Guess Who

If you saw this on Facebook, don't give it away.

Clue:  mezzo.

Performance Practice II

Continuing with Singing in Style by Martha Elliott, subtitled A Guide to Vocal Performance Practices:

Isn't this the coolest thing!   I swear I've never heard of this.  Caccini described an ornament where you start a third or fourth below the written pitch and slide up to the real note.  Another guy calls this cercar della nota (searching for the note).  This is an actual thing.  Doesn't that sound like a scoop to you?  Who knew?

For a description of a scoop see here.  For Part I see here.

here/after

There is a new album of songs by Jake Heggie called here/after.  It's on Amazon and perhaps elsewhere, but not iTunes.  So if you import it into you iTunes from disk, it will be blank.

It includes the wonderful Camille Claudel song cycle with Joyce DiDonato and the Alexander Quartet I reported on here.  I still like it as much as before, but there are no pictures of her sculptures here.

Another outstanding cycle on the recording is Friendly Persuasion; Homage to Poulenc with Stephen Costello.

Heggie's music is very seductive.
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The Nose

Today we were blessed with The Nose by Dmitri Snoztakovich live from the Metropolitan Opera in HD, sung in Russian.  You have no idea how long I've been waiting to tell that joke--stolen from Emily Pulley.

Conductor: Pavel Smelkov
Production: William Kentridge
Stage Directors: William Kentridge, Luc De Wit
Projections: Catherine Meyburgh, William Kentridge
Set Designers: William Kentridge, Sabine Theunissen
Costume Designer:  Greta Goiris
Lighting Designer: Urs Schönebaum
Live in HD Host:  Patricia Racette

Cast

Kovalyov: Paulo Szot
Police Inspector: Andrey Popov
The Nose: Alexander Lewis

The only person to be interviewed for this simulcast was William Kentridge who explained that his own nose was the model for the character The Nose.  He turned to show us a profile.

This performance is an art work on three levels.

I.  The short story by Nikolai Gogol.  The opera plot follows this story, written between 1835 and 1836, very closely.

II.  The opera by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) written in 1929, an early work.  My reaction to this was that I was viewing an opera comique complete with spoken dialog.

III.  The production by William Kentridge, which is fully an art work in its own right.

Before I get too far into this, I feel that 2:15 is too long for an opera with no intermission.  A short period to relax, complete with an interview with Paulo Szot, would have made me enjoy this a lot more.

Every time there was piano music in the score there was a film of Shostakovich playing the piano.  The other person whose photograph frequently appeared was Joseph Stalin whose reign had just started two years before.  At this time Shostakovich had not yet fallen from political favor. 

While his owner lounges around in his bedroom staring at himself in the mirror and feeling sorry for himself, the nose has a full and exciting life.  He participates in swim meets and track and field contests.  He loves to ride a horse, and rises to a higher place in the political hierarchy than his owner.  We see all this in the projections on the set.

There is a lot of crashing and banging in this score full of complex and varied orchestral colorings.  There are many soloists, supers, chorus and actors on the set.  I must say I really only enjoyed the parts where Paulo was on the stage.  He is a wonderful performer with great variety and presence.

I was asked on exiting the theater if I would go again to see Nixon in China, and I reported that I had already seen it 3 times in 3 different productions.  I love it, and they hate it.  Maybe once will be enough for The Nose.

This review is supposed to include an extended discussion of the deeper meaning of The Nose.  All I seem to be able to think of is that if a barber actually cut off your nose, your face would have a hole in it and not a flat piece of skin.  And occasionally I would remember the photograph of the man who is growing a new nose on his forehead.  Nothing was done to make Paulo seem not to have a nose.  Perhaps it is all a dream.

News for Today

The big news in the opera world today is the smash hit performance of Angela Meade and Jamie Barton at the Met in Norma.  To hear what a truly wailed Norma sounds like look for the audio clip here.  It is remarkable how well their voices go together.  I hope they like each other because I think there may be many more Normas in their future.

Other important news:  I have heard only good things about Fliegende Hollander at the San Francisco Opera.  I'm going on Halloween.  And on the following day on PBS is Moby Dick.

La Vestale

This morning Gaspare Spontini's masterpiece La Vestale (1807) is streamed from Paris, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, via medici.tv. Once long ago I read Berlioz' Evenings with the Orchestra--highly recommended, actually.  Monsieur Berlioz had a friend who played in the opera orchestra in Paris, and he allowed Berlioz to view the opera from this in front of the front row perspective.  The book is a memoir on this experience.  All the sources say this is fiction, but I didn't know that when I was reading it.  He wrote about his loves and hates at the opera, and my memory tells me that most beloved were the performances of La Vestale.  This is my first opportunity to view this opera.

Conductor:  Jérémie Rhorer
Stage director:   Eric Lacascade
Set designer:  Emmanuel Clolus
Costume designer:  Marguerite Bordat
Lighting designer:  Philippe Berthomé
Dramaturgy:  Daria Lippi

Julia:  Ermonela Jaho, soprano
Licinius:  Andrew Richards, tenor
La Grande Vestale:  Beatrice Uria Monzon, mezzo
Cinna:  Jean-François Borras, tenor
Le Souverain Pontife:  Konstantin Gorny, bass

Does it sound like anything?  The date is before Rossini and even before Fidelio.  The composer is Italian, but I hear more Gluck, a very formal and intense Gluck.  The expected Italian coloratura is missing.

I see there are 2 full length films of La Vestale on YouTube, one stars Denyce Graves and the other Leyla Gencer, but both are audio only.  In my mind it's Callas, and I see on Amazon that there is a CD version with Callas and Corelli.  I enjoy Beatrice Uria Monzon more than Ermonela Jaho. A mezzo could sing Julia.

I have gotten used to the modern minimalist stagings with only modern clothing and the least possible stage decoration.  People in suits without shirts are soldiers.  Women in slips with red hair are the vestal virgins.  Did I mention La Vestale translates to the Vestal Virgin?  When Lucinius goes off to war, Julia's father makes her become a vestal, while she is in love with Lucinius.  He is a Roman general and is making his triumphal return.  Julia is chosen to crown him--they arrange a date during the ceremony.  Minimalism takes a lot of the fun out of this.  In my brain they are parading through the forum to the rostrum, like Caesar in the movie Cleopatra.

She is assigned to guard the sacred flame.  Hanky-panky ensues and she lets the flame go out, a capital offense.  The goddess relights the flame, and there is a happy ending.

This opera was wildly popular for about 20 years, and then nothing. I think someone truly fabulous could bring it to life, but for me it's almost a Spieloper (a light opera popular in 1830-50).  Maybe you have to be French.

The Gershwin Experience

The first event of the combined Sacramento Philharmonic and Sacramento Opera was something called The Gershwin Experience, a packaged show that has already played in places like Portland, Salt Lake City, Des Moines, Savannah, Long Island, etc.  The orchestra was our local Philharmonic with Michael Morgan conducting.  The out of town guest artists were:

David Snyder, piano, vocals and narrator
Sylvia McNair, vocals
Daniel Gardner, vocals and tap dancing
Llewellyn Sanchez-Warner, 17 year old piano virtuoso

The show included photos and films from the Gershwin family files.  Gershwin died in surgery.

Michael Tilson Thomas presented Of Thee I Sing as a semi-staged orchestra concert, so I have seen this sort of thing before.  It was very enjoyable.  Llewellyn Sanchez-Warner played Rialto Ripples, Rhapsody in Blue and Allegro Agitato from Gershwin's Concerto in F, and he received two standing ovations. 

But for the opera goers in the audience there was nothing that resembled opera.  There can never be too much Gershwin.

Performance Practice I

 

 David with his theorbo

I've started reading Singing in Style by Martha Elliott, subtitled A Guide to Vocal Performance Practices, and I am going to be boring you in future weeks with bits from it.

She starts with John Dowland (1563 – 1626 and Giulio Caccini (1551 – 1618), of course.  Dowland accompanied his songs on the lute and composed in tablature.  Baroque tablature was very similar to modern guitar tablature, and made it possible to write out the whole piece in a form that others could play as is.  Caccini and the Italians composed in score with just melody and bass, expecting the player to fill the other parts in to the best of his ability.  I like it that she says that Caccini recommended accompanying yourself on the theorbo which would have stronger low notes than the lute.  At least now you could find a theorbo.

As an old person, I remember when we had no idea how these pieces were actually composed, except we were aware that figured bass started around this time.  We selected a printed realization we liked and went with it.  Ms Elliott recommends that you acquire an original facsimile of your piece.  She provides one sample by Monteverdi.  I think maybe you have to actually go to the library for this, though I see there are facsimiles on line.  She wants the singer to take responsibility for his own performance.  I searched for quite a while for a small sample of a facsimile lute tablature by Dowland but did not find one that I could show.  Amazon sells something in tablature form, but it cannot be downloaded and isn't a facsimile.  One source says that published facsimiles of lute music are rare.  Caccini was easier to find.  Note:  bass is already figured:

FYI:  modern Italian sounds similar to how it would have sounded in Caccini's time, while Dowland's words would have sounded much different from ours. 

In the early Baroque everything is much harder than you thought.

This first chapter includes an extended discussion and quotes from historical sources about vibrato, tremolo, trill, etc.  It is very important to realize that true knowledge of the constantly fluctuating singing voice required modern technology.  It is only when you record the voice on a graph that you can see that it is always fluctuating.  It even fluctuates as it slides from one note to another.  It is not possible to truly understand this using the ear alone.  It is important to make this modern interpretation of ancient sources.

I have discussed this topic here, here and here.

My own discussion of singing in the Italian Baroque had only to do with the prominence of castrati and preference for high voices.  I don't know how practical it is to require everyone to become a musicologist.  Perhaps if you major in theorbo this would be necessary.

War

Ian Bostridge, Anna Netrebko and Thomas Hampson

This photograph will be from the performance of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem at the Salzburg Festival this summer and not from the new recording with the Orchestra and Chorus of the Academia Nazionalle di Santa Cecilia in Rome and Antonio Pappano conducting.  You can listen to it here, I don't know for how long.

This is a wonderful, deeply emotional performance.  I know I've heard this work before but I don't think I knew it was this beautiful.  Each is perfect for the part, and Anna Netrebko is especially gorgeous, by turns dramatic, lyrical and sweet.

Perhaps it is the right thing for today.  We Americans have narrowly escaped our pathetic, made up political crisis which appears to have been nothing more than a game of chicken.  Think about the larger vision of life. We have music to enrich our souls instead of politics to maim us.
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Falstaff in San Francisco

I noticed something I hadn't noticed before in Verdi's Falstaff seen last night at the San Francisco Opera:  Bryn Terfel enters Windsor Park in the final scene in his very Wotan-like outfit (see picture above), and some very Wotan-like music accompanies him.  My goodness.  Wasn't he doing Wotan....?

Conductor:  Nicola Luisotti
Director: Olivier Tambosi

Falstaff:  Bryn Terfel
Alice Ford:  Ainhoa Arteta
Nannetta:  Lisette Oropesa
Dame Quickly:  Meredith Arwady
Fenton:  Francesco Demuro
Ford Fabio:  Capitanucci *
Meg Page:  Renée Rapier
Bardolfo:  Greg Fedderly
Dr. Caius:  Joel Sorensen
Pistola:  Andrea Silvestrelli

Heidi Stober was scheduled for Nannetta, but she was replaced by Lisette Oropesa who is singing the role at the Met.  Bryn was fabulous.  Meredith Arwady was excellent as Dame Quickly.  It was well cast and well sung all around.

But.  You knew this was coming.  I couldn't get over how much easier it was to follow the plot in Portland.  Perhaps in Portland the Falstaff was less interesting and therefore the others stood out in comparison.

Remember I'm the one that thinks the production is supposed to explain the opera.  It didn't.  The hiding Falstaff while everyone searches was well done, but the characters were not really drawn individually.  Which is what I like.  I liked the linens being thrown all over the stage.  That was cute.

It is a problem for me to see the same opera over and over in close succession.  One cannot resist comparisons.  And there's going to be another one soon in HD.