« June 2011 | Main | August 2011 »
Good news. Last year's most amazing opera cook book, like, evah - Die Oper Kocht - has been translated from German.
The English version is called The Opera Cooks and is officially launched on 2 August (though you can already buy it in Salzburg at the Festspielhaus shop). I will publish ordering details once I find them out.
| | |
|
Le nozze di Figaro - Haus Für Mozart, Salzburg, 30 July 2011
Claus Guth's cinematically-inspired 2006 production sets Figaro in funereal Bergmanesque monochrome. Hitchcock's The Birds is referenced in the dead crows and autumnal leaves littering the bare rooms. It looks more like a particularly scary The Turn of the Screw than a Mozart comedy.
Continue reading "Salzburg's nozze di Figaro gets the bird" »
| | |
|
Die Frau ohne Schatten - Grosses Festspielhaus Salzburg, 29 July 2011 (first night)
It now seems incredible that Strauss's musically richest and most colourful opera was dismissed as 'boring' by its first critics. Christian Thielemann coaxed the Vienna Philharmonic into a display of such aural opulence on its Friday premiere that it was easy to overlook the deficiencies of Christof Loy's meagre production.
Continue reading "Die Frau ohne Schatten opens in Salzburg " »
| | |
|
Half the publicity the Salzburg Festival receives is based around the talented and indecently photogenic Anna Netrebko and Erwin Schrott. Not to mention the glowing critical reviews and through-the-roof ticket sales for anything they're in.
So it's surprising to read an interview with the pair in today's Austrian News magazine that confirms next year's La bohème is the last Salzburg Festival booking in Anna Netrebko's calendar. Worse, Erwin Schrott says there's no place for him whatsoever in new Intendant Alexander Pereira's plans (which are noticeably stuffed with job opps for his old Zurich cronies).
"Doesn't that hurt?" asks the interviewer. "Yes it does" they both confirm.
When you bear in mind that they're not clapped-out old singers trading on past glories, but young (in classical music years) artists whose talents grow year on year, the exclusion seems even odder. Bad for music, bad for business.
But it's not goodbye to Austria. They remain based in Vienna, and performances there will feature in their future, even though there are no immediate plans. Netrebko says she's waiting for the right time and the right production. They both dodged questions about specific commitments, with Netrebko refusing to confirm that she'll make her Wagner debut as Elsa with Thielemann in Dresden - though she does say she can't wait to sing the role. And she wants to clarify that although she's retiring some roles, Violetta is not one of them, as has been reported elsewhere.
They also talk about their widely-reported plans to open a restaurant (location: Vienna, cuisine: undecided).
Read an extract from the interview online, or see the whole thing below (click to enlarge):
Continue reading "Netrebko and Schrott 'hurt' to be ditched from Salzburg Festival" »
| | |
|
There's no need to trek out to Glyndebourne for a picnic with an opera thrown in. Urban opera festivals on both sides of the capital supplement the the few crumbs the Proms toss out to opera-starved Londoners in August.
"Don’t come if you love opera for its chandeliers and tiaras!" warn Tête à Tête. For their 5th annual festival, they present 40 different productions from 4-21 August at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith.
These include Streetwise Opera with Fables – A Film Opera, Scottish Opera workshopping their new piece for toddlers, SensoryO; Glyndebourne Youth Opera "exploring the phenomenon of wind" in world premières by Orlando Gough and Hannah Conway; Welsh National Youth Opera with The Sleeper by Michael Symmons Roberts and Stephen Deazley, and Opera North with Toby Litt and Emily Hall’s Life Cycle. Works in development by Robert Fokkens, Michael Zev Gordon and Stephen McNeff will also be presented.
Everything is (relatively) brief, so you may be able to take in more than one performance each night, and tickets are just £6 per show.
Turning eastwards, the Grimeborn Festival returns to the Arcola Theatre in Hackney from 15-27 August.
This too includes new work, but there's also a focus on the standard repertoire, with productions including Britten's The Turn of the Screw, Janacek's The Diary of One Who Disappeared, and Handel's Alcina. Rarities include a double bill of Holst's Savitri and The Wandering Scholar, Mozart's Der Schauspieldirektor with Salieri's Prima la Musica and, most enticingly, Viktor Ullmann's The Emperor of Atlantis, written in the Terezin concentration camp in 1943.
Tickets are £15.
| | |
|
Tristan und Isolde - Nationaltheater Munich, 27 July 2011
A superbly-executed Festspiele performance of one of Munich's great productions. Covent Garden's older Wagner efforts are so embarrassing they're practically unrevivable. But thanks to Peter Konwitschny, the Bavarian State Opera has several that can be reliably resuscitated year after year, each time gripping/fascinating/provoking a new audience.
| | |
|
Die Frau ohne Schatten opens at the Salzburg Festival tomorrow night in a new production by Christof Loy (photos below). It will be conducted - without any cuts - by Christian Thielemann, who says it is his favourite Strauss opera.
Loy's staging was inspired by the circumstances of the opera's first recording in 1955. Its conductor, Karl Böhm, was so driven to set the work down that he persuaded his ill-assorted ensemble to work without fees, in the midst of winter, in unheated rooms. And so Loy's production begins with a young singer hired to record the part of the Empress. According to Maestro Thielemann, not even the cast are quite sure what it all means.
A local Salzburg boutique meanwhile has out-regied the Regisseur with a puzzling complementary display of Trachtenmode and hand-painted wellies.
| | |
|
Jonas Kaufmann / Helmut Deutsch - Nationaltheater Munich, 26 July 2011
One of life's great guilty pleasures is striding past a straggle of downcast faces and Suche Karte signs, smugly contemplating the sought-after ticket tucked away in one's own reticule.
| | |
|
Lucrezia Borgia - Nationaltheater Munich, 25 July 2011
Created two years ago as a star vehicle for the eternal Edita Gruberova, Christof Loy's production is well-known to those interested in such things via the DVD which appeared soon afterwards. Loy's latterday predilection for monochrome, minimalist sets is manifested in a stage that remains resolutely bare except for the occasional chair. But then who goes to the opera to admire the furniture (apart from Amazon reviewers)?
| | |
|
The 2011 Bayreuth Festival opened last night with a new production of Tannhäuser directed by Sebastian Baumgarten and conducted by Thomas Hengelbrock.
Lars Cleveman took the title role, with Camilla Nylund as Elizabeth, Stephanie Friede as Venus, Guenther Groissböck as the Landgrave and Michael Nagy as Wolfram von Eschenbach.
The staging, according to Bloomberg's Catherine Hickley, "transposes Wartburg castle to an organic waste recycling plant and features a pregnant Venus living in a cage with giant tadpoles and furry, ape-like nymphs." In true Bayreuth style, it was expensively accoutred, extensively rehearsed, and greeted with a hail of boos at the end.
Continue reading "Eco- Tannhauser opens Bayreuth Festival - in photos" »
| | |
|
After days of rumours, the Bayreuth Festival confirmed today that they have asked the 60 year old Berlin theatre director Frank Castorf to direct the bicentenary Ring in 2013. It's not yet in the bag, but contract negotiations are under way - the same point at which their earlier choice, Wim Wenders, dropped out of the running. Castorf however is unlikely to demand 3D filming - the sticking point with Wenders. It appears the final step will be the selection of a production team.
Two years is not a long time in opera, so they're racing the clock now whoever is chosen.
Castorf is either an interesting choice or a desperate one. A radical deconstructionist, some regard him as an iconoclastic genius, others as a spent force. Having spent his whole life in the theatre, he only turned to opera five years ago. Typically, his Meistersinger was cut down, chopped up, and performed - in a theatre - by actors and locals rather than trained opera singers.
At least Castorf's past suggests that whatever he creates can't be as deadly dull as the Tankred Dorst production it replaces.
| | |
|
When Vesselina Kasarova, Queen of Pants, signed up for this production (which premiered in March), there was some talk of it being her last-ever Romeo. However she's booked to return next year with Anna Netrebko, so perhaps she's not hanging up her boots just yet. And why should she? She still has all the notes. And her dashing Romeo convincingly displays the uncertainties of youth, whatever the calendar says.
| | |
|
I expressed some reservations about Opera Holland Park's new distribution method for their cheap £12 'Inspire' tickets at the time it was announced. And, wouldn't you know it, my predictions materialised.
| | |
|
photo: Sivan Cotel
"If Webern had a cat, this is what Webern’s cat would have written."
That's how one of the judges described Piece for Piano, Four Paws, a prizewinning entry in the Paris New Music Review’s One-Minute Competition in 1997.
The composer, a black and white cat named Ketzel (Yiddish for 'cat'), sadly passed away last week at her New York home having reached the grand old age of 19 (the equivalent of 93 in human years).
Her solitary oeuvre was performed several times in public, earning her $19.72 in royalties. More (including audio) in the New York Times.
| | |
|
This could be a load of cobblers, but rumour has it that Thomas Hampson will make his role debut as Hans Sachs at the 2013 Salzburg Festival.
| | |
|
Snoop Dogg would "like to try a little opera" on his next album according to the Daily Star, who know all about these things.
A Dogg's Heart would be the obvious choice, but maybe that's a bit too artsy for Snoop. Dogg Giovanni? Dogg Carlos?
| | |
|
Die Entführung aus dem Serail - Nationaltheater Munich, 11 July 2011
Die Entführung remains a staple of German opera houses, however high the risk of inflaming racial sensitivities with its provocative libretto. They just can't not do it. Another reason Martin Duncan's bland 2003 production was revived, presumably, is this year's Munich Opera Festival theme of freedom and imprisonment, into which it slots nicely.
| | |
|
Tosca - Royal Opera House, 17 July 2011
There was something missing from tonight's Tosca - the Maestro's vocal accompaniment. Has he bowed to public pressure and resolved to conduct in silence?
| | |
|
Saint François d'Assise - Nationaltheater Munich, 10 July 2011
When the Madrid Opera staged Saint François recently, they took over a sports stadium to accommodate the vast forces required. The Bavarian State Opera had only the middling-sized Nationaltheater, so the 100+ musicians spilled out into boxes and even on to the stage, where they sat on either side in stripy costumes that matched the cast's, big-band style.
Continue reading "Saint François d'Assise paints Munich red" »
| | |
|
Recent Comments