime and several dying astronauts.
Gioachino Rossini was born in 1792 and was a prodigious composer of operas – composing 39 altogether. At the age of 31 he composed his last opera in Italy, being Semiramide, which had its premiere in 1823 in Venice. The music recreated the Baroch tradition of decorative singing with unparalleled skill. The ensemble scenes, particularly the duos between Arsace and Semiramide, together with the choruses, are of an extremely high order.
These two operas, Cavalleria rusticana by Pietro Mascagni and Pagliacci by Rugerro Leoncavallo, both had their world premieres in the last decade of the 19th century and in fact were first staged as a double bill at the Metropolitan Opera New York in December 1893. They have both been hugely successful as a duet and indeed the original Director of this revival, Damiano Michieletto, has brought a common theme to the two operas, relocating them both to a small town in Southern Italy, with a bakery for the Cav and a community hall for the Pag.
In a remarkable career spanning six decades in the theatre, Giuseppe Verdi 1813-1901, composed nearly 30 operas, at least half of which are at the core of today’s repertoire. His Requiem, premiered in 1874, stands as a unique testimony to his artistic and human vision and is a setting of the text for the Roman Catholic mass for the dead as it existed until its revision in 1970.
Alfred Hitchcock’s film Marnie, starring Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery, was lightly based on the original book by Winston Graham. Hitchcock’s film ending was more dramatic perhaps than the books. The Composer, Nico Muhly, decides to stick more closely to the original book version, with skilful subtlety that is so prevalent in its musical score.
Lucia di Lammermoor was Donizetti’s 46th opera written in 1835 and based on Sir Walter Scott’s similarly titled novel. It was premiered in Naples in its original Italian version, but very soon thereafter a French version (which is rarely performed) was commissioned for the Paris Opera. Many of the great sopranos have sung the role of Lucia, some of whom have made their career as a result, such as Melba, Callas, Sutherland, Anderson, Serra, Gruberova and more recently, Damrau and Dessay.
Doctor Tom Walsh must have known the best medicine to cure all of his patients, because it was he and a group of opera lovers that founded the Wexford Opera Festival in 1951 and indeed he became the Festival’s first Artistic Director. Thereafter, some notable artistic directors have come and gone, namely Brian Dickie pre Glyndebourne and Elaine Padmore pre Royal Opera House. The current Artistic Director is David Agler, who has been in the role since 2005 and the Chairman is the wonderful Ger Lawlor who is always at the front door to meet and greet patrons as they arrive. The new Wexford Opera House has been rebuilt on the same site and was opened in 2008. The Festival indeed is a marvel of creation, with the wonderful Irish people always ready to greet its visitors. Never far away is the wonderful smell of the Lobster Pot pub and salt from the Atlantic Ocean nearby.
The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which was opened in 1964, seating 3,200 people, is a beautiful opera house. There is lots of wood and no carpet and the sound is excellent and everything is tall and big, quite typical of such concert halls in America. However, the seat rows are at times more than 60 seats long with no middle section. That’s a long walk along the row if you start at the wrong end! I particularly reflected on the initial announcement made in the auditorium asking the audience to ‘refrain from talking during the opera’!
Nearly 30 years has passed since Jonathan Miller’s production of the Barber of Seville adorned the Coliseum stage of the English National Opera. The moving sets are clever, well lit, light and as relevant today as they were 3 decades ago. The biggest complement to the restaging by Peter Relton was the joy in which it was received by Jonathan Miller himself, who said ‘its brilliance is nothing to do with me!’ Relton has found comedy and humour where previously there was none, in this 18th century Seville setting.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was born in 1897 in Austria/Hungary and died at the age of 60 in California. He was a child prodigy, having a great European career until the rise of the Nazi regime forced him to flee to America in 1934. Thereafter, he worked on some 16 Hollywood films, writing the scores and receiving two Oscars for his work. His main classical work was written in Europe and this particularly applies to the opera, Das Wunder der Heliane (The Miracle of Heliane), which is written in three acts and was first performed at the Hamburg State Opera in October 1927.
