.

Vale Margreta Elkins

2009-03-31T20:13:00.000-07:00

Margreta Elkins
16 October 1930 - 1 April 2009

Elkins (Margaret Geater) was born in Brisbane and studied piano and singing, with Ruby Dent, while at school and at seventeen won a Queensland Government scholarship to study dramatic art and music theory. In 1950 there was no conservatorium of music in Queensland and Elkins studied at the Sydney Conservatorium with the well-known concert singer Harold Williams and also with Marianne Mathy and in Melbourne with the singer Pauline Bindley. She entered several competitions including the 1952 Sun Aria Contest and the Mobil Quest in which she competed against Joan Sutherland. The two became friends and their professional paths would cross on many occasions.

She married Harry Elkins and joined the National Opera Company of Australia and - Margreta Elkins - during 1953, 1954 and 1955 sang the roles of Carmen, Azucena in Il Trovatore Siebel in Faust and Suzuki in Madama Butterfly on tour throughout the eastern states of Australia and also in New Zealand (where the company was joined by the New Zealand mezzo Heather Begg). At one point during these tours she sang Azucena every night for two weeks!

Having won the second prize in the 1955 Mobil Quest she used the money to travel to London where she was engaged to sing Carmen and Dorabella in Cosi fan tutte for the Grand Opera Society of Dublin. In England she auditioned unsuccessfully for the Royal Opera but joined the Carl Rosa Opera Company in what proved to be the final years of its chequered history. With the Carl Rosa she toured England and Scotland singing Maddalena in Rigoletto, Rosina in The Barber of Seville, Nicklause in Tales of Hoffmann and, a considerable rarity for any company at the time let alone the declining Carl Rosa, Ascanio in Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini.

The Carl Rosa company disbanded in 1958 but Elkins had attracted considerable attention by then. The Manchester Guardian had described her instrument, in the Berlioz opera, as "a fine, big voice which is yet cuttingly exact on intonation and wonderfully flexible in all but the very top register," and that "her singing of the difficult entr'acte aria in Act III was something to remember long after the performance." Elkins sang with Joan Sutherland in a number of the London Handel Opera Society stagings and was accepted into the Royal Opera Company at Covent Garden, where her friend and now colleague, Sutherland was also a member. At the Royal Opera Elkins's first roles were in the Ring Cycles (in which she and Sutherland sang Rhine maidens), Ulrica in Un Ballo in Maschera, the Priestess in Aida and Alisa in the production of Lucia di Lammermoor in which Sutherland was launched into super stardom.

Further roles at the Royal Opera brought wider attention including Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier, Amneris in Aida, Hippolyta in Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Marina in Boris Godounov and Helen of Troy in Michael Tippett's King Priam which she created in 1962. She had made a special study of the role of Octavian, travelling to Vienna where she was coached by Alfred Jerger, the famous baritone who had been a favorite of Richard Strauss's and who had created Mandryka in Arabella. At this time she also received further training in London from Margaretta Kraus (Kiri Te Kanawa's teacher) and Vera Roza and in Italy with Ettore Campogalliani, the teacher of Renata Tebaldi, Luciano Pavarotti and Mirella Freni.

Elkins made her American debut in 1965 alongside Sutherland in Handel's Alcina in which she was singled out by the New York Herald Tribune as "easily the most secure stylist of the evening". During 1964 and 1965, with Bonynge's encouragement, Elkins extended her range to encompass soprano and in 1965 was one of the featured artists in the Sutherland-Williamson opera seasons returning with Sutherland to their native Australia. In Australia she undertook soprano roles such as Tatyana in Eugene Onegin.

Elkins returned to Australia in 1976 and continued to sing with the Australian Opera and was an active recitalist with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and, re-settling in Brisbane, lectured and taught the Queensland Conservatorium of Music. Her engagements continued to be varied and - in one where she sang the alto solo in Mahler's Song of the Earth at every performance of The Australian Ballet's staging of Kenneth MacMillan's choreographed version - extraordinary . An honorary life member of Opera Queensland Elkins made her final operatic appearance with them in 2002, aged 71, in Cavalleria Rusticana.

Elkins was lucky on records and her friendship with Sutherland and Richard Bonynge resulted in her selection for a number of Sutherland's recording which, despite the vagaries of the recording industry, have remained in print. She also sings Alisa to Maria Callas's Lucia in EMI's second recording of the opera featuring Callas. As a soprano Elkins is featured in the title role of Williams Shield's ballad opera Rosina (currently available on ABC Classics Australian Heritage 461 922-2).

Review - Don Giovanni - Victorian Opera

2009-03-19T19:42:00.006-07:00

White Knight
Jean Pierre Mignon’s production of Don Giovanni scales the opera down and in a production with as much farce as drama makes for an exhilarating rather than grandiose story. In a gleaming white costume, the reverse of his true colours, this Don (Samuel Dundas) looks as though he stepped out of a Mills & Boon bodice ripper. Although his voice is still young (remember that Luigi Bassi, the first Don Giovanni, was only 21) and light toned, he uses it with great skill, projecting the text, in very good Italian and giving it shape and nuance. For a young singer he has a good grasp of the Don’s mercurial character even if it beggars’ belief that so young-looking a Don has so extensive a catalogue of conquests. Physically he is everything you could want (ie: barihunk) but also conveys the swaggering, aristocratic arrogance, arm resting raffishly on his sword-hilt and, above all, the snake-eyed charm. With only three modest solos Don Giovanni's persona lives through music involving other characters. Dundas savors the recititative passages, making them carry the bulk of his characterisation. An example is the brief scene with Zerlina (Michelle Buscemi) before their duet where his words drip like honey. Only the softest parts of the music, the opening phrase of “La ci darem la mano” and the act two serenade would have benefited from a softer tone but, overall, Dundas manages many impressive things.

Zerlina’s music suits Buscemi’s silvery voice and she conveys Zerlina's gentle eroticism, ecstatically sighing the words “toccami qua” in ‘Vedrai, carino’ with same understanding as Dundas conveying Giovanni’s lust, . A terrific Zerlina in her own right Tiffany Speight steps up to the dominant female character Donna Elvira. Speight’s radiant soprano easily encompassed the music including the often-difficult lower passages (including marvellous downward runs in the epilogue) . She is a very subtle comedienne too, doomed by her unshakable obsession with the faithless Don her Elvira is like a frustrated schoolmistress and flusters about like an operatic Maggie Smith. The insistence now on either the Prague or Vienna versions of the opera (from the looks of it the über-urtext Bärenreiter edition is used here) is a pity; if Speight had been allowed her big aria ‘Mi Tradi’ it would have crowned a spectacular performance.

As Don Giovanni’s sidekick Andrew Collis is another more experienced singer who creates an oily Leporello, the director relating him back to the character, Sganarelle, in Moliere's play Don Juan, clowning the part without overdoing it. He clearly hates his master but in the 'catalogue aria' there was just a hint of admiration. With no sign of stage nerves, Dundas is a natural clown too and with Speight and Collis makes the serenading scene in act two hilarious without undermining the beauty of the music.

Donna Anna is a big sing and challenged Caroline Wenborne. She managed the difficult fioritura without any compromises but the fearful drama in "Or sai chi l'onore" was less evident. She does a terrific stage faint. James Egglestone was equally adept at Don Ottavio's 'Il mio tesoro'. Pity his 'Dalla su pace' (another post-Prague variant) was omitted, it provides a few moments of reflection and repose. Anthony Mackey's is a really interestingly rebellious Masetto, holding back from physically attacking the girlfriend usurping Don but ultra sarcastic in 'Hai capito' (the Figaro rebelliousness again?). His voice had a slight backward sound but a genuine bass baritone. Occasionally too rigid, as in the ensembles but adding the bass weight to important ones like the act two sextet where Don Giovanni and Leporello are absent.

The vocal preparation of all of the soloists was obviously thorough. The smaller scale allows for some details that would never work in a larger theatre. The Don, for example, gives Zerlina a flower which drops suggestively from her hand at the end of “La ci darem la mano”, it is retrieved and passed again, along with the Don's come-on lines, until it ends up planted in Elvira's hopeful cleavage.

Richard Roberts’s set is a marvel of economy transforming from back streets to a Moorish palace and sinister tomb. The lighting, however, could have been more varied. The overture like most of the music in general moves swiftly with the action. The omnipresent fate theme that begins the overture or the mysterious few seconds of string music that follow it was somewhat understated but, thanks to the intimacy of the production, it was like examining a masterpiece under a microscope. The ensembles ending each act shone like little gems and balance allowed the younger singers to show their potential and the more experienced singers, like Speight, to hint at glories yet to come in their careers.

Don Giovanni (originally Il Dissoluto Punito, ossia Il Don Giovanni)
Music - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Libretto - Lorenzo Da Ponte, after the Don Juan legend an in part by the libretto by Giovanni Bertati for the opera Don Giovanni o sia il Convitato di pietra (1786) by Giuseppe Gazzaniga
First performance - 29 October 1787, Prague National Theatre
First Australian performance - 21 October 1861, Theatre Royal, Melbourne (8 performances)
cast
Don Giovanni - Samuel Dundas
Donna Elvira - Tiffany Speight
Donna Anna - Caroline Wenborne
Zerlina - Michelle Buscemi
Don Ottavio - James Egglestone
Leporello - Andrew Collis
Masetto - Anthony Mackey
The Commendatore - Steven Gallop
Conductor - Richard Gill (3,5 & 7 March) Nicholas Carter (10, 12 & 14 March)
Director - Jean-Pierre Mignon
Costume Designer - Christina Smith
Set Designer - Richard Roberts
Lighting Designer - Paul Jackson
National Theatre, St Kilda 3, 5, 7, 10, 12 & 14 March 2009
followed by a metropolitan and regional Victorian tour between 28 March and 25 April
175 minutes (including one interval)
Victorian Opera

performance reviewed 5 March

Review - The Arditti Quartet - Melbourne Recital Centre

2009-03-19T19:42:00.005-07:00

I'm in new music meltdown, having been at a concert of fairly tough modern music nearly every night. Into the mix throw three concerts by the Arditti Quartet of string quartets representative of benchmarks in the history of modern music. As they did during the 2001 Melbourne Festival they planned a residence during which they played a potted history of the modern string quartet.

The Ardittis view modern music as do historians and began with the revolutionary epoch. Originally intended as the finale of the op 130 quartet Beethoven's Grosse Fugue op 133 added just too many more technical difficulties to a quartet already crammed with them. The Ardittis began it with a biting attack and smoothed out its unusual progression from fugal to sonata form and other so-called difficulties. The main part of the work was almost elegiac.

Harrison Birtwistle's Tree of Strings (2007) was premiered by the Arditti Quartet only last year at a concert to mark the 100th birthday of Elliot Carter (who's music features in this series). The rather perfunctory programme note records it as being "described as a study in creative fragmentation, as depicted by the music and the choreography of the players." It may be that there is deliberate fragmentation built into the work but, whenever an instrument breaks away from the ensemble (usually by playing a sudden and jagged five note phrase) a unifying theme (sounding not unlike the 'sleeping' theme that punctuates the movements in Britten's Nocturne). When the quartet physically fragment, getting up from their desks and walking to another desk placed at the outer extremities of the platform (as though, pardon the 'tree' pun, transferring to an outlying branch) the work is reaching its climax and five note phrase has become part of a cycle that breaks away the players and then reunites them. In this case it becomes their exit music as each player leaves the platform (a la Haydn Farewell Symphony).

Finally Schoenberg's notorious second string quartet which perplexed players and audiences as much as the Grosse Fugue in the previous century. As demonstrated in 2001 when they played this quartet, all difficulties drop away. In the first two, purely instrumental, movements the attack was sharp and sudden, like in the Beethoven. In the second movement the waltz theme was made to seem like a Brahmsian waltz. Joined by Merlyn Quaife for the vocal movements the clinical quality of the hall's acoustics become apparent. The sound is very immediate here, the reverb is quick too and not very kind to voices. Recordings can interveave the voice with the instruments (except in the famous premiere recordings by the Kolisch Quartet where the soprano was asked to step further and further back from her microphone) in this work but as performed here Quaife's voice tended to dominate proceedings.

Arditti Quartet

Irvine Arditti, violin I

Ashot Sarkissjan, violin II

Ralf Ehlers, viola

Lucas Fels, cello

Merlyn Quaife, soprano (February 19)

Melbourne Recital Centre

February 19, 21 & 23 Melbourne Recital Centre

Reflection - Orlando - Opera Australia

2009-03-19T19:42:00.003-07:00

The stage action begins with the overture and at its conclusion it has set in place an incredible magical/psychological landscape. General Orlando's office, with its looming map of the Middle East and Africa is suddenly crowned by a starlight sky.

The magician who is controlling Orlando's most dangerous mission ever - to fall in love and battle with his own jealousy - enters holding a naked flame in his hand. Justin Way's production sets the opera in a unspecific HQ somewhere during World War Two and (unlike Harry Kupfer's disappointing Otello, which relocates the story to the mid twentieth century but proceeds to ignore the fact and cause more dramatic problems than it sets out to solve) refers, humorously to dozens of wartime romance films and various jingoistic wartime propaganda.

The clever and canny self-referencing is like Dennis Potter only using Baroque opera instead of popular songs from the era. The wall that shatters into many columns is especially effective, becoming a maze for the love-struck and love-lorn characters to wander around. The magician, in silver military dress and modest walrus moustache, looks a little too much like the soviet propaganda images of Stalin 'defender and savior' suggesting he may not be as benign as we would think. The shepherdess Dorinda is a cross between a land-girl and Red Cross volunteer, perpetually knitting socks. The Princess Angelica (Emma Matthews) appears to be a mysterious, border-crossing and glamorous refugee (a spy?). Orlando is in red leather throughout and with his tendency to violence, that he is mad for most of the opera and that his staff wear black shirts - one even sports a eye patch - could even suggest that the hero and army are Fascists. The sheep become a bit of a problem, was there a special deal on novelty sheep statues and Way couldn't help himself and bought the lot?

Musically it is gorgeous, the singing especially by Matthews and Tobias Cole (as Medoro) is crystalline (considering the size of the theatre). The trio that ends act one is one of Handel's most beautiful creations and, despite its languidness, creates the dramatic tension of the rivalry in love between the protagonists. Matthews deals valiantly with the relentlessly low tessitura, occasionally singing a passage up an octave just to give it some variety. As with her performance in Hoffmann last year she has a very special ability to declaim and her voice projected into the big house easily and tirelessly. If you only see one thing by Handel this Christmas, don't make it Messiah, see this.
State Theatre, The Arts Centre
December 10 & 13 2008

Singing High - The facts about castrati, male soprani and other related matters in Handel's Orlando

2009-03-19T19:42:00.001-07:00

CaStraight
In 1994, a controversial collection of essays in a book entitled Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, brought some very famous musicians and their music out of the historical closet. One of the authors, Gary C. Thomas, gathered enough evidence about lifelong bachelor George Frideric Handel to come up with a ‘homotextual Handel’ who gravitated toward the most homo-centric places in Europe at the time: the Italian and London theatres, where he wrote operas especially for the famous Italian castrati. These castrati – men castrated before puberty in order to preserve their high voices – dominated the opera houses, attracting legions of both female and male admirers.

Nearly 300 years later, Handel’s fantasy operas seem camp inversions of male heroics: particularly an opera like Orlando, where a castrato sang the title role while the other male lead, Medoro, was taken by a female singer! In Opera Australia’s new production of Orlando, director Justin Way bends the gender the other way, with the title role being sung by a woman: mezzo soprano Dominica Matthews.

“There were two types of castrato,” Ms Matthews explains, “soprano castrati and alto castrati. They sang both female and male roles; the soprano castrati sang female characters while the alto castrati specialised in male ones, boys on the verge of manhood. “These days mezzo sopranos sing the roles that are young men, and Orlando is one of these characters, so his music is way down in my boots. I’ve had to put away my mezzo soprano voice for the time being to concentrate on the lower contralto music.”

Queering the Pitch claims that because castrati sang male and female roles and women sang male roles the audience at the time did not automatically associate high-pitched voices with women. In some operas they “were confronted with men who sang their love for each other in similar registers, regardless of the gender assigned them by the libretto” Baroque opera gave rise to a kind of 'aural homosexuality'.

Tobias Cole, who sings Medoro, knows one of many examples of this. "There is an opera, Marc'Antonio e Cleopatra by Hasse and the great castrato Farinelli was in the first performance of it singing the role of Cleopatra," he says. "I suppose to the ears of people of that time the idea of a male character being sung up high was not as peculiar as it is to us. Life was so different, think of the camp costumes men wore! I feel there must have been a very wide spectrum of what it means to be male. How strange and challenging the castrati must have been. It was a freak show certainly and people thought they must see this. Audiences now expect quality of story and a certain truth of character so there is more pressure now to make the love scenes more sexy and even show a bit of flesh. That expectation of audiences today for verismo in theatre makes it necessary to have the lovers as male and female. Of course you could also go for the lesbian bent but it does make a difference and more importantly gives a director more opportunities to consolidate that by having a male in a male role."

"I was in a production in Perth, the revival of Lindy Hume’s for OzOpera where both Medoro and Orlando were sung by men. The funny thing was when she did it originally for the Melbourne Festival she had two women in the roles but in the Perth revival she had men and could take it further; she had Christopher Josey (as Orlando) taking off all his clothes for the mad scene, as he does in the Ariosto Orlando Furioso."

Cole is a counter tenor, a male voice type which can extend into the soprano range creating a sound similar to the extinct castrato. Like Handel's and other operas from the Baroque, the modern interest in the counter tenor voice began at about the same time in the mid-twentieth century. One of first important singers was the male alto Alfred Deller. Deller came to prominence just after the Second World War and began to make recordings and give performances and experiment in early music performance practice with his ensemble of singers of musicians, the Deller Consort. Such was the impact of Deller's voice that composers began to write again in earnest for that voice, Britten amongst them with the role of Oberon in his opera of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Audiences soon began to appreciate the sound of the counter tenor, if not fully understand it - a French woman, upon hearing Deller sing, asked him "Monsieur, vous êtes eunuque", to which Deller replied "I think you mean 'unique', madam".

But even to Cole himself, that sound is still surprising. “Whenever I sing," he laughs, "I think ‘Oh! I wasn’t expecting that,’ a high voice coming out of a man,’ so what we have to do is create that ‘sound scape’ that the audience accepts. In performing a Baroque opera now,” he explains, “the first aria is used to ease people into that world and often it takes the first act to take people into that sound scape. Handel took the story from the epic poem Orlando Furioso about the medieval knight Orlando and his adventures in exotic and pagan worlds but Way’s production uses twentieth century references.“The idea that he wanted,” says Cole, “is to capture a time when going off to fight in a war was a good thing. You couldn't do that today so he sets it in the Second World War when people felt that going to fight was a necessary evil. There is a brilliant design idea starting it in what looks like Churchill’s’ War Room with a map on the wall. The room flies out and a larger version of the map is revealed which begins to fracture and becomes the forest. At the end it goes back to the War Room and people feel that the opera is Orlando’s dream”.

“Orlando is a great military general,” says Matthews, “who spent all his life fighting and who has no experience in sexual matters. Now he is in love for the first time and does not know what to do.” In Way’s production Orlando is a very masculine war hero, looking like a fighter pilot and Matthews is perfecting masculine attributes to do that conception full justice. “I’m getting used to the idea of walking like a man,” she laughs. “When a woman walks she takes small steps, putting one foot in front of the other, men, particularly Australian men, don’t, they take wide steps. And just this morning,” she adds, “I asked three different men how I should put my hands on a table because I know it would be done differently.”

Orlando (1733) by George Frideric Handel is at the State Theatre, The Arts Centre on November 27, 29 and December 2 & 10

Now in its second edition Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology is published by Routledge.

This is an expanded version of the interview published in the arts, entertainment and lifestyle publication Canvas magazine

Review - Madama Butterfly - Opera Australia

2009-03-19T19:41:00.007-07:00

Blossom Time

Spooky but, opening on Remembrance Day (11 November) this is the first of three operas featuring a hero from the armed forces. Written three years after the death of Verdi, Madama Butterfly is a remarkable achievement, a quantum leap from his previous opera that “shabby little shocker” Tosca, instead it reshapes the nature and form of Italian opera. By now a remarkable orchestrator Puccini’s score is obviously melodious but in equal measure the melody is responsive to the drama in a very modern way, shifting a long way from Verdi.

The libretto’s origins as a stage play remain obvious, and Puccini seems confident and unconcerned about leaving conversational passages essential to the plot. Instead he accompanies them music that is equally conversational and constantly illuminating the importance of character and situation like a subtext that threads together the growing tragic themes and which gives the opera its power. At one point, in act two when Sharpless asks Butterfly what she would do if Pinkerton were never to return she is stunned, the orchestra play only a few stammering, unconnected chords matching her own speechlessness. When her father’s hara-kiri knife is first sighted the orchestra screeches a fateful motif that returns time and again, reminding the listener that, for Butterfly, honour is everything and without honour only death remains. Even before the lugubrious ‘humming chorus’ the theme emerges pointing toward the tragic outcome and that, although we see Butterfly, Suzuki and ‘Sorrow’ patiently waiting for the dawn and Pinkerton’s return, we are told musically the dawn will only bring death. Emerging out of this conversational music "Un bel di" seems obtrusive.

The conductor Shao-Chia-Lü relishes these orchestral felicities, highlighting one after another. The first hearing of the knife and death themes in act one, where Butterfly’s prattle about her worldly goods is interrupted by Pinkerton’s enquiry about the knife, the theme suddenly lurches out. Even in "Un bel di" he underlines its orchestral postlude, reminding us that the vocal part stops in musical mid-phrase and is continued and concluded by the orchestra - even managing to hold the traditional applause at bay until that phrase is complete.

Nicole Youl is at her best in the second and third acts. A century later it is dramatically more important to present the noble and honourable aspects of Butterfly’s character rather than just creating a believable 15-year-old. The impression of her in act one is of creating a Butterfly entering into the marriage in order to save that family honour and rescue her and her mother from destitution. When she is cursed by the Bonze and abandoned she similarly entrusts herself to Pinkerton for the sake of honour. Without resorting to overt melodrama she sighed, spoke and sobbed the part with equal attention to its musical and dramatic structure. In “Che tua madre dovrà” she faces the prospect of returning to her Geisha calling, this time, and like it was for her mother, with a child in tow, her despair at the prospect - again with that knife theme when she vows she would rather die -beginning a great arc of desperate emotions that carries through the rest of the act, right through to the end of the opera.

With the conductor intent on merging the orchestral subtext with the stage action, to experience it this way is doubly overwhelming. Sally-Anne Russell blends well with Youl vocally as well as creating a sisterliness in the relationship rather than one of mistress and servant. Russell also manages the high-lying parts of Suzuki's music easily such as the 'flower duet' and "Piangerà tanto, tanto" just before her last scene with Butterfly.

Pinkerton could be considered little more than an unfeeling 'sex tourist.' I still recall from an earlier staging of this production when Butterfly revealed that was only fifteen. "Quindici anni!" says Sharpless looking hurriedly from her to Pinkerton. "Quindici anni" Pinkerton repeats, nodding his head while a revolting leer spread across his face. Rosario La Spina is less insightful. When Sharpless warns him that Butterfly is entering into this sham marriage in earnest and that Pinkerton may "plunge a trusting heart into despair" La Spina manages a derisive chuckle (then a sad face when Pinkerton and Sharpless assume the same positions in the third act when Sharpless tells him 'I told you so'). His singing is varied, "Dovunque al mondo", the closest to a conventional aria, is his most successful contribution but "Addio, fiorito asil" gets pulled away from the action to make an exit aria rather than be a culmination of the subtle trio and ensuing fluid ensemble that begins with Sharpless' "Io so che alle sue pene". In the act one love duet - one of the longest and most inspired Puccini wrote - La Spina's Pinkerton is sexually nonthreatening or urgent, his 'vieni, vieni' as he urges her to bed has no urgency but, in fairness, the dangerous sexuality of the scene is drained by Moffat Oxenbould's production which - as the house disappears and a night sky is revealed - turns into a pleasant nocturnal stroll.

Oxenbould's stylised production to a certain extent dumbs down Puccini's ingenious score. Supernumeraries (with masks and gowns more appropriate to an operating rather than opera theatre) whisk on and off with the knife every time it is suggested rather than let its fearsome presence in the music speak for itself. Within the stylised designed the set numbers and dramatic flow, while occasionally interrupted by these 'supers', of act two and three still emerge very convincingly.

Madama Butterfly (Madame Butterfly) (1904, final performance version 1907) by Giacomo Puccini.
Libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa after the short story Madame Butterfly (1898) by John Luther Long as dramatised by David Belasco. Also based in part on the novel Madame Chrysanthème (1887) by Pierre Loti.

First performance 17 February 1904, La Scala, Milan (1st revised version 28 May 1904, Grande, Brescia)

First Australian performance 26 March 1910, Theatre Royal, Sydney

cast
Conductor - Shao-Chia-Lü
Madama Butterfly (Cio-Cio-San) - Nicole Youl
Suzuki - Sally-Anne Russell
BF Pinkerton - Rosario La Spina
Sharpless - Barry Ryan
Goro - Graeme Macfarlane
Kate Pinkerton - Sian Pendry
Prince Yamadori - Luke Gabbedy (Andrew Moran 11 November)
Commissioner - Andrew Moran (Andrew Jones 11 November)
Registrar - Gregory Brown
Opera Australia Chorus
Orchestra Victoria
Director - Moffat Oxenbould
Set & Costume Designers - Peter England & Russell Cohen
Lighting Designer - Robert Bryan
11, 15, 19, 22, 26 & 29 November 4, 6, 9 & 13 December 2008
165 minutes (including 1 interval after act 1)

CD Review - Puccini Romance - ABC Classics

2009-03-19T19:41:00.005-07:00

Arias and duets from La Bohème, Tosca, Le Villi, La Fanciulla del West, Turandot and Madama Butterfly. Chrisantemi for strings.

Antoinette Halloran, soprano.

Rosario La Spina, tenor.

The Queensland Orchestra.
Stephen Mould, conductor.

ABC Classics 476 6404

This disc faces a marketplace already crowded with similar compilations from major companies who can raid their archives to offer similar repertoire at bargain prices. None the less this disc has some attractions. They are not, however, in the musical layout. Multiple selections from an opera are presented out of order. This is less of an issue with operas like Madama Butterfly or Tosca, where the chosen excerpts are separated often by an entire act, but informed listeners will be amused by the four La Bohème items which places “O soave fanciulla” before “Che gelida manina” and “Sì, mi chiamo Mimi” so that the young couple declare their love before making their introductions. More amusing still is that ‘Mimi’s farewell’ follows immediately so having “come to bother you at an inconvenient time”, she immediately declares her intention to return alone to her solitary nest to make fake flowers!

Rosario La Spina has the makings of a good tenor. He has a bright ‘Italianate’ voice, if occasionally backwardly placed on some higher notes but the biggest irritant are the intrusive aspirates that occur more often when he uses his middle range as well as occasionally assisting him into top notes; the Tosca duet is riddled with them. He has a natural feeling for Italian, singing through diphthongs and making some beautiful sounds although his actual handling of the words is disappointing. Phrases are dully shaped, salient words or the emotions they convey are rarely pointed. It would be hard to imagine any soprano responding to his serenades, let alone undergoing the emotional and physical tortures Puccinian women suffer for their men.

Halloran is another bright and intelligent Australian soprano. Her Mimi and Butterfly are well thought out and characterised. In the ‘Dream’ aria from La Rondine her voice expands into a rich and well controlled forte.

The unsung, so to speak, heroes are conductor Stephen Mould and the orchestra, underpinning the moods and commenting on the characters like old troupers from an Italian house that play this music daily. In “Sì, mi chiamo Mimi”, the short, blunted phrases as she details her dull daily routine suddenly swell, as she reveals the pleasure spring flowers bring her, into beautiful arching phrases. La Spina, incidentally, is not on hand to sing ‘si’ when she asks “lei m’intende?” The disc ends with the “Butterfly” duet where the orchestra respond superbly; the harp passage as Butterfly begins to remove her wedding gown almost suggests its silken texture. Similarly, the horns in the closing moments throb with suggestive anticipation as Pinkerton urges Butterfly into his arms and bed. The low gong strike in that closing passage hovers in mid-air and the overall sound is in the demonstration class. Anyone wanting vocal interpretations of these familar arias and duets might need to look elsewehere, too often the feelings behind the music are overlooked.

CD Review - Transcendent Love. The Passions of Wagner and Strauss

2009-03-19T19:41:00.003-07:00

Lisa Gasteen, soprano. West Australian Symphony Orchestra Orchestra. Simone Young, conductor.
ABC Classics 476 6811

That the classical music recording industry has come to a “stehe still” – excuse the pun derived from one of the songs on this album – could explain why an international label has not snapped up Lisa Gasteen, one of the best dramatic sopranos to emerge from Australia since Marjorie Lawrence. The big labels appear to require one 'house soprano' only these days. Gasteen appears in several recordings derived from live performances and, as her reputation continues to grow, a studio-recorded recital would be just what the fans are clamouring for. The selections chosen however will probably disappoint anyone expecting the “transcendent love” to include her immolating Brunhilde, alein Elektra or abanoned Ariadne. Instead there is Wagner’s Wesendonk Lieder, including a second version with violin solo, the ‘Tristan’ prelude (but no “Liebestod”), a selection of Richard Strauss lieder and his Metamorphosen.

Gasteen can focus her instrument into a very fine ‘slivery’ tone as well as the expected broader and “wall-shaking” ones. Here the microphone emphasises a natural but constant tremor that is more pronounced in the Strauss items and which detracts from their enjoyment. There is also a tendency to blandness in all the vocal items. Marilyn Richardson’s 1989 account of the Wesendonk Lieder with the Queensland Symphony [ABC Classics 426 999-2 no longer available] reveals more urgency in the opening of “stehe still” and, when that stillness arrives, a sense of ecstatic anticipation. Richardson finds too the Isolde-like ecstasy in “Träume” (which uses material common to the opera), which is placed, as usual, in her account as the final song. Gasteen’s account opens her re-ordering of the songs and is more languid, taking a minute longer than Richardson while the slower tempo shows up Gatseen’s vocal tremor. “Im Treibhaus” is the more successful; taking the usually ominous theme from the introduction to act three of “Tristan” the conductor, Simone Young, induces a chamber-like sound and coils the near-transparent ascending theme around Gasteen’s voice.

Perhaps a few more recordings will give Gasteen more ease in the presence of a microphone. In the Strauss items Gasteen blasts the high notes and in “Heimliche Aufforderung” her voice spreads sustaining them. Perhaps these are effects that do not transfer from the stage or concert platform.

Despite her overseas success Young has also been neglected by the big record labels there. Strauss’s Metamorphosen is the longest offering allowing her to display her talent with orchestra alone. It is a very thoughtful account with some subtle phrasing. The division of the strings about 15 minutes in, along with the quicksilver tempi leading up to the introduction (at 18’30”) of the more serious theme that forms the closing part of the work is a beautiful example of the way Young navigates this score.

Review - Arabella - Opera Australia

2009-03-19T19:40:00.002-07:00

Stairway to Heaven
Just when I thought I was immune to Herr Doktor Strauss and his box of musical tricks! Arabella isn't really top drawer Strauss either but the old wizard makes it a persuasive if sentimental night of schmaltz, providing you follow the instructions. Directed by John Cox (reproduced in Melbourne by Cathy Dadd) the instructions are followed in myriad detail but in a staging that is cunningly economical to look at.

Maintaining the essential Vienna 1860s period it works from the centre, with beautifully recreated gowns and works outward, shedding excessive details as it spreads into the wings. Interiors are suggested with props and free-standing doorways only. It isn't meant to look cheap or appear a cost cutting measure, rather it cuts out the superfluous scenic excesses, the same way Opera Australia's time share production of Der Rosenkavalier also does. Rather than slavishly recreating Vienna in it's hey day Robert Perdziola's set is dominated by huge architect's scale model of Vienna set on a right angle at the back of the acting area. It is one of those operatic re-thinks that can give an audience a new way of looking at this difficult to stage art form without going too far. It simply looks like the heroine of the story, the loved by everyone Arabella, has the whole of the city at her feet. It looks a little too like one of Albert Speer's models of Germania made for Hitler (but let's not go down that avenue of Strauss's life). The other big coup is the famous staircase - "the staircase of fate," according to the famous producer Rodolf Hartmann* - reconciliation scene that ends the opera, why it is so important for Arabella to descend a staircase with her glass of water will always escape me, but the practical job that suddenly whirls so easily into the final tableau where Arabella looks like she is descending from Heaven won't be easily forgotten.

The economy was only really apparent in the second act where the Cabbie's ball seems to have attracted no more than dozen people. Mandryka got off lucky, when he announces he will buy champagne for all the guests he would probably have a few bottles left from a single crate! Even with a thin crowd it still looked like a great, 'Fledermausy', ball scene, the weird but not untypical Straussian coloratura creation Fiakermilli (Lorina Gore), with her even weirder aria looked a little like Prince Orlofsky in that 'other' Strauss opera come to think of it.The musical side of a Strauss opera is always a priority, the man could simply turn on a flood of music that bypasses all reason and goes straight to your heart.

Orchestra Victoria played superbly, the restrained first and second acts with their hints of goodies to come were especially well done. The Straussian self-parody, a kind of musical menu of Straussian situations, was great. In the opening scene with the fortune teller Strauss echos Clytemnestra's dream from Elektra, or when Arabella first appears that enigmatic, often slithery 'love me' string writing that appeared in the presentation of the rose and kept appearing right up to the very closing bars of his last opera Capriccio says straight off that Arabella is a charmer, all of it lovingly brought out to charm your defences away. Another point, when Mandryka reveals to Waldner that he is in love with Arabella the orchestra quietly announces the first of the themes that will flood the final act, counterpointing horns and strings, a foretaste of the lusciousness to come.

In the second act, when Mandryka begins their great love scene, telling Arabella about his late first wife, the great recordings with Bavarian and Vienna orchestras can seem to suspend time. Orchestra Victoria came close to creating that mysterious sound world and every other felicity of the score - including the great orchestral prelude to act three, depicting Zdenka and Matteo making love - one of Strauss's many depictions of 'nookie' in purely musical terms - was beautifully shaped and coloured.

Dr Cheryl Barker** comes close to an ideal Arabella in phrasing the great music. She only falls short in one or two places; the floating high note in her 'Der Richtige' passage in the act two duet where she sings about the sunlight on the river is one. None the less Barker has vocal poise, as Dame Edna would say, she can shape a phrase beautifully and a killer legato. I attended the second of the three performances where Peter Coleman-Wright had cancelled, the part of Mandryka sung instead by Warwick Fyfe. A lighter voice than Coleman-Wright but in no way short change. Perhaps the outraged and drunken scenes could have been a little more forthright and he could even been a little more vulgar but he was thoroughly familiar with the part and the production, cut a clean sway through the music and was very moving in the scene in act two recalling his first wife and again touching in his act three shame. Bringing out the the man's sincerity and venerability in the important scenes in acts one and two are more important than the few minutes of abandon.

Like other Strauss operas there are many borderline roles that verge being integral to the success of the whole. Under play or under sing them and it falls apart. The tenor role Matteo is sung by a newcomer to the company, Richard Roberts, who has a beautiful and powerful, Straussian male, voice and a touch of 'Hunkentenor' (how could Zdenka have kept the light with that specimen in her room!). In the fearsomely high and exposed passage when he confronts Arabella in act three, begging her to look at him one last time and not deny what (he thinks) passed between them in the hotel room, his voice rung out with a secure and broad tone. The next tenor in the food chain Count Elemer is one of those comprimario roles that needs a front rank voice. Kanen Breen, slipping into 19th century mode for an extended stay, coped very well with the part that is written for extreme highs and lows and is no simple comedy part. The list goes on; Arabella's parents Adelaide (Milijana Nikolic), with a particularly fruity mezzo when required, and Waldner (Conal Coad) were perfect. Emma Matthews in the pants part of Zdenka sounds like her well known mezzo mode voice, particularly welcome in Strauss. In short everything fell in place to become the most persuasive argument for an unfamiliar work you could have wished for.
Arabella (1933)
Music - Richard Strauss
Libretto- Hugo von Hofmannsthal
First performance 1 July 1933, Dresden Sächsisches Staatstheater
First Australian performance 7 March 2008, Sydney Opera House
Arabella - Cheryl Barker
Zdenka, her sister - Emma Matthews
Adelaide, their mother - Milijana Nikolic
Count Waldner, their father - Conal Coad
Mandryka, a wealthy land owner - Peter Coleman-Wright (Warwick Fyfe 6 May)
Matteo, an army officer - Richard Roberts
Count Elemer, one of Arabella's suitors - Kanen Breen
Count Lamoral, another one of Arabella's suitors - Barry Ryan
Count Dominik, another one of Arabella's suitors - David Thelander
Fiakermilli, a party girl much in demand with cab drivers - Lorina Gore
Welko, a Hussar, Mandryka's manservant - Stephen Smith
A Famous Fortune-Teller - Jacqueline Dark
A Waiter - Warren Fisher
Opera Australia Chorus
Orchestra Victoria
Conductor - Lionel Friend
Director - John Cox, rehearsed by Cathy Dadd
Set & Costume Designer - Robert Perdziola
Lighting Designer - Donn Byrnes
State Theatre. 3, 6 & 9 May 2008
195 minutes (2 intervals)
*Rodolf Hartmann Richard Strauss: The Staging of His Operas and Ballets (1980), English edition, Phaidon Press 1982
**At the annual graduation ceremony on May 15 2008 the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) conferred Honorary Doctorates of Visual and Performing Arts on both Cheryl Barker and Peter Coleman-Wright.

performance reviwed 6 May

Synopsis - Carmen - The New Opera Glass

2009-03-19T19:40:00.001-07:00

Micaela a peasant girl will make a visit to Don José, a sargent in the spanisch army who is promised to her, but after not finding him she is going away. Now girls are coming out from the zigarette fabric under whom is Carmen, a wilde gipsy. Carmen enticing José from his mother. Stirring in the fabric. Carmen has stabed an other girls and José must arrest her but she fascinate him to leave her escape. José is emprissoned.
Second Act: Carmen by her friends at smugglers tavern, she is falling the love on Escamillo who is singing now the famish song ‘Toreador be careful’. José is searching Carmen and will be desserting from the army. He fly at the mountains with her.
Third Act: In the mountains. José jellous from Escamillo going away now, but he know, that he is winning the hearth from Carmen. Micaela is treating the stage and informing José from his mother’s soon dead. He is going home.
Forth Act: Carmen relate she shall marry Escamillo when he is succeeding at the steerfight. José will win back her hearth, but she renounce and he murdered her. In this moment Escamillo is coming triumphal out from the steercircus.

Review - Carmen - Opera Australia

2009-03-19T19:37:00.000-07:00

José and the Pussy Cats
The most popular opera in this galaxy, Carmen, as most people know was a flop at its premiere. The audiences at the initial performances thought the first act OK enough but nothing special. Things turned sour with the 'toreador' song and from that point on the reaction turned against it for the rest of the run. If there had have been video in 1875 Carmen would have gone straight to it. Bizet died shortly after, unable to undertake any revisions or compose recitatives in place of the spoken dialogue which were required to get the work accepted to mainstream houses in Paris and other countries. Subsequent stagings were better received and since then it has become a staple. With every tune in it so well known you'd think it was the operatic equivalent of a 'juke box musical' but no, it was written like that and - with the once despised toreador song now one of the most popular tunes in the world - stands as an operatic freak, doomed to over familiarity. That scholars have been working since the 1960s toward a definitive critical edition and that this production tries to create an 'urtext' Carmen of it's own doesn't really matter.
Francesca Zambello is currently one of the top opera directors creating (usually) literal productions in terms of keeping within the intended time and location of an opera. Her direction of Prokofiev's War and Peace would rate as one of the most magnificent stagings of the last decade; she attended to every internal and external detail. The sexual tension, for example, in this scene is electric while her ability to place, move and direct a performer's gestures is so telling. Zambello's Carmen surprisingly has little sexual tension. The story is so well known that, like a Classical tragedy, the outcome is so inevitable that the action along the way is almost redundant. Zambello injects some new life into the old favorite (sadly the matador dance from her recent Covent Garden staging has still to be seen). The Carmen here is Pamela Helen Stephen, light-voiced and light-mannered when you consider how over the top some Carmen’s can go. There is very little sign of attraction to José and the attraction to Escamillo is as underplayed, at the end of act three the smugglers exit one way while Carmen seems to wearily wander the other way towards Escamillo's off-stage voice. Choosing between José and Escamillo is purely commercial. There may be some connection to Carmen the fatalist in the "Habanera" and final scene where she flings her arms outward in a sacrificial pose. These arm gestures are often involuntary with even the most skilled acting singers but here they suggest the woman's surrender, even sacrifice, to either sex or death.

The action doesn't really take off until the entrance of the factory girls, up till then it is Seville straight out of a travel brochure. There are some strange goings on. The town square is crowded with people apparently determined to do nothing. On one side the army barracks on the other the cigarette factory in the middle an orange tree (Seville - Seville oranges, geddit?) that wobbles with every stage movement as much as Carmen's breasts in this production don't. The stage is cramped with exotic supernumeraries, chickens and even a donkey. High class ladies and gents mostly stand motionless throughout the act looking more like a Spanish version of Sunday in the Park with George. Long haired 'majo' mill around endlessly picking fights with each other while, and most extraordinarily of all, a not very discreet maja sits topless being washed in full view of the populace and right outside the town lock up! While the 'fate' theme plays between the end of the prelude and the beginning of act one proper we see the collapsed and disheveled Don José being lead away by a soldier to remind us that this theme will recur and be associated with José's obsession and Carmen's murder because of it. This is not a new idea but it is not half as problematic as Zambello's business with Micaëla.

When the factory girls come out things pick up. The enormous doors swing open and in a cloud of cigarette smoke and lead by forewoman the girls enter. Wearing undergarments due to the stifling heat of the factory conditions they flap petticoats to air the sweat and smells while the forewoman half protects and half pimps them to the drooling majo. The set pieces, the "Habanera" and "Seguidilla" are choreographed to their detriment - perhaps because audience expect the full Carmen experience and feel cheated without a dumb show - but they contain some interesting and telling details, especially the "Habanera". Carmen does not seem to vamp the crowd rather than surrender to it, up to a point, repulsing any physical advances. The chorus, now they are supporting important action rather than filling in air time, starts doing interesting things. The women also start making sense. The factory girls, provocatively in their under skirts, suggest that this is indeed a town with two standards. Among the crowd is a black clad duenna feigning interest in a book while all the while snatching glances at Carmen relating her manifesto in habanera time. In the second act that same woman, now drunk and swing a bottle, mixes with the low-lifes in Pastia's tavern. Interestingly, Pastia usually assumed to a man is here played by a woman. Following the factory brawl in act one when Carmen is arrested Zambello has Stephen play the usual Carmen-isms down. No heaving shoulders and 'poitrine', pouting lips or cat-like rubbing up and down Zuniga. Instead she reels of her 'tra-la-la-la-la-la-las' as if to say 'yeah, yeah, I know the drill .., I have the right to remain silent etc etc" and that Zuniga probably arrests her every other day. It might upset the punters coming to see Carmen the 'panto' but it was certainly refreshing. The factory brawl was more than usually vigorous, with Carmen wielding a knife big and nasty enough to take the offending chorine's head off!

Zambello brings Micaëla back on at the end of the first act to see Carmen dupe José and escape. Rather than push him down as agreed she slips out of the rope and runs off leaving it obvious that José was responsible. That's a nice touch, it makes it fairly certain that Carmen has nothing but contempt for the man and it gives Micaëla something extra to worry about. In act three she returns determined to bring him back to his dying mother. Zambello makes it clear that there is no intention of Micaëla and José marrying now (in her aria she says "j'amais jadis"[I loved formerly]). Getting a closer look at Carmen is her primary interest so giving her an initial look at her, as she now does in act one is another nice touch. Bringing her on in the final scene to witness Carmen's murder makes very little dramatic sense however, if she is over the man, as she says, why does leave Navarre a third time to follow him? (and imagine the inquest over Carmen's death: "would you please explain to the court Ms Micaëla, why you did nothing to prevent the attack or raise the alarm?).

Vocally this is an impressive cast. Stephen, a lighter and brighter voice mezzo, makes Carmen's music almost conversational. She was convincing in all aspects of the 'Carmen as sex object 'legend; repulsing an unwanted contact; lap dancing the mummy's boy José or wrapping her legs around his neck. Hye Seoung Kwon has an impressive lyric voice. Her Micaëla sounds intensely dramatic for a lighter voice and she made some impressive tonal shading in her aria (no mean feat considering its frequent and difficult transitions between loud and soft). On paper Joshua Bloom seemed an unlikely Escamillo, the part seeming to lie outside his range, but it turned out to be a most complete assumption of a role. Everything about the character was there even if the voice sounds covered to create a deeper texture. His swagger, with a slight forward lean and self satisfied smirk he was every inch the show off. He was easily the best mover too, taking the choreographed gestures during his song in his stride which extended to some table top dancing). He is also a convincing horse rider (in the great Australian tradition of operatic horse riding set by Marjorie Lawrence). To cap it all his Escamillo looks like a young Ruggerio Raimondi. No wonder Bloom has established himself in the Northern Hemisphere so readily and even been elevated to barihunk-dom
It's good to see such re-thinking of a war horse and the re-thinking extends into the musical side as well as the dramatic. Richard Hickox spiced up the overly familiar line up of famous tunes and set some brisk tempos. The smuggler's quintet is breathless but breathtaking and most of the other numbers went at a similarly fast pace. Details are not smudged anywhere though, a striking instrumental phrase for example is beautifully highlighted, even the strange horn passages before the main theme in the act one José/Micaëla duet can be heard. Relating to the many recordings of the opera Hickox's tempi most resemble those of Beecham (EMI, 1958) and Clutyens (EMI,1950). Like the Clutyen's recording Hickox opts for spoken dialogue rather than sung recitatives between numbers. The version performed here, although using the first printed edition by the publisher Choudens which was issued with recitatives composed after Bizet's death three months after the premiere, reverts to something like the original with spoken dialogue. Not all of the known dialogue is included and the 'melodrame' sections (spoken over music) have been pruned so, sadly, Carmen's first words to José - the suggestive "épinglier de mon âme" - are gone.

Carmen (1875) by Georges Bizet (Opéra-Comique version)
Libretto - H Meilhac and L Halévy after the story by Prosper Mérimée
First performance 3 March 1875, Opera Comique, Paris
First Australian performance - 14 May 1879, Opera House, Melbourne (12 performances)
cast

Carmen - Pamela Helen Stephen

Don José - Rosario La Spina

Micaëla - Hye Seoung Kwon

Escamillo - Joshua Bloom

Zuniga - Shane Lowrencev

Frasquita - Amy Wilkinson

Mercédès - Sian Pendry

Remendado - Graeme Macfarlane

Dancairo - Luke Gabbedy

Moralès - Andrew Moran

Lillas Pastia - Diana Emry

Guide - Robert Mitchell

Opera Australia Chorus

Gamins of the the National Boy's Choir

Orchestra Victoria
Conductor - Richard Hickox (April 9-26)
Olivier-Philippe Cunéo (April 29 May 3, 8 & 10)

Director - Francesca Zambello

Set & Costume Designer - Tanya McCallin

Choreograhper - Denni Sayers

State Theatre, The Arts Centre April 9, 12, 15, 17, 23, 26 & 29 May 3, 8 & 10 2008
190 minutes including two intervals
Warning: this production contains children and animals .

Review - Sydney Symphony 75th Anniversary Collection: A Recording Heritage

2007-11-07T15:18:00.000-08:00

Sydney Symphony 75th Anniversary Collection: A Recording Heritage
ABC Classics 476 5957 5-CD box set
Performers include: Neville Amadio, Valda Bagnall, Elizabeth Campbell, Birgit Nilsson, Florence Taylor.
Conductors: Otto Klemperer, Eugene Goossens III, John Hopkins, Willem van Otterloo, Patrick Thomas, Charles Mackerras, Stuart Challender, Edo de Waart, Gianluigi Gelmetti.

The prize in this set is its preservation of the earliest of Otto Klemperer’s six extant concert performances of Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony. Seeking his endorsement as conductor, Klemperer played Mahler the scherzo from an arrangement by Klemperer for two pianos (never published, alas, and subsequently lost during Klemperer’s American sojourn) of the “Resurrection” symphony (the composer remarking “why do you want to become a conductor? You’re an accomplished pianist”). Mahler’s eventual endorsement secured Klemperer his first conducting post and he quickly became one of the composer’s chief acolytes, one of his early jobs being conducting the off-stage band in a performance of the symphony. Klemperer had introduced the symphony in 1935, the first year of his tenure with Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and again in a Carnegie Hall concert subsidised entirely from his own pocket shortly before he was offered guest appearances in Australia. Because of his association with the composer, Klemperer’s Mahler performances are of great value and this, from September 1950 pre-dates by eight months his pioneering LP (now on Vox CDX2 5521) account with the “pool of orchestral players struggling to earn a decent living after the austerities of wartime” that constituted the ad-hoc Vienna Symphony Orchestra, recorded in impossibly tight schedules caused by players notching up often 50-hour or more weeks in variously pseudonymous orchestras. Klemperer appears to prefer brisker speeds in concert; the Sydney performance, like a Concertgebouw performance from July 1951 (on Decca CD 4765762) and featuring Kathleen Ferrier is faster in all movements than the contemporary Vox set. The Sydney performance is available on a single CD (Doremi DHR7759) with sound little better than this present recording (neither are as well preserved as the Decca performance) and both feature a persistent ‘swish’. The original engineers accommodated the very loud passages, a plus over the Vienna performance where they “are little more than noise, and there are moments of bad pitch-wavering throughout” as reported in a contemporary review in the 1955 Record Guide and still evident on CD. In the ABC Classics remastering the pitch sounds consistent while clearest section is the Scherzo [CD1 track 3] where Klemperer, perhaps aware from experience that it will be the most immediately appreciated by an audiences unfamiliar, if the estimation the Record Guide is anything to go by, with Mahler’s “lapses of taste” in this “bran-pie of a symphony.” Literally interpreting the instruction “fliessender” (flowing), he has the orchestra ebbing and flowing in “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” mode. There are ensemble lapses but the players manage to stay in touch with this, for the time, unfamiliar sound world. Florence Taylor has an old-world British contralto but her enunciation of the words (given here in English translation) has not been well caught and her “Urlicht” song sounds like the Fairy Queen’s invocation from an inter-war recording of Iolanthe.

The two Goossens conducted items derive from the sources used for their commercial releases. The Beethoven Symphony No.2, produced for HMV by their veteran sound engineer Arthur Clarke (who had been joined the firm and worked on Caruso’s famous recordings and later Elgar’s equally famous electrical recordings, including the Cello Concerto with Beatrice Harrison as soloist. It was Elgar, incidentally who had recommended Goossens to HMV as a recording conductor) was the orchestra’s introduction to the world market and was compared favourably, unlike Mahler, in the 1955 Record Guide alongside a Vienna Philharmonic performance and was missing only “the relaxed grace of the Viennese players”. It still sounds good with, perhaps, a relaxed Australian grace unknown to British critics while the remastering clarifies the orchestral textures along with occasional studio noise. The sound for the famous recording of John Antill’s Corroboree Suite is murky but the gusto of the piece emerges to explain why it was so popular. The exoticisms of Antill’s boisterous score appear to extend beyond Aboriginal borrowings; the two inner movements sound at times like Colin McPhee’s Balinese inspired and equally culturally suspect Tabuh-Tabuhan from 1936 (could Antill have known this score?). Overlooking the cultural insensitivity, which precludes revival today without apologies and reservations it is a gutsy performance. The contra bassoon [CD2 track 5, 15 seconds in] alternating with stabbing strings is a scary thing indeed as is the bull-roarer in the finale, which might sound to some as though the recording sound were deteriorating further. The switch to Grainger’s Youthful Suite conducted by John Hopkins in a spacious 1976 recording comes as an aural shock with the brass and percussion rattling out of the speakers. Only in the eccentric "Eastern Intermezzo" does a slight tape hiss bother the hushed introduction. The final "English Walsh" is a gem, the way Hopkins and the players indulge this miniature to the hilt makes one long for EMI to reinstate his Grainger recordings from this time. Mozart’s first Flute Concerto is given another splendidly recorded performance. The soloist, Neville Amadio, is made to sound larger than life.

Willem van Otterloo’s 1974 Symphonie fantastique was briefly available on an RCA LP. The strings in “A Ball” [CD3 track 2] are exquisite and totally together. The sound is very wide-ranging and atmospheric with the timpani [CD3 track 3] rolling menacingly out of near silence. Only the “March to the Scaffold” and “”Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath lack the last degree of excitement in the best rival recordings. As in the third movement, however, the relish van Otterloo takes in the gory details of the “March to Scaffold – the falling of the guillotine, the severed head tumbling away and so on, are like an adolescent boy delighting in horror comics!

CD 4 could have contained the entire Das Lied von der Erde conducted by Stuart Challender. Instead only the final “Der Abschied” is included. It is an intimate reading, sounding almost like a chamber version, the middle section where the soloist is silent, is very evocative and relaxed and good to compare to the struggles with Mahler forty years earlier on the Klemperer disc. The opening concert of the Sydney Opera House brings Charles Mackerras and Birgit Nilsson (the complete concert is available from ABC Classics as a CD and DVD package 476 6440). Singing Brunhilde's "Immolation Scene", Nilsson is on autopilot (her physical and musical gestures were duplicated wherever she sang by this stage of her career) and the orchestral sound is distant, as though the singer and orchestra were in two different halls. It doesn’t sound like a very thrilling experience either, despite the occasion. Edo de Waart is represented by Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. A great trainer, de Waart’s interpretation sounds plush but faceless, missing individual details for the sake of an impressive overall impression of rhythmic finesse and tonal control. The sound is not as detailed as in the Berlioz on the earlier disc. Pity de Waart’s one time teacher Dean Dixon, who headed the orchestra in the 1960s, is not represented in the set. Gianluigi Gelmetti directs the final item, Debussy’s La Mer. This catches the excitement Gelmetti generated in this sort of music. The recording even captures him [CD 5 track 9, 5’32”] calling out, Beecham style, an instruction to the orchestra as they approach the ending. Like its companion volume of archival Melbourne Symphony Orchestra recordings, this is a fascinating release. Despite their limited sonics the older recordings have an enduring interest and testimonial value and are an interesting sideline to ABC Classic’s activity. If they still exist, the recordings of Stravinsky’s Melbourne and Sydney concerts would be a release with greater overseas currency.

1 Timothy Day, A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History, 2002, Yale University Press.
2 Day.

Review - The Flying Dutchman - Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

2007-11-01T16:09:00.000-07:00

Hollandaze
Oleg Caetani's conducting of this Flying Dutchman was so brisk it was more like the Flying Scotsman! (he brought the whole thing in at just under two and half hours, including a twenty minute interval). The breathless overture, where the damnation and redemption motives were not isolated but driving back into the overriding storm and damnation motives, giving a clear idea of how the story was going to end. Each scene was driven into the next; the sleepy steersman's (Adrian Dwyer) song had no lethargy, no suggestion that the man was falling asleep. The Dutchman's (John Wegner) monologue had little suggestion of timeless damnation. The effect was none the less very exciting, this is Wagner's most exhilarating score and his most direct and seeing it with the orchestra as the main focus for a change gives a listener a chance to appreciate it on its primary terms such as the shaping of the music for dramatic exposition. In, for example, the scene between the Dutchman and Daland (Bjarni Thor Krisinsson) the cunning in the music, as The Dutchman cajoled the dim Daland had sharply pointed rhythms as the Dutchman sings in contrast with the slower, squarer and simpler ones for Daland.

The second act relaxed a little; only the short chorus to get the girls off before Senta and Erik's scene, where the already fast tempo was rushed to the point of gabble. The soprano Lisa Gasteen had cancelled and her replacement, Gabriele Maria Ronge was reported to be unwell herself. She sat through the spinning chorus clutching a handkerchief, nursing two glasses of water and a handbag that matched neither gown or shoes (in fairness it was probably loaded with butter menthols) and things didn't look good. There was little shading in the way Caetani took the Ballad but Ronge had been responding physically as well as musically in her opening scene (she clearly knows this character well) and transported gestures from prior stage appearances in the concert. When she relates how the Dutchman comes ashore every seven years, she accordingly holds her arms up with seven fingers splayed. Her 'Hui's' in the Ballad were hardly mysterious for a girl haunted by the legend but in the coda she opened up a powerful top and displayed one of those broad haus-rawking voices that can ride all but the biggest orchestral tuttis (like the ones Caetani had been saving up all year to deliver in this). But the Ballad was a warm-up for in the scene with Erik (Stuart Skelton) she was on fire, her Senta, after making that pledge to the Dutchman, had become edgy, almost neurotic, just how we like 'em. "Erik, sag'! fürchest Du ein Lied, ein Bild?", she sings, jabbing her finger at him, the voice now revealing a glacial incisiveness. Acts two and three were played together but she left the platform as she would in a fully staged production. When she returned in act three, san handbag, she had total vocal security and her instrument was primed for a big finish. She only had trouble when riding the full orchestra at full volume and the extreme speeds probably caused her to rush the build up toward high lying phrases. Otherwise she rocked the hall, the final lines - mercifully without the orchestra - gleamed with mania, the diabolically high-lying final phrase sounding uncomfortable but, when about to to plunge into the ocean in a floridly spychotic state why shouldn't she? The word 'treu' (on the highest and most exposed note) was more a fearsome yowl. Skelton, like Ronge, was better in characterising throughout the opera. His act two cavatina and act three narration, nice as they were, were nothing compared to the way he work against Ronge and told much more about himself and Senta in their scenes together.

Wegner has developed an almost motionless 'Wieland Wagner' way of singing the Dutchman, the extremes speeds in the first act gave him little room for anguish and his physical stillness, more so when singing alongside the frenetic Ronge, made him appear only malevolent. He has a great way of exactly controlling the number of rolled 'r's when singing important words like 'treu' (1 'r') or 'Hollander' (2 'r's) and builds up phrases so evenly as well, no matter how thick the orchestral texture, only sounding strained on the most exposed high notes. Another bonus was the Icelandic bass Krisinsson, not the cavernous black bass I was expecting but well controlled, almost elegant. His big moment "Mögst du mein kind" was, sadly, on the fast side as well. The big choral scene in the third act was massive - the Melbourne Symphony 'house choir' beefed out with the Victorian Opera chorus positioned on three side above the orchestra was so fearsome that the raw piccolos and wind machine were lost in the din. These MSO operas in concert are all about the music, and how it tells you everything that you need to know making costumes and sets seem like an insult to your intelligence. First and foremost it was about the music which, even with the extreme speeds in the first act, were brought into sharp and appreciable relief.

The Flying Dutchman (1843)
music and text by Richard Wagner
First performance - Dresden 21 January 1843
First Australian performance - Princess's, Melbourne 29 April 1901 (1 performance)
Senta - Gabriele Maria Ronge
The Dutchman - John Wegner
Daland - Bjarni Thor Krisinsson
Erik - Stuart Skelton
Mary - Sian Pendry
Steersman - Adrian Dwyer
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chorus
Men of the Victorian Opera Chorus
Conductor - Oleg Caetani
25, 28 & 30 August
Hamer Hall, The Arts Centre
155 minutes (including 1 interval)

synopsis - The Flying Hollander - The New Opera Glass

2007-10-26T22:32:00.000-07:00

Daland, norwegisch seacaptain, is meeting the Hollander on spektership. This recount he was badly cursed from the devil to wander eternal in the seas, only he could get safed if he find a woman witch will be true to the dying.
Daland is taking him to his house. Senta his daughter is singing the spinsong, she is knowing of him and will salve him by the marriage. But Erik the ancient lover of her is not merry and he is begging her for not dessert him. The Hollander is hearing on this and in the meaning he is deceived he is running on the ship and informing the peoples from his really name.
Senta is throwing herselves on the seas and now the ship has sunked, but the Hollander and his espoused are soaring at the sky because the curse is broke.

Erkki-Sven Tüür - Symphony No 4 Magma etc. CD

2007-10-02T20:08:00.000-07:00

Tüür of Duty

Out of all the new music recordings I'm really concentrating on at present is the new CD from Virgin/EMI of music by the Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür.
Firstly, I like him a lot (his series of seven Architectonis caught my attention a few years ago) and, secondly, the Australian Chamber Orchestra have commissioned from him a work for recorder and strings which will be premiered here next month in their national tour.
The minimalist school divided into two camps. One favours the repetition of notes and phrases with pronounced, often swift, tempi. The other favours slower tempi, longer phrases built around single notes or themes with a less frenzied rhythm. They even divide geographically. The former school operate in the USA and the UK, the slower and more ponderous school dwell in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Bloc.
Tüür, born in Estonia in 1959, belongs to the latter group, the ‘Baltic Mininmalists’.
Tüür's best work to date has been minimal in duration as well as schooling. Larger and longer forms perhaps put a classical pressure on a composer to resort to traditional notions of development, internal movements where the slow ideas get put into an adagio movement, faster one become a scherzo and so on. Magma to a certain extent avoids that but in being a concerto, and not for a single instrument but for a number of instruments in the percussion family it spends most of the firts 'movement' introducing one after another as though the soloist, Evelyn Glennie, had given him a list of what she wanted included and Tüür has dutifully put them in. The slowness of his earlier work where the progression, often at a breathing pace, unfolds with far less fuss. It does build up to a explosive finale, with Evelyn going full-tilt and then dissolving out of the picture as it cools down, to run with the Magma (to run with the primal molten rock analogy of the work's title) into a cold and more familiar sounding Tüür work.

The most attractive item is The Path and the Traces for string orchestra. Another work to rank alongside his best like Lighthouse and Isula Deserta, short works that anxious audiences can accept in one hearing and enjoy on record in repeated hearings. The Path and the Traces has an icy intensity like Sibelius' exquisite miniature Scene with Cranes.

Erkki-Sven Tüür (b 1959) (Estonia)
Symphony No 4 Magma for solo percussion and orchestra (2002) [31:06]
Inquiétude du fini for chamber choir and orchestra (1992) [4:37]
Igavik (Eternity) for male choir and orchestra (2006) [4:37]
The Path and the Traces for string orchestra (2005) [12:36]
Evelyn Glennie, solo percussion [Magma]
Estonian Philharmonic Choir [Inquiétude du fini]
Estonian National Male Choir [Igavik]
Estonian National Symphony Orchestra
Paavo Järvi, conductor
Virgin Classics 0946 3 85785 2 9

Zandonai - Francesa da Rimini DVD

2007-09-23T21:21:00.000-07:00

First staged in 1914, Riccardo Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini had a tough life. Even as Zondonai’s masterpiece it had to contend with the vice-like grip with which Puccini held (and still holds) the world’s opera stages. Even with Puccini’s own publisher Tito Ricordi having a hand in Francesca’s libretto and Tito’s trumpeting of Zandonai as the next best thing to Puccini this remarkable opera has had a chequered career. The Met staged it in 1914 and then selected it again for that golden period in the 1980s for Renata Scotto’s vocal ‘Indian Summer’ where she was partnered (as she so often was) by the young(ish) Placido Domingo. The result preserved in this video and now remastered on DVD is one of the erotically charged operatic performances imaginable. Scotto at 50 already had close to 30 years stage experience and creates a passionate woman carried away by her attraction to Paolo. Zandonai, unlike Puccini, could carry the erotic charge in his music far beyond the premature ejaculation that afflicted the more famous composer.
In the first meeting the orchestra dies away to a solo cello melody accompanying the silent stage action of Francesca walking slowly to the gate where Paolo stands where they then place their hands on the either side of the gate, the caress of each other’s hand transcending the wrought iron that separates them. Later, when they read together from Thomas Mallory’s “Death of Arthur” how Lancelot and Guinevere first kissed, Scotto, laying prone on a divan brings her lips to Domingo’s and create a sexiness that eludes even the greatest of screen kisses.

Scotto, is so totally immersed in the role. She savours the words and music as though it were the richest Italian food or wine. Her incredible legato is as though, pardon the analogy as it really doesn’t sound very sexy, it were a long strand of spaghetti that she draws right down to the plate licking every remnant of the sauce.

The production itself is the most handsome thing the Met must have ever mounted. Even by their own luxurious standards it is exquisite in its faux Medievalism as Zandonai’s own music. Every minor part, even down to the last spear carrier seems to understand their part in the tragedy. During the battle scene every soldier wields his weapon as though they trained to use them since childhood. The handmaidens shudder with fear as the guilty Francesca wakes from her nightmare. And instead of being as crowded as a peak hour train by singers standing and delivering from this favoured position, the area at the front of stage remains as empty as no-man’s-land, these singer’s have found a new way to win over the audience.

Riccardo Zandonai Francesca da Rimini
Francesca - Renata Scotto
Paolo - Placido Domingo
Gianciotto - Cornell MacNeil
Malatestino - William Lewis
Chorus, Orchestra and Ballet of the Metropolitan Opera, New York
Conductor - James Levine
recorded April 1984
DVD Deutsche Grammophon 00440 073 4313