It is the most fabled opera house in the world, whose reopening was lauded as one of the big events in music. Yet just three months later, La Scala is being paralysed by a crisis of Verdian theatricality that has led to rebellion and strikes, and is now prompting a head on clash between two of the titans of contemporary opera.
Villazón at the Wiener Staatsoper
Er ist ein Bühnenmensch. Durch und durch. Schon ein Interview mit ihm ist eine äußerst unterhaltsame Dar bietung: witzig, inspiriert und sprühend lebendig. “Ich wollte immer alles darstellen,” sprudelt es aus dem 33-jährigen Mexikaner hervor. Mit Kindereien hat er sich dabei nicht aufgehalten. Bereits mit elf Jahren gehörte sein literarisches Interesse Camus und Kafka. “Die Figuren aus den Romanen waren für mich real, ich wollte so sein wie sie.” Das hat er bisweilen im Extrem ausgelebt. Die Biografie Gandhis hat den Jugendlichen später so fasziniert, dass er mit runder Brille und Glatze zur Schule ging. Das überbordende Ausdrucksbedürfnis entdeckte auch bald den Gesang. Vorerst unter der Dusche, am liebsten die Songs von “Perhaps Love”, Placido Domingos Cross-over-Album mit dem Popsänger John Denver – beide kann Villazón heute noch köstlich imitieren.
Is it Bach or is it Koopman?
Am Anfang die Frage: Ist’s Bach, ist’s Koopman? Von Johann Sebastian Bachs Markus-Passion ist nur der Text erhalten geblieben. Der Holländer Ton Koopman hat nach einer gängigen Kompositionsmethode Bachs – der Wiederverwendung eigener Werke – die Arien und Choräle der Passion gesetzt und die Rezitative dazwischen neu komponiert. Man könnte sagen, einen handwerklich bearbeiteten Bach erschaffen. An dieses ganz besondere Stück wagte sich nun Philipp Amelung mit seinem Bach-Ensemble und bescherte damit dem Publikum im Münchner Herkulessaal einen äußerst spannenden Abend.
Stravinsky’s Les Noces and Oedipus Rex at the Barbican
After opening its brief Barbican residency with Rimsky-Korsakov, the Mariinsky Theatre moved on to less regular territory for the company, with performances of Shostakovich’s The Nose and a Stravinsky double bill. Although the two Stravinsky works – the “choreographic scenes” of Les Noces and the “opera-oratorio” Oedipus Rex — were first performed (both in Paris) just four years apart, in 1923 and 1927 respectively, they belong to different musical worlds, for Les Noces had been conceived much earlier, in the immediate aftermath of The Rite of Spring, and Stravinsky took a decade to perfect its formal shape and scoring.
James Levine and the 21st Century
We’re undeniably in the era of James Levine. The Cincinnati-born, 61-year-old conductor is right now art music’s Great Enabler. As music director of the Metropolitan Opera for nearly the last 30 years and in the home stretch of his first season as chief conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, his potential for goosing the possibilities of 21st-century classical music performance is unique.
New York City Opera’s 2005-6 Season
The New York City Opera said Tuesday that it would offer six new productions during its 2005-6 season, including two contemporary works: “The Little Prince” by Rachel Portman and “Lysistrata, or the Nude Goddess” by Mark Adamo.
In releasing details of the new season, City Opera said its offerings would skew toward the modern. New productions also include “The Mines of Sulphur,” by Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, which was given its premiere in London in 1965; Paul Dukas’s “Ariane et Barbe-bleu” (1907); the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta “Patience” (1881); and “Capriccio,” the last opera by Richard Strauss, first performed in 1942.
TOMMASINI: The New York Times Essential Library: Opera — A Critic’s Guide to the 100 Most Important Works and the Best Recordings
“I particularly want to reach newcomers” writes Anthony Tommasini, Times chief classical music critic, in his preface. I do not think they will be helped very much by this book. A rookie who picks it up and reads the subtitle may expect something more than two operas by Bellini, two by Donizetti, one Gounod (not Faust), one Massenet (not Manon) and no Lohengrin.
Opera Colorado Gala to Feature Jake Heggie Work For Renée Fleming
Soprano Renée Fleming, one of opera’s biggest names, heads a star-studded parade of 12 singers set to perform at the Sept. 10 gala opening of the $86 million Ellie Caulkins Opera House, Opera Colorado announced Monday.
Royal Holloway-British Library Lectures in Musicology
MUSIC AND COURTLINESS
The elite civilisation of Europe in the central and later Middle ages is often spoken of as a ‘courtly’ one, where the ‘courts’ at issue include the households of secular magnates, bishops and abbots. Men and women of exalted station had always possessed courts in the West, since Roman imperial times, but after approximately 1050 writings from Western Europe refer with increasing frequency to a quality of ‘courtliness’, or curialitas. A music theorist of c1100, whom we know only by the name ‘Johannes’, is the first European writer to identify certain kinds of music as inherently ‘courtly’ (curialis) and therefore appropriate to courtliness. Since his treatise is a technical one, we can trace this courtliness in terms of actual musical procedures. We can also place him, with some confidence, exactly where other sources lead us to expect him, in the episcopal and indeed imperial milieux of ‘Germany’.
Mozart? Maybe Not.
01. März 2005 Ein Rokokoherr mittleren Alters, Frack, Spitzenjabot, gepudertes Haar – könnte das nicht Mozart sein? Niemand weiß, wie der Komponist wirklich ausgesehen hat.
So galt es denn als „Weltsensation”, als die Berliner Gemäldegalerie ihren bisherigen „Herrn im grünen Frack” vor wenigen Wochen aufgrund einer computergestützten Analyse des Musikliebhabers Wolfgang Seiller als neu entdecktes Mozart-Porträt präsentierte. Gemalt hatte es der seinerzeit renommierte Münchner Porträtist Johann Georg Edlinger „vor 1790”, was aber nun auf „um 1790” umfunktioniert wurde.