Opera
When you see two of the undisputed masterpieces of the repertoire in one week in one of the world’s leading opera houses, competently performed, and remain largely unmoved, you’re bound to ask yourself the question: have I been to these things, and heard them on record, too many times? It is, after all, possible to get tired even of the greatest works if you have experienced them regularly in the same productions, and without any special ‘magic’ ingredients, such as can bring back to life, or sustain, a standard work.
It was a question I found myself asking with...
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The Enchanted Island is a baroque concoction at the New York Met which has been widely touted and last Saturday was relayed worldwide to cinemas, a transmission that went less smoothly than any I have seen before, with some sharp variations of volume and a temporary complete breakdown. On the whole, the sound level is very high, as if everyone is singing at the top of their voice; while it’s nice to have ample volume, it is clearly and disconcertingly a misrepresentation. Danielle de Niese, for instance, has a small voice which just about fills Glyndebourne’s house. Here she sounded...
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Giulio Cesare was the first of Handel’s operas to return to general favour after more than a century and a half of neglect, and I suppose that it is still the most frequently performed. That isn’t surprising, since its plot is, by Handelian standards, simplicity itself, and the level of inspiration in the arias is astonishingly high. There is a problem with it, at least in the UK at the moment, and that is that David McVicar’s Glyndebourne production of 2005 has been so widely and wildly acclaimed, and distributed, that new productions are bound to be seen in its...
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As I’m not the first person to have pointed out, the Royal Opera has indulged in a truly phenomenal number of performances of La Traviata this season, in the largely traditional production by Richard Eyre, which opened in 1994 with Angela Gheorghiu making her name. The three main roles have been cast differently for these three runs of performances, of which the last has just begun.
It’s the kind of production that allows plenty of scope for individual interpretations, and in the many revivals I have seen of it the two outstanding pieces of casting have been the Alfredo...
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‘It is impossible that you should not have sensed,’ wrote Wagner to Ludwig II shortly before the first performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, ‘under the opera’s quaint superficies of popular humour, the profound melancholy, the lament, the cry of distress of poetry in chains, and its reincarnation, its new birth, its irresistible magic power achieving mastery over the common and the base.’ The King, and anyone else, might well not sense that in the latest revival of Graham Vick’s production of the opera at Covent Garden.
Always a toy-town affair, with little high-roofed houses and distant spires, all...
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Bernard Levin once wrote an article in the Times called ‘But seriously, how can anyone compare Verdi with Wagner?’ (or something very like that). I can’t remember the article in detail, but its drift was ‘No one can seriously compare them’, something that I had and have always felt. Yet there is the temptation: they were born within a few months of one another in 1813, they were indisputably the two greatest opera composers of the 19th century, and each of them is thought to embody some of the most striking characteristics of their country. It fascinates people, too, how...
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