Gloriana

Stage director.....David McVicar
Conductor..........Ivor Bolton

Queen Elizabeth I........................Anna Caterina Antonacci
Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex...Leonardo Capalbo
Frances, Countess of Essex..........Paula Murrihy
Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy...Duncan Rock
Penelope, Lady Rich...................Sophie Bevan
Sir Robert Cecil..........................Leigh Melrose
Sir Walter Raleigh......................David Soar
Henry Cuffe................................Benedict Nelson

This production on medici.tv of Benjamin Britten's Gloriana comes from Teatro Real de Madrid, 2018.  The opera was composed to honor the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953.  The queen herself came to the first performance.  It looks as you wish it to.  The costumes are magnificent.

The relationship between Elizabeth I and the Earl of Essex is well known.  Less well known is his rivalry with Lord Mountjoy.

There is a masque portraying Concord dancing.  I am fascinated to see that this female role is played by a man in drag.  Accurately in short.  All the dancers are guys.  It's fun.  All is to glorify the Queen who adores it.

The star of this production is Anna Catarina Antonacci whom I have seen in Carmen with Kaufmann, in La Ciociara by Marco Tutino in San Francisco, in Sancta Susanna by Paul Hindemith at the Paris Opera, and in La Voix humaine by Poulenc in San Francisco.  This is a wonderful variety of roles all performed by a great singing actress.  There is great range in her portrayals, and that certainly is true here as well.  Her Elizabeth is mature.

Here we see Essex and Mountjoy plotting treason against the Queen.  Other versions slant the story more in favor of Essex. I'm fascinated that with the inclusion of period musical forms Britten is trying to bring the past to us.  The music is still Benjamin Britten and not Elizabeth's time.  There is a gathering of the court for entertainment, and Essex has brought his wife dressed more beautifully than the Queen.  Elizabeth orders the women to change their attire and steals Frances's dress.  When everyone reappears, Elizabeth is wearing the beautiful dress which she declares too long.  It is surprising that at this moment she sends Essex off to Ireland.  The scene ends with yet another dance.

In the next scene Essex returns from Ireland offering a truce.  The Queen wanted victory, not a truce.  There is something stunning about this.  The use of musical forms to frame the scenes is very attractive.  Why have I never seen it before?  I feel they are trying to show the truth, very rare in an opera.

La Voix humaine

Anna Caterina Antonacci and her accompanist Donald Sulzen presented a program of French vocal music at the Taube Atrium Theater in the Veterans Building.  The first half of the program was a selection of French songs done in the traditional recital way with the addition of projected translations:

BERLIOZ: La mort d’Ophélie, Op. 18, No. 2
    This is familiar to me from Cecilia Bartoli's recording.

DEBUSSY: Chansons de Bilitis (a group of 3 songs)

POULENC: La fraîcheur et le feu  (a group of seven songs)

These were all pleasing if not very exciting.  I think I liked best the Debussy.

After the intermission they performed the POULENC: La Voix humaine.   I would describe it as fully staged.  We can tell from the projection shown above that we are in Paris.

This opera is based on a play by Jean Cocteau.  The liner notes say that Ms Antonacci based her interpretation on a film starring Ingrid Bergman. This woman is complicated and desperate.  She begins with lies, pretends to have been away visiting a friend.  Then she admits that she has been to the hospital after attempting suicide.  The only thing hard to grasp is why he is calling her.

He is lying too, pretending to be at home when he is out at a club, probably with his new girl friend.  Anna Catarina is a wonderful singing actress.  Grazie mille. This was a marvelous tour de force.

Cavalleria Rusticana in Paris

👍🏻

Cavalleria Rusticana 

Conductor for both: Carlo Rizzi
Director for both: Mario Martone

Santuzza: Elīna Garanča
Turiddu: Yonghoon Lee
Lucia: Elena Zaremba
Alfio: Vitaliy Bilyy
Lola: Antoinette Dennefeld

Sancta Susanna 

Susanna: Anna Caterina Antonacci
Klementia: Renée Morloc
Alte Nonne: Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo

On November 28 we attended Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana paired with Sancta Susanna by Paul Hindemith at the Paris Opera.  This double bill was performed without intermission.  Curious, we said to ourselves.  Why would they do that?  And who ever heard of Sancta Susanna?  Well, it turns out that this opera premiered in 1922 in Frankfurt and was a terrific scandal.  I think the modern day European is much harder to scandalize.

The production for Cavalleria Rusticana reminded me of the Cavalleria Rusticana production at the Met. Just furniture and no set.  Normally the Easter mass is celebrated inside a church which appears in the set and Santuzza stands outside.  Here there is no set, so the mass is celebrated on the stage in our view.  My experience of the mass shows the crowd much more active than here.  People stand and sit, occasionally speak, and move to the front to receive the wafer, but here they only mime, of course.  The characters are in front.  I think it was staged this way to emphasize the importance of religious imagery in the story.  The large crucifix becomes a character.

Though I have written extensively about Elīna Garanča, this is my first live experience of her.  In this house her voice was large, full and very suitable for a wonderful Santuzza.  I withdraw all previous reservations about her transition to spinto mezzo.  The singing was spectacular, but the production very much muted the physical parts of her characterization.  Yonghoon Lee is improving.  He looks good and sounds dramatic.

After a brief pause, the curtain rose on the physical parts of the set.  Sancta Susanna was presented as a small chamber surrounded by a giant blank wall.  We had visited the death chamber of Vincent van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise the day before and thought Susanna's chamber very much resembled it.  Susanna is a nun dressed in white.  Other nuns appear dressed in black and white.

I was explaining to my son that this is expressionism, an art style that consists of realistic details without context.  Then I thought, "oh."  Thus the giant blank wall.  

We are told that Susanna is dying.  The window in her chamber is open, and she intensely enjoys the scents.  Sister Klementia begins a cautionary tale about a woman seen naked in the woods some 30 or 40 years ago.  A space below the chamber opens up, and we see a nude woman and a crucifix much like the one in the previous opera.  Susanna suddenly rips off her habit, revealing her I must say rather gorgeous breasts and declares herself to still be beautiful.  She runs out and throws herself onto the reclining crucifix.  There is much lamenting and confusion.  This is sort of a wtf opera.

Clearly only the beautiful Anna Caterina Antonacci could be expected to pull this off.  Her acting is superb here but the role is a bit contralto for her voice.  As you know, I do not read explanations of what this is supposed to mean before going, but it does seem to me the pairing of these two operas is intended as a religious commentary.  Santuzza tells us that she has been excommunicated but without explanation.

Symbols can be more powerful than reality, and clearly that is the intention here.  It was only partially successful.  It was oddly pleasing to hear Hindemith who is of course nothing like Mascagni but not in any way shocking to modern ears.

La Ciociara

Composer: Marco Tutino *
Libretto: Marco Tutino and Fabio Ceres *
Conductor: Nicola Luisotti
Director: Francesca Zambello

Cesira: Anna Caterina Antonacci
Rosetta, Cesira's daughter: Sarah Shafer
Michele, a young intellectual: Dimitri Pittas *
Giovanni: Mark Delavan

First I want to get something off my chest.  When you put ciociara into Google translate, it comes back two women.  Now if you know any Italian at all, you know that two women is due donne.  Ciociara means a woman from Ciociaria, an area of Italy somewhere east of Rome.  Non e importante.

The opera La Ciociara by Marco Tutino makes every effort to keep this as Italian as possible.  He is assisted in this effort by the entire technical crew.  Films of Italy in WWII flash on the screen between scenes to provide us with a realistic context.  The main set of a bombed out building could be in any old Italian town, but successfully suggests Sant' Eufemia, a town in the region of Italy where the heroine Cesira is from.  She returns there when the invasion of Rome begins.

The uniforms of the various military groups--fascisti, Nazi, Moroccan, American and possibly English--look realistic.  Bombs explode.  This is an opera that will probably not survive any modernizing attempts since it is so firmly tied to a time and place.

There is also a definite effort to suggest Italian music, specifically Puccini, in the sound of the orchestra.  We find ourselves in a post romantic world, with perhaps more complex orchestration than Puccini, perhaps a bit of Strauss in the sound.  [On a second hearing I hear only vaguely modern movie music until about 3/4 of the way through when it definitely sounds like Puccini.]

This opera is firmly in the opera as tone poem school.  The orchestra plays through every scene change and creates a sense of a giant, atmospheric work of serious drama.  Luisotti conducts this marvelous tone poem masterfully.  It is very beautiful.

The most successful in the cast at suggesting a real Italian is Anna Catarina Antonacci, the only real Italian in the cast, at least I assume.  I think she has a beautiful figure which is only revealed on occasion.  Dimitri Pittas was very successful at creating a sympathetic hero.

But opera isn't like a movie soundtrack where the music heightens the story playing out before us.  In opera the emotion comes from the characters who are presented both theatrically and vocally.  We need for the action to pause at critical points to allow the characters to reveal their inner lives through singing. This is what leaves us so full of emotion when their fates are finally played out before us.  This is the heart and soul of opera and the reason why so few contemporary operas succeed in the long term.  Who is this person to him or her self and why should we care about them?  Singing is not merely a feature of the opera--it is the opera.

The story begins with bombing in Rome and extends until the successful allied invasion with all the accompanying violence of war.  I have only seen the dress rehearsal and cannot comment fully on the singing.  I will see a performance later in the week.

P.S.  I have difficulty understanding the modern idea that opera is supposed to be like real life and portray historical events.  This opera is too literally historical.

In the real opera performance Antonacci increased her intensity toward the end of the opera, creating a beautiful tension.   I didn't mind seeing it twice.

I have to comment on the standard criticism which has accompanied this opera.  People are complaining that they don't hear anything new.  New music must always sound new.  This is a very destructive idea.  If you listen to music of the past, one generation is only slightly different from the one before it.  Music moves forward in complexity for a while and then suddenly moves to simple.  More valid would be to discuss the music as revealed by itself.  With regard to this particular opera, only part of it successfully survived a second hearing.

Two Women Dress Rehearsal

GIOVANNI: MARK DELAVAN
CESIRA:  ANNA CATERINA ANTONACCI
ROSETTA: SARAH SHAFER
MICHELE: DIMITRI PITTAS *

I went to the dress rehearsal of Two Women at the San Francisco Opera, and you should try to experience this for yourself.  Above is the main cast enjoying San Francisco together.

Sexy Carmen

Carmen, 1876, is the precursor to Italian Verismo that started in 1890 with Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana. All the characters are from the lower classes, and violence is a prominent feature. Carmen is a modern woman who praises the virtues of liberté, a woman who chooses her lovers and warns them to beware of her love, to regarde a toi.

We may well wonder why she chooses the timid good boy Don Jose when she could have anyone. Jonas Kaufmann completely personifies Jose, and provides in his good looks a possible reason why the wild and crazy Carmen should want him. She picks him because he is the only man there who is not pleading for her affection, who seems not even to notice her. She intuits his inner turmoil, throws the flower at him, and he says he feels as though he were shot by a bullet. We cannot guess what Jonas may be like, he so completely disappears into the role.

During the third act he rappels down a wall with the aid of a rope. Can your tenor do that?

The contrast between this Carmen and the Zurich version with Kasarova could not be greater. Kasarova acts with her shoulders while Anna Caterina Antonacci uses her whole body. This version has a credit for the person who stages the fights. Whoa! There is a terrific knife fight between Escamillo, here played by Ildebrando d'Arcangello, and Don Jose. And in the final act Carmen and Don Jose get down on the floor and wrestle around quite a lot.

The opera begins with a staged scene during the Prelude of Don Jose being taken off to his execution. This sort of thing, staging of scenes during the overtures of operas, is verging on cliche.

The world wasn't ready for Carmen when it opened, but we are definitely ready for such a physical, intense, well sung and sexy Carmen. Highly recommended.
#ad