Category: Performances

Sex, religion and real estate: Put ‘em together, and you’ve got a plot that will bring out the best and the worst in any cast of characters.

Sieben von zwölf seiner Bühnenwerke sind nach einer Frau benannt. Puccini selbst wird der Satz nachgesagt: “Wenn ich nicht mehr verliebt bin, begrabt mich!” Was lag daher für Regisseur Stefan Herheim näher, als sich der “Madama Butterfly” aus dieser Perspektive zu nähern, die Bühne zeitweise zu einem Puccini-Museum zu machen. Mit stummen Auftritten von Tosca, Mimi und Manon Lescaut, aber auch dem Komponisten selbst. Ungewohnt auch Butterflys Ende: Sie muss in einem blutrünstigen Harakiri ihr Leben lassen.

Die Tote Stadt is often described as Erich Korngold’s masterpiece. An enormous success when first performed simultaneously in Hamburg and Cologne in 1920, it has become one of those pieces every opera fan has heard of, yet few have seen: it has never been staged in Britain. That makes the new production from Netherlands Opera a real collector’s item. Musically and dramatically, it does the work proud. What it can’t do, though, is turn a deeply flawed piece into a good one.

The CIM Opera Theater is offering two revelations this week, one old and one new. What a joy to experience Mozart’s neglected “La finta giardiniera,” which the precocious fellow wrote at the age of 18. The more recent discovery is soprano Jung Eun Oh, who was a sensation in the title role at Wednesday’s opening.

There is one conspicuous reason for reviving Rossini’s Tancredi in our time. Fortunately that reason — the availability of the Polish contralto Ewa Podles — underlay the Canadian Opera Company’s production of that work which opened Friday night for six performances at the Hummingbird Centre in Toronto.

Alcoholism, depression and loneliness were a few of the things that killed Modest Mussorgsky in 1881. He was 42 years old. He left behind the unfinished piano score of Khovanshchina, a vast historical opera that was, among other things, a criticism of Tsar Peter I.

Mignon at OONY turned out to be a mixed experience last night. Eve Queler is controversial as a conductor and last night’s opera did not play to her strengths or do anything to conceal her deficiencies. The overture began in a plodding fashion and only came intermittently alive in the conclusion based on the coloratura showpiece for Philene. Throughout, Mignon has some really lovely arias and ensembles but a lot of note spinning as well and not just during the recitatives (the opera was presented in Thomas’s second of three scores, the one in which he suppressed most — not quite all — of the spoken dialog and wrote his own recits). Ms Queler provided almost nothing to enliven, vary or give grace and charm to these conventional passages.

For opera conductors, the Ring cycle remains the professional Everest. So the fact that Andrew Davis has just completed his first Ring at the Lyric Opera in Chicago marks not merely a career peak for one of this country’s most important conductors, it is also a major event for British music – even if it is taking place thousands of miles from home.

Humor is not a quality normally associated with Verdi. He was a dour fellow, dubbed “the bear of Busetto” by his long-suffering wife. His first comic opera, “Un giorno di regno,” was a crashing failure, and “Falstaff,” his final work for the stage, looks more intently into the abyss than most commentators care to admit.

While ruminating about “Madama Butterfly” in these pages the other week, I mentioned that the de facto premiere of the work was not in Italy at all but rather New York, since the David Belasco play originally opened on Herald Square. In the case of “Girl of the Golden West,” both the Belasco theatrical piece and the Puccini opera were launched in Manhattan, the latter under Toscanini in 1910.