Living at the Opera

Gioachino ROSSINI (1792-1868)
Torvaldo e Dorliska - Drama semiserio in two acts (1815)

Dorliska - Darina Takova (soprano)
Duca d’Ordow - Michele Pertusi (bass)
Torvaldo - Francesco Meli (tenor)
Giorgio - Bruno Practico (bass)
Carlotta - Jeannette Fisher (soprano)
Ormondo - Simone Alberghini (bass-baritone)

Orchestra Haydn di Bolzano Trento
Conductor: Victor Pablo Perez
Prague Chamber Choir
Chorus Master: Lubomir Matl
Director: Mario Martone
Set designer: Sergio Tramonti
Costume designer: Ursula Patzak
Light designer: Cesare Accetta
Fortepiano: Giulio Zappa
Cello continuo: David Etheve
Video director: Tiziano Mancini

Edizione critica della Fondazione Rossini in collaborazione di Casa Ricordi Rec. live, Teatro Rossini, Pesaro, August, 2006. Synopsis and essays in Italian, English, French and German. DYNAMIC 33528 2DVDS: 157 Min.

It is not often an opera goer gets to revisit a fondly remembered performance hoping the praiseworthy first impressions still ring true. Fortunately, the solid musical and dramatic values from the Rossini Opera Festival’s production of Torvaldo e Dorliska are still very much alive on this recently issued DVD taped in August 2006. And what stands out about the DVD is the care Dynamic took in presenting both the gentle reflections and the forceful declamations in Rossini’s semiserio opera, letting the camera capture these contrasting musical moments the composer recognized were essential to this genre.

(more…)

By James L Zychowicz

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

Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of Lyric Opera of Chicago, Chicago Children’s Choir, Sir Andrew Davis (conductor) Lyric Opera Center, Chicago 13.10.2007 (JLZ)

Production: Stage Director – Renata Scotto
Set and Costume Design - Pier Luigi Pizzi
Lighting - Christine Binder
Chorus Master - Donald Nally

Cast: Mimí - Elaine Alvarez
Musetta – Nicole Cabell
Rodolfo – Roberto Aronica
Marcello – Quinn Kelsey
Colline - Andrea Silvestrelli
Schaunard – Levi Hernandez
Benoit/Alcindoro – Dale Travis

Rodolfo – Roberto Aronica and Mimí - Elaine Alvarez

Among the delights of the 2007-2008 season of Lyric Opera of Chicago is its exceptional production of Puccini’s La bohème (1897). With attention to all the details of this familiar opera, this finely cast and well-executed production conveys a sense of excitement to the work. It is, after all, solid theater with excellent music, yet La bohème also requires a highly talented and experienced cast to elicit the strong response that the audience gave on Saturday and throughout this run of performances. As much as La Bohème is a staple of modern opera repertoire, a finely nuanced production like the present one offered by Lyric Opera of Chicago, will remain in memory for years.

(more…)

Gioachino Rossini, February 29, 1792 - November 13, 1868

The Otello Set

If the swift downpour that hit Pesaro, moments before the Prima of G. Rossini’s Otello on August 8th, seemed like a bad omen, that was nothing compared to the two major cast changes that could have weakened the foundation of the Rossini Opera Festival’s new production of the opera and washed it away.

To start with, tenor Giuseppe Filianoti, who was slated to be ROF’s Otello, canceled at the beginning of the rehearsal period. So on July 1st, tenor Gregory Kunde got a call from the powers that be offering him the role. Kunde accepted gladly, but he had never performed the role, so he needed at least two weeks to learn it. Keeping that in mind, ROF hired tenor Ferdinand von Bothmer, who had a small role in ROF’s 2006 production of Mozart’s Die Schuldgkeit Des Ersten Gebots, as a cover for Kunde. As a cover, von Bothmer was promised one performance on August 11th. Tenor, Chris Merritt, who had not appeared in Pesaro since he sang Otello in 1991, was cast as Iago in this production. Now the cast included Kunde, Merritt and, as originally planned, Juan Diego Florez as Rodrigo. Today, Florez is known in the opera world as the supreme Rossian tenor and, with nine previous appearances at Pesaro under his belt, the singer is the object of an adoring public at the festival.

(more…)

In today’s opera world with so many opera directors and production designers running rough-shod over the musical and artistic intentions of composers, particularly those of the Romantic and Verismo periods, it was a great pleasure and quite a relief to encounter Opera Orchestra of New York’s (OONY) presentation of Ferderico Cilea’s 1897 opera, L’Arlesiana on February 21, 2007, at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Eve Queler, the company’s musical director has been at the forefront of presenting seldom-performed operas in concert version for just about 40 years now. She is well known for giving new talent and for that matter, established opera singers a chance to show off their vocal and dramatic abilites before enthusiastic audiences who feel the voice is the most important element in opera. And on this evening, Ms. Queler, once again, made good on her pledge with an outstanding performance of Cilea’s versimo work before a hungry audience clamoring for an operatic feast.

(more…)

Giacomo Puccini, December 22, 1858 - November 29, 1924

Many sopranos, regardless of their vocal catagory, have yearned to include Puccini’s Madama Butterfly into their repertoire and unfortunately the annals are filled with stories of their unsuccessful attempts. But that was not the case with the Arizona Opera Company which had the good fortune of presenting two sopranos, Indira Mahajan and Barbara Divis in the role of Butterfly who easily met the numerous vocal and dramatic challenges Puccini so passionately delineated for his beloved tragic heroine. These two portrayals, however, were only part of what made this Butterfly production surely one of the best examples of how regional opera is capable of rivaling any international opera company’s presentation of a Puccini work. To be honest, along with Mahajan and Divis, conductor Antony Walker and director Colin Graham were unknowns to audiences here in Tucson, aided little by the sketchy bios in the program. But with five successful performances in Phoenix and three in Tucson, at the end of January and the beginning of February, they will now be remembered for their moving collaborative undertaking of Puccini’s most intimate work.

(more…)

The Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, Italy, had as many surprises on the stage inside as the weather had outside. The month of August in this resort town is usually filled with sunshine, but this year, the festival’s first week was filled with cloudy days, intermittent rain showers, fluctuating humidity and some choppy waters, rare for the Adriatic resort town. As unexpected as the weather was, the outcome of the main operatic productions, proved equally topsy-turvy.

(more…)

In today’s opera world, run over with esoteric opera directors pushing their entangled symbolic productions on to operatic stages, the musical and vocal values, the two most necessary components in presenting opera, often get lost in the shuffle. But not on November 12th and 13th, 2005, when two concert opera performances in New York City took on the frenzy of old- fashioned revival meetings causing their audiences to stand up and give a rousing toast to the musical dramas the Teatro Grattacielo Opera and the Opera Orchestra of New York bestowed on their public. For it was in the performances of Ruggerio Leoncavallo’s Zaza by Gratacielo and Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell by OONY that proved to be the special gifts their devoted fans have been hoping for and were finally delivered to them in bravura style.

(more…)

Giuseppe Verdi, October 9/10, 1813 - January 27, 1901

This performance of Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi and a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave was staged by O. Mukhortova at the St. Petersburg Mussorgsky State Academic Opera Theater on May 1st, 2001.

I can still recall with vivid immediacy the visceral excitement I felt just moments after the curtain went up on Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Academic Opera Theater in St. Petersburg. It was on May 21, 2001, to be exact,’ that my eye caught the chorus members ever so gracefully flitting across the stage in perfect harmony with Verdi’s exuberant open­ing chords of Act 1, acting out the regal banality that is so much a part of the Duke of Mantua’s courtly affectations. They projected this atti­tude with such assurance and aplomb that it immediately stirred my emotions. The pleasure I felt on seeing and hearing the Russians pre­sent their unique interpretation of Guiseppe Verdi was based on their skilled acting and their striking vocal rendition.

(more…)

Gaetano Donizetti, November 29, 1767 - April 8, 1848

This performance of L’Elisir d’amore by Gaetano Donizetti; libretto by Felice Romano was staged by Ludmila Noletova at the Moscow Theater named after Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Memirovich-Danchenko on May 28, 2001.

To most of today’s opera critics in the Western world, performing an opera in two languages in the same production is suspect, almost subversive. Fortunately for the audience gathered at the Moscow Aca­demic Music Theater for Gaetano Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore on a May evening in 2001 there were no critical detractors present for this bilingual presentation. On that evening, in that historic theater named after Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, the audience was allowed to enjoy L’Elisir without any bothersome out­bursts of disapproval. The production, bordering on the experimental and slightly daring, was carried off with sufficient panache to do away with any misgivings the audience might have had.

(more…)

Often the Russians are able to delve deeper into an opera score and find a different slant to the composer’s intent which other companies do not always perceive. Thus it was when Artistic Director and Conductor Valery Gergiev, and Stage Director David McVicar, brought the Kirov Opera’s new production of Verdi’s Macbeth to the Kennedy Center. Some producers do not see the moments of intimate dialogue depicting the covert plottings between Macbeth and his Lady as a force equal to the musically-charged finale of Act One. There we find the court, hor­rified on learning of King Duncan’s murder, raising its voice in a tremendous fff and then dropping to a reflective ppp in which Verdi combines the court’s anxiety about who the new king will be with the most imploring plea to Heaven for mercy ever to be found in any of his operas.

(more…)