Well, I’m back from Vancouver, but on one of my last days there I saw a work-in-progress dance performance by local company 605 Collective at the Vancouver International Dance Festival. which I enjoyed, but after a mostly electronic soundtrack, I was surprised that the piece ended to the tune of Enrico Caruso singing this aria from Bizet‘s 1863 Pearl Fishers opera:
Probably the best known piece from this opera, but if you want to see the full picture, it’ll be receiving its first Met Opera production in 100 years in the forthcoming 2015-2016 season:
So I’m in Vancouver, Canada for a week, and considering the last opera I saw was the Canadian Opera Company‘s performance of Semele at BAMlast week it seems fitting to discuss their forthcoming season, which, fittingly, features the world premiere of a Canadian Opera!
In October, COC will give the world premiere of Barbara Monk Feldman‘s short 2010 opera, Pyramus and Thisbe. It’s based on a tale from antiquity so the COC is presenting it alongside two short, similarly classically themed, pieces by the grandfather of opera, Claudio Monteverdi: a scena for three voices and an aria, which is the only fragment to survive from his second opera, L’Arianna, performed below by Italian soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci:
Here’s hoping I can make a return trip to Canada for this interesting early opera/premiere opera combo!
Looks pretty crazy, right? The key to this unusual production is the KT Wong Foundation, devoted to fostering dialogue in the arts and education between China and the West, which approached Chinese artist Zhang Huan with the idea of directing an opera. His inspiration was a 450 year old Chinese temple he bought and wound up using as the centerpiece of the production (watch it being assembled at BAM here).
Three Heads Six Arms by Zhang Huan in Florence, 2013
KT Wong has several videos about the project on Youtube and it’s certainly an interesting one! Besides performances at Brussels and Toronto, the show was also taken to Beijing (where it was censored, natch)
Now, as a first-time opera director, Chinese person unfamiliar with Western opera, and a fancy-shmancy artist, Zhang is not beholden to opera’s sacred cows and has taken a pretty radical approach. Besides the weirdo stage elements, he’s omitted some of Handel’s music (a capital offense in my book) and inserted several anachronistic Chinese elements. So some weird hybrid of baroque opera and modern performance piece which I’m admittedly having a hard time preparing myself for… I’ve seen reviews run the gamut from negative to glowinglypositive, so we’ll see which what side I’ll land on…
In any other situation calling this concurrent production of Semele at the Seattle Opera the more traditional one might seem strange, but heck, this is just old school in comparison! Opera News seemed to like this one a lot more, at least…
It’s great to see Semele performed by a smaller, regional companies, and if Zhang Huan’s production spurs renewed interest in this very deserving opera, than that’s a good thing!
The stage maquette for Semele by Zhang Huan at La Monnaie
And for no other reason than because I like their Digital Archive, here is a set maquette from La Monnaie!
The Los Angeles Philharmonic celebrated this sesquicentennial with a staged performance in collaboration with the Los Angeles Opera. This was the work’s belated LA premiere, since the LA Opera was one of the original commissioners of the piece, which ultimately premiered at the Munich Opera Festival in 2007.
The reviews I’ve read have been excellent, which is pleasantly surprising as I’ve heard mixed things about the opera with its bristly, modern musical language and elliptical, playfully obtuse libretto by David Henry Hwang.
At any rate, an interesting recent development is that the Royal Opera House in London has commissioned a sequel opera by the same team of Chin and Hwang, based on Through the Looking Glass! This is scheduled for the 2018/2019 season, so I wonder if that will add fire to the second wind that Wonderland seems to be having…
Today is the 50th anniversary of the American release of The Sound of Music movie musical so stop everything you’re doing and go climb some mountains!
The movie is of course based on the 1959 musical which was the last collaboration of the famous Rodgers and Hammerstein musical dream team, since Oscar Hammerstein II died nine months after the Broadway premiere, of cancer.
An interesting Youtube find was this footage from actors on the set during the making of the movie:
Of course, the Oscars recently commemorated the anniversary of their 1966 Best Picture Winner with a medley performed by Lady Gaga that was an internet sensation. Proof that the movie and the musical have still got it, all these years later!
Last Monday the composer Marvin David Levy passed away and though he only ever wrote one opera, the scale of its premiere followed by its passage into obscurity and then late-life renaissance sorta overshadow all his other accomplishments… I guess opera can do that!
That opera, Mourning Becomes Electra, was one of two operas commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera when they moved to Lincoln Center in the mid ’60s. It wasn’t too well received, and was barely performed again for three decades, until 1998 when Levy created a revised version for the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Since then, it’s been performed at a few other American companies, most lately the Florida Grand Opera, where the newsreel below is from:
Along with Levy’s repairs, I wonder if the very fact of it being an American setting of ancient Greek tragedy (it’s based on Eugene O’Neill’s transposition of the Oresteia by Aeschylus to the American Civil War) can help give it a new life around the US at regional opera companies…
Speaking of Met commissions, it’s apparently not an uncommon story for those rather rare birds to be neglected for a while, then championed dramatically by other companies, as the Los Angeles Opera is currently doing with John Corigliano‘s The Ghosts of Versailles, commissioned by the Met for their 100th anniversary and premiered in 1991.
It would certainly be interesting to track how well Met commissions have done historically once they’ve received their house premiere, especially in light of the Met’s renewed commitment to commissioning new opera… What might they do differently going forward?
Speaking of all these companies and of new opera, I certainly am excited it’s season announcement season! Will have to get back to you with thoughts about the recently announced 2015/2016 seasons from several American companies…
This week, the Met+Juilliard collaboration between the Metropolitan Opera and the Juilliard School will be giving three performances of Gluck‘s 1774 Iphigénie en Aulide. It’s been pretty much supplanted in popularity by Gluck’s own 1779 Iphigénie en Tauride, so much so that most performances of it seem to occur as a double-feature with both installments:
At any rate, this week presents a pretty rare opportunity to see it! Here’s a Juilliard Journal article interviewing some of the people involved in this production.
The Met+Juilliard collaboration has produced a few operas at Juilliard already, and though none have made the jump to the Metropolitan Opera, in some of the early announcement materials I read, that was cited as a possibility…
Which leads to some speculation… Much has been said recently about the Met showing more modern opera and even commissioning new works… In one such announcement from 2013, Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov was said to be working on an operatic adaptation of the original Euripides play Iphigenia in Aulis, tentatively slated for the 2018/2019 Season.
Hmm… Aulide, Aulis… What if – stay with me here – the Met were planning a 2018/2019 season including both Golijov and Gluck’s versions of Iphigenias in Aulis? (And hey, they could even toss in their existing production of Iphigénia en Tauride, seen below).
Would that be too crazy? Or would it be super amazing? Thoughts?
Written on Skin was incredibly well-received after its premier at the 2012 Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, with a subsequent production at the Royal Opera House, which resulted in a new commission for the 2018 season for the team of Benjamin and Martin Crimp…
This new initiative builds on Philharmonic Music Director Alan Gilbert’s success with innovatively semi-staged operas at the Philharmonic in collaboration with production team Giants Are Small, starting with György Ligeti‘s Grand Macabre in 2010:
This clip Barbara Hanngian features at the NY Phil production of Le Grand Macabre, and of course Hannigan created the role of Agnes in Benjamin’s Written on Skin too, so nice coincidence there…
We here at Bizarro Twins are huge Jeopardy fans, and always relish the rare opera or comic-themed categories, but opera has burst onto America’s favorite trivia show in a surprising way recently…
If you’ve been watching, the current Jeopardy champ is Elliot Yates from New York, and he’s introduced as an opera producer which is exciting enough on its own… But in his second chat with host Alex Trebek he talked about a new opera he’s working on about Truman Capote! Unfortunately, my Googling is not turning up much concrete information about this project, but as always, I’m excited to hear about new operas, no matter how far in the future they may be!
Capote is obviously known as a writer of prose, from short stories to novels to non-fiction, but he did write the book for one musical: 1954’s House of Flowers, about rival bordellos in Haiti… cheery, I guess. With music by Harold Arlen, the most enduring song is probably A Sleepin’ Bee, sung here by Diahann Carroll, a member of the original Broadway cast.
Funnily enough, this song was also sung by Barbra Streisand seven years later on her first appearance on American national television, on The Jack Paar Show in 1961:
Now, another interesting tidbit about this forthcoming Truman Capote opera is the fact that Capote’s distinctive voice will be portrayed by a countertenor. On hearing this, Alex Trebek referenced the British singer Alfred Deller who helped revive the use of the countertenor voice in the mid 20th century. So now I like Alex even more than before! Here is Deller singing an Elizabethan love song by Thomas Campion, accompanied on lute as he was wont to be…
All around, not a bad day for opera on national television…
Gipsy Princess poster from The Memory of the Netherlands digital collection
In the latest case of me learning about something just hours before it’s set to start, Medici.tv will be live streaming a special New Year’s performance of Emmerich Kalman‘s 1915 operetta Die Csárdásfürstin (aka, The Gipsy Princess for those non-Hungarian speakers among you) from Staatskapelle Dresden with the powerhouse duo of Anna Netrebko and Juan Diego Flórez. You’ll need an account to see the live performance, but it’s free and pretty painless!
Here’s an old school televised version of a duet from the Gipsy Princess in all it’s glory:
Operetta seems to be an old world New Year’s tradition, and the Met Opera is getting in on the game with a new production of Franz Lehar‘s Merry Widow premiering on Wednesday, New Year’s Eve! So get your operetta fix this week!
Bizarro Twins 