parterre box

37 comments

• Hans Lick says:

  Yes, Meyerbeer is a far greater composer than Gounod, yes they should do Robert le Diable sometime (also Das Nachtlager in Schlesien, a score I didn’t know till La Cieca & Milton podded it last summer). This summer’s Huguenots had its problems (mostly staging), but the singing was mostly excellent – all those small but important roles behind the Big Seven were very well cast, and I liked six of the seven. (St. Bris was bumpy.)

  I’m glad Spyres is getting the appreciation he deserves here – I, too, doubt he could sing Raoul in a Great Big House, but the quality of the voice was a joy, beautiful and sensuous, and as this shows, he knows what he’s singing about and isn’t afraid to show it. He was kind of pushing by Act V, but that’s the problem with Raoul – he has something BIG to sing in each of five acts (unlike the other stars); uncut, it’s murder. The prayer trio in Act V was glorious, just as you were expecting him to have run out of steam.

  Deshorties illustrates the problem of the slow-maturing voice in the present age. If she doesn’t hit it young, the recording companies want nothing to do with her and the churls (a few here) do not forget the missteps. She sang Konstanze because the Met was desperate, promised her the moon, and then forgot her the minute she came a cropper. (I’m told her last performances of the part, she’d finally got a handle on it. And is it or is it not the toughest soprano role in the repertory?) She knew it was wrong for her, and she let herself be tempted/pressured. For an ambitious kid, a difficult thing to resist. But I have also found her Donna Anna and Fiordiligi less than satisfying – she has great scads of not unbeautiful voice, but she seems to toss them out unsure how far they’ll go. Mozart gets done a lot, but it’s not her fach.

  Valentine is the best thing I’ve ever heard her do – the quiet singing in Act III and the opening arietta in Act IV were superb – with no push at all, she was, though, piano, loud and clear throughout the house. I agree she would have fun with Rachel (also the Queen in L’Africaine) – Leonora and Desdemona, perhaps. Then the duet, which was splendid. In contrast, Lorengar sang the duet beautifully but could not manage the rest of the role – so the Berliners obligingly cut the rest of the role. Meyerbeer does not fight the cuts, but I like to hear the often-cut things precisely because a singer like Deshorties or Spyres can astonish you with them, and they were composed to astonish in the mouths of the right singers.

  It was a great Huguenots, to everybody’s flabbergast, and I wish you all could have seen it, and that we could all go back to it this winter.

  on August 25, 2009 at 11:46 AM
• Hans Lick says:

  P.S. On relevance:
  A stage spectacle about religious intolerance destroying a civilized society is just the sort of thing we could all use right now.

  (Pity they don’t let women perform on stage in Iran – but in the West we don’t have that excuse. Except in Colorado, where they ban Faust and probably wouldn’t care for Meyerbeer either. Jewish, y’know.)

  on August 25, 2009 at 11:51 AM
• operablogger says:

  @ Cocky – #26: Buster is correct in that Milla Andrew sings Massenet’s Sapho. I have it on Opera d’Oro , which is a live recording from London in ’73. The Gounod recording (a Radio-France production) features Katherine Ciesinski in the title role. The rest of that cast (alongside Vanzo) includes Elaine Lublin, Frederic Vassar, and Alain Meunier.

  While Gounod’s opera is a tale of the Greek poetess, Massenet tells the story of a contemporary artist’s model who’s known as “Sapho” simple because she sat for a sculptor who created a statue of said Grecian. The character’s real name is Fanny.

  on August 25, 2009 at 11:54 AM
• operablogger says:

  @ Hans #32: I don’t get the Colorado dig, especially as Opera Colorado performed “Faust” in 1997 to great acclaim.

  on August 25, 2009 at 12:01 PM
• Hans Lick says:

  operablogger – the reference was to an outrageous case a couple of years ago – a Colorado public schoolteacher showed the Sutherland & puppets half-hour version of Faust to her 8th graders, and was denounced by parents for showing a story about the devil. She apologized abjectly, but was fired in any case; the schoolboard knelt in the dust before these cretins. I assume these folks didn’t grow up watching Lassie.

  on August 25, 2009 at 12:50 PM
• louannd says:

  #35 I would guess Colorado Springs and not Boulder?

  on August 25, 2009 at 2:48 PM
• ogiovetti says:

  Funny, Hans, that Who’s Afraid of Opera Faust stuck with me to the point that I now have a Faust tattoo.

  on August 26, 2009 at 2:00 PM