How monarchic was my sprezzatura!
“Yet the evening’s first words, heard in the set-piece Ombra ma fui—like all of Xerxes’ arias sung with monarchic sprezzatura and amoral relish by Stella Doufexis…”
Review
The Prussians are coming
Sometime in 1753, Frederick The Great of Prussia, following a tiff with his great friend Voltaire, began writing an opera libretto in French prose that was to elucidate his ideas about the role of an enlightened monarch.
Mist opportunity
The story is enough of a cipher to make any regie-bent director salivate.
Renaissance: fair
On this Gay Pride weekend, I remember my late friend Robert Chesley, activist and playwright (Stray Dog Story), who had also been an elementary schoolteacher.
Round midnight
As a child I had but a few criteria that were necessary to ensure a happy entertainment. These included mostly ball-gowns, fairy godmothers and Julie Andrews, though Sally Ann Howes was acceptable in a pinch.
Blonde item
This year, I attended one of Natalie Dessay‘s only fully-sung Traviatas at the Met.
Shadow, no doubt
Richard Strauss’s “last romantic opera,” as he called Die Frau Ohne Schatten, is and has always been a problem child.
Cold case
The operas of Leos Janácek have been slowly gaining ground in the world’s theatres over the past fifty years.
Stealing Rome
L’incoronazione di Poppea nearly disappeared from the stage completely after its 1642 Venice premiere and a Naples revival in 1651.
Captive audience
Die Entführung aus dem Serail has been a bit of an unruly child recently, with productions by Neuenfels and Bieito dividing audiences and inspiring critics like Heather MacDonald to lengthy manifestos.
Past imperfect
One of my adolescent pastimes was trolling the classical cut-out bins in record stores searching for overlooked gems or unfamiliar singers.
Citius, Altius, Fortius
Of all the Olympics-related products created to honor the upcoming summer games in London, surely one of the oddest must be a brand new pasticcio just released on a two-CD set
by Naïve—L’Olimpiade.
The windmills of his mind
Jules Massenet’s Don Quichotte was one of a number of commissions from the Monte Carlo Opera that occupied the composer at the end of his life.
Pillow talk
Francesco Cavalli’s 1649 opera Il Giasone (Jason) was virtually a model of the many conventions that had come to be expected in Venetian public opera in the seventeenth century.
Grand, hotel
Sneaking in under the wire during the final week of May were two highpoints of New York’s opera season: the Cleveland Orchestra’s Salome with a stunning Nina Stemme and operamission’s revelatory US stage premiere of a complete edition of Handel’s first opera Almira.
Unexpected ghost
Frustrated, perhaps, by the bulky requirements and dubious future of grand opera—and grand opera commissions—Benjamin Britten created some of his most intriguing and, nowadays, popular pieces for small casts and chamber orchestra.
Expect opera, pay less
You may remember, gentle readers, that last year about this time Peter Gelb decided to enter into an unholy alliance with Target to benefit their mountainous number of opera loving customers by pre-releasing two Met performances exclusively in their fine emporiums.
Just my Gluck
For all his historical importance Christoph Willibald Gluck remains one of the least known and performed of the great opera composers.
Lyre’s poker
The Underworld as corporate boardroom, Pluto a “suit,” the damned a bunch of clerks tapping away at laptops.
“Ne m’accuse pas, pleure-moi!”
Jules Massenet wrote Werther at the midpoint of his very successful career.
Not another teen opera
Vincent Boussard’s 2011 take on Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi returned on Saturday (May 12) to Munich’s Nationaltheater.
A little traveling music
Gustav Holst was always searching for deep theses from which to suspend his art.
Wholly Grail
Certain opera productions become the stuff of legend as much for the circumstances surrounding the performance as for the musical results.
It might as well be Einspring
Kate Royal withdrew as Mozart’s Contessa the other night (May 3) in Munich and we were forced to accept as substitute—gosh!—Anja Harteros