Prima la musica

On the road to Taos, NM. (Taken with instagram)

Surtitles with a social conscience. (Taken with instagram)

30 Day Opera Challenge: Day 30

It's all over!

Facebook challenge: A not particularly famous opera that you find beautiful

My standard answer. Bizet's Djamileh. (I can't embed it.) 

An Acquired Taste: Best finale

How else could I end all this?

The only question left is, what am I going to blog about now?

30 Day Opera Challenge: Day 29

Facebook challenge: The first aria you fell in love with

Thanks to Barbara Bonney's CD of the same name, which I fell in love with even before my operatic obsession had really begun, it's "Fairest Isle", from Purcell's King Arthur. And lo and behold, here's a clip of her singing it in a production of the opera. A very weird production, by the looks of it, but hey, it's Barbara, I'm not complaining.

An Acquired Taste: The most attractive artist ever

Female or male? Never mind, I can answer both with one photo. Here are Franco Corelli and Anna Moffo. Both outrageously attractive, and as it happens, both favourite singers of mine.

30 Day Opera Challenge: Day 28

Facebook challenge: A good operatic character you'd like to play 

Papageno seems to have a lot of fun.

An Acquired Taste: Take your favourite opera and assemble your dream cast

My favourite opera is Peter Grimes, but I've already seen my dream cast in that. But I do dream of a Rosenkavalier with Soile Isokoski as the Marschallin, Joyce DiDonato as Octavian, Diana Damrau as Sophie, Kristinn Sigmundsson as Ochs and Thomas Allen as Faninal. That would not, I suspect, be terrible. Nor is it actually beyond the realm of possibility. Peter Gelb, are you listening? 

30 Day Opera Challenge: Day 27

Facebook challenge: Best Lieder composer

An Acquired Taste: If you could play any role, what would it be?

I'd like to be a villager in Peter Grimes. Just to be part of those amazing choruses.

In the wings at the Santa Fe Opera. (Taken with instagram)

30 Day Opera Challenge: Day 26

Facebook challenge: Best classical opera composer

It would be fairly obtuse to not say Mozart, wouldn't it? So, Mozart.

Now here's a clip of Patricia Petibon singing Haydn.

An Acquired Taste: Your first favourite opera

An easy one, at last. Die Fledermaus. 

30 Day Opera Challenge: Day 25

Facebook challenge: An aria you would never be able to sing

Pick one. I don't (can't) sing. But even if I could, clearly I could never sing this, and frankly I'm amazed anybody can.

An Acquired Taste: Least favourite misconception about opera

I think this image pretty much sums it up:

Either that or Katherine Jenkins's repeated claim that it's impossible for a mezzo soprano to sing opera before the age of 30.

30 Day Opera Challenge: Day 24

Meme fatigue is starting to set in, but having come this far, I'd feel silly if I didn't see it through. So here we go.

Facebook challenge: Favourite singer with a huge voice 

Let's have some Birgit.

An Acquired Taste: Best opera to see alone

In my case, the answer is pretty much all of them — I've always been a fan of going solo to the opera, whether by choice or compulsion, or because my steady date is, you know, up there singing. However, I do recall actively discouraging company when I saw a string of Butterflys with Cheryl Barker — I wanted to keep all that wonderful trauma to myself and not dilute it with socialising and stuff — so let's go with that.

30 Day Opera Challenge: Day 19-23

Catching up on the opera challenge. I figured illustrating everything with video would be overkill.

DAY 19

Facebook challenge: Favourite opera of all time

An Acquired Taste: Most powerful aria

DAY 20

Facebook challenge: Best duet

An Acquired Taste: The opera you listen to most

(Only true this year.)

DAY 21

Facebook challenge: Aria which perfectly exemplifies anger

An Acquired Taste: An opera you'd sell a kidney to see

Salome with Cheryl Barker in the title role. Luckily, I understand I won't need to pay nearly so dearly.

DAY 22

Facebook challenge: Famous operatic chorus

An Acquired Taste: Best opera to see with a friend

Surely that depends pretty heavily on the friend? But I guess most people would struggle to have a terrible time at Tosca. (And it's certainly the best opera to take my best friend to.)

DAY 23

Facebook challenge: An evil character you'd like to play

(Speaking of Tosca.)

An Acquired Taste: Best opera to see with a lover

Peter Grimes. No, really. As a test. I mean, if you don't fundamentally agree about Grimes (either positively or negatively) then maybe you need to reconsider the whole relationship. Or is that just me? 

Cendrillon

We went to London for fairly practical reasons, but I engineered it so we'd spend an extra night and see Cendrillon at the Royal Opera. It is, after all, a truth universally acknowledged that you can't come within reach of a Joyce DiDonato performance and decide not to bother. Although, perhaps not as universally as you'd think: the show wasn't sold out, and I booked my ticket on the morning of the show. 

Just one ticket, as it turned out. It would have been two, but my date was called upon to save the day and step in for the Verdi Requiem here in Zürich — so after 24 hours in London, he was on a plane again, bound for rehearsals, and I stayed for shopping and mezzo-sopranos. Sounds like a fair balance, don't you think? 

And there really are a lot of mezzo-sopranos in Cendrillon. My hat is off to whoever went to the trouble of assembling Joyce DiDonato, Alice Coote and Ewa Podles (who's a contralto, but still) in one cast. It's such a surfeit of low-voiced pleasure that when the ominous man-with-a-microphone appeared onstage with an announcement, and said "Joyce DiDonato..." and I thought she might have cancelled, I remained philosophical, because, hey, we'd still have Alice and Ewa. As it was, however, she who sang Rosina on a broken leg, was still singing — she just craved our indulgence if her illness interfered. 

She needn't have apologised. I bet there are singers who'd happily buy and imbibe a bottled form of whatever ailment she was suffering, if it would make their voices glow as hers did. She sounds lovely in French — I started wishing that her next solo disc would be French art songs — and sweet, generous, resilient Cinderella fits her temperamentally to a tee, I think. Alice Coote sounded eerily similar to her at times, yet different enough to keep the two voices distinct, and to blend beautifully in their duets, which are probably some of the best music in the opera. To nobody's surprise, Ewa Podles's outrageous (and hilariously curvaceous) Evil Stepmother stole the show. Evidently, along with freakish vocal gifts (as impressive in-house as on record) she's also blessed with natural comic timing.

Honestly, I think this opera is the female equivalent of Parsifal in terms of skewed gender balance. There are almost no men. There are, however, two stepsisters, played with priceless vacuity by Madeleine Pierard (my compatriot!) and Kai Rüütel, and the platinum blonde Fairy Godmother — Intermezzo nailed it with the Dusty Springfield comparison — of Eglise Gutierrez on coloratura duty. Jean-Philippe Lafont, as Cendrillon's father (still alive, in this one, but powerless to resist his horrid wife's bullying) has the only sizeable male role, and struck a kindly if cowering figure; and I wished that Jeremy White, as a rather sprightly king, had had more to do. 

I liked Laurent Pelly's production a lot. It's all made to look as if it's been fashioned out of a big old-fashioned book of fairytales. The walls are printed pages, chairs are made from letters, the carriage is shaped like the word "carosse", and almost everything sticks to a black/white/red/gold colour scheme. Cendrillon is allowed some shades of grey, however, in her rather fetching rags — an outfit which wouldn't look out of the place in the window of Anthropologie — and her ballgown (pictured above) is a beacon of light in a sea of ladies in bizarre scarlet concoctions.

Pelly goes with the fairytale flow, he doesn't try to subvert it, and I'm glad. The show was laugh-out-loud funny in front of an audience of adults, and I'm certain an audience of children would be even more enchanted than we were. What a shame the Royal Opera hasn't made it easier for them to come; a Christmas season of matinées — you wouldn't even need the same, starry cast — would be ideal.

As it was, my inner child and I were delighted by the frolicking horses, the red-painted servants, the fairy godmother's chimney-top world and the dancing. Oh, the dancing. We wanted to hug both Alice's adorably shy Prince Charmant and Joyce's radiant Cendrillon. We laughed at the silly stepfamily, and forgave them when Cendrillon did — they're pretty harmless in this version, Madame de la Haltière is not exactly Angelica Huston, and the sisters are to easily flummoxed to pose a threat. We cried sad tears when the lovers were separated, and happy tears when everyone lived happily ever after. It was all pretty magical.

The music, well, it's Massenet in sugary fairytale mode. Well, apart from that bit where he forgets, and turns Cendrillon into Thaïs or Manon in their respective repentant modes, singing expansively about redemption and misery. It showed everybody's voices off well — especially our trio of low-voiced ladies — without ever turning into, say, great art. But who needed great art anyway? That's what I have Parsifal for. Cendrillon is not Massenet's most memorable score, but while you're actually listening to it, it evokes the shiny unreality of the tale quite wonderfully. Having previously known only a couple of arias, and not the score as a whole, I can't say much to the merits of Bertrand de Billy's conducting; but the magic in the pit seemed basically to match the magic onstage. Ça suffit.

Now I'm back in Zürich, gearing up for a Verdi Requiem and one last Parsifal, before flying to Santa Fe — where, as it happens, this production of Cendrillon had its premiere — for Wozzeck. All very serious, weighty music, and magnificent of course, but I have to say: I'm glad I had my little sliver of enchantment in between. 

Photo: Bill Cooper

30 Day Opera Challenge: Day 18

Facebook challenge: Best conductor ever

I don't have a particularly strong opinion on this, but if I say Carlos Kleiber, then I can post this:

An Acquired Taste: Most visually entertaining opera

I think this really depends on the production. In which case, I pick Rameau's Les indes galantes, on account of the insane Les Arts Florissants production.

30 Day Opera Challenge: Day 17

Facebook challenge: Favourite Italian composer

In all honesty, I think the answer is probably Verdi if it's anyone, though all my real favourite composers are from everywhere but Italy. For variety's sake, however, and because I love how he got it so right, so early, I'm going with Monteverdi.

An Acquired Taste: Happiest romance

Marie and Tonio. Nobody dies, there are no massive misunderstandings or accusations, and it all ends happily. I've already posted a clip of Natalie, so here's the excellent Mariella Devia (and Paul Austin Kelly) instead.

30 Day Opera Challenge: Day 16

Facebook challenge: A song or aria you used to like, but now hate

I'm going to cheat a little here and go with a singer-specific answer. In the hands of its writer, Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You" is a song I like very much indeed. Translated into Italian, dressed up with a syrupy orchestral backing, and sung by Katherine Jenkins, it definitely falls into the category of HATE.

Here's my beloved Dolly singing it. Let's try and pretend KJ never touched it.

An Acquired Taste: Most tragic romance

Tatyana and Onegin. Talk about tragically bad timing. So bad, in fact, that they possibly don't count as a romance. But I'm choosing them anyway.

(Yeah, I know it's in the wrong language.)

30 Day Opera Challenge: Day 15

Facebook challenge: Most beautiful male operatic voice

How about Fritz?

An Acquired Taste: Favourite couple

Arabella and Mandryka.

30 Day Opera Challenge: Day 14

Facebook challenge: Most beautiful female operatic voice

Kathy.

An Acquired Taste: Favourite tragic role

I know it's a comedy, but few characters make me sadder than Countess Almaviva.