Verdi
David Nice
You can usually trust the buzz around rehearsals. From Glyndebourne, five weeks into preparation for La traviata, which opens tomorrow, one of the team working on Tom Cairns’ new production declared in an e-mail conversation that newcomer soprano Venera Gimadieva was possibly the most definitive Violetta yet. And when I was havering over whether to interview American tenor Michael Fabiano, not by then having watched a wealth of stupendous videos on his website, the response was “you absolutely must”.I soon saw why Fabiano at 30 is feted in the States as one of the most exciting lirico spinto Read more ...
David Nice
The best that you can usually expect from an interview is that it takes off from stock beginnings in spontaneous and unexpected directions. This one was rather exciting from the start: the end of a day in the life of a new role, Puccini's good-time girl Manon Lescaut, for lyric-dramatic soprano Kristine Opolais. To be working in the company of Antonio Pappano and Jonas Kaufmann as her tenor love – real-life husband is fellow Latvian and great conductor Andris Nelsons – was no more than she already deserved, but Manon had come alive for her at that day’s Royal Opera rehearsal for the first Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The German soprano Diana Damrau has had the role of Violetta Valéry in La Traviata in her sights for a very long time. As she has explained in interviews, seeing the Zeffirelli film of the opera, with Teresa Stratas in the title role, as a 12-year old was a decisive moment in making her want to become a singer. That was 30 years ago. Now, as the pre-eminent high soprano in the world, she is performing the role in several leading opera houses. Last night she made her debut as Violetta at Covent Garden.Damrau's musicality and security of vocal line are spellbinding. It is impossible to imagine Read more ...
David Nice
Last year a DVD appeared featuring the 15 winning performances from the start of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition up to 2011. I watched them all, skimming if any seemed a notch below par but staying with most. You could see the star quality and the promise in many who have since become great artists, including Karita Mattila, Anja Harteros and Ekaterina Shcherbachenko. But only two seemed like the fully finished article from the start: Siberian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky in 1989 – the year Bryn Terfel won the Lieder prize – and American soprano Nicole Cabell in 2005, the Read more ...
David Nice
Only the most antagonistic of diva fanciers, opera queens, call them what you will, would deny coloratura soprano Natalie Dessay her place as one of the great singing actresses of our time. The size and range of the voice are rather more limited for the role of giant-hearted Violetta, Verdi’s Parisian courtesan who sacrifices true love on the altar of convention and dies of consumption.Not that it matters too much in film-maker Philippe Béziat’s take on the opera, originally Traviata et nous, in which he guides us through the drama chronologically but very selectively from rehearsal room to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Old sins, the saying goes, cast long shadows. These are nothing, however, to the shadows cast by old productions. Jonathan Miller’s Mafia Rigoletto looms larger than most in this regard – a lowering giant of directorial inspiration, with 30 years in rep and as close to cult status as opera gets. As Christopher Alden’s new Rigoletto made his way through the darkened streets yesterday more than just assassins lurked in the shadows.I say new, but of course this Rigoletto has almost as long and tortured a history as Verdi’s hero. It started life back in 2000 at Chicago’s Lyric Opera. Abandoned Read more ...
graham.rickson
The colours! Or the lack of them; Johan Engels’s neat, versatile set is decked out in 50 shades of black and grey. As are most of the cast, meaning that you begin to feel that you’re watching a grainy monochrome newsreel. Scotland has rarely looked so unalluring – a dark, damp, claustrophobic pit of a place, its sour-faced population dressed in grey trench coats.Birnam Wood is cleverly suggested with the slenderest of means, and the steeply raked slope stage rear adds to the sense of clammy confinement: we’re all in this together. Tim Albery’s 2008 staging of Verdi’s Macbeth is full of Read more ...
David Nice
Which musical calendar year isn’t laden down with composer commemorations, too often a pretext for lazy and unimaginative planning? The last 12 months, with Verdi, Wagner and Britten as the birthday boys (in case you failed to hear), have raised the stakes.It looked on paper as if the BBC Proms were going for the obvious: all the major Wagner operas except The Flying Dutchman and The Mastersingers in semi-staged versions.The execution exceeded everyone’s wildest hopes (there, I’ve snuck in a collective top choice already). Now, it seems, is the time when opera is becoming the designer’s Read more ...
philip radcliffe
How do you mark the Verdi bicentenary? As music director of the Hallé Orchestra and a Verdi specialist, Sir Mark Elder gave it a lot of thought. He decided to tell a story rather than direct a concert performance of one opera – say, La traviata. The story is that of the unlikely creative relationship between the composer and Arrigo Boito, who was 30 years Verdi’s junior and became an inspirational librettist for the later operas Otello and Falstaff, as well as reviving Simon Boccanegra.Elder kicked off with an hour-long informal chat with author Jonathan Keates before proceeding to concert Read more ...
David Nice
First fanfare had to be for the Royal Opera House’s main gambit in Verdi bicentenary year, staging its first ever Sicilian Vespers 158 years after the Paris premiere. Any of Verdi’s operas from Rigoletto onwards deserves the red carpet treatment, and this unwieldy epic, with its opportunistic grafting of a melodramatic plot on to the Palermitans’ massacre of the French in 1282, has more than enough vintage music to be worthy of anyone’s close attention. What’s more, Antonio Pappano is surely the best opera-house music director in the world to reveal its colours and beauties, and he rose to a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This season opener was about closure too. The London Symphony Orchestra was back at the office last night, but this fresh stretch of concerts opened with an opera it has been performing while also acquiring a suntan in Aix-en-Provence. A new cast of singers replaced gaudy costumes and facepaint with elegant evening garb, and semi-acted their roles on the thin strip of forestage not occupied by the massed ranks of the orchestra.The concept of the concert performance has never had more enthusiastic support than at the recent run of seven Wagner operas, amounting to a gazillion hours without Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It was too little too late to redress the scant attention gives to Verdi’s bicentenary at this year’s Proms but the “Maltese Tenor” – Joseph Calleja – arrived with an eleventh hour offering of low-key Verdi arias and joining him was the Milanese orchestra bearing the composer’s name. Calleja’s growing legions of fans were much in evidence, of course, more Maltese than Italian flags, but what can they have made of the music stand which came between them and their hero? Five arias, one of which he will have sung a zillion times, and still – despite the presence of TV cameras – the music was Read more ...