Hansel and Gretel from the Met

Conductor - Thomas Fulton
Director - Nathaniel Merrill 

Gretel - Judith Blegen
Hänsel - Frederica von Stade
Gertrud - Jean Kraft
Peter - Michael Devlin
Witch - Rosalind Elias 

I watched the Met stream from 1982 of Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel.  It is perfection.  It plays in my head in German, but this is also very nice.  I could do this forever.  Blegen and von Stade are lovely children.  Elias as the witch looks like someone from the Wizard of Oz.  This is the one you want if you speak English.  And luckily you can have one of your own.

Not enough Rossini

Tanti affetti with Agnes Baltza.




Tanti affetti with Cecilia Bartoli.




Tanti affetti with Joyce DiDonato. Next year in Santa Fe.




At a 1973 Met performance of Il Baribiere, Marilyn Horne sang "Tanti affetti," from La Donna del Lago, during the lesson scene.



Caballe.




One more--Frederica Von Stade.

Cats

 Duetto buffo di due gatti

These  are my favorite three versions of the famous Cat Duet, perhaps by Rossini.

 First we have Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Victoria de los Angeles.  You can't really tell their voices apart.  On second thought maybe you can.



The next one is more your grand divas Leontyne Price and Regine Crespin. 



The last one is quite bizarre:  Nicolai Gedda and Frederica von Stade.  I think they're the funniest.



I apologize for the lack of videos. Oh what the heck. Here's another one with pictures. In spite of the German narration, this is obviously a Prom.

20 Mezzos

Gramophone hasn't done one, but so what? This list in chronological order comes mostly from my iPod.

Giulietta Simionato	Italian	(1910-2010)
Kathleen Ferrier	English	(1912-1953)
Christa Ludwig	German	(1928-2021)
Janet Baker	English	(1933-)
Marilyn Horne	American	(1934-)
Fiorenza Cossotto	Italian	(1935-)
Teresa Berganza	Spanish	(1935-)
Tatiana Troyanos	American	(1938-1993)
Brigitte Fassbaender	German	(1939-)
Agnes Baltsa	Greek	(1944-)
Frederica von Stade	American	(1945-)
Eva Podleś	Polish	(1952-)
Dolora Zajick	American	(1952-)
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson	American	(1954-2006)
Susan Graham	American	(1960-)
Olga Borodina	Russian	(1963-)
Denyce Graves	American	(1964-)
Cecilia Bartoli	Italian	(1966-)
Joyce DiDonato	American	(1969-)
Vivica Genaux	American	(1970-)
Magdalena Kožená	Czech	(1973-)
Elīna Garanča	Latvian	(1976-)

I just posted this and now see that Giulietta Simionato has died. I added 2 more to make the list 22. I am going to annotate and rank the list. There are a lot of American mezzos here, but that is due to my own personal bias.

Shirley Verrett
Elena Obraztsova

On the Town

The entertainment in Portland is pretty thin, but there is this nice video of Bernstein's On the Town with Michael Tilson Thomas and the London Symphony Orchestra video taped at the Barbican in 1992.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green, creators of the book and lyrics, appear as members of the cast, speaking narration, occasionally singing and playing minor characters. The show is semi-staged behind the orchestra. Only the dancing is missing. Since the movie with Gene Kelly is mostly dancing, this is a bit hard to imagine. It starts off "New York, New York, a hell of a town," something that does not translate to a Gene Kelly movie.

The cast is a bit rag tag. Opera singers Frederica von Stade, Thomas Hampson, Samuel Ramey and Evelyn Lear play Claire de Lune, Gabey, Claire's fiance Pitkin and Madame Dilly respectively. The other characters are played by Broadway types Kurt Ollmann, David Garrison and the fabulous Tyne Daly as Chip, Ozzie and Hildy the cab driver. I watched it to see Tyne Daly sing, and she was perfect, especially in "Come up to my place."

Bernstein's music is good, as usual, but the story is a bit tenuous, an excuse for dancing. It was fun and made me wish for more of Tyne Daly.

Volpe's Gala

An excellent write up of this event appears here. Apparently a lot of people appeared on the 5 hour plus program who were not included in the television broadcast. These included:

Roberto Alagna, Stephanie Blythe, Dwayne Croft, Denyce Graves, Salvatore Licitra, Samuel Ramey, Ruth Ann Swenson and Dolora Zajick.

Sieglinde offers this list of people not on the program at all: June Anderson, Cecilia Bartoli, Hildegard Behrens, Barbara Bonney, Jane Eaglen, Angela Gheorghiu, Hei-Kyung Hong, Jennifer Larmore, Catherine Malfitano, Susanne Mentzer, Aprile Millo, Heidi Grant Murphy, Jessye Norman, Sondra Radvanovsky, Diana Soviero, Cheryl Studer, Sharon Sweet, Dawn Upshaw, Carol Vaness, Veronica Villarroel, Anne Sophie Von Otter.

I would add to that list Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon. Deborah Voigt only appeared in her comic persona and not in what we all wanted to hear, how is her voice doing now that she's lost all that weight? In the live program she sang Sieglinde's aria. I would have preferred that they skip Ramon Vargas. I wonder who made the cuts?

I liked very much Juan Diego Florez' selection from Semiramide, the touchstone opera for his Fach, which he takes very seriously. He is aiming for the stars.

René Pape's aria from Don Carlo was the highlight of the evening for me. I don't think I have heard him in Verdi before, and he was excellent both vocally and emotionally.

Ben Heppner does a first-rate prize song. One begins to love this aria, Wagner's own personal trial song, written with loving care in the AAB form of the true Meistersingerlied.

The orchestra played the Polonaise from Eugene Onegin, something I have recently purchased on a dvd for 300 years of St. Petersberg (Anna and Dmitri are both on it.) All I can say is that they do it better in Russia.

Noteworthy is what is currently going on with the repertoire of Renée Fleming. In a recent broadcast she sang "Visi d'arte" from Tosca, and here she does an aria from Il Trovatore. Previously her Verdi was limited to Otello. Renée is finally taking the plunge into the heavier Romantic mainstream.

We have proof of an American with no French language difficulties: Frederica von Stade. I adored her "Je cherche un millionaire."

Volpe is very stodgy, very much the devotee of heavy voices, all amply represented here. I will be interested to see what happens to the Met now.

The Dangerous Liaisons

 

 

The latest entry in the unwatched video list is Conrad Susa’s The Dangerous Liaisons (1994). I didn’t see this opera when it played at the San Francisco Opera, and I don’t recall how it was reviewed.

The music has been described as post romantic. I would call it spooky movie music, such as might accompany "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer." It would be spooky Strauss if Strauss couldn’t write a decent melody. The best part is the spooky movie orchestration which I happen to know was done by my son’s friend Manly Romero. Good work, Manly. I wonder, though, if spooky is exactly the right feeling here--perhaps decadent would be more appropriate.

The singers never sing anything even marginally pleasant. Melodic patterns never show up again, that is assuming there were any in the first place. Every now and then when things get tense, someone will break out into coloratura. It creates an unpleasant atmosphere, which may be exactly what was intended.

The story is an excellent example of the love as perversion plot type common in the twentieth century. Everyone is up to no good.

The Marquise de Merteuil (Frederica von Stade) is angry because her current lover is getting married, to Cecile as it turns out. He isn’t in the opera, but she takes it out on everyone who is. She has hooks into the Vicomte de Valmont (Thomas Hampson) and seems to be able to order him around. He is quite smitten with Madame de Tourvel (Renée Fleming) who appears to be religious and honorable, though married, and to have wandered into this opera from somewhere else.

There is also a young couple, Chevalier de Danceny (David Hobson) and Cecile de Volanges (Mary Mills), who are flirting heavily with one another, though Cecile is engaged. The cast also includes various mothers, aunts, servants, business acquaintances, etc.

Everyone is constantly writing letters to everyone else and then using these letters to control and blackmail the sender.

The Marquise takes the young man to bed while Valmont does the same with Cecile. Meanwhile, he continues to make love to Madame de Tourvel. At the end of act I he is seen to succeed with her.

The bitch Merteuil is bored and orders Valmont to dump Tourvel. He does. Tourvel goes back to her old convent and goes mad. Everything goes from bad to worse. What a sorry business. If I actually liked the music, I might think it would work as an opera. Singable melodies would have helped a lot.

The high-priced talent were excellent in their roles. Thomas Hampson is completely incapable of projecting the kind of sliminess managed by John Malkovich in the movie and seems more victim than victimizer. Frederica is admirably disgusting and loathsome. Renée is her divine self.