My Favorite Productions of the 2011-2012 Metropolitan Opera Season

It has been a couple of weeks since that I was rewarded with receiving the Metropolitan Opera’s 2011-2012 Radio Broadcast and Live in HD guide for the upcoming season, and I was elated to find it among the items in my mailbox. Naturally, I immediately began to scan the pages that were contained between the covers, and the front of the brochure was clearly designed and utilized to cater to the widest possible audience, for it featured soprano Anna Netrebko in a production photograph for the season’s new production of Jules Massenet’s Manon. I could spend some appreciable time on why I think it is an odd move for Netrebko to add the role of Manon to her repertory at this precise moment, but I shall abstain for the nonce.

My favorite production for which I possess the most excitement in the current season has to be Handel’s Rodelinda, which stars Renee Fleming and Andreas Scholl, the latter of whom recently gave a critically lauded recital at Carnegie Hall. This was the opera that was my maiden voyage into this beautiful art form, and Renee Fleming had portrayed the heroine in that Metropolitan Opera broadcast responsible for my new passion. This sort of brings my journey in the world of opera to the point of its origin. In that light one could make the case that I am embarking on a new stage of my journey in opera, which is certainly veritable as I begin to make this my career. The production is by director Stephen Wadsworth, and it is a safe, traditional one, which keeps me glad. I cannot wait to at least hear this glorious performance.

My second— That is to say, my other production for which I am elated is the new baroque pastiche with music from Vivaldi, Handel, and Rameau among others and featuring a new libretto by Jeremy Sams that is entitled The Enchanted Island. The plot of this new work is centered around the characters from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but this episode has them shipwrecked on the island from another of Shakespeare’s plays, The Tempest. The cast is exciting, for it includes a star-studded roster of excellent vocalists, some of whom you would expect in baroque repertoire, and there are others whom you would not. The cast comprises the talents of Placido Domingo, whom I should not expect to find singing baroque music, Lisette Oropesa, whom I shall be glad to have the pleasure of hearing again, Joyce DiDonato, who has become the premier mezzo-soprano in the Rossini and baroque repertoire outside of the renowned Cecilia Bartoli, David Daniels, Luca Pisaroni, and Danielle de Niese, who is one of my favorite sopranos to hear.

I am certain that my readers will notice the emphasis I took to say that The Enchanted Island is my other favorite production of the season, and there is due cause for this. Twitter is responsible for this wording, and there is a rather humorous anecdote involved with the fact. When I am not writing blog posts or studying, I can often be found scanning the tweets of my hallowed list of people that I follow on Twitter to obtain more news of the happenings in the operatic and theatrical worlds, and I also am given the liberty of mentioning things that I am anxious to do or see. It is in this part of the story that it would be nice to say that Danielle (yes, this Danielle) and I “go way back” as the expression is, but, unfortunately, we do not. However, we mutually and reciprocally follow each other on Twitter, and she responds to things I post considerably often when one thinks of who she is and what she does. Well, as it happened, I casually mentioned that my favorite production in anticipation of the Met’s current season was Rodelinda as I have mentioned here, and, having more than one, I followed that remark with,

My second choice of a production to witness at @MetOpera would have to be ‘The Enchanted Island’ with @Danielledeniese and @JoyceDiDonato.

 Much to my surprise, I received this reply from Ms. de Niese in good humor:

@TylerBarton27 @metopera @joycedidonato second? ….. <louder and with longer vowels> SEEECOOOND? 🙂

Thus, my later choice of wording for all of eternity became “other” at her direction, for she replied when I said that I could have used a different word,

 @TylerBarton27 @metopera @joycedidonato yes…. “Other” or…… “first” :-)))))))))

Well, it did not go quite so high as first, though it could well tie for that title, but I have employed greater discretion thereafter using the alternate wording, and divas the world over are the happier for it, I am pleased to announce.

Returning to my other productions for which I am excited, one of them has revealed itself to me on short notice, and it is to be streamed live this Halloween evening. Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which is a perennial favorite at the Met as a showcase for both established stars and the new talent that presents itself to the world of opera. I am most anxious to hear soprano Mojca Erdmann , who had a feature in Opera News’ October issue, and Mariusz Kwiecien after his surgery on his back. Barbara Fritolli and Ramon Vargas complement these artists in the production, and I am certain that they shall be in excellent vocal form this evening. This may well be my activity for the evening, so it would be nice if some kind patron would leave a container of chocolates upon my doorstep since I shall be unable to go begging for it from other houses in my neighborhood.

We also have exciting new heirs to the La Fille du Regiment star vehicle this year in tenor Lawrence Brownlee and Nino Machaidze. Kiri Te Kanawa returns as the Duchess of Krakenthorp. Having witnessed Brownlee perform in person, his ability is solid, but his acting leaves a void with the audience. He is more of the “stand in one place and sing” type of singer presently, but I expect that will change with time. Of course, with his voice, who would complain about that fact?

Another Donizetti opera receives a stellar cast pairing this season, and it is quite unexpected for me. Diana Damrau and Juan Diego Florez are the two lovers in L’Elisir d’Amore, and they join forces with Kwiecien and Alessandro Corbelli. This promises to be a memorable run of performances, and, from the standpoint of the singers alone, it may well raise the performance standard for this opera to an exponential degree. I am excited for this!

A new thing that I want to hear is Leos Janacek’s The Makropulos Case starring skilled Janacek interpreter Karita Mattila. Janacek’s music has intrigued me ever since I heard Renee Fleming’s recording of selections from Jenufa, and I was impressed by the melodies in From the House of the Dead when it made its premiere at the Met a few years since. Janacek is composer that I would feel ready to hear in a new, untried context, so I look forward to this outing to have the chance.

Natalie Dessay brings the Met her interpretation of Verdi’s doomed heroine in  La Traviata after her touring  of the role in Europe over the summer festival season. The best story of one of these runs came from the Aix en Provence festival with Dessay in the role of Violetta under the baton of Louis Langree with the assistance of the London Symphony Orchestra. Maxine Kwok-Adams, who is one of the principle violinists with that revered ensemble, and who is another person I follow on Twitter, tweeted that she screamed in the orchestra pit as a fox ran amongst the musicians during a performance! The festival is an outdoor one, so I suppose occurrences such as that one will happen occasionally. Nevertheless, the New York Times did not give it a very nice review, and they did mention that Langree could not seem to keep absolute hold of the orchestra. One now wonders why… As for her Alfredo, I am most dissatisfied, for they have chosen Matthew Polenzani. His Alfredo from 2007 opposite Renee Fleming was a weak one in my opinion, but I shall listen again to see if he has improved since then.

Patricia Racette returns to us in Puccini’s Tosca, and Roberto Alagna and Aleksandrs Antonenko share the role of Cavaradossi while James Morris and George Gagnidze alternate as Scarpia this season.

Of course, there are also the two new installments of Wagner’s Ring cycle for us to herald with Deborah Voigt and Bryn Terfel. James Hunter Morris debuted as Seigfried recently replacing the indisposed tenor who preceded him, and he was phenomenal by all accounts. I cannot wait to hear him continue in the role.

That list completes my greatest anxieties for expectation for the Metropolitan Opera’s 2011-2012 season, and it promises to be an exquisite one. The broadcast season will soon be upon us, and my Saturdays shall be claimed by being employed in the practice of listening to the world’s best opera house delivering us the grandest performances in the present world.

I pray that my readers are all exceptionally blessed in their lives currently, and I intimate my utmost ingratiation to all of you for allowing me this pleasure of including myself in your lives. I pray that God continues to bless all of you immensely!
-Tyler.

Renee Fleming in Armida on PBS, and Opera on Twitter

Concerning the first part of my post’s title,  Mary Zimmerman’s latest production for the Metropolitan Opera, Gioacchino Rossini’s Armida, will be aired on PBS later this month. My local station is scheduled to air it on the twenty-eighth, and I am immensely excited to see this again after being one of the nearly two hundred thousand audience members who saw it in May as part of the Met’s Live in HD season. The cast included the radiant Renee Fleming as Armida, who is supposed to be a sorceress, the incomparable Lawrence Brownlee as Rinaldo, who falls in love with Armida, the surprisingly talented John Osborne, and a former cast member to Renee in Handel’s Rodelinda when it was last presented at the Metropolitan Opera, Kobie van Rensburg. Because I immensely enjoyed this performance, when I discovered that the Met was scheduled to revive this production for the 2010-11 season with much of the same cast including Fleming, I elected to choose it as the anchor of my entertainment for my maiden visit to New York City next year.

The production itself was rather lacking in developing and advancing the chronicle of events, and I did not think that it gave enough emphasis to the magic potential of the production, since this was a critical point of the Met’s marketing of this production, and, for evidence of this, I refer to the line that I constantly read which regularly mentioned Fleming starring as “Rossini’s sorceress”. I wish Zimmerman would think in such visionary spectrums as Robert Lepage or in such wonderfully revitalizing terms as Bartlett Sher. Beyond the failings of the production, I must say that the singing was most enjoyable, and the tenors performed exceptionally well. I was impressed by the varying vocal tones of the different tenors, who are all respected as opulent performers of the Bel Canto repertoire. Lawrence Brownlee’s high notes sounded almost effortless, and I must admit that I was extraordinarily envious of his marvelous voice. I would appreciate seeing him perform in other Rossini operas that are rarely performed, so I would be anxious to see him Guillame Tell somewhere.

As for the second portion of my title, it may have come to some of my readers’ attention that I have included a Twitter widget to my blog’s sidebar, which implies that I have a Twitter account. I have found a wealth of information through both Chelsea and SarahB, and I would like to think that I have become a better acquaintance to both of them in the process. Chelsea and SarahB, I proffer my immense gratitude to you both for so readily accepting my presence on Twitter and through following your respective blogs, and I have exuberantly enjoyed learning so much from the both of your collective knowledge of opera. I have also discovered that opera has an enormous presence on Twitter. I follow sixty-nine people or organizations, most of which are related to opera or the arts, which is a considerable amount of entities when one considers the limited amount of time that I have spent using Twitter. It turns out that almost any piece of relevant news to opera that can be expressed in one hundred forty characters or less can be found on this rather unique social networking website. Danielle De Niese, Renee Fleming, Joyce DiDonato, Thomas Hampson, the Metropolitan Opera, and most of the other major opera houses of the nation, and, indeed, the world, have Twitter feeds, and I have collected all of the ones of which I am aware into a list, which is what I display in my Twitter widget as a feed. The amount of information one can receive from these short communiques is most definitely immense, and it is not difficult to hold conversations on a given subject between a group of people, for Chelsea, SarahB, and I discussed American opera and Tobias Pickers’s An American Tragedy recently. I hope that this new medium of communication affords us as great an opportunity at discovering new things about opera as any of its predecessors, and I am pleased to think that I am an humble part of it. I currently possess five followers to my tweets, as they are colloquially known by account holders to the service, and among this group of individuals is Carnegie Hall’s Twitter account. I am most exuberant about this, and, while my cause for rejoice may be slight in the minds of some, I am honored that I am referenced by such a revered establishment as it is among our world of entertainment venues.

I thank all of youfor continuing to peruse my posts, and I continue to pray for God’s blessings to each of you.

-Tyler.

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If I Were In Europe This Summer,…

… I would attend the festival that receives the pleasure of hearing what shall probably be the last Violetta that Renee Fleming will ever sing. I am not sure, but I believe that Zurich is the European city to host this performance, and she also sings a Strauss opera there later this summer; moreover, if anyone could record this, I would be elated to peuse such a recording. The other continental festivals look rather enticing also, and for example I inform my readers that Diana Damrau, Joyce DiDonato, and Anne Sofie von Otter are all scheduled to sing in Europe over the summer months. Reading about all of this in the latest issue of Opera News has made me wish that I had some sort of festival near me such as the ones in Europe to which we all long to make our pilgrimage.

In other news Diana Damrau has withdrawn herself from performances of Ades’s Hamlet because of pregnancy. Naturally, one wonders if she will be singing this role at the Met soon, for I read a comment on YouTube about how Diana Damrau forever seems to sing a role the year after Natalie Dessay is given it. It would be nice to see Damrau get to perform it first for once.

Philip Langridge, who is perhaps most recently known as the biennial Witch Regina Lickspittle in the Met’s abridged, English language production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel, died on March the 5th. This is a veritable shock to anyone who heard his vibrant performances as the Witch, for they were so recent to us this season. Langridge was an artist of incredible longevity, and he ought to be a model for all future singers who aspire to perform professionally, for at seventy-one he was yet performing with great constancy and vigor. Having sung several world premiere works and been a noted interpreter of Benjamin Britten, he was scheduled to give yet another world premiere in 2011. He won an Olivier Award for his performances, and he was in the world premiere of Ades’s The Tempest. I am sure that he shall be sorely missed by opera audiences.

When I listened to the Met’s broadcast of La Traviata, I must admit that I was rather disappointed. My greatest loss of faith in the performance came form Angela Gheorghiu during her rendition of Sempre Libera. At the end of the aria, she let the orchestra preced her, and she missed a phrase; however, the mortifying part was that the audience seemed to applaud as if nothing had happened. Gheorghiu’s singing that afternoon was full of problems for me, and there were times when she sounded as if she was marking, for there were instances in which she sounded very quiet in the first act and the second scene of the second act. Despite the prima donna’s failings, Jmes Valenti sounded excellent in his Metropolitan Opera debut, and Thomas Hampson provided depth and intelligent insight to the character of Germont.

On the first of May, which turnoed out to be a most splendid afternoon insofar as the weather is concerned, I was blessed to go to my local cinema to see the Met’s Live in HD simulcast of Rossini’s Armida starring Renee Fleming and Lawrence Brownlee. Though I thought Mary Zimmerman might have utilized the full potential of the Met’s extensive technical resources a little better, I must say that I was pleased with the outcome of the production. Renee Fleming amazed me to the fullest extent with her singing for the afternoon, and her acting, which I have heard criticized by some people I know, left little to be desired, for I thought she provided an excellent interpretaion of her character. Lawrence Brownlee, whom I had never heard before this broadcast, proved to be every bit as marvelous a singer as I had heard him lauded to be by so many. His colleagues, sopranos Fleming and Sarah Coburn not least among them, praise his instrument when they work with him, and I look forward to hearing more from him in the future. His high notes did indeed sound effortless, and when one considers that he is yet a relatively young singer, it sets the imagination to dreaming about his future performances. Fleming and Brownlee, however, were not the only stars of the afternoon; the cast also included Kobie van Rensburg, Barry Banks, and John Osborn, and I must confess that I heard so many high notes that I was unsure if I would ever be considered an opera singer. I thought that it was rather hilarious that Mary Jo Heath claimed that there must not be any other Bel canto operas being performed that Saturday because of the fact that the Bel Canto tenors seemed to all be in the cast of Armida. John Osborn quickly pointed out that Joyce DiDonato was singing a Rossini opera in Europe that day. I am anxious to see this production next season at the Met. As an aside, does anyone have any idea as to what that Bel Canto opera was that Renee Fleming referenced when she promised that she was going to sing another one in a couple of years?

Thank you for continuing to read my posts, and I pray that my readers are all well and that God continues to grant you the desires of your heart.
-Tyler.

Everything Over The Weekend

I have been madly preoccupied of late, which explains why I have not been able to either read the blogs of others or post a new title to my own. Nevertheless, I am delivering another post to the inquiring minds of my followers.

I have recently gotten a position of weekly employment at Poteet Theatre, my local theatrical “home.” Jay, after he could cull no one from the ranks of his regular employees, asked me to do some work for him at the theatre. It has since become our task to purge the theatre of anything that is not needed anymore and to organize what remains. The theatre is located in a grand church near downtown Oklahoma City, which has a tall bell-tower adjacent to its sanctuary. It was my duty to clear out one of the five or six floors of this before we could begin the other things we wanted to accomplish, and I was able to complete this within a day. In my next post, I shall provide pictures of our performance space and the sweeping view from the tower and other things in which I think you shall have some interest in seeing for your enjoyment. Anyway, I am to work to this end that I have heretofore briefly described for four more weeks, and then if Jay can find a donor to furnish my wages for the remainder of the year, I am to remain there coming once a week to ensure the maintenance of the theatre. This occupation profits me well and it is pleasant to work where I have so many friends and acquaintances constantly coming and going to and from wherever they will.

On Saturday I did not audition, nor did I listen to the Met’s broadcast of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold. I was unable to audition because neither of my parents would take me to auditions since there was about an inch of snow on the ground. Of all of the weekends for it to snow, this was definitely not the one I should have chosen. It is more incredible to believe when one knows that just the weekend prior, we had temperatures in the 70’s across our state! Oklahoma weather can be most enjoyable, but it can also be just as detrimental to one’s plans. I was rather disappointed at this since there was no ice upon the roads and my parents went out later in the day, but I am glad that I may still be allowed to work at Poteet as often as I do. As for the Met’s broadcast, I missed it for the simple reason that the batteries in my little portable radio went dead. Had I been determined to hear the broadcast, and I was eager to hear Waltraud Meier sing Sieglinde, I could have comandeered someone else’s radio from them, but I do not think that God should have looked kindly upon such an action. Besides, there is a good chance that it will be available for download on the Uploads From the Metropolitan Opera website. I am elated at the prospect of hearing the rest of the Met’s Ring cycle.

On Sunday, which, may I remind my readers, is supposed to be a day of rest and reflection upon God, my family and I worked on some renovations to our house. These took the larger portion of the day to complete, pro tempore, and we finally sat down to other activities and dinner at around nine o’clock. This practice is not condusive to one’s continued well-being, and I do not recommend it, but it was invigorating to make the progress we created.

As for opera, which I have not mentioned in a good while, I have a little to relate. On April 2nd Natalie Dessay will be in the Met Opera Shop from 12:30 – 2:30 P.M. to sign copies of her CD’s. Rolando Villazon will be there on April 16th from 2-4 P.M., and Placido Domingo will visit on April 23rd from 2:30 – 5:30 P.M. Renee Fleming was the first to greet customers in the renovated retail space, and here is a picture of her there:

Rolando Villazon has dropped out of the cast of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, and Massimo Giordano has steeped in for him to sing opposite Angela Gheorghiu for tonight’s performance. He has cancelled both of his runs at the Met this season, and it leaves one wondering why he has done so. Last year, if I am not mistaken, he took a sabbatical, and it was allegedly because his voice was not at its best. One wonders if he is losing his instrument, perhaps? His voice does seem rather light on his Opera Recital CD, and perhaps all of these La Boheme performances with Anna Netrebko have taken a toll upon his voice. I hope that we shall hear him on Saturday as Donzetti’s “country bumpkin.” We still have one more Live in HD event scheduled for this year, and that is Rossini’s La Cenerentola. We are promised a grand stroke of luck with the casting of “the other prominent Rossini tenor” Lawrence Brownlee and mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca as Cinderella. Maybe I will go see that since I cannot listen to it over the radio.

As much as Wagner’s Ring cycle needs to be heard, think of the three or four broadcasts we might have heard without it expending so many broadcasts! First, we could start with La Cenerentola. Then, there would be Don Giovanni with the excellent cast of Barbara Fritolli, Soile Isokoski, Isabel Bayrakdarian, Samuel Ramey, and Peter Mattei. For our third selection we should be allowed to hear the Cav/Pag double bill with Jose Cura and Nuccia Focile. All for Wagner…

Thanks for reading.
-Tyler.