To Frank - the most wonderful teacher

I had many phases in my life (the Germanic languages one, the U2 one (unintended reference!), the football one). Among my long-lasting obsessions, there's contemporary Irish literature.

Yesterday I received an email from my favourite school teacher, the one who made me fall in love with English literature first. The email's object was about a loss: 'The world has suddenly become a sadder place'. Frank McCourt died in Manhattan, aged 78.

Angela's Ashes is the first book I bought in a bookshop in London - my first proper purchase of an book in English (I felt like a serious grown up at that point). I was 16 and it was still too linguistically difficult for me, but I had read Le ceneri di Angela in Italian, and I was eager to savour it in its original version. After a few years, now I'm convinced it's impossible not to love McCourt's writing. He wrote his first (Pulitzer Prize winning) book at 66, and the honesty and irony of his prose are unique.

I was reticent to share my thoughts here, as this is supposed to be a music-related blog. Then today I came across OperaChic's post, who found this memorable video [see link above] of Frank McCourt playing harmonica to some teachers and students - he's been a school teacher for his whole life. I felt stupid - not for not youtubing McCourt (always something related comes up! and he's an Irish man as well, the music link is always there somewhere), but for not having indulged in my desire to dedicate a post to him.

Many celebrated his life - The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Salon... He'll be tenderly missed.

Musical Promenades

The Proms have started!

Listen to Haydn's Creation on BBC3! and here's the programme notes.

Some happy news, and some other mournful.

Kiri Te Kanawa confirmed her performances of the Maschallin in Der Rosenkavalier at Cologne and her her spoken (or sung?) role in La fille du régiment at the Met in 2010.

Sir Edward Downes, one of the best Verdian conductors ever, and his wife decided to end their lives in an assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland.

(Trumpets are a bit dodgy in this performance, but Sir Edward has been of the finest and more passionate interpreters of Verdi's work. His Stiffelio at Covent Garden in 1993 has been the first British professional staging of this opera. José Carreras sang the title role).

Love from afar

Some takes on Saariaho's L'Amour de loin - today is the last night at the ENO.

Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times:

LONDON — The struggling New York City Opera should take heart from its “people’s opera” counterpart in London, the English National Opera. Not so long ago the English National was similarly mired in an artistic, administrative and financial crisis. But under the leadership of John Berry, as artistic director, and Edward Gardner, as music director, the company has rebounded. It now draws large audiences to innovative productions at its meticulously restored home here, the old Coliseum Theater, originally a variety hall.

New York operagoers have seen some boldly theatrical English National Opera productions in recent seasons, including Anthony Minghella’s cinematic staging of “Madama Butterfly,” which Peter Gelb presented at the Metropolitan Opera to begin his tenure as general manager, and Phelim McDermott’s staging of Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha,” a co-production with the Met.

Now the English National is presenting a new production of Kaija Saariaho’s first opera, “Love From Afar” (“L’Amour de Loin”), a tale of idealized love between a medieval French troubadour and a countess from Tripoli, who are loath to spoil their fantasy by actually meeting. This visionary, ruminative and unconventional work had its premiere at the Salzburg Festival in 2000 in a production by Peter Sellars that seemed ideal. [...]

Stephen Graham of MusicalCriticism:

[...] Though the more grainy, esoteric structures of microtone and timbre found in some of her other music are largely sublimated into a more public sense of music-dramatics here, the opera is nevertheless imbued with a delirious sonic palette that flows fluidly through event, form, and character. From the subterranean strings which framed a cavernous sound space throughout the show, to the repeated and evolving motifs (each of which are symbolic of characters in the piece) in piccolo, in piano, and in harp, to the striated high tones of wind and electronics in the final passages, the music communicated an awesome profile.

Review of Reviews of the British press response by Delia Casadei:

Is sensuous beauty enough to sustain an evening of opera? This is the question that several critics faced when reviewing Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de loin, which made its fully staged premiere at the ENO on 3 July.

And here you can read an interview with the composer Kaija Saariaho.

On art criticism

Interesting point from Joshua Kosman's blog:

An on-line commenter on one of my recent reviews has some sage advice:

Spare us your subjective judgements and report on the concert. How were the performances?

On a Pacific Aisle, 12 June 2009

Bienvenido

Esa-Pekka Salonen and Gustavo Dudamel

(Credits: LA Phil/Mathew Imaging)

A free welcome concert for Gustavo Dudamel has just been announced. It's going to take place on 3 October at the groovy Hollywood Bowl, LA, and it's in honour of the Venezuelan conductor who's about to start his first season as Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Gustavo Dudamel by Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera

From TIME Magazine

I first met Gustavo Dudamel four years ago in Daniel Barenboim's dressing room at the Berlin State Opera. He was working as one of Barenboim's conducting apprentices, and although Gustavo was only 24, Barenboim described him as the most exciting new conducting talent he had heard in years. I soon learned that his opinion was shared by Claudio Abbado and James Levine, two of the world's other top maestros.

Soon after, I heard Gustavo conduct his first opera performance of Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore, and I quickly offered him a future engagement at the Met. Since then, his career has skyrocketed. This fall he will become the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

With what appears to be unlimited talent and charisma, Gustavo has invigorated the sometimes staid world of classical music. His performances are ecstatic affairs, with musicians and audiences unable to resist his infectious joy. His concerts often end with his hugging each member of the orchestra.

Gustavo's musical zeal was nurtured in his native Venezuela, where he participated in the country's classical-music program for children from impoverished areas. He's using that model for a program in the U.S.

The conductor to whom Gustavo is most often compared is Leonard Bernstein, arguably history's most charismatic conductor. After a 25-year-old Bernstein made his New York Philharmonic debut in 1943, the New York Times reported, "Mr. Bernstein advanced to the podium with the unfeigned eagerness and communicative emotion of his years. He showed ... his brilliant musicianship and his capacity both to release and control the players."

When Gustavo made his own New York Philharmonic debut a year and a half ago — using Bernstein's old baton — the Times declared, "Once this kinetic young conductor took the Philharmonic's podium, the comparisons with Bernstein were obvious ... He delivered teeming, impassioned and supremely confident performances. Clearly, the Philharmonic players were inspired by the boundless joy and intensity of his music-making."

Unofficial Violetta

Tonight is the last performance of La traviata with my most beloved Violetta so far, the wonderful, shining Renee Fleming. Hoping for an official release of any kind, here's a luscious (if tottering) video from the 30 June cinema broadcast.




(The way she expresses 'L'uomo implacabile per lei sarà' (see below) through her acting and voice, and the long pause before 'Dite alla giovine' is so poignant. Thanks to both Renee and Tom Hampson, this scene truly comes alive as a masterpiece).

VIOLETTA:

So, for the wretched woman who’s fallen once,

The hope of rising is for ever gone!

Though God should show His mercy,

Man will never forgive her.

(to Germont, weeping)

Say to your daughter, pure as she is and fair,

That there’s a victim of misfortune

Who's got only one ray of happiness

that she will sacrifice for her,

And that she will die.

Così alla misera ch'è un dì caduta,

Di più risorgere - speranza è muta!

Se pur benefico le indulga Iddio,

L'uomo implacabile per lei sarà.

(a Germont, piangendo)

Dite alla giovine sì bella e pura

Ch'avvi una vittima della sventura,

Cui resta un unico raggio di bene che a lei il sacrifica

E che morrà!

------

Renee Fleming about Marie Duplessis, the real-life courtesan who died at 23 on whom the character of Violetta is based.

'Imagine what she learned in those years. She learned languages and became extraordinarily cultured. She learned how to play the piano – Liszt gave her piano lessons. She would have been the CEO of a company today, to have accomplished all that in so short a time. And she was the toast of Paris. She must have been very talented and very bright.'

Does that have a bearing on the opera, though?

'I think it's important to understand what a courtesan was in that period. If we don't have that context, we imagine her to be what we would call today a prostitute, and it's not the same thing at all. These women actually had lives that were far more interesting than their married counterparts. They were socially with the greatest men of their time, whereas the married women were at home. So if they were wise, and if they saved their money and were healthy enough, they could retire and live quite well. They lived by their wits, and they were independent.

'It was a very unique period of time. Some of the women also travelled around a lot. One of my favourite stories is about a courtesan who went to St Petersburg and offended the Kaiserin by dressing better than she did at an event. She was exiled! And she did it on purpose: she was trying to win over a man. They were very colourful women. It's no accident that Violetta's book was Manon Lescaut; the stories all feed into each other, and these are characters that I really love to play.'

Interview with Dominic McHugh, 10 June 2009.

Of Jane Austen and Verdi

I wrote this on 19 June, but various events - among which the accidental spilling of half a bottle of orange juice over my laptop - kept me away from my computer... I'm not backdating it, but at least in this way the weird chronology ('yesterday's Aida', see below) makes more sense.

I start writing again after quite a log gap. My last months in London before my move to San Francisco are keeping me busy, and interminable administrative procedures - often under the form of expensive FedEx documents - eat up a lot of time. Melancholy thoughts and preemptive nostalgia (I'm such a melodrama lover) for the city and for the people aren't helpful either.

Enough with justifications. At the moment I'm in Milan, staying at my cousin and sister's house. As it often happens when I'm around, the conversation soon switched to operatic topics - Barenboim's booed Aida at La Scala, whose first night was yesterday, made for today's cue. I was having a chat with my cousin, student of economics and literature lover, who is not persuaded that opera can be as articulate as a literature as for the range of situations and emotions that these art forms can convey at an immediate level of perception i.e. among people who are not experts either of literature or of music, but who read and go to the theatre because they enjoy it. The conversation floated in realm of general comments mixed with subjective views, but it's worth reporting. Here's what my cousin argued - my thoughts in square brackets:

'Opera is like a sport, like watching acrobats. [Yet, doesn't the form convey the expressive power of the genre and therefore it should not be dismissed so easily?] When you go to the opera, you experience a mix of individual facets - the libretto, the music, the singers; and, actually, you often go to the opera to see a particular singer. With theatre, it's the work per se [the 'work per se'!! watch out] - you can enjoy it only by reading it. With opera you always need the vehicle of a performance. You can't have your own idea of the work if it's not mediated by interpretation; and when you go to see an opera it's like you see a performance in which the critic is already embedded in it - you can't have your own idea, you're already experiencing a particular reading.

'On the contrary, you can give your own opinion on Hamlet without attending a performance - you can say you like Hamlet. You can't say you like La traviata per se because you need to listen to it - or can you imagine it looking at the score? Can you? In case you can, it's an elite knowledge of the work then...' [At this point, it got very tricky for me, because I have in mind the whole issue of the score/performance that haunts every musicologist and that I still find labyrinthine. As a very naive consideration, it seems that it's like a 'private performance' (i.e. reading the play) of Hamlet is enough to appreciate the work, while it's not enough to hum the tune or imagining the sound of the orchestral lines when reading an opera score. This reminds me of a conversation with a musicologist friend of mine, who arguing that if you're a music scholar you're supposed to be able to perform, or at least to play on a stereo, the work you're talking about; while literature teachers are not supposed to be able, or even just to attempt, to recite 'Shall I compare thee to a summer day' or any of Hamlet's monologues during a literature class.]

'You've got problems with the fact that you can't understand the words in opera, don't you?', I suggested.

'That, also!' was her reply. 'I'm too much a worshiper of literature and poetry to start thinking that music can have an effect even comparable to the one of words - to me.

'Don't torment yourself, Marins. If you won't manage to make me love opera as you do, remember than I failed in making you truly fall in love with Jane Austen'.

More to come on these subjects.

------

A Jane Austen pilgrimage trio.
Chawton, East Hampshire, UK.









------

Some Handel-related Jane Austen
Sir Arthur Somervell's arrangement of

Handel's 'Non lo dirò col labbro' (Tolomeo)

from Emma (1996).

I want it all

Lately I've been in denial about my starting a PhD and not having trained as a professional musician instead - it's a periodical obsession, particularly irritating due to its anti-sleep properties.

Tonight I found out that such a figure exists: David Pesetsky, Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics at MIT and principal second violinist in the New Philharmonia Orchestra. He's a dream come true. Gotta love him.

I'm now going to compile a list of academic-musicians, yes yes.

More noise

Sound-quality is not ideal, but it's really worth checking!

(Acknowledgements to Opera Chic via Tim Mangan).

Met memorabilia

Free Met Player Weekend! Don't miss it!

From the Met website: Plàcido Domingo with Woody Allen, who made his opera-directing debut this September at Los Angeles Opera (of which Domingo is General Director)

Photo: Julie Skarratt/Metropolitan Opera

libiamo on the bus

That (see below) made my day. 

As Manhattan Bus Rolls, Driver Polishes His Pavarotti

One famous aria after another: the operatic hit parade began as the bus pulled away from the depot, empty. “La donna è mobile” from Verdi’s “Rigoletto” was followed, somewhere on the West Side Highway, by “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s “Turandot.” 

[...]

“I never used to sing on the bus,” he said. But one day on the M20, he and a passenger got into a conversation about how singers enunciate. He was talking about Luciano Pavarotti’s recording of “O Holy Night” and could not help singing it himself, with the same drawn-out vowels.

“Everybody said, ‘Who’s singing that?’ ” he said. “One guy said, ‘Why are you driving a bus?’ ”

James Barron, The New York Times,  23 April 2009

(Credits: Christine and her facebook status!)

Venezuela feat. UK

Dudamel, Dudamel, Dudamel!

(That was to express my joy for the success of the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra mini-residency at the Southbank Centre).

Gustavo Dudamel conducts the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar 

at the 2007 BBC Proms. Arturo Márquez, Danzón Nº 2.

It's all about the men (this time)

Yesterday at Covent Garden, Il Trovatore premiered with Alagna and everyone's favourite bariton, Hvorostovski, in the roles of Manrico and Conte di Luna respectively. The (controversial) production is a directed by its creator Elijah Moshinsky. Here's our take on it! Looking forward to other reactions!

Interestingly (for my I'll-be-sad-to-leave-London plans!), Dmitri features in the first work of the 2009-10 season at the SF Opera. And in Il Trovatore again! McVicar's production this time.

Il Trovatore at Covent Garden, 2002. Behind the Scenes pt.1. Featuring José Cura, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Yvonne Naef, Verónica Villarroel.

I wanted to dedicate this space to the victims of the earthquake in Abruzzo, Italy, and to those who are helping to overcome the tragedy.

Ermione follow up

...and here's my review of the latest performance of Rossini's Ermione. (Quite a catty character, this Greek girl!).

[...] Soprano Carmen Giannattasio made of her character a dangerously emotive woman, who appears from the beginning to be furiously in love and contemptuous of any other character, disregarding of social roles (Pirro is her king) and human empathy (she blames Andromaca, who nevertheless shares an equally ill-fated destiny). Giannattasio's warm and fierce tone was effective in conveying hysterical lines such as 'Odio Pirro, odio Oreste, odio me stessa!' ('I hate Pirro, I hate Oreste, I hate myself!').

[...]

Marina Romani, MusicalCriticism.com, 29 March 2009

Dying heroines - Rossini's Ermione

I'm very excited about Rossini's Ermione at Royal Festival Hall tonight. I don't know the work very much, but it has always intrigued me. And Greek history/mythology has got its charm too...

In a letter from 1819, Rossini wrote his mother that he was afraid his latest work - based on Racine's Andromaque - was too tragic. It is true that this opera has been neglected for a long time: first performed at Teatro San Carlo, Naples, in 1819, this original staging was withdrawn after seven performances. It was revived only in 1987 at the Rossini Opera Festival (Pesaro), in a production featuring Montserrat Caballé, Marilyn Horne, Chris Merritt and Rockwell Blake. The first British Ermione took place at Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1992, although it was a concert performance - such as tonight's performance. Same happened in the US: the San Francisco Opera put on an Ermione concert in 1992. The first staged performances took place at Opera Omaha, Nebraska (1992) and Glyndebourne (1995).

I was googling to gather info about this opera, and I came across this review of the 2004 production by New York City Opera and Dallas Opera, which is useful to have an idea of what one might expect. Enjoy!

Forgotten works of music are not infrequently exhumed with great fanfare, only to demonstrate the reason they were forgotten in the first place. So one might be wary in approaching Rossini's ''Ermione,'' which played for one night in 1817 and not again for 170 years. It arrived at the New York City Opera on Sunday afternoon in what the company called its first fully staged production in the city.

Well, here's more fanfare: for my money, this is the best rediscovery to cross the radar in a long time. Anyone who likes 19th-century Italian opera -- from Donizetti to Verdi -- should see City Opera's ''Ermione.'' 

The opera is beautifully structured in a great dramatic sweep, with consistently strong music. Admittedly "Ermione" shares a weakness with many of Rossini's comic operas: its second act denouement doesn't quite live up to the first act's complexity and invention. But the piece as a whole is tight. Arias and duets become components in larger dramatic scenes that fit one into the other like well-made cabinetry, gliding into place with a satisfying click. [...]

Anne Midgette, The New York Times, 13 April 2004

Rossini, Ermione, Act One Finale. Conductor: Claudio Scimone. Choeur Philharmonique de Prague, Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-carlo.

Ermione: Cecilia Gasdia; Andromaca: Margarita Zimmermann; Pirro: Ernesto Palacio; Oreste: Chris Merritt.

Handling Handel

Along the lines of I say Sibelius, you say Sebelius, here's my favourite Economist letter so far - in theme with 2009, that seems to be the Baroque-st year in a while, as Nick Kenyon rightfully notices.

SIR – The first thing I learned in a musicology course given by Paul Henry Lang, a distinguished Handel scholar at Columbia University, was how to pronounce the great composer’s name correctly (“Georgian splendour”, March 21st). Omitting the umlaut in texts is bad enough, but forgivable if you don’t have a German keyboard on your computer. The universal practice of music teachers and radio presenters pronouncing it as “Handle” or “Hahndel” was considered sacrilege by Professor Lang. The proper pronunciation? “Hehndel”, through pursed lips, of course.

Les Dreyer

Retired violinist at the Metropolitan Opera orchestra

New York 

The Economist, 26 March 2009

Shall We Dance, (1937) featuring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers 

performing Gershwin's Let's Call The Whole Thing Off

Playing from home

A five-day interruption due to intercontinental traveling and frantically rehearsed concerts.

San Francisco, and its people, were difficult to leave, even if I'll have time to explore it from next fall. As a goodbye to the City (I learned that's how they call it over there!), I picked up our latest interview with Nicola Luisotti, San Francisco Opera House Music Director Designate. Dom met him in occasion of his collaboration with Covent Garden for a revival of Puccini's Turandot:

The conductor has enormous plans for his new theatre, about which he speaks enthusiastically. 'For example, I will do lots of Verdi repertoire because I would like to create a sound for Verdi there. In recent years, they've done lots of German repertoire, so I would like to create something special with Verdi, and I will be the only person to conduct his music there. I will also do Puccini, of course, but there is other repertoire that interests me. I will do Salome, Eugene Onegin, Lohengrin, the trilogy of Mozart, and I will start something that has never happened before in San Francisco: a small symphonic season. So every autumn and spring, we will do symphonic repertoire. We will start with Beethoven's Ninth – with the joy! – and we'll go on with Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Mahler, Brahms and so on.

'Every orchestra has to play symphonic repertoire. If they are always in the pit, they become depressed and too servile. They don't like it. They need to show their faces on stage, to show that they can play these symphonies. Fortunately, the theatre board agreed with me.'

Nicola Luisotti interviewed by Dominic McHugh, MusicalCriticism.com, 7 January 2009

And here's a lively contribution by Luisotti at the SFO 2009-10 Season press conference, not long after his Covent Garden appearance:

Playing San Francisco #5

William Kentridge was the protagonist of a series of events at Berkeley. Today an insightful discussion regarding his work took place, in a panel including Kaja Silverman (Rhetoric and Film Studies Professor), Larry Rinder (Berkeley Art Museum), and Mark Rosenthal (Norton Museum of Art). Having worked with many different art forms, now Kentridge expresses himself preeminently through charcoal, combining this medium with computer animation techniques that allow him to experiment in the creation of his narratives.

Kentridge engaged himself in opera in the last years - his most acclaimed achievements being a full production of The Magic Flute for La Monnaie opera house, Belgium (2005). This production traveled the world, and in 2007 opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He is also committed to the Met for the realization of Shostakovich's Nose, the opera based on Gogol short story, in a production  conducted by Valery Gergiev in 2010.

The emphasis of today's discussion was on the political, social and biographical implications of Kentridge's work: exploiting the power of contradiction and the provocation of absurdity, the South African artist lays emphasis on problematic topics such as colonialism, gender relations, psychological quests, and the dangers of power. Some of Kentridge's articulated replies to the panelists' comments echoed his answers to similar issues during an interview with Anne Midgette of The New York Times:

“George Bernard Shaw said that Sarastro’s music is the only music that would sound right in God’s voice,” [Kentridge] said. “This is very anxious-making about the divine.”

He cited Sarastro’s “falsely reassuring tone,” adding: “In the years since the opera was written there are so many examples of Sarastro-like kings who think they have superior knowledge. You know how calamitous that is.”

After his “Flute” had its premiere, Mr. Kentridge explored its “political unconscious” in a piece called “Black Box” for the Guggenheim Berlin that presented some of the disastrous consequences of the German colonialization of Africa, like the massacre of the Herero people in what is now Namibia in the early 20th century. He has since reworked his portrayal of Sarastro for the New York “Flute” production. [...]

 

William Kentridge's Magic Flute production, 2007.

Kentridge's latest works are displayed at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (new exhibition, March 2009), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Marian Goodman Gallery, Greg Kucera Gallery, Inc., Tate Modern (London). The book featuring his Mozart's Flute re-elaboration is available on amazon.