Leonard Turnevicius

Mozart 'n Makropulos

(Salzburg, Austria) The final Salzburg Festival performance this summer of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, a remount of Claus Guth's production, took place in the Haus fuer Mozart this afternoon.

In the pit, conductor Robin Ticciati micro-managed the opening bars of the Overture, something that didn't help the flow of the music. Thankfully, that wasn't the case for the rest of the opera. Ticciati, who was often a bouncy presence in the pit, drew out the various hues of Mozart's orchestration, not to mention some very supple playing from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. His tempo for Porgi amor approached glacial territory. Yet, that gave Genia Kuehmeier as the Countess ample opportunity to show off her rich timbre. And it gave some of the instrumentalists a minor fit (things flow better under their fingers at a slightly quicker pace than what Ticciati had set).

Simon Keenlyside was a superb sounding Count Almaviva. (This year he replaced Canadian baritone Gerald Finley who has moved to sing Don Giovanni in the Salzburg remount.) Erwin Schrott's Figaro was well projected, though monochrome of timbre.

Marlis Petersen received much applause for her portrayal of Susanna. Katija Dragojevic was a lovable Cherubino, literally, for in Guth's production this character becomes involved in a threesome with Susanna and the Countess. Marie McLaughlin was a very suitable Marcellina. Franz-Josef Selig, a long time Salzburg favourite, continued his winning ways as Bartolo. Pat Henckens was Basilio, Oliver Ringelhahn sang Don Curzio, while Malin Christensson essayed the role of Barbarina. Adam Platechtka wasn't overly humorous as the gardener Antonio.

Uli Hirsch played the Cherubim, a mute character with so-called angel's wings on his back. Guth's accretion to the cast is much like a master-puppeteer, pulling the strings as it were in just about every situation throughout the opera, visible, of course, only to the audience.

The audience loved it and showered the performers with nine minutes of applause.

At 9 p.m., Esa-Pekka Salonen took to the pit of the Grosses Festspielhaus and conducted Janacek's opera The Makropulos Case as though it were a symphony. He had the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra front and centre in the mix, sometimes to the disadvantage of the cast on stage.

Angela Denoke was a standout as Emilia Marty, the 337 year old, who after getting her hands on the Greek parchment with the instructions that would grant her even more years of life, gives it over to her admirer Krista, here sung admirably by Jurgita Adamonyte, who promptly burns it.

The male roles of Dr. Kolenaty, Vitek, Albert Gregor, and Jaroslav Prus were handily taken by Jochen Schmeckenbecher, Peter Hoare, Raymond Very, Johan Reuter. Ryland Davies was a fairly low key Hauk-Sendorf, the self-confessed idiot. Ales Briscein was Janek, while Scottish mezzo Linda Ormiston was a plump Scottish maid.

Anna Viebrock's uniset consisted of a courtroom flanked by two enclosed spaces, stage right where two females spent quite a bit of time smoking, and stage left where people appeared now and then visible through the greenery near the window. None of it did much to clarify matters except to provide a background for legal wranglings.

Director Christoph Marthaler inserted some stage business in between acts, the last one a humorous take on legal proceedings. There was some humour at the opening as well where small jabs were taken at decision making processes, and opera to name but two. These were read in the German and English surtitles, supposedly the conversation the two women were having in the enclosed space which of course none of the audience could hear.

What'll be heard tomorrow? Trevor Pinnock (who attended Le Nozze and had a balcony seat), and flutist Emmanuel Pahud, as well as Strauss's opera, Die Frau ohne Schatten.

Photo by Leonard Turnevicius: the cast of The Makropulos Case in the Grosses Festspielhaus.

A night at the opera -- Innsbruck style

(Innsbruck, Austria) No sooner had the overture to Telemann's opera seria Flavius Bertaridus begun in the pit of the Tiroler Landestheater as part of the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music that Jens-Daniel Herzog's directorial shenanigans were underway.

Grimoaldus, the tyrant in this tale of the political struggles in the medieval Lombard kingdom updated by Herzog, walks on stage with three good-time girls, total skank, one of whom is supposed to be an Amy Winehouse-type floozy. Soon, one of the girls is on her knees before Grimoaldus ready to perform you know what on him.

If that wasn't enough to get your attention, then maybe what followed over the next three hours and thirty-four minutes would have. How about Grimoaldus killing a guy at a banquet. Or Grimoaldus’s rape of Rodelinda, Flavius's wife. Or the snorting of cocaine by Flavia (Flavius's sister) and others. Or Flavius’s slitting of Grimoaldus's throat. Or Grimoaldus's murder at the gloved hands of Orontes, his general. Yup, all of this, of course, a rather coarse attempt to titillate the audience. None of it matching any of Telemann’s tones.

Telemann's opera is a kind of "goûts réunis" (unified style, tastes). It contains both German and Italian text, more of the former than the latter. First performed in 1729 at Hamburg's Gaensemarkt Oper, it united different nationalistic styles of music then prevalent--German, Italian, and French. After all, back in those days, Hamburg and its harbour was the "gateway to the world," and this sort of musical cosmopolitanism matched that notion perfectly.

The only thing Herzog has unified in his direction is the combination of bad and good taste. As for the latter, there were a few moments that brought a smile to one's face, like the tableaux during arias in Act 2 and 3. And there was rhyme and reason to the madness by book-ending the opera with a scene at a long table.

For almost every scene, Mathis Neidhardt’s set was in flux, its partitions being twisted and slid to form a banquet hall, an entrance to a brothel and a ladies’ room, a bus terminal waiting area, a bedroom, and a conference room.

Maite Beaumont in the trouser role of Flavius Bertaridus displayed a lovely, focused tone throughout. Antonio Abete was a fuzzy toned Grimoaldus. He reveled in his character's sexual debauchery and violence. In Wie glücklich, his low G, actually an F# due to A=415Hz tuning, didn't project well at all, and his aria Süsse Worte wasn’t delivered very sweetly. Nina Bernsteiner was an accomplished Rodelinda. Ann-Beth Solvang was announced as indisposed. Nonetheless, she was heard in solid voice as Flavia, floating her notes in Was deine Sehnsucht.

Katerina Tretyakova had a bit of uneven vocal production in Geliebter Vater, an aria by Cunibert, Flavius and Rodelinda’s son. Jürgen Sacher cut a creepy Orontes who was outfitted in a uniform akin to a WWII German officer. He made heavy weather of the dotted rhythms in Es leben die gekrönten. Herzog displayed no qualms about racial stereotyping having Korean-Canadian countertenor David DQ Lee portray Onulfus, Bertaridus’s confidant, as a kind of bumbling Charlie Chan character. Lee rose above this typecasting, skittering over filigree in arias such as Quando mai, spietata sorte, (which was transferred from Bertaridus in Act 3 to Onulfus in Act 1), and Die Bosheit muss erliegen, performed while strapping on rounds of ammunition and toying with a machine gun, and applying a Karate Kid-martial arts bandana. Melissa Petit was a very convincing Regimbert, Grimoaldus and Flavia’s teenage son.

De Marchi had the Orchestra of the Academia Montis Regalis, forty-two strong including three bassoons and a contrabassoon (there wasn't enough room in the pit for all of them so the trumpets and timpani played from hollowed-out spaces in the proscenium), playing with suppleness. They captured the various moods in Telemann's music: majestic, joyful, heroic, pastoral, sad. De Marchi also played the harpsichord for most of the recitatives, the remainder played on theorbos and organ. De Marchi also supplied or proscribed the ornamentation for the singers. There were cuts to Telemann's long score with more than a few recitatives and arias being axed. The six piece off-stage band contained a chalumeau which had some intonation problems. As for Claudio Chiavazza’s eighteen voice Choir of the Academia Montis Regalis, the group needed more male presence. Curiously, the German surtitles weren't always an exact match of what was being sung on stage with many words omitted. The cast all wore small portable microphones as the performance was being recorded for a future CD release.

The evening was a long one, beginning at 7:05 p.m. and ending at 11:44 p.m.--that included an intermission after Act I and 2. The performance time had been grossly underestimated by an hour, and a special announcement had to be inserted in the program booklet for patrons.

Unlike the previous night in Pesaro, there was no booing from the audience.

With that, it's off to the Salzburg Festival.

Photo by Leonard Turnevicius: The cast of Telemann's Flavius Bertaridus at Innsbruck's Landestheater.

Just another night at the opera...not!

(Pesaro, Italy) It started off like any night at the Rossini Opera Festival in the Adriatic Arena. Free shuttle buses took patrons from around town to the arena in the northern section of the city where Rossini's Mose in Egitto was to be performed.

The honour guards were at the gates, as they had been at the entrance to the Teatro Rossini the previous evening. Some of Pesaro's finest were also on hand...just in case things got out of control.

Well...things almost did. The close of Act I was greeted with some very loud boos from a number of people in the sold out hall. It seems they weren't too pleased with Graham Vick's updated re-telling of the well-known Biblical story.

Photos of Pharaoh and his wife Amaltea adorned each of the proscenium walls. On stage, Stuart Nunn's uniset of a palatial staircase flanked stage left and right by a three-storey platform, one of which eventually served as an Israeli apartment building complete with satellite TV dish, and national colours hanging from a balcony.

During the Introduction, Vick had some of the Hebrews comb through the audience. They did so dressed by Nunn in blood-spattered white tunics, displaying small photos of themselves as they went.

Later, Mose's invocation for God to restore daylight brought about a different sort of fiat lux from Vick--a large chandelier was raised to the flies. (The same chandelier was lowered to do away with Pharaoh's son, Osiride, later on.) At the end of Act I, Vick's interpretation of the storm of fire amounted to the cast of Hebrews opening their tunics to display small, flashing red lights on their belts.

"Vergogna!" shouted a man seated in Row 22 at the end of Act II. That was followed by the boos of a few people around him. Quick as lightning, the festival's suits were there. So too, some of Pesaro's finest. The house lights were turned up as the performance ground to a halt. Patrons shouted at the group who were booing, telling them to be quiet. They weren't, and more words were exchanged. The air was tense. It was broken by another man in the audience shouting "Bravo maestro" in the direction of conductor Roberto Abbado in the pit. Applause broke out. After several very long moments, Act III finally started.

Vick's parting of the Red Sea was effected by lowering two slabs of the "wailing wall" located upstage. Pharaoh entered from the rear of the hall as his henchmen, in dark get-ups with black ski masks on their heads combed through the audience pointing their machine guns as they went. Spotlights mounted on the auditorium's walls searched through the crowd as though there had been a prison break. Suddenly, a very loud and mysterious gunshot stunned the Egyptians into total submission. By then, the Hebrews had long escaped.

Boos and applause were heard at the end of the opera. That overshadowed some fine music making from Abbado and the Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna. Even though there were some moments when Abbado and company covered the singing on stage, Abbado had the orchestra eating out of his hands. The Coro, too, had suddenly improved since last night, and sounded quite inspired.

Alex Esposito was a top-notch Faraone, his voice resonant, his tone full. Olga Senderskaya's heavy vibrato got in the way of her Amaltea. Dmitri Korchak was a very fine Osiride with an exciting top register. As Mose's daughter Elcia, Sonia Ganassi's lower notes tended towards a very throaty quality, and had little in common timbre-wise with the rest of her fine voice. (Yes, there were one or two boos for her at the curtain call along with much applause.) Stuffy sounding Riccardo Zanellato was no more than adequate as Mose, though Dal tuo stellato soglio was sung with the utmost reverence. As Aronne, Yijie Shi's tone was quite similar to that of Korchak's, so these two made for a good match. Enea Scala as Mambre and Chiara Amaru's Amenofi completed a cast that on the whole was better than the one at last night's Adelaide.

Tomorrow night, it's Telemann's Flavius Bertaridus at Innsbruck's Early Music Festival with Canadian countertenor David DQ Lee in the role of Onulfus.

Photo by Leonard Turnevicius: The cast of Rossini's Mose in Egitto at the Adriatic Arena.

St. John in tune with gypsy music

Need to know

Who: Lara St. John

What: Carmen Fantasie, Zigeunerweisen, Tzigane

With: Boris Brott & the NAO

When: Thursday, August 11 at 7:30 p.m.

Where: Mohawk College’s McIntyre Theatre, 135 Fennell Ave. W.

Cost: $32, senior $27, student $10; reserved section add $5

Call: 905-525-7664

“Stay where there are songs.”

It seems that Canadian violinist Lara St. John took that gypsy proverb to heart, spending three and a half months earlier this year concertizing throughout Australasia. In fact, over the past four months, she was only at her New York City apartment for about six days. Not that she’s complaining, too much.

“It was great trip, but I have to say it’s a little bit too long,” said St. John over the phone from Gotham. “After about eight weeks I started to kind of just loose it. I just wanted to be in a kitchen. Hotels get so old after a while.”

But St. John didn’t stay long in her kitchen. Exeter, Ottawa, San Francisco, and Vancouver beckoned. Next Thursday, she returns to Hamilton, this time performing gypsy inspired music with Boris Brott and his National Academy Orchestra. On the bill, Waxman’s Carmen Fantasie, de Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen (Gypsy Airs), and Ravel’s Tzigane (Gypsy). If you’ve followed St. John’s recording career you’ll know that these works can be found on her 1997 release, Gypsy, though all accompanied by piano.

While there’s no gypsy blood coursing through St. John’s veins, she’s been drawn to gypsy music for years. She got a taste of it in 1988 while in the U.S.S.R. Oh, that tale about St. John falling into a band of gypsies during her stint at the Moscow Conservatoire? Turns out it’s nothing but an urban legend.

“Well look, I mean, I went to Russia when I was 16,” explained St. John. “It was still the Soviet Union. One of my best friends was half-gypsy and taught me a bunch of songs, and that. And we used to sort of party some on the outskirts of Moscow and that sort of thing. But that was years, and years, and years ago.”

These days, St. John is an avid collector of off-the-beaten track East European music. She’s often come back from those parts with her luggage full of LPs and 78s (you know, those circular black things that spin around on a turntable). And, ethnomusicologist style, she’s gone out into the field and transcribed songs sung to her by folks of an older generation.

“I’ve learned so much from gypsy singers over the years,” confessed St. John. “Even just the way I’ll do certain vibrato things in (Waxman’s) Carmen. It’s all intertwined really. I’ve learned a lot from someone like (the late Romanian gypsy singer) Romica Puceanu. For example, just the way she uses vibrato to go from note to note. You can actually impart these things onto the violin. We’re really just imitating the voice.”

For her Hamilton audience however, she definitely doesn’t plan on imparting so-called subharmonics. Back on May 21, The Spec ran a New York Times feature by freelancer Matthew Gurewitsch on Mari Kimura, a relatively unknown New York based violinist, and her exploration of subharmonics, “subterranean sounds” as they were described, notes sounding lower than the violin’s G string. The article stated that the violinist “began to discover these low sounds” while working on the opening two minute soliloquy of Ravel’s Tzigane. It took St. John less than two minutes to debunk the Times’s article.

“Everybody kind of realizes there are such things as subharmonics, although we generally tend to think of them as something to avoid. It’s basically kind of a controlled fart sound, really,” chuckled St. John. “You have to force them out (the subharmonics). “I guess we (violinists) kind of think of it as a scratch that does actually sound a third below, or a fourth below, or whatever. It’s not really a nice sound. For me, when that does happen, I’m not pleased.

“She (Kimura) mentioned she discovered these learning the Tzigane, but under no circumstances was that intentional, or would that have been intentional on the part of Ravel.”

And St. John’s advice for unraveling Ravel’s Tzigane?

“You have to stick very much to what he wrote. He’s very exacting.”

The concert concludes with Ravel’s Boléro, which the self-critical composer once described as “orchestral fabric without music.” Movie-goers will recall it from the Bo Derek-Dudley Moore flick, 10. Leave your telescopes at home, please.

A lukewarm opening night in warm Pesaro

(Pesaro, Italy) Opening night at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro's Teatro Rossini was a lukewarm affair. And that wasn't due to the warm temperatures here on the Adriatic coast.

This year's opening honours fell to Rossini's Adelaide di Borgogna. First performed in 1817, it's one of these win-the-hand-of-the-widow-and-the-crown-is-yours type of operas. Pier'Alli updated the action from medieval times to the mid-nineteenth century with period costumes. Videography of images such as a crown, an old fortress town, water, rain, a time piece, and other items were projected onto the backdrop. These served in place of scenery. The set was limited to a couple of couches, and a couple of mannequins (fallen soldiers) leaning against said backdrop. Pier'Alli's handing of the chorus--placing them in two angled lines to sing--was uninteresting. As for the battle scene, the "umbrella warriors" made more noise shuffling their feet on the stage than did the orchestra playing in the pit and the vocalists singing on stage. And you wonder why he was booed at the curtain call?

As for the cast, Jessica Pratt was a fiery-toned Adelaide. Daniella Barcellona, in the trouser role of Ottone, was not a total disappointment, though a lack of vocal colours kept her performance from being totally top-drawer. Nicola Uliveri's Berengario, and Clemente Antonio Daliotti's Ernesto were both well projected. Francesca Pierpaoli was a capable Iroldo, while Jeannete Fischer contributed some finer shades as Eurice. Bogdan Mihai's Adelberto was the biggest disappointment of the night. His is not a big voice. To make matters worse, he kept his voice in reserve during the recitatives. Not that his arias were showstoppers, either. The production of his high notes was suspect, and he received some boos from the audience in mid-aria. That negative reaction seemed to have spurred him to to work harder, and to be fair, there were some shouts of bravo for him afterward as well.

In the pit, Dmitri Jurowski led the Orchestra e Coro del Teatro Comunale di Bologna. As for Lorenzo Fratini's Coro, the male choristers sometimes have a bad habit of trailing off at the ends of lines or phrases. However, when combined with the women choristers, their sound can be stirring.

As for Jurowski (he's the younger brother of conductor Vladimir Jurowski), there was a mixed reaction from the orchestra. Sometimes they were right with him, and at other times, they reacted after his gestures.

Accompanying the recitatives was Sabrina Avantario at a fortepiano with cellist Sara Nanni primarily doubling her bass line.

Tomorrow night, it's Rossini's Mose in Egitto as directed by Graham Vick.

Photos by Leonard Turnevicius: The Teatro Rossini, and the cast and chorus of Adelaide di Borgogna.