Opera Music

Gotham Chamber Opera presents Daniel Catán’s 1988 opera, La hija de Rappaccini (Rappaccini’s Daughter), on Mondays, June 17 and 24, 2013 at 7pm at Brooklyn Botanic Garden (rain date June 25). Seating is by general admission on the lawn. Blankets and outside food will be permitted. Boxed picnic dinners will also be available for purchase. [...]

Nathan Wyatt as Bobby Kennedy and Caitlin Vincent as Jackie Kennedy (Photo: Britt Olsen-Ecker)Nathan Wyatt is new to this site and we discovered him singing the role of Robert Kennedy in the world premiere of Joshua Bornfield's Camelot Requiem. The North Carolina native has been involved with a number of world premieres lately including, Jake Heggie’s “Epilogue: Under the Blessing of your Psyche Wings,” as part of the Opera America Songbook, and William Bolcom’s “Gettysburg, July 1, 1863,” a commission by SongFest. Camelot Requiem was commissioned by Baltimore’s Figaro Project in honor of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The opera tells the story of Jackie Kennedy and the small group who surrounded her immediately after the President’s death in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Caitlin Vincent's libretto is drawn from the written history of the event, as well as the traditional requiem mass.Nathan Wyatt sings William Bolcom’s “Gettysburg, July 1, 1863”North Carolina native Nathan Wyatt is a recent graduate of the Peabody Conservatory. He was awarded a Tanglewood Music Festival Fellowship for the summer of 2013. In September, Wyatt was one of two invited soloists, along with soprano Elizabeth Futral, to perform new works in the official opening and ribbon-cutting ceremony of the new Opera America National Opera Center in New York. Nathan WyattHe received first place honors in the Maryland/DC chapter of the National Association of Teachers of Singing and was a finalist in the Sylvia Green Competition in 2010. Recent opera roles include Alexander Kerensky in the world premiere of Joshua Bornfield’s Strong like Bull, Le Directeur and Le Gendarme in Les Mamelles de Tirésias, Figaro in Le nozze di Figaro, Lescaut in Manon, Guglielmo in Cosi fan tutte, and The Forester in The Adventures of Sharp-Ears the Vixen. In the fall of 2011, Mr. Wyatt made is Carnegie Hall debut under the direction of Marin Alsop in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s production of Arthur Honneger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher.

Glyndebourne Opera House Music-Master – Sir Thomas Allen Major-Domo – William Relton Lackey – Frederick Long Officer – Stuart Jackson Composer – Kate Lindsey Tenor. Bacchus – Sergey Skorokhodov Wigmaker – Michael Wallace Zerbinetta – Laura Claycomb Prima Donna, Ariadne – Soile Isokoski Dancing Master – Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke Pianist – Gary Matthewman Naiad – Ana Maria Labin Dryad – Adriana Di Paola Echo – Gabriela I?toc Harlequin – Dmitri Vargin Scaramuccio – James Kryshak Truffaldino – Torben Jürgens Brighella – Andrew Stenson Katharina Thoma (director) Julia Müer (set designs) Irina Bartels (costumes) Olaf Winter (lighting) Lucy Burge (movement) London Philharmonic Orchestra Vladimir Jurowski (conductor) Katharina Thoma’s Glyndebourne debut had been heavily publicised. Sad to say, not only does her production of Ariadne auf Naxos fail to live up to any expectations that might have been engendered; it fails dismally to live up to Strauss and Hofmannsthal, indeed even so much as to engage with them. Audience members would apparently erupt into uproarious laughter when someone, anyone, so much as walked onstage seemed delighted, but there was more sign of the artwork we know, love, and desperately wished to have interrogated in the miserably paraphrased surtitles – is it that difficult to offer a reasonable translation? – than on the Glyndebourne stage, at least during the Opera proper. The 1940s seem almost to be de rigueur for a certain breed of opera directors at the moment; this staging follows in the dubious footsteps of David McVicar’s not entirely dissimilar Médéefor ENO. A pandering desire to ‘entertain’ – ironically here, given the concerns of the Prologue, though the irony seems entirely accidental – replaces genuine dramatic, or indeed almost any other variety of, engagement. And yet, of course, Zerbinetta does not appeal to the lowest common denominator; that she both amuses and touches is owed to an expected level of Kultur on the part of the audience. Insofar as what she offers is ‘low’ culture, and that is a considerable ‘insofar’, that only has meaning in terms of contrast with its ‘high’, seria antipode – or cousin. Here, we simply have her reduced to a ‘mad’ person, straitjacketed in a wartime hospital, who, tedious ‘joke’ of tedious ‘jokes’, sings some of her high notes whilst having an orgasm induced by a visitor. I am not sure what is more offensive: the transformation of mental illness, presumably a product of wartime, into fodder for laughter, the refusal so much as to listen to the text (and no, the orgasm does not betoken serious study of the score), or the fact that so many seemed to respond so positively to Carry on Ariadne. Naiad, Dryad, and Echo are nurses, whose every shaking of a sheet elicited helpless guffaws from that vocal section of the audience. A still greater indignity suffered by the work comes at the end when Ariadne, reuinited with her fighter pilot Theseus, has him land himself on top of her behind a curtain. It was difficult to decide whether such prudishness were preferable to a more full-frontal vision; either path would simply have been embarrassing in context – or rather, weirdly out of context. Hoffmansthal’s concern with transformative myth receives not so much as a nod, but then nor does the transformative power of Strauss’s music. Goodness knows what the Composer has been doing, wandering around the Opera, not unreasonably lost; to start with I thought he was a doctor, then a patient, but he really seemed to be there to give the false impression that what we see is somehow connected with the Prologue. For that is the greatest problem of all with this staging, bafflingly so, since one would have thought that, whatever Konzept or none, it would have been pretty straightforward to get right. Much of the Prologue is presented reasonably enough: no particular ins

Mr. Fischer-Dieskau in 1970 Eric Auerbach/Getty Images The news media are all very sadly reporting on the death of one of the music world's greats, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Here is the New York Times article, which is remarkably detailed in telling of Mr. Fischer-Dieskau's upbringing and career. It concludes with this wonderful quote by journalist John Amis: Providence gives to some singers a beautiful voice, to some musical artistry, to some (let us face it) neither, but to Fischer-Dieskau Providence has given both. The result is a miracle, and that is just about all there is to be said about it. The Internet abounds with wonderful performance clips. Click here to see two previous Taminophile posts with wonderful clips. Think I'll listen to some Schumann now.

At the 2013 European Culture Prize gala to be held in Leipzig on 21 May, the theme is local boy made good Richard Wagner, whose 200th birthday is of course celebrated on the next day. Klaus Florian Vogt (winner of the Music prize) will sing from Lohengrin, and guests will tuck into what were allegedly Wagner's favourite dishes. The menu comes from a book of family recipes handed down to the composer's great-granddaughter, Daphne Wagner. Wagner is said to have served the traditional crayfish and vegetable dish Leipziger Allerlei to his guests at Bayreuth: He was supposedly fond of rustic dishes from Bavaria and Saxony. Gala guests will be served Bayrisch Creme mit Baumkuchen, which looks more like a Masterchef entry: Anyone sweet-toothed enough for more can round off the evening with Schoko-Zwieback, originally baked by Mathilde Wesendonck for the composer:

[artwork by Rykoe] There will be no new chapter this weekend; #33 gets pushed to next Friday/Saturday. Sorry! I thought I could fit it in last night, but the chapter proves to be a little more complex because of, well, stuff. Also, the big grant application that I spent the last two months preparing needs […]

La Cieca invites the cher public to open up and discuss any off-topic or general interests they might want to get off their chest.

Though it sounds like something that should have existed for 50 years at least, the Gramophone Hall of Fame began last year. Here are this year's inductees:Conductors Karl BÖHM ? Adrian BOULT ? Sergiu CELIBIDACHE ? Colin DAVIS ? Gustavo DUDAMEL ? Carlo Maria GIULINI ? Bernard HAITINK ? Mariss JANSONS ? Rafael KUBELÍK ? James LEVINE ? Charles MACKERRAS ? Zubin MEHTA ? George SZELL ? Bruno WALTER The only thing surprising here is the presence of the still very young Dudamel. Singers Montserrat CABALLÉ ? Renée FLEMING ? Thomas HAMPSON ? Anna NETREBKO ? Leontyne PRICE ? Bryn TERFEL ? Fritz WUNDERLICHThe three singers from the past are all richly deserving, especially my favorite Leontyne Price. This year shifts the emphasis to active artists: Fleming, Hampson, Netrebko and Terfel. At least there's no one in this category I've never heard of as there seem to be in the other categories. There are no mezzos at all this year. Pianists Leif Ove ANDSNES ? Vladimir ASHKENAZY ? Emil GILELS ? Wilhelm KEMPFF ? Arturo Benedetti MICHELANGELI ? Sergey RACHMANINOV String/brass/woodwind players Maurice ANDRÉ ? Julian BREAM ? James GALWAY ? Heinz HOLLIGER ? Steven ISSERLIS ? Yo-Yo MA ? Wynton MARSALIS ? Albrecht MAYER ? Anne-Sophie MUTTER ? Emmanuel PAHUD ? Jean-Pierre RAMPAL ? Jordi SAVALL ? Andrés SEGOVIA ? John WILLIAMS Vocal and instrumental ensembles Alban Berg Quartet ? Amadeus Quartet ? The King's Singers ? The Tallis Scholars Producers/engineers/record label executives Bernard COUTAZ ? Fred GAISBERG ? Klaus HEYMANN ? Goddard LIEBERSON ? Kenneth WILKINSON If they're going to do a list like this every year, they might want to shrink the size.

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