TENOR.com - The Opera Blog

All the passion of completing your tax returns.

More fun than you can shake a stick at, plus the stick.

It’s blog opera. Because there’s not enough great opera out there to enjoy just the way it is.

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A thoughtful article about the genesis, highlights and lowlights of reading English while hearing something else.

Now, in the 25th anniversary year of supertitles, such systems have been embraced by companies and audiences. The benefits are obvious. Opera is a form of drama, and that basic element of the genre becomes immediately apparent, even to neophytes, when titling is used. In the early 1980s productions of Wagner’s complete “Ring” cycle were undertaken by relatively few companies. Now a “Ring” production has become a calling card for any house that wants to be taken seriously. Titles have made the difference.

With audiences able to follow Wagner’s librettos, this complex mythological tale of sacred treaties made and broken and the catastrophic mingling of gods and mortals, of curses, hatreds and impossible hopes passed down through generations, emerges as an engrossing, humane and tragic operatic epic.  …

Robert Jacobson, then the editor of Opera News, published by the Metropolitan Opera Guild, deplored supertitles as a “pathetic marketing grab for the fringe public,” adding that opera “is not a reading experience.” Then, speaking of the Met, there was James Levine. As supertitles were catching on everywhere, Anthony Bliss, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, said that even that august company was considering a tryout. But in a 1985 article for The New York Times Magazine the music critic Will Crutchfield quoted Levine as saying, “Over my dead body will they show those things at this house.”

He is still living down that statement. In 1995 the Met introduced Met Titles, a system of individual screens mounted on seatbacks. Levine has said that he dropped his objections when the Met devised a system that allowed patrons the option to turn the things off.

Yet the record reveals widespread support from the start, most critics included. Reviewing the City Opera’s “Cendrillon” production in The Times, Donal Henahan described supertitles as “a dangerous experiment in audience education that on the whole worked astonishingly well.”  …more

My advice:  Sit in the cheap seats if you don’t want to strain your neck reading them.

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Break a leg. No - two legs!

Soprano Joan Sutherland was picking flowers at her home in Switzerland, fell down and broke both her legs. Please send prayers and happy thoughts for a quick recovery. She’s 81 years old, God bless her.

Dame Sutherland made countless recordings, among them is Les Huguenots with my voice teacher, Anastasios “Taso” Vrenios.

Here’s Taso in the final scene from La Rondine with Teresa Stratas.

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Would you rather run the Metropolitan Opera, or be the Master Carpenter?

It turns out both are making some crazy cash.

The Met’s General Manager pulled down $1,000,000 last year.

The Met’s Master Carpenter pulled down $533,450.

That’s alot of wood.

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This doen’t sound like a crossover artist.  It sounds like a drive-by shooting.

An NHS dentist has just been signed up in a £1m record deal by SonyBMG, it was announced today. Andrew Bain, 34, who had worked in a North London dental practice for ten years, was noticed by Sony executives after he send in a demo tape containing his operatic interpretation of Prince’s pop classic, ‘Purple Rain’.   …the whole thing

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That headline sounds like a bad children’s book.   And Alagna’s tantrum after getting booed in the opening minutes of Aida at La Scala is the kind of thing that you’d see in one.

Listen for yourself - it’s not a great ending to “Celeste Aida,” and it certainly doesn’t sound like the rest of the performance is going to be good.  Alagna has supertenor status in Europe, but that can’t shield him from a mediocre live performance in the land where opera was born.   And it looks like he won’t be going back to La Scala any time soon.

Alagna at his best are recordings like these:

Sacred Songs with a wonderful O Holy Night track (in french of course) and the obscure “La Procession” by Cesar Franck - a piece that is beautiful and quintessentially Catholic.

His opera arias CD is excellent too.

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A smart cookie, that Ben Heppner:  try out one of the most difficult roles in the heldentenor repertoire in a Wagnerian backwater.

Heppner trying on Siegfried in Aix-en-Provence

His performance at Saturday night’s premiere was in some respects a triumph and in others a work in progress.

For sheer visceral excitement, nothing beats the sound of Heppner’s lean, muscular high notes cutting through the orchestra at full volume _ and this orchestra was the Berlin Philharmonic, one of the finest in the world. The freshness and vigor of his declaration of love to Bruennhilde near the end of Act 3, “Sei mein, sei mein, sei mein!” (”Be mine!”) resonated through the Grand Theatre de Provence with thrilling clarity and punch.

That this came at the end of a long night _ three acts, each lasting more than an hour, with his character rarely off stage _ made it even more remarkable.

Heppner showed his newness to the part a few times: too much eye contact with the conductor early on, one or two missed entrances, a bit of holding back in the sword-forging scene. In Act 3 there were a few rough patches in the middle register when he had to sing softly, the only hint of vocal fatigue.

It’s ironic that Wagner wrote the role of his young superhero with such strenuous vocal demands that it can be sung only by a tenor whose voice has fully matured, typically in early middle age. Heppner, a 52-year-old Canadian with a bulky physique, is not going to make anyone think he’s a teenager, but he runs about the stage energetically and assumes a wide-eyed innocence that helps make him believable.

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Desperate times led to a remarkable solution in Verdi’s “Aida” at the Benedum Center last night: The conductor stepped in to sing for an ailing tenor.

That would be amazing enough, except that Antony Walker, the Pittsburgh Opera’s music director, didn’t leave the podium. In a rare occurrence indeed in the opera world, Mr. Walker conducted and sang the role of Radames in the final act of the opera while the tenor acted the role on stage.

“I trained as a singer for seven years and sometimes it comes in handy,” Mr. Walker said after the performance. “I never had to sing and conduct before and I hope I never have to do it again!”

Yesterday, tenor Vladimir Kuzmenko, cast as Radames, came down with the same bug that has sidelined mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe. Pittsburgh Opera management yesterday decided to fly in a tenor to sing the role if Mr. Kuzmenko couldn’t make it through the performance. But Eduardo Villa’s flight was delayed and Mr. Kuzmenko lost his voice by the end of the third of four acts.

Panic? No. Not when you have a tenor in the pit. Christopher Hahn, the Opera’s artistic director, knocked on Mr. Walker’s door and said, “Can you do it”?

“Act 4 is light and lyrical; It was feasible;” said Mr. Walker, who already had been steeling himself for the possibility. “It was the only way we could continue the opera.” …full article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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