Living at the Opera

There are two live recordings of the opera with Renata Scotto, one from Palermo in 1968 and the other, much preferred here, from Venice in 1970. One finds Scotto on firmer vocal ground in the latter hitting most of the High Cs and Ds head on that are scattered throughout the score. This vocal security allows her to give a fully realized interpretation of the heroine’s emotional turmoil in a role filled with dramatic declamation and touching arioso, two musical characteristics that Scotto was always able to fully project.

For a concise view of the tangled, somtimes bewildering libretto see John Rosselli’s The Life of Bellini in the Musical Lives series from Cambridge University Press. The performance is on Opera d’Oro OPD1261 2CDs.

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.

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“I’ve always wanted to be a singer ever since I was a little kid; I first sang in public when I was in kindergarten,” declares Panuccio, as if he never had any doubt about what he wanted to do in life. It’s the day after his debut with the Arizona Opera Company in early October, and he’s relaxing over lunch at Cuvee, one of Tucson’s pleasant eateries, enjoying a salad and a glass of red wine. “It’s okay to have a glass now that the performance is over,” hinting at a life filled with hard work, but not one without enjoyment.

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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.

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By Harvey Steiman

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

Renee Fleming, soprano; music of Copeland, Seeger, Adams, Ravel, Puccini and Prokofiev. Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, 19.9.2007 (HS)

Leave it to Michael Tilson Thomas to put together an opening-night gala program that proves you don’t have to dumb things down for the big spenders, even if you want to keep things in a party mood. It didn’t hurt that most of the program involved music the orchestra had been playing on its three-week European tour, and they were in prime form.

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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.

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Arizona Opera ended its 2006/07 season with a tightly-knit, well-tuned presentation of Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, his best known opera that has enjoyed numerous productions since its New York City Opera debut in 1956. The work is based on the Biblical account of Susannah and her Elders from the Book of Daniel, as it appears in certain Bibles. From that account we learn the Elders, who steadfastly lust after Susannah, spy on her while she is bathing and soon realize that the young beauty will never give in to their lascivious advances, so they accuse her of fornicating with a young man. This charge is eventually proven false, and Susannah is saved from death. Floyd, using a librettist’s poetic license, simplified the storyline by relocating the bathing Susannah to an isolated community called New Hope Valley in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee. There, she is observed by her own church Elders who are repelled by her audacity to bath in a small stream which is supposed to be used for baptism.

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When Charles Roe, the artistic director of the University of Arizona’s Opera Theater looked around for an opera to produce for the school’s 2007 spring production, he decided on Kirke Mechem’s 1982 work, Tartuffe. The director had heard the opera a number of years ago and was impressed by Mechem’s varied musical score and recognized he had a good singing troupe of graduate and undergraduate students that could give the eclectic score the justice it was due. And as an extra added incentive, Roe wanted a work that would equal if not surpass his successful and moving production of Mark Adamo’s modern adaptation of Little Women which the opera theater presented last year. So Tartuffe it was, and happily for the audiences who attended, the production turned out to be quite an artistic success for the University’s opera department.

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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.

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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.

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