Well I’m trying. The liner notes read: “Les Enfants Terribles, the final installment of Philip Glass’ trilogy based on the work of Jean Cocteau, articulates Cocteau’s belief in the transcendent power of imagination and creativity. It is the story of a brother and a sister, Paul and Lise, two characters so caught up in a world of their own imaginings that they can no longer see a reality beyond their ‘game’.” The music on this cd is the accompaniment to a dance/opera (and thus it’s only half the story — to be as fair as possible to thing). The work is scored for three singers and a narrator, accompanied by three keyboards.
Year: 2005
SAARIAHO: Cinq reflets de L’Amour de loin; Nymphea Reflection; Oltra Mar
This is very pleasant new music, long in breath, richly scored, nice poetry, nothing pretentious, but good solid rewarding composition. Ms. Saariaho is truly adept at making a great orchestral score, and she has a way with voices, particularly Pia Freund’s on the first track, which truly soars.
Berg’s Lulu at ENO
Richard Jones’s English National Opera production of Berg’s Lulu was widely regarded as one of the company’s finest achievements when it premiered in 2002. The first night of its revival, however, was a somewhat awkward affair, in which illness regrettably played its part. Lisa Saffer (Lulu) and Susan Parry (Geschwitz) were singing with apologies, after suffering from throat infections. Fine actresses both, they compensated for vocal roughness with performances of uncommon dramatic vividness, though Saffer’s understandable tentativeness inevitably meant that we were faced with a Lulu whose physical glamour was unsupported by equivalent vocal allure.
Henze’s The Bassarids in Paris Without Orchestra
No other city puts on a welcome quite like Paris. When the Olympic committee came to evaluate the city’s bid to host the games, they were greeted by strikes, and last week the Théâtre du Châtelet’s bid for artistic glory met with a similarly thumb-to-the-nose response.
Gounod’s Faust at the Met — A Preview
Tomorrow night, the Metropolitan Opera unveils a new production of Charles Gounod’s “Faust,” its sixth. The musical expectations are high. James Levine, the Met’s music director, is conducting the opera for the first time, leading an international A-list cast: the French-Sicilian tenor Roberto Alagna as Faust, one of his signature roles; the Finnish soprano Soile Isokoski as Marguerite, the innocent he seduces and abandons; the German bass René Pape as Méphistophelès, an eagerly anticipated role debut; and the Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky as the soldier Valentin, Marguerite’s brother.
Menotti’s The Consul in Arizona
Even though no sensation-hungry opera director has tampered with Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Consul to “update” the work in today’s all-too-common effort to make opera “relevant” to modern audiences, this half-century-old opera has not lost one iota of such relevancy.
Sir Thomas Allen: Great Operatic Arias
Some 20 years ago I ended my subscription to Opera Magazine after an article by its editor, the late Harold Rosenthal. He had written a review of La Clemenza di Tito that described tenor Stuart Burrows in words that, for those who did not attend the performance, they had missed the second coming of Enrico Caruso, Jussi Björling and Beniamino Gigli in one person. I had attended and I knew that Rosenthal and his colleagues could be almost funny in their chauvinism but enough was enough. Well, I’m happy to report the old tradition still lives on. I looked at some reviews of this recital by British critics and Giuseppe De Luca, Tito Gobbi and Robert Merrill in their heydays would have been proud of such notices.
The Cambridge Companion to the Lied
Books described as a “Companion” to this or that and published by university presses should be required to come with a Reader Beware label. As is the case with many books put out by university and many for-profit publishers, the main reason for publishing these is to advance the tenure and promotion prospects of the authors. This is not a bad thing, except that all too often the books aren’t very good.
Gérard Mortier — The Misunderstood Megalomaniac
Monsieur Mortier ist nervös. Gleich will Isabelle Huppert anrufen. Frankreichs Vorzeige-Actrice möchte eine Karte für seine Oper. Und Ehrengäste sind für den Intendanten Chefsache. So wie alles andere eigentlich auch. Die Fotos fürs Programmheft, der Zug im Schnürboden und die Versammlung der Gewerkschaft. Jetzt, wenn die Huppert anruft, macht er einen Bückling, sagt “oui” und “bien sur”. Gérard Mortier ist ein Mann mit hervorragenden Manieren. Und ein Netzwerker. Er weiß: Wenn die Huppert morgen kommt, ist übermorgen ganz Frankreich bei ihm zu Gast. Sein Auftrag ist es, den protzigen Glaspalast an der Pariser Bastille jeden Abend mit 3000 Menschen zu füllen.
Muti in New York
Riccardo Muti, the Italian conductor, has been much in the news lately, having quit La Scala – that is an interesting story. But that is not today’s story: Mr. Muti was in New York last week, for a subscription series with the Philharmonic. On his program were two seldom-heard works, the first more seldom heard than the second: Goffredo Petrassi’s “Coro di morti” (“Chorus of Dead Ones”) and Liszt’s “Faust Symphony.” Saturday’s was a concert of the highest order.