From summer in San Francisco

Special announcement from SF Opera - they are running their last lockdown-driven free live streaming season. That's optimism for you.

An opera every weekend in July!

And the first on offer is their brilliant production of Janáček's

Here's the link to their full information. And here's the program - dates are our time.

Given time difference the free live streams are from Sunday 3am through to Monday 5pm.

This link to the website will take you to the stream when it's available.

JANÁČEK’S JENůFA

JULY 11–12

Celebrate the break with a brilliant production of Leoš Janáček's 'grim story of infanticide and redemption', his first great success (1904). Here's an introduction to its shock value and success in Wikipedia.

Malin Byström is Jenufa, her stepmother Karita Mattila

SFO's production dates from 2016 and stars Malin Byström, Karita Mattila, William Burden, and Scott Quinn under the baton of Jiří Bĕlohlávek. Directed by Olivier Tambosi. The reviews for this production are ecstatic. Bachtrack summarized, 'This performance showed Janáček as a light for composers of future generations'.

Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, just one in a cast of great singers, was particularly praised. She has sung the role of the stepmother worldwide. 'But this doesn’t explain her unearthly ability to inhabit both the music and the role to such a powerful, psychologically-layered degree that one forgets there is a human being, in costume, on stage, pouring forth those glorious high notes and unspeakably beautiful, emotive vocal colors. She is so utterly believable that it seems the rather hateful self-centered Kostelnička is in fact real.'

Here's another review: 'And as a singing actor, Mattila is nonpareil. The combination of provincial rectitude and maternal tenderness that make Kostelnicka such a tricky character to embody onstage shone through with telling clarity in her performance.'

We've a focus on Janáček's operas coming up in some future term - so start here!

And here are the later SFO livestream productions - more detail as they get nearer.....

BERLIOZ’S THE TROJANS

JULY 18–19

Back to Troy for us, and a fine cast for SFO. Hector Berlioz’s monumental five-part epic The Trojans, with Bryan Hymel, Susan Graham, and Anna Caterina Antonacci under the baton of Sir Donald Runnicles in David McVicar's production.

STRAUSS’ ELEKTRA

JULY 25–26

Christine Goerke is Elektra, in a radical production.

VERDI’S LUISA MILLER

AUGUST 1- 2

Verdi’s star-crossed romance Luisa Miller, 'a tale of class, deception, and betrayal set in the Alps'. With Leah Crocetto and Michael Fabiano

Operatic solstice feast

Dear all,

We're meeting today virtually, defeated again by lockdown rules.

But our traditional end of term party, and shared feast, has a virtual Zoom event today, and a collaborative gastronomic gift to all.

Here's our classic collaborative Christmas in Winter recipe book.

Cover images: The feast of Saul, Handel, in Adelaide, 2017. David Hockney feast at Glyndebourne celebrates Rake’s Progress – painting by Bob Marchant. Mariusz Kwiecien as Don Giovanni berates Leporello for his very reasonable concern. (Lyric Opera 2014).

Download your copy of this splendidly warming book below!

Operatic Christmas in Winter 21

.pdf

Download PDF • 3.36MB

And for those who joined us in 2021, here's the earlier edition, Operatic Recipes, from the depths of lockdown in September 2020.

A fine series - but we do hope it's not a continuing one.

Happy winter break, everyone. As they sang in La Boheme, see you in the spring.

Lyn, 25/6/21

Operatic Recipes 2020

.pdf

Download PDF • 2.82MB

Opera and Australia

Opera often appears to be one of the (many) species endangered by current Australian society. The lists of Australian composers and Australian works are short, and the seasons of any productions - and memories of them - are shorter.

Did you miss Richard Meale's opera Voss, from Patrick White's novel of the same name? Widely labelled the Great Australian Opera, it was commissioned by The Australian Opera, premiered at the Adelaide Festival in 1986, did Sydney and Melbourne and then, in 2011, was added to the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia's Sounds of Australia registry. But don't worry - it comes back courtesy of Vic Opera later this year - a hugely anticipated and ambitious project. We'll be there, through generosity of Vic Opera.

Meanwhile, don't look for a DVD of Voss. Or of Richard Mills' shattering operatic account of the wreck of the Batavia. The only available video recordings of past Australian opera composers' triumphs are of Mills' Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and two more recent operas by Brett Dean. His much lauded version of Peter Carey's novel, Bliss was recorded by ABC and is available on Vimeo (we'll get to that). And his more recent Hamlet currently boasts the only international success of Aussie opera - premiered in Glyndebourne 2017 - we viewed it last year, it is now on the (possible) next season at the Met in New York.

Sydney Opera House hosts the third and probably last production of The Eight Wonder, 2016. (It rained.)

Thus it was for The Eighth Wonder, Alan John's and Dennis Watkins’ opera telling the saga (or one side of it) of the artistic and political battles around the building of Sydney Opera House. It was produced, in Sydney, three times, and disappeared - in a symbolic demonstration of its main premise, that Australian culture was antipathetical to opera! Recently, as documented in a detailed Limelight article, the opera has won its own website, devoted to storing safely a carefully restored libretto and score, as well as some of the rave reviews from those performances, and delightful images of costume design. You can visit the website here.

But how to view this apparent gem? There was apparently never a video record of the first staging in 1995, and the later staging, in 2016, was an ambitious experiment with audience outside and orchestra inside, singers moving between these worlds. Not good for recording!

One highly imperfect record remains, and we'll view it this week! The second 1995 performance was hastily screened on ABC TV, an unacknowledged and possibly illegal video was taken by someone, a copy was found by online searching in the US and has made its way to our group. It's our viewing this week.

Reviews of the 2016 performance raved (and blessed the messages about cultural cringe).

Here's Peter McCallum. 'In Dennis Watkins and Alan John's libretto, the story of how a moment of visionary post-war optimism from premier Joe Cahill and conductor Eugene Goossens weathered peevish artistic rivalry from The Maestro (Adrian Tamburini) and the skulduggery of opposition leader Robert Askin, to realise Joern Utzon's architectural masterpiece is a metaphor for nation building.'

The Guardian reviewer did detect a 'slight whiff of propaganda'.

A metaphor for nation building?

Wondering why the great Australian blight on opera? Here's reflections in 2015 from the Guardian. A footnote: do they have to be Great Australian Operas to succeed? We've seen three new brief operas from Vic Opera this year.

In his glowing Limelight article, Kim Williams discusses the importance of the opera and why he recommends logging on to the eighthwondertheopera.com.

'In my view there are two truly great, large-scale, original Australian operas, The Eighth Wonder by Alan John with libretto by Dennis Watkins and John, and Voss by Richard Meale, composed to a libretto by David Malouf (based on the famous Patrick White novel). Both were commissioned and premiered by The Australian Opera (as Opera Australia was then known), a decade apart. Both are major masterpieces and deserve to be standard repertoire here and internationally.'

Lyn, 13 June, '21