Richard Sasanow - Page 2

Maria Callas—or Maria Anna Cecilia Sofia Kalogeropoulos—was born in New York City on December 2, 1923. She was a supernova who blazed across the opera world (and beyond) and it will never be the same. If you need proof, take a listen to the Warner Classes/Erato boxed set, “La Divina: Maria Callas In All Her Roles,” which was issued in September, consisting of 131 CDs of La Callas in all her 74 roles.

All that was missing were shouts of “food fight!” to turn last night’s performance of Richard Wagner’s TANNHAUSER—the first of the Met’s season—into a version of National Lampoon’s Night at the Opera, as climate activists interrupted the house debut of the great baritone Christian Gerhaher, and audience members traded barbs with the demonstrators, threatening the company’s determination that “the show must go on.”

Just as the Met’s debut of Mexican composer Daniel Catan’s FLORENCIA EN EL AMAZONAS (FLORENCE IN THE AMAZON) began the other day, a member of the audience yelled out “Viva la ópera en español!” (“Long live opera in Spanish!”). And that was before a single note of the composer’s lyric, highly accessible and heavy-on-the-Puccini score was played.

It’s amazing how much emotion John Musto and Mark Campbell have been able to cram in the mere 75 minutes of LATER THE SAME EVENING, a one act opera, which has been on view this past week at Juilliard Opera at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, on West 65 Street, down the block from Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall.

MasterVoices, under Ted Sperling, found THE FROGS irresistible—and the result was a hit, or, as Shakespeare wrote in “Hamlet”: “A hit, a very palpable hit.” With its libretto by Burt Shevelove and Nathan Lane (and Nathan Lane again), it fit the stage of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theatre very nicely indeed.

It’s taken a long time for X: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MALCOLM X—the rediscovered and revised ‘80s work by Anthony Davis, Thulani Davis and Christopher Davis, in Robert O’Hara’s production and conducted by Kazem Abdullah--to cross the plaza from what was the old City Opera at New York State Theatre to a premiere at the Metropolitan Opera.

An historic recording of golden age tenor Richard Tucker singing “Sound an Alarm” from Handel’s JUDAS MACCABEUS” set the tone for the Richard Tucker Music Foundation’s Gala concert at Carnegie Hall. There was wonderful singing ahead of us—but of a certain kind. Like many other classical organizations, the Tucker Foundation, has found that, as Charles Dickens said in “A Tale of Two Cities,” “It was the best of times, the worst of times.” The “best” is for the quality of the singers that the foundation has supported through varying kinds of grants. The “worst”? Money from the usual donor pool is in shorter supply than usual, which meant a less elaborate evening

World Opera Day is an international initiative to showcase the ways opera companies and artists enrich the livelihood and civic fabric of their communities.

One of the troubles of being a major institution like the Met is that when they produce a new production of a major opera--and Verdi’s UN BALLO IN MASCHERA, which opened in revival the other night, certainly falls into that category--it’s an expensive undertaking. It's true that sometimes a production can be pulled out of its death tumble, with a new cast or simply time making the absolutely awful suddenly make sense. In the case of the current run of the opera, with Angela Meade, Charles Castronovo and Quinn Kelsey heading the cast, even good and sometimes inspired singing can’t save the day. Alden’s take is simply too laden with concept for it to breathe.

The Met’s production of NABUCCO from Elijah Moshinsky may date back to 2001 but its style hearkens back even further--a fancy, old-fashioned unit set that uses the house’s big turntable--and it’s a whale of a show, design-wise, thanks to John Napier’s scenic design.

According to creator and star tenor Karim Sulayman, UNHOLY WARS, a 70-minute opera pastiche that made its debut on Saturday at Philadelphia Opera’s O23 Festival, “stitches together a collection of baroque music centered around the Middle East and the Crusades, examining the separation of the human race based on creed and color.” The result was a creative multi-visual/musical work with dance, drawing heavily on Monteverdi’s IL COMBATTIMENTO DI TANCREDI E CLORINDA, supplemented by Baroque arias and modern electronic music.

It’s rather surprising, really, for the audience to embrace a contemporary piece like DEAD MAN WALKING, no matter how easily it falls upon the ears, considering the subject matter. In this Ivo van Hove production, it starts with a rape and double murder in a rather graphic piece of film, the use of video being one of van Hove’s trademarks. It ends with a death by lethal injection, also graphically shown in live video.

When composer Rene Orth came across the story of investigative reporter Nellie Bly’s expose of the abuse of women at an asylum in New York at the end of the 19th century, she immediately knew that “this story needed to be told as an opera.” She was right. The result of her efforts, with the first-rate creative team including librettist Hannah Moscovitch, is 10 DAYS IN A MADHOUSE, a 90-minute work that opened Opera Philadelphia’s festival (this year, called O23) with its world premiere at the Wilma Theatre.

Another year, another Met season without Jonas Kaufmann. Sigh. What’s a music lover to do? His current set of performances is at the Park Avenue Armory’s Drill Hall--in a staged production by Claud Guth, commissioned by the Armory, of Schubert lieder, under the title DOPPELGANGER. It's an evening of autumnal chill through words and music that were “anxious and heavy,” through a heart “utterly alone.”

The Metropolitan Opera somehow managed to upstage itself on Thursday, when it offered audiences a spectacular recital by Norwegian soprano Lisa Davidsen, with her excellent musical partner James Baillieu, on piano, 12 days before the company’s official opening night (the Jake Heggie-Terrence McNally DEAD MAN WALKING on the 26th). It’ll be a hard act to follow.

Nearly a decade ago, when composer Paul Moravec and librettist Mark Campbell started work on an operatic version of Stephen King’s novel “The Shining” for the Minnesota Opera they were dealing with one of the most popular psychological thrillers of the 20th century—as well as one of the scarier movies of the ‘70s. It's having its East Coast premiere at Atlanta Opera, co-presented by the Alliance Theatre.

Donizetti’s so-called “Tudor Trilogy”--ANNA BOLENA, MARIA STUARDA and ROBERTO DEVEREUX (aka, “the one about Elizabeth I”)--suddenly has some competition on British history in opera: Camille Saint-Saens' HENRI VIII.

The famed playwright and wit George S. Kaufman once said, “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.” One can only imagine what Kaufman--whose many credits include YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU, as well as the source of Sondheim’s MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG, which is circling Broadway for a return this fall--would have had to say about satiric operas. CRISPINO E LA COMARE (CRISPINO AND THE FAIRY GODMOTHER), a lively and lightweight 1850 comic piece that was was happily rescued from obscurity this week by Will Crutchfield's Teatro Nuovo.

Usually, when long-neglected works somehow find their way to the forefront, we find there’s a pretty good reason for the lack of interest. Happily for us, this does not apply to Donizetti’s POLIUTO, which Will Crutchfield’s Teatro Nuovo performed last weekend at Montclair State’s Kasser Theatre and on July 19th at Jazz from Lincoln Center’s Rose Theatre. It’s filled with wonderful music that the current performers--particularly the suave tenor of Argentine Santiago Ballerini in the title role and the potent coloratura soprano Chelsea Lehnea--deliver with aplomb.

As I sat down to write about the delightful recent performance I heard of Rossini’s IL TURCO IN ITALIA at Madrid’s Teatro Real, with soprano Lisette Ororpesa in a charming new production by Laurence Pelly, I went to Spotify to see what kind of recordings were around. I was surprised to find more than a dozen of them--headlining everyone from Callas (in several of them) to Bartoli, with Sills, Jo, Caballe, Sciuti and some less familiar singers.