Recently in Reviews
27 Jun 2005
Vom Bundeskanzler bis zu Deutsch lands Feuilletonistinnen waren alle da. Denn mit Andrea Breth und Ni kolaus Harnoncourt hatten zwei Liebkinder des Kultur-Establishments erstmals gemeinsam eine Musiktheaterproduktion zu erarbeiten. Derartige Kunst-Bande zu knüpfen, ist die nobelste Aufgabe von Festspielen. Womit die “Styriarte” für ihre heurige Eröffnung ein adäquates Zeichen gesetzt hat. Auf der Strecke blieb dabei Bizets “Carmen”; oder zumindest das, was man bisher dafür gehalten hat. »
26 Jun 2005
EMI has re-released a 2-disc set of some of Samuel Barber’s most compelling orchestral and chambers works on the Gemini — The EMI Treasures label. An album of the same recordings was released in 2001, itself a remastering of original recordings dating from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s. Disc 1 from both these sets contains music recorded in 1986 and 1988 with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Slatkin and released in 1990 as a single disc. The second disc of the set contains chamber music of Barber, recorded in 1995. Each time this music has been released it has received positive reviews. See for example, Jon Yungkans’s review on the The Flying Inkpot; the reviews on Amazon.com; or Victor Carr’s review on Classics Today. »
26 Jun 2005
Ottorino Respighi’s reputation as an arranger of early music sometimes obscures the contributions he made in assembling those works into what are essentially new compositions. The carefully planned suite of music from the Baroque era entitled “Gli uccelli” – “The Birds” – is an excellent example of his ability to adapt older compositions into a new context, and in this case juxtapose music by various composers into a cohesive whole. Respighi completed this suite in 1927, and the orchestrations remain effective, over a half a century later. The idiomatic use of the orchestra makes “Gli uccelli” a fine piece for an orchestra to show its ability to perform as a tightly rehearsed ensemble, and this is borne out in the festival performance preserved in this recording. »
26 Jun 2005
Das schönste Teil steht als Reklame vor der Tür: einer von Jimmy Durhams Büffeln, gehäutet und skelettiert. Ansonsten hat der indianische Künstler und Bühnenbildner eine Mischung aus Showbühne mit Aussichtspodest und Bahnhofshalle für Hans Zenders neue Chief Joseph-Oper gebaut: Vorn links auf dem teilweise überdeckten Orchestergraben ein Riesenmüllcontainer, aus dem später der kleine Joseph oder auch Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht, was soviel heißt wie “Der Donner, der über die Berge rollt”, kriecht und den Vater befragt, wie das denn sei mit den Weißen, ob sie alle Lügner sind, oder ob man einigen von ihnen wenigstens trauen kann, bevor er selbst das Kommando übernimmt, übernehmen muss. In rotbraunem Siedleranzug, nicht in umbrafarbener Federkluft, geht er dann sinnend durch die Szene. »
24 Jun 2005
One of my oldest memorabilia is a programme of a performance of Zigeunerliebe by my father’s operetta company just after the war. It was one of the many amateur companies in Flanders though the title roles were sung by good singers who earned extra money by combining a few companies. I was too young to assist at this performance but a few years later I would be a regular spectator. The moment I could read I was put into service rehearsing my father’s lines. Every time the company put on a new piece I eagerly read the libretto. Most people nowadays think that an operetta is something like a Carmen with a few dialogues but that’s definitely not true. A Lehár operetta always had a lot of spoken dialogue and often had a 50% spoken 50% sung lines balance. Many an operetta lasted 3 hours without including pauses. »
23 Jun 2005
Ernst Krenek is remembered primarily for one work, his jazz opera Jonny spielt auf, which irritated the cultural conservatives in Germany and Austria in the years between the wars and helped ensure his exile to America during the Nazi era. If an opera strewn with jazzy tunes and a romantic black hero wasn’t enough to tick off the right wing, he turned to serialism for his magnum opus, the anti-Nazi, pro-Austrian Karl V (Charles V, whom you’ll remember from Verdi’s Don Carlo). »
23 Jun 2005
Two recent CDs of Carissimi oratorios provide the listener the opportunity to compare very different “takes” on the composer’s remarkable works, which exemplify the sophisticated and exclusive style cultivated by the cardinalate nobility in mid-seventeenth-century Rome. Carissimi’s oratorios survive in manuscript only, and with relatively sparse indications concerning instrumentation; it has long been a challenge for contemporary performers to balance the need for dramatic clarity with the desirability of sonic variety, and the two groups featured on these CDs take different approaches to that challenge, each with fruitful results. »
22 Jun 2005
This production of Puccini’s classic, originally directed by John Copley, began life in 1974 and is now the oldest in the Royal Opera’s repertory. It’s still serviceable in its old-fashioned way, at least when lit with sufficient discretion to hide its increasing shabbiness. »
21 Jun 2005
If you’ve recently browsed the shelves in a bookstore or Blockbuster, you would have to be oblivious not to notice titles such as The DaVinci Code, the Romanov Prophecy, or films like National Treasure and Kingdom of Heaven. Responses to these titles suggest an increased interest in historical topics and journeys that provoke us to unravel clues that, in the end, will reveal an ultimate truth. Works that exude knowledge and mystery have always been popular in music, because it is by the dissemination of clues and their eventual interpretation that lead to the re-creation of a musical moment in history. One might even call it one of the earliest forms of a “treasure hunt.” In this high quality CD, the Concert des Nations directed by Jordi Savall, has successfully disseminated the few details left by Couperin and re-created what are perhaps the most important works of the French royal court: the Concert Royaux. Having already recorded Couperin’s Pièces de Voile, Les Nations, and Les Apothéoses, the Concert Royaux would comprise the second category of chamber works written by Couperin for the Court of King Louis XIV. To gain a better understanding of the general purpose of these concerts, you might think of them as relative to Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, but only in their sense of purpose. Their stylistic elements couldn’t be more diverse. »
20 Jun 2005
ST. LOUIS, June 19 – In more than 50 years on the British throne Queen Elizabeth II has shown scant interest in opera. So it is paradoxical that one of the major events of her coronation ceremonies was the 1953 premiere by the Royal Opera at Covent Garden of Benjamin Britten’s “Gloriana,” an elaborate three-act work about the first Queen Elizabeth, with a libretto by William Plomer based on Lytton Strachey’s book “Elizabeth and Essex.” »
19 Jun 2005
Die Zugabe war klug gewählt: “Wien, Wien nur du allein” sang der deutsch-kanadische Tenor Michael Schade zum Abschluss seines Liederabends im Konzerthaus. Bei so viel Zuneigung war ihm frenetischer Beifall sicher – und mancher Lacher für die drollige Aussprache. Den Applaus hatte er sich verdient. “Of Ladies and Love” war das Motto des Konzerts mit Liedern von Schubert, Beethoven, Liszt, Faure, Ravel und Strauss. Besonders mit leidenschaftlichen, ungestümen Liedern überzeugte er, etwa mit Liszts “Tre sonetti de Petrarca” oder Beethovens “Adelaide”. Hier kam Schades volle, schön timbrierte Stimme hervorragend zur Geltung, und auch im Ausdruck schienen ihm dramatische Liebeserfahrungen näher zu liegen als innig-verzärtelnde. »
19 Jun 2005
BOSTON, June 17 – For fans and performers of early music, this city is paradise for a week every other June, when the Boston Early Music Festival sets up its combination concert marathon and trade show. The festival offers performances every night between 5 and midnight. The centerpiece is always a lavishly produced Baroque opera – this year’s is Johann Mattheson’s long-lost “Boris Goudenow” – but concerts by imported ensembles and soloists, and by the festival’s period instrument orchestra, are also a strong draw. »
18 Jun 2005
Despite theoretical beginnings several centuries earlier, we have come to think of early polyphony as having its first “golden age” in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Paris, an environment teeming with things new: the University of Paris, the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and the large-scale organa by Leoninus and Perotinus. If our attention is drawn to Paris, it is with good reason. But significantly, the musically innovative style of the Parisians had a geographic dissemination that took it to places like St. Andrews in Scotland, home to a cathedral roughly contemporary with Notre Dame and, to continue the symmetry further, in the fifteenth century, also home to Scotland’s oldest university. A run of Norman bishops in St. Andrews secured a degree of continentalism in the local ecclesiastical culture, and one of the most important manifestations of this is the Scottish manuscript of Parisian repertory that we today know as “W1.” W1 is a copy, in all likelihood one made at St. Andrews, of the Parisian Magnus liber organi — the “great book of organum” by Leoninus, as well as other works, some of them local. And it is from this local Scottish repertory contained within W1 that Red Byrd has fashioned their “Scottish Lady Mass.” »
16 Jun 2005
In the seventeenth century Germany did not move quickly to embrace the new oratorio genre, despite its mainstream cultivation in Italy. Arguably, in fact, the Italianism of the genre may have made it suspect in some Protestant circles, and contributed to its slow cultivation. However, German interest in musical settings of sacred narrative is clear, given the examples of historiae composed by Heinrich Schütz and his contemporaries. These historiae present Biblical stories without modern poetic interpolations, and Schütz’s “Resurrection History” of 1623 is one of the most compelling. Music historians have rightly seen in the historia an antecedent of the German oratorio, but in its own right — and especially in Schütz’s compositions — it is a rich form, liturgically functional and compositionally sophisticated, that need not be harnessed to the more prominent oratorio to warrant our attention. With this recent recording of the “Resurrection History,” Manfred Cordes and Weser-Renaissance Bremen add a fifth installment to their series of Schütz recordings for Classic Production Osnabrück and with it a welcome new performance of this significant work. »
16 Jun 2005
El dramaturgo y premio Nobel de Literatura italiano Dario Fo confesó ayer que ha «saqueado» a Rossini y la tradición de la ‘comedia dell’arte’ para hacer la escenografía de la ópera ‘La gazzeta’ del compositor italiano, que el Liceo barcelonés estrenará el próximo día 20. ‘La gazzeta’ narra la historia de don Pomponio, que quiere casar a su hija con el mejor partido. Para ello, inserta un anuncio en el diario en el que hace un elogio ditirámbico. Aunque la obra estaba llamada a tener éxito, la escasa promoción propició, según Fo, que no recibiera el interés del público cuando se estrenó en Nápoles en 1816. »
