September 2023
Dream Team Reunited: Joyce DiDonato & Jake Heggie Join Forces for the Met Premiere of Dead Man Walking
Met Recitals: In the Grand Tradition • Immortal Art: Verdi’s Requiem • Met Chorus Master Donald Palumbo • Rene Orth at Opera Philadelphia • Arturo Chacón-Cruz at San Francisco Opera • Terrence McNally’s Lisbon Traviata • Sound Bites: Emilie Kealani
Features
Earned Moment
Joyce DiDonato & Jake Heggie join forces for the Met premiere of Dead Man Walking.
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In the Grand Tradition
In the Grand Tradition
The Met has presented great singers in recital for more than a century.
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In Good Hands
In Good Hands
The magnificent sound of the Metropolitan Opera chorus is the work of Donald Palumbo.
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Step Into the Unknown
Step Into the Unknown
Opera Philadelphia will present a new work by composer Rene Orth.
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A Certain Solace
A Certain Solace
Terrence McNally’s Lisbon Traviata captures the world of rabid opera fans.
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A Sense of Tradition
A Sense of Tradition
Czech conductor Jakub Hrůša leads Jenůfa next month in Chicago.
Departments
In Review
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Treemonisha at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
Treemonisha at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’s forty-eighth festival season included works by Joplin, Floyd, Puccini and Mozart.
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Susannah at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
Susannah at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
"Given OTSL’s longstanding commitment to American opera, it is remarkable that it had never offered Susannah until this season. Patricia Racette’s production filled the lacuna, telling the sad, simple story plainly and effectively and making a thoroughly convincing argument for the dramatic validity of Carlisle Floyd’s 1955 opera."
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Tosca at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
Tosca at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
"This intelligent production did not mine Tosca’s full theatrical value, largely because it was hard to believe in the passionate connection between Katie Van Kooten’s Tosca and Robert Stahley’s Cavaradossi."
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Così Fan Tutte at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
Così Fan Tutte at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
"Director Tara Branham took a wildly intrusive approach to Così Fan Tutte, placing the work not in eighteenth-century Naples but in World War II-era England. It would be nice to report that this Così’s musical presentation helped redeem the dreadful production, but this was not the case. Conductor Jeri Lynne Johnson maintained tight coordination between stage and pit but offered her cast little opportunity for nuance: the music marched forward in fixed formation. Most of the singing was too loud, with the performers rarely aiming for dynamic levels below mezzo-forte."
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El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego at San Francisco Opera
El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego at San Francisco Opera
"Part ghost story, part fervent romance, and a full-on celebration of Latin culture, the opening-night performance marked the first Spanish-language opera performed by the company in its 100-year history. It was worth the wait. Gabriela Lena Frank’s score—the first commissioned opera from a female composer ever produced on the company’s mainstage—is a work of enchanting beauty."
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Bound at Seattle Opera
Bound at Seattle Opera
"At the end of an opera season with several new or recent works in which social justice issues and storytelling pushed emotional buttons that music often failed to support, Bound was a refreshing change. Its story, in a libretto by Bao-Long Chu, is the true one of Diane Tran, a Vietnamese immigrant and straight-A high-school student in Texas who, working two jobs to support herself and her siblings, missed enough school to be jailed for truancy. Soprano Karen Vuong, shortly after a fine and glamorous Rusalka in Portland, looked tiny and crushed as Diane as she with great intensity lamented her state and conflicting loyalties in the most beautiful aria in any new or recent work."
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The Met Orchestra at Carnegie Hall
The Met Orchestra at Carnegie Hall
"Does an opera orchestra play a tone poem with more narrative thrust than a symphony orchestra? It seemed so with the Met Orchestra's performance of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. Yannick Nézet-Séguin achieved a naturalness in transitions here that was lacking in the performance of Bernstein’s suite of dances from West Side Story, while the premiere of Matthew Aucoin's Heath (King Lear sketches) showed canny spatial manipulation of the orchestral texture."
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Lucia di Lammermoor at Cincinnati Opera
Lucia di Lammermoor at Cincinnati Opera
"The company's season-opening production of Donizetti's opera was strongly cast, from principals through secondary parts, all of them making role debuts. Raven McMillon had been heard in lyric roles here in the past two seasons—Frasquita, Ruthie in Gregory Spears’s Castor and Patience and Musetta—but nothing in those characters had called for the kinds of abilities she revealed as Lucia. Her voice is not large, but it is well focused and projected, and the sound itself is quite beautiful throughout the very wide range of the role."
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Dialogues des Carmélites at the Glyndebourne Festival
Dialogues des Carmélites at the Glyndebourne Festival
"Barrie Kosky's new production of Poulenc's opera at the Glyndebourne Festival featured soprano Sally Matthews, who gave the performance of a lifetime as Blanche de la Force. Her wide-ranging soprano encompassed all the notes and dynamics required by the testing role: physically, she honored the presence of a troubled character who contemporary authorities might interpret as being on some kind of spectrum."
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Werther at the Royal Opera
Werther at the Royal Opera
"Singing the title role in the Royal Opera's revival of Benoît Jacquot’s production, Jonas Kaufmann was well below his best form as Massenet’s hero. There was vocal artistry on display—most notably in softer passages at pretty well every level of his range—but in many higher sections notes were approached with distinct caution and a full tone was rarely attempted; when it was, the sound that came out was clouded and worryingly limited."
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Hänsel und Gretel at Opera Holland Park
Hänsel und Gretel at Opera Holland Park
"Laura Lolita Perešivana’s Gretel offered a luscious, freely flowing soprano, and mezzo Charlotte Badham, as her stage brother, Hänsel, matched Perešivana perfectly in tone and expertly in childlike body-language. Their duets were musical and especially vocal highlights."
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Roméo et Juliette at Paris Opéra
Roméo et Juliette at Paris Opéra
"The opera was cast from strength, headed by the star-crossed couple of French–Danish soprano Elsa Dreisig and French tenor Benjamin Bernheim. Dreisig’s silvery timbre projects sweetness as well as determination. This was a Juliette who knew what she wanted, and her performance of 'Amour, ranime mon courage' combined virtuosity and force, although her trills need work. Opposite her, Bernheim had an exceptional evening vocally. His Roméo was sung with loving attention to detail and perfect diction, as well as expansive, thrilling high notes."
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The Knock at Cincinnati Opera
The Knock at Cincinnati Opera
"Aleksandra Vrebalov’s score realizes fully the dramatic potential of the opera's premise and the performers here were uniformly excellent, so much so that the sense of performance disappeared immediately. This performance became a shared human experience, at times painfully intimate in the small Wilks Studio."
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Dialogues des Carmélites at Opéra Royal de Wallonie-Liège
Dialogues des Carmélites at Opéra Royal de Wallonie-Liège
"Speranza Scappucci, former musical director of the house, made a triumphant return to Liège with an opera that showed off her versatility. She demonstrated a keen ear for the composer’s modernist touches and relished the more original harmonic moments in the score—although the orchestra seemed at times overexcited by the colorful orchestration and there were occasional problems of pit to stage balance."
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Fidelio at the Opera Company of Middlebury
Fidelio at the Opera Company of Middlebury
"A converted New England town hall was convincingly converted into an appropriate facility for Opera Company of Middlebury to manifest itself for its ongoing twentieth anniversary. Beethoven’s Fidelio was the anniversary season’s ongoing solid anchor. The opera demands theatricality, vocally demanding voices, and a good pit orchestra to be sculpturally solidified. It worked, thanks to the evocative staging by artistic director, Douglas Anderson."
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Le Nozze di Figaro at Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz
Le Nozze di Figaro at Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz
"The advantage of casting a Mozart opera in a company with a fixed ensemble of singers, such as Munich‘s Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz, who are used to working with each other day-in and day-out, cannot be overestimated. The Gärtnerplatz’s unity of purpose and complete understanding of each other made their new production of Le Nozze di Figaro, enormously satisfying."
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Woman at Point Zero at Linbury Theatre
Woman at Point Zero at Linbury Theatre
"Bushra El-Turk's opera offers only the rarest moments of light amidst the darkness, mostly provided by the initially wary but steadily increasing trust between the two women at its core. But the story possesses a considerable power, amply realized in the performances of Dima Orsho’s Fatma and Carla Nahadi Babelegoto’s Sama. Both singers are clearly committed to their roles and skilfully directed in Laila Soliman’s stark but effective production."
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Hamlet at the Munich Opera Festival
Hamlet at the Munich Opera Festival
"Brett Dean has written a cogent work, orchestrally innovative and musically inventive, which pays a debt to the history of the art form. There are touches of Benjamin Britten, particularly in Hamlet's monologue and echoes of Donizetti in Ophelia's music, especially in her mad scene. Dean's highly expressive score has dramatic continuity as well. It is to librettist Matthew Jocelyn's credit that, every line in the opera is original Shakespeare."
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Alcina at Caramoor
Alcina at Caramoor
"This Alcina is not a profound work: it has none of the dramatic complexity of Monteverdi’s contemporaneous operas. But the music is extremely diverting. Caccini’s score works its own kind of sorcery, in lilting dance movements and eloquent recitatives. The composer’s setting of text is especially compelling: the vocal lines are characterful and expressive, and governed by the cadences of human speech."
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La Bohème at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées
La Bohème at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées
"Lorenzo Passerini conducting the Orchestre National de France conducted Puccini's score with melodramatic intensity, drawing electrifying playing from the orchestra. A few curious pauses were questionable, but generally this was a coruscating reading of the score. The brilliance of the bohemian’s music has rarely sounded more vivid."
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Tomasz Konieczny & Lech Napierala at the Kosciuszko Foundation
Tomasz Konieczny & Lech Napierala at the Kosciuszko Foundation
"With deft piano accompaniment, Konieczny brought to bear more legato than he had as the Holländer over an orchestra, and within the realm of the technically possible he observed the sung songs’ dynamic markings. But headiness and swift vocal maneuvering play little part in his voice's current make-up, which limited his effectiveness in some numbers."
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Ghost Opera at the Ojai Music Festival
Ghost Opera at the Ojai Music Festival
"Few contemporary composers make us listen as closely and as exactingly as Tan Dun. We savor the tone, quality, and texture of each moment, we scrutinize the sounds that arise from unusual combinations of instruments, melodies, and voices, and we listen, above all perhaps, to the silence to which the music gives definition and meaning. Ghost Opera is not strictly an opera—in Tan Dun’s composition list it is labeled as “performance art”—but one of the most distinguishing functions of operatic music is its capacity to fill a space, so that space and music become one. Tan Dun is one of the masters of this particular art and this work clearly showed us how he is."
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The Harlem Chamber Players at Miller Theatre at Columbia University
The Harlem Chamber Players at Miller Theatre at Columbia University
"The Harlem Chamber Players celebrated their fifteenth anniversary at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre. Damien Sneed conducted the diverse, enthusiastic and talented orchestra, accompanying five singers of color who performed a mix of arias from the standard repertoire and works by Black composers."
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"Secret Byrd" presented by Death of Classical
"Secret Byrd" presented by Death of Classical
"The singers and instrumentalists all gave excellent performances. It is a real treat to hear five-part polyphony sung one to a part (and well sung) at such close proximity. The ensembles played very well in tune with each other in music that is not always so easy. This was an effective and compelling dramatic presentation, as well as a reminder of our hope for a world in which people’s differences of belief are tolerated and respected."
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The Queen of Spades at the Grange Festival
The Queen of Spades at the Grange Festival
"The outstanding achievement of the Grange Festival's 2023 season was the company premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, given in a production by Paul Curran and conducted by Paul Daniel. Curran brought a commendably coherent overview to the piece while regularly focusing on smaller details that registered powerfully: the slow, steady disintegration of Eduard Martynyuk’s Herman was particularly well presented in the tenor’s stance and physical gestures."
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Hugh Cutting & Orchestra of St. Luke's at Zankel Hall
Hugh Cutting & Orchestra of St. Luke's at Zankel Hall
"With his unruly mop of blond hair, cherubic face and sweet, milky countertenor, countertenor High Cutting presented a boyish demeanor, but his musicianship during this evening of Bach and Handel was elegant and evolved."
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Ariadne auf Naxos at Garsington Opera
Ariadne auf Naxos at Garsington Opera
"Director Bruno Ravella is a craftsman and the intricate conversational byplay between the characters in both halves of the piece was finely observed."
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Don Giovanni at Teatro Grattacielo
Don Giovanni at Teatro Grattacielo
"Tasos Protopsaltou’s production design was inspired by Pedro Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, with the singers drifting around in an unspecified space wearing unflattering ’90s outfits and lounging onstage on futons decorated in Rubik’s Cube chic. Unfortunately, an aesthetic isn’t the same as a coherent concept, and in this misguided production the young singers, some performing complete roles for the first time, floundered. Asking any soprano, let alone an inexperienced one, to sing the most famous duet in the opera while preparing a smoothie is just unfair. It also doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but nothing in Stefanos Koroneos’s direction did."
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Ein Deutsches Requiem at Carnegie Hall
Ein Deutsches Requiem at Carnegie Hall
"This was the kind of ideal performance one imagines when contemplating this monumental work, with the highs at their most terrific, the lows at their most serene and the dynamics in between carefully calibrated. It’s rare to hear choral and orchestral forces so well-matched—then again, these ensembles work together year-round."
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100th Anniversary Concert at San Francisco Opera
100th Anniversary Concert at San Francisco Opera
"San Francisco Opera marked its centennial with the kind of concert opera-lovers dream about—an evening-length program that looked back on the company’s storied history while celebrating its vibrant present. Hosted by SFO general director Matthew Shilvock and featuring three conductors—company SFO music director Eun Sun Kim, former SFO music director Donald Runnicles, and former principal guest conductor Patrick Summers—the concert in the War Memorial Opera House featured sixteen singers, the San Francisco Opera Orchestra and John Keene’s Chorus in a wide-ranging program staged by Shawna Lucey."
Recordings
DAYTON: All in the Sound
“This imaginative composer specializes in creating fresh contemporary repertoire for the voice.”
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MASCAGNI: L’Amico Fritz
MASCAGNI: L’Amico Fritz
“Rosetta Cucchi’s warm and charming staging transplants this gentle-tempered opera from nineteenth-century Alsace to 1980s Connecticut.”
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PUCCINI: Tosca
PUCCINI: Tosca
“Anna Netrebko’s singing here is generally satisfactory but seldom more than that.”
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BLOW: Venus & Adonis
PURCELL: Dido & Aeneas
BLOW: Venus & Adonis
PURCELL: Dido & Aeneas“These two works, encapsulating the birth of English opera, have an undeniable synergy, which is especially apparent in this handsome double bill.”
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SØRENSEN: St. Matthew Passion
SØRENSEN: St. Matthew Passion
“This oratorio gives the impression of eavesdropping on the thoughts of someone at a Good Friday service, the Scripture readings triggering very personal memories.”
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Sandrine Piau: Voyage Intime
Sandrine Piau: Voyage Intime
“The soprano’s performance is strongest in the mercurial, post-Romantic moods of Wolf, Debussy and Duparc, which suit the soprano’s temperament ideally.”
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Joshua Blue: Black and Blue
Joshua Blue: Black and Blue
“A testament to Blue’s personal journey of artistic discovery.”
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Mary Bevan: Visions Illuminées
Mary Bevan: Visions Illuminées
“It’s interesting to hear Britten’s Illuminations performed, as at its 1940 premiere, by a soprano—and in the context of an entire recital of French music.”
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Lucile Richardot and Stéphane Degout: Les Heures Claires: Songs of Nadia and Lili Boulanger
Lucile Richardot and Stéphane Degout: Les Heures Claires: Songs of Nadia and Lili Boulanger
“The songs and instrumental pieces heard here, composed between 1901 and 1920, afford a wonderful representation of the intense, refined musical world of the Belle Époque.”
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GESUALDO: Tenebrae Responsoria, Feria Quinta
GESUALDO: Tenebrae Responsoria, Feria Quinta
“The six singers provide beautiful and sophisticated a cappella singing of this demanding music.”
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WIEMANN: I Give You My Home
WIEMANN: I Give You My Home
“Beth Weimann imagines a speech Rose Standish Nichols, New England landscape architect and suffragist, might have given to guests at a Sunday salon.”
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LORTZING: Der Waffenschmied
LORTZING: Der Waffenschmied
“Lortzing’s spielopern deserve more than a passing glance—especially this one, which Mahler called ‘the little Meistersinger.’”
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Eva Zaïcik: Mayrig: To Armenian Mothers
Eva Zaïcik: Mayrig: To Armenian Mothers
“Zaïcik’s uniquely expressive mezzo enlivens these Armenian songs with musical nuance and poetic urgency.”
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Kitty Whately: Befreit: A Soul Surrendered
Kitty Whately: Befreit: A Soul Surrendered
Songs by Müller-Hermann, Mahler, Strauss and Schweikert. Middleton, piano. Texts and translations. Chandos CHAN 20177
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Rachel Willis-Sørensen: Four Last Songs
Rachel Willis-Sørensen: Four Last Songs
“Willis-Sørensen’s voice responds keenly to Strauss’s vocal writing. The top is its glory.”
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Karim Sulayman: Broken Branches
Karim Sulayman: Broken Branches
“At its core, this is an album by two Western classical musicians of Asian descent attempting to navigate their intersecting ethnic and sonic identities.”
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OFFENBACH: La Vie Parisienne
OFFENBACH: La Vie Parisienne
“This five-act, three-hour version for completists drags on and on; there’s an excess of heavy-handed dialogue delivery and an abundance of mugging.”