Angela Gheorghiu and Nelly Miriciou replace Deborah Voigt as Tosca at Covent Garden

The Royal Opera has announced the withdrawal of Deborah Voigt from the high-profile revival of Tosca, opening on 9 July. The American soprano has cancelled all her appearances as the title role of the opera due to 'acute colitis'.
In her stead, two oustanding Romanian-born sopranos will share the role of Floria Tosca: Angela Gheorghiu and Nelly Miricioiu.
Angela Gheorghiu returns to this production in the role that she created in 2006, when this staging with set designs by Paul Browan was first seen. With Bryn Terfel interpreting the role of Scarpia, Tosca's dream team will be reunited, as both artists featured in the original production. Gheorghiu will sing in the performances on 9, 14 and 16 July.
Gheorghiu is familiar to the Royal Opera stage, where she made her international debut in 1992 singing Zerlina in Don Giovanni and came to fame in the 1994 production of La traviata, which will be revived for her next season. Her first Tosca in a fully staged production was at Covent Garden in 2006.
However, the more intriguing part of the announcement is that in the other two performances of Tosca, on 11 and 18 July, the title role will be taken up by Nelly Miricioiu.

Read the whole article here: http://www.musicalcriticism.com/news/roh-cast-tosca-0609.shtml

An Interview with Ramón Vargas on Un ballo in maschera at the ROH

The Royal Opera's summer Italian mini-festival continues with a revival of Verdi's mid-period masterpiece, Un ballo in maschera. Heading an interesting cast in Mario Martone's production is Mexican tenor Ramón Vargas in the lead role of Riccardo, the Governor of Boston, who dies at the hands of his best friend Renato during a masked ball when the latter believes Riccardo has been engaged in an affair with his wife, Amelia. It's an innocent love, however, and Riccardo dies innocent of the crime for which he has been murdered.
Un ballo in maschera is one of the composer's most underrated mature works, and Riccardo has become something of a signature role for Vargas who, more than twenty years into a distinguished career, ranks amongst the world's finest lyric tenors. He partnered Renée Fleming in excerpts from Manon and La traviata in the Met gala given in her honour to open the 2008-09 season, came to London to sing Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni,and is now back to perform an opera by Verdi, whom he ranks as the greatest of all opera composers.
We meet during rehearsals for Un ballo and Vargas is a charming, direct and expressive interviewee, as well as being a keen advocate for his art form. When I ask why he thinks this piece remains so powerful 150 years after its premiere, he answers simply: 'Because in many ways it's a very modern story. It's something that happens every day. Many people in the audience will be able to relate what happens on stage to real life. Frustrated love is very human, and it's always happening.'

Read more here:

http://www.musicalcriticism.com/interviews/vargas-0609.shtml

Coming soon:

Reviews of Boheme, Orpheus, Ballo and Katya Kabanova at Opera Holland Park
Reviews of L'Amour de loin at ENO;
Barbiere, Ballo and Tosca at the ROH;
DiDonato, Hampson and Calleja in concert at the ROH;
Colin Davis and the LSO at the Barbican;
Oklahoma! at the Chichester Festival

Recording reviews:
the Danish Ring on DVD; Magdalena Kozena's Vivaldi disc; Corrado d'Altamura on Opera Rara; and the Mariinsky's new label

La traviata at the ROH with Renee Fleming 18 June 2009

Rapturous applause greeted the return of Renée Fleming to Covent Garden for a revival of Verdi's La traviata – and with good reason.
The cast was unusually consistent from top to bottom, with strong leading performances by Thomas Hampson as Germont and Joseph Calleja as Alfredo, while Antonio Pappano's meticulous conducting and the return of Sir Richard Eyre to revive his production for the first time since it was unveiled in 1994 made for a richly engaging experience.
Perhaps surprisingly, this wasn't an especially high-voltage, stand-and-deliver-as-loudly-as-possible Traviata but instead a highly nuanced revival. In particular, there's so much going on in Fleming's interpretation that the connoisseur could not help but be intrigued by what she brings to the role of Violetta. Though she was slightly tentative vocally in the early scenes of Act 1 and inevitably the hectic coloratura passages of 'Sempre libera' did not seem entirely comfortable, her trademark sumptuous tone started to emerge in the love duet and particularly in the recitative to her big aria. And by bringing out the tipsiness of the character during 'Sempre libera' – she staggers round with her champagne glass and throws some ice from the champagne fountain into the air – Fleming gave the number a whirligig feeling that helped propel her through it. In this revival, Violetta also flings open the doors at the start of the second verse of the number, as if to visually emphasise her decision to 'throw herself into the vortex of pleasure' – in other words, to let real life come through the door.

http://www.musicalcriticism.com/opera/roh-traviata-0609.shtml

The Diva Returns: An Interview with Renée Fleming on La traviata at the ROH

In a constellation of the world's opera stars, one shines brighter than all the rest. But it's not merely her ravishingly beautiful voice and physical glamour that make Renée Fleming special. In person, she makes an extraordinarily intelligent and articulate interviewee. And it comes as no surprise, since as a probing interpreter of the works that she performs, she has few equals and no superiors.
Though Fleming appeared in concert performances of Thaïs at Covent Garden in 2007, she hasn't done a staged opera here since an Otello in 2005. So her return for a revival of Sir Richard Eyre's acclaimed 1994 production of Verdi's La traviata this month is a major event, surely made more so by her excellent co-stars, Thomas Hampson and Joseph Calleja. It's not just a London event, either: the performance on 30 June will be broadcast live to free big screen relays around the country and to cinemas around the UK and the world.
This was to have been Fleming's final run of performances as Violetta, but things have changed since that announcement was made. 'I said I'm saying goodbye to it,' she acknowledges, 'and it looked on the calendar like that would be the case, because my opera appearances are scheduled so far in advance. But I'm actually now singing it next summer in Zurich for two festival performances.'
Of the character of Violetta, Fleming comments that 'She's great. It's such a beautiful role, but it's extremely challenging.' With characteristic wisdom, the soprano delayed adding the role to her repertoire until only about six years ago, when she felt fully prepared. 'I waited because she's so completely iconic,' she explains, 'and the list of legends who made their name by singing her is so long that it's daunting. Anthony Tomassini wrote an article a few years ago about the fact that many singers of my generation have hesitated to sing these iconic roles – Tosca, Butterfly, Violetta. There are so many classic recordings of them, and there are big shoes to fill. When we do sing them, people are very quick to be harsh. People don't necessary want to make room for the new generation.
'Where we've succeeded is in Mozart and baroque opera – repertoire that wasn't so well represented in the past, whereas the bread-and-butter Italian repertoire was incredibly well sung in the 1950s and '60s. I think now people are starting to say, OK, it's been a long time now, we'd really like to hear this music again!'

To read the whole article, visit the site here:
http://www.musicalcriticism.com/interviews/fleming-0609.shtml

Royal Opera announces 2009-10 season

Ahead of the official press conference on Wednesday, the Royal Opera House has distributed details of the resident companies' 2009-10 season at Covent Garden through its Friends' magazine, About the House. Various online sources, including the opera weblog Intermezzo and the Ballet.co site, have reported on the programming.
New productions of Tristan und Isolde, Manon, Tchaikovsky's The Slippers, Tamerlano, The Gambler and Aida provide several of the highlights of the season.
The stars lined up to appear include Plàcido Domingo, Rolando Villazón, Anna Netrebko, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Jonas Kaufmann, Roberto Alagna, Ben Heppner, Elina Garanca and Angela Gheorghiu.
In addition to Music Director Antonio Pappano, the conductors planning to take to the Covent Garden pit include Sir Colin Davis, Sir Charles Mackerras, Sir Mark Elder, Nicola Luisotti, Semyon Bychkov, Bertrand de Billy, Hartmut Haenchen and, in a rare ROH appearance by a female conductor (and a British one at that), Julia Jones.
The season opens on 7 September with a concert performance of Donizetti's masterpiece Linda di Chamounix. Donizetti specialist Mark Elder leads a largely young cast including Eglise Gutierrez, Stephen Costello and Luciano Botelho, along with veteran Italian baritone Alessandro Corbelli. The concert will be repeated on 14 September. As previously reported, bel canto specialist label Opera Rara will record the concerts for release later in the season.

Read the whole story here: http://www.musicalcriticism.com/news/roh-0409.shtml

Roberto Alagna Returns in the ROH's Il trovatore; Dmitri Hvorostovsky Interview

While it's perhaps true that Il trovatore demands the four greatest singers in the world, in reality it rarely gets them. That means that the focus shifts to different characters depending on who the stronger performers happen to be. On this occasion it was all about the men, thanks in particular to the return of Roberto Alagna to Covent Garden after a five-year absence, in the role of Manrico.
But this third revival of Elijah Moshinsky is far from an all-out success. The staging has always been cumbersome, largely due to Dante Ferretti's enormous, overblown sets, which are traditional in the sense of retaining Verdi and Cammarano's story in a slight updating, but at the same time they do not depict the opera's locations with the lavish hyperrealism of a Zeffirelli. Nor are they so beautiful. It's frustrating, in fact, how four-square and un-evocative it all is, since this piece is hugely demanding in performance. The librettist constantly falls back on the racconto form, whereby action is recounted in narratives rather than actually depicted onstage. This means that the director and designer have to provide an imaginative framework in which the singers can convey the famously convoluted and nonsensical plot about mistaken identities and parental curses.

Read more here:
http://www.musicalcriticism.com/opera/roh-trovatore-0409.shtml

Easter Monday marks a highpoint in The Royal Opera's calendar, as an exciting revival of Verdi's Il trovatore brings together two favourite singers making their house role debuts – Roberto Alagna as Manrico and Sondra Radvanovsky as Leonora – with a member of the original cast of the production, the great Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky.
Verdi has always been a mainstay of Hvorostovsky's career, and with the Royal Opera alone he's appeared in La traviata, Un ballo in maschera, Don Carlo, Rigoletto and I masnadieri, as well as Il trovatore. Elsewhere, he's expanded his repertoire to include Simon Boccanegra, while his signature role has always been the title part in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin.
His appearances in song recitals, such as that with Evgeny Kissin last autumn at the Barbican, are equally as legendary as his operatic appearances, while he's also expanded his repertoire to include Neapolitan arias. Russian popular music is a new fascination for him, with a brand new album recently in the bag, and he's keen to venture into new territories such as film, as well as adding Rubinstein's The Demon and further Verdi roles in Ernani, Macbeth and Otello to his profile. I caught up with him in the final stages of rehearsals for Trovatore to ask him about all this and more.
Hvorostovsky's role in the opera, the Conte di Luna, is something of an evildoer, bringing about his brother's death. But does he have a sympathetic side? 'Of course: he's in love,' says Hvorostovsky. 'That says it all. I think the motivation of being in love can drive you to extremes. In this production he's a military man, and love turns him evil easily, because he's been dealing with arms and wars.'
The roles that the baritone tends to do nowadays are either fathers, such as Rigoletto, Germont and Boccanegra, or lovers, such as Di Luna, Onegin and Renato. Does he prefer one to the other? 'No,' he assures me. 'Each role is fulfilling. Sometimes my character reflects it all, and you can always mix them up. With Rigoletto you're dealing with a big touch of lyricism and the father's love and dedication, so that makes him into a good character. So the Conte di Luna becomes totally obsessed with his love for Leonora, and his revenge and constant rivalry with his brother, Manrico, is also part of the love triangle. I haven't done the most totally evil roles yet: Iago is yet to come into my repertoire.'

Read more here:
http://www.musicalcriticism.com/interviews/hvorostovsky-0409.shtml

The BBC Proms 2009 announced

Handel's Partenope, a tribute to the MGM musicals, Bernard Haitink's 80th birthday, Purcell's Fairy Queen, Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, a celebration of Cambridge University's 800th anniversary and a weekend commemorating the 75th anniversary of the deaths of Elgar, Delius and Holst are just a selection of the concerts on offer at this year's BBC Proms.
Visits by international orchestras, such as the Royal Concertgebouw under Mariss Jansons, the Leipzig Gewandhaus under Riccardo Chailly, and the Vienna Philharmonic under Harnoncourt and Mehta, are contrasted with a Bollywood extravaganza, a complete performance of Handel's Samson and three performances from Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. The latter includes a complete performance of Beethoven's Fidelio in concert, with a rare UK visit from Waltraud Meier as Leonore, Simon O'Neill as Florestan and Sir John Tomlinson as Rocco. Barenboim will also lead the orchestra in the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde and Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique.
The birthday composers are well served. In addition to Partenope and Samson, Handel is represented by a massed-choir performance of Messiah, four of the Coronation Anthems, arias from several of the operas and excerpts from Music for the Royal Fireworks. Glyndebourne's production of The Fairy Queen comes to the Proms in a semi-staging, while other Purcell works are showcased in a Chamber Prom and on the Last Night. Mendelssohn does particularly well, with the symphonies, the Violin Concerto and the First Piano Concerto. Of note here is the Halle's performance of Symphony No 2, Lobegesang, with its extended choral movement. Haydn, too, is celebrated, but perhaps less extensively so than might be the case, given his enormous output. Still, The Creation should be a highlight, with soprano Rosemary Joshua joining Paul McCreesh and his Gabrieli Consort, as should the Manchester Camerata's performance of The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross.
Contemporary music is as well served as ever, with a wide range of world and UK premieres. Louis Andriessen's The Hague Hacking is played here for the first time, as are the revised version of Rebecca Saunders's traces and Schnittke's Nagasaki, while Sir Harrison Birtwistle and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies are also represented. As ever, the Proms are branching out, too, with an evening devoted to seventy-five years of the MGM musicals with Sir Thomas Allen and Kim Criswell and a special day celebrating the music of Bollywood.

Read more at
http://www.musicalcriticism.com/news/proms-0409.shtml