http://news.ft.com/cms/s/ac687fc0-15cd-11da-8085-00000e2511c8.html
Month: August 2005
BONONCINI: La nemica d’Amore fatta amante
Giovanni Bononcini (Modena, 1670 – Vienna, 1747) is best known today for his dozen years in London, which began when he was 50 and Handel was 35. Five years later, a well-known epigram likened them to Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee . Londoners then had to decide whether Handel, compared to Bononcini, was “but a Ninny,” or whether Bononcini, when matched with Handel, was “scarcely fit to hold a Candle.” For many Londoners, the more luminous composer was Bononcini, since he had served munificent patrons for four decades before his arrival in England: duke Francesco II of Modena (1680s); two immensely wealthy noblemen – Filippo Colonna and Luigi de la Cerda, the Spanish ambassador – in Rome (1690s); two emperors – Leopold I and Joseph I – in Vienna (1700s); and an immensely wealthy Viennese ambassador in Rome (1710s).
The Death of Klinghoffer at Edinburgh
It has taken 14 years for John Adams’ second opera to reach a British stage. Scottish Opera’s production of The Death of Klinghoffer at last goes boldly where no opera company in these islands has dared before (and one of them, Glyndebourne, shared in the original commission).
Melodrama in Edinburgh
First performed in 1775, Georg Benda’s Ariadne auf Naxos is a melodrama in the most literal sense of the word — a work for actors and orchestra in which music is deployed to heighten the effect of emotional declamation. Even though posterity has tended to play its influence down, many in the late 18th and early 19th centuries rated it as both a masterpiece and a major vehicle for a tragic actress. This performance revealed it to be a work of considerable power.
The Threepenny Opera in LA
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – German writers Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s stylized 1928 masterpiece “The Threepenny Opera” is savagely cynical, sardonic, brittle and worldly wise—and wonderfully well-performed at the Odyssey Theater Ensemble, a tribute to savvy director Ron Sossi and a cast of 16 talented and eager performers.
Mercadante’s Pelagio in Gijón
http://www.lne.es/secciones/noticia.jsp?pIdNoticia=321076&pIdSeccion=35&pNumEjemplar=1010
Celebrating Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s 80th at Salzburger Felsenreitschule
http://www.diepresse.com/Artikel.aspx?channel=k&ressort=ke&id=501560
THOMAS: Polish Music since Szymanowski
Throughout the history of Poland, music has been an enduring force in its culture, and Polish composers were at the forefront of a number of developments in the twentieth century.
GIORDANO: Andrea Chénier
Carlo Bergonzi never recorded the role commercially and he is obviously the ” raison d’etre ” of this set. Among collectors there are quite a lot of Met-performances circulating but none is in very good sound. These performances date from around 1960 during the tenor’s heyday but even they prove that the role is not completely his best: part of the score lays a little too high for his tessitura and he misses the sheer power to overwhelm us in some of the arias. This Venice-performance is in good sound and as the theatre is so much smaller than the Met maybe better suited for a role a shade too heavy for the voice. By 1972 too he knew much better where his strong points were and he fully exploits them. Time and again he makes a point by a diminuendo or a piano where Del Monaco and Corelli hector along. While the voice is slightly less beautiful than in the famous 1970-concert performance in London he succeeds in giving us a truly fine ” Come un bel di di maggio “; the only piece Luigi Illica culled from the poems of Andre Chenier himself. In London Bergonzi has to switch in a lower gear when he realizes he is not going to make it but in Venice the voice is at its best in the fourth act. There are some fascinating glimpses of the tenor’s experienced singing. When in his second act monologue he gets before the beat, he simply introduces a little sob and stage and pit are once on the same wave length. In that terrible first act monologue ” Colpito qui m’avete ” he has given so much breath in getting to the top in the first verse, that during the second verse he starts declaiming instead of singing though he does that with such skill and conviction that most people in the audience probably thought of it as an interpretative trick. A live audience probably didn’t notice the appearance of the weak link in late Bergonzi’s vocal armour: a gliding towards a fortissimo note from high A onwards that would almost always result in flat singing above the staff from 1975 onwards.