Donizetti, The Elixir of Love

By Harvey Steiman

Reprinted with permission from Seen and Heard – Music Web’s Live Opera, Concert and Recital Reviews.

Soloists, Orchestra and Chorus of San Francisco Opera, Conductor Bruno Campanella, War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, 29.10.2008 (HS)

Cast:

Adina: Inva Mula (soprano)
Nemorino: Ramón Vargas (tenor)
Belcore: Giorgio Caoduro (baritone)
Dulcamara: Alessandro Corbelli (bass)
Giannetta: Ji Young Yang (soprano)

Nemorino: Ramón Vargas

In the very first scene of The Elixir of Love, re-set to a small town in nearby Napa Valley instead of “a small Italian village,” we meet Nemorino scooping ice cream for a gaggle of children. From the vintage of his ice cream truck and the costumes, it’s around 1915. He sees Adina on the town bandstand, wearing a sash proclaiming her “Queen of the Harvest” and signing up townspeople for library cards. He prepares a strawberry ice cream cone for her, but in delivering it he falls face-first and the ice cream tumbles to the ground. He picks it up, balances it on the cone and sheepishly offers it to her. She laughs and turns away.

In one deft moment, director James Robinson establishes the setting and the personalities of the two protagonists. Nemorino, played by tenor Ramón Vargas, is awkward and shy, and clearly infatuated with Adina, played by Inva Mula. She may be bookish but the town adores her. You can tell by the way they follow her around. The way she smiles at Nemorino, you can tell that she likes him but considers him unworthy. She’s a dish and she knows it. It’s only the first of many delightful and telling moments in this charming, colorful and apt production.

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Second Opinion. Mussorgsky, Boris Godunov

By Harvey Steiman

Reprinted with permission from Seen and Heard – Music Web’s Live Opera, Concert and Recital Reviews.

Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of the San Francisco Opera, Conductor, Vassily Sinaisky, War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco. 2.11.2008 (HS)

Boris Godunov – Samuel Ramey (bass-baritone)
Prince Shuisky – John Uhlenhopp as Prince (tenor)
Grigory/The Pretender Dimitri – Vsevolod Grivnov (tenor)
Varlaam – Vladimir Ognovenko (bass)
Pimen – Vitalij Kowaljow (bass)
The Simpleton – Andrew Bidlack (tenor)
Innkeeper: Catherine Cook (mezzo-soprano)

The Act I Set

Probably no other other opera has gone through as many revisions, re-orchestrations, re-sorting of scenes and acts and other adaptations than has Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. Right from the beginning, the composer himself went back to the drawing board. The Imperial Theater rejected his original 1869 version, noting among other things the lack of a significant female role. By 1872 the composer had reworked the seven existing scenes and added an entirely new act set in Poland, where the princess Marina decides to use a pretender to the throne as her path to becoming queen of Russia.

The stark scenes in the original more single-mindedly focus on a dark, brooding portrait of the troubled tsar than the grander, more epic-scaled opera we are accustomed to. By the time the original version finally was staged in 1928, several posthumous revisions, culminating in a colorfully orchestrated one by Rimsky-Korsakov, had changed Mussorgsky’s tight, no-frills portrait into a grand opera.

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Strauss, Elektra

By Bernard Jacobson

Reprinted with permission from Seen and Heard – Music Web’s Live Opera, Concert and Recital Reviews.

Seattle Opera, soloists, cond. Lawrence Renes, dir. Chris Alexander, set designer Wolfram Skalicki, costume designer Melanie Taylor Burgess, lighting designer Marcus Doshi, Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, Seattle, 18, 19, & 29. 10. 2008 (BJ)

It is too easy, in discussing Strauss’s Elektra, to stress the sheer aggressiveness of the score at the expense of other equally important qualities. From a composer who had already established his modernist and psychologically penetrative credentials in Salome, the drama of Elektra’s obsession with avenging her father Agamemnon’s death naturally drew clamorous orchestral writing and dissonant superimpositions of mutually contradictory chords that grind terrifyingly on the ear.

Yet Hofmannsthal’s and Strauss’s Elektra is not merely a violently inclined madwoman–her madness, and her lust for vengeance, are the twisted results of a love for her lost father and a capacity and longing for family happiness that have been unhinged by the trauma of that father’s murder by his wife Klytämnestra and her lover Aegisth. (I give the characters’ names in their German versions for consistency’s sake.) This shattering experience, intensifying the “Elektra complex” posited by Jung as a daughter-father counterpart to Freud’s “Oedipus complex,” is just one psychologically significant element in the plot – Freud’s emphasis on the importance of dreams, too, is evoked by the nightmares that have poisoned Klytämnestra’s sleep and also torture her daughter.

If it had been merely bloodcurdling, Seattle Opera’s new Elektra would have been a less astounding achievement. What this stunning production managed to do, without shortchanging the violence of the action or the uncompromising vehemence of Richard Strauss’ music, was to reveal the humane and lyrical side of both in their full glory. Yes, the composer of Elektra was the composer of Salome; but very soon he would be the composer of Der Rosenkavalier, and you could hear that in the warmth and lyricism that, together with the moments of gruesome discord, emerged from the pit.

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