Past Production Reviews
4Bring your binoculars. Your wide-angled field glasses; your high-powered spyglass; your best mother-of-pearl lorgnette. Because Seattle Opera's new ``Rusalka'' production is likely to be one of the loveliest-looking shows you'll ever see. Gasps and applause greeted the storybook sets, fairy-tale forests, glittering waters and brilliantly subtle lighting effects created by renowned designer Gunther Schneider-Siemssen, who also made his American stage-directing debut with this production.
In London, Fleming’s colleagues were less consistently good than Fleming herself. Reiffenstuel’s dresses for Alice Coote’s Octavian and Mariandel were not the most becoming the mezzo-soprano has worn on this stage, where she has thus far specialized in male characters. Coote’s singing was often ungainly, frequently with a discomfiting rawness to the tone. The finest exponent of the three main women’s parts was Sophie Bevan, who sang the ingenue role of her namesake to perfection, with a top register to die for.Steinberg’s family-sized sets looked too big on the Covent Garden stage; the Princess’s bedroom and its mammoth collection of dynastic paintings dwarfed the characters. A troublesome feature of Act II was a collection of enormous field guns and an obsession with rifles: in his desire to underline the militarism of his redesignated period, Carsen decided, without any specifics in Hofmannsthal’s text to back it up, that the army supplies that provide the basis of Faninal’s fortune were, in fact, armaments. Act III swapped the original’s dubious suburban inn for a palatial, populous brothel, where Ochs’s assignation with Mariandel almost got lost in the wider sweep of hedonistic goings-on. Overall, Carsen’s direction lacked the detail and focus that can make Der Rosenkavalier profoundly moving. Supplying some, at least, of the missing magic was the conducting of Andris Nelsons, whose enthusiasm for Strauss has already resulted in persuasive Covent Garden performances of Salome and Elektra. Once again his ability to balance super-enriched textures and provide dramatic momentum in a score that needs to be kept on the move paid rich dividends. The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House responded keenly to his confident direction.
It is an evening placed under the sign of charm and elegance that Renée Fleming offered to the public who came to applaud her at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées for her only Parisian recital of the season. Judiciously constructed, the program is essentially composed of melodies and Lieder between which are inserted a few arias from operas taken from his repertoire, all adapted to his current means. Dressed in a sumptuous dark dress, the singer, visibly moved, is greeted by heavy applause. The concert opens with six Lieder by Brahms with contrasting affects which allow the singer to express a wide range of feelings with a perfectly appropriate diction. The light tone of Ständchen succeeds Die Mainacht on a slow rhythm which highlights the legato of the soprano at the same time as her capacity to express with emotion the loneliness of the character who wanders in the night. Just as after the lyrical flights of Meine Liebe ist grün , Wiegenliedis whispered with infinite tenderness. Throughout these pages we are captivated by the richness of this voice, its musicality, its ability to vary colors, and its dynamics. It is hardly so in the treble, which no longer has its mellowness of yesteryear, the wear of time is felt. Change of climate with Massenet who inaugurates a series of airs in French. Renée Fleming offers an excerpt from Thaïs , a role of which she left an authoritative version on the record and which she sang on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera as well as in Paris in concert, at the Châtelet. Vocally superb, this tune suffers strangely from a fuzzy diction, not to say unintelligible, a pity because the singer shows herself in an excellent vocal form. Two of Fauré's most famous melodies follow , Mandolin and Clair de lune, superbly phrased in which the diction is hardly better. Rarely offered in concert Evening at seade Saint-Saëns is for many a nice discovery. This part ends with a tasty excerpt from Oscar Straus ' Three Waltzes , interpreted with a delicious touch of humor, whose final treble, triumphant, triggers a beautiful ovation. After the intermission Renée Fleming dressed this time in a magnificent light dress, treats us with two beautiful Chants d'Auvergne de Canteloube before offering us a magnificent rarity: four Lieder by Egon Kornauth (1891-1959). This Austrian composer also made a career as a pianist during the interwar period before teaching music in Vienna and Salzburg. The greater part of his production is devoted to chamber music, piano pieces and Lieder of a very classical style. Those that the soprano has chosen to offer us are all imbued with a sweet melancholy which is ideally suited to her voice. Finally, Ariadne auf Naxoswhich concludes the program shows how great the affinities are between Renée Fleming and the music of Richard Strauss which she has admirably served throughout her career and more particularly during the last two decades which have seen her happily walking her Arabella, his Countess of Capriccio and especially his Marshal on the biggest stages. It was in Baden-Baden in 2012 that she took on the role of Ariadne, from which she gave us three excerpts this evening of a high standard. On the piano, Hartmut Höll, who has collaborated with the greatest performers of Lieder, is both an accomplice accompanist and a seasoned musician, as evidenced in particular by the solo passages of the Chants d'Auvergne . After having said how happy she was to find the Parisian audience, the soprano offers an encore of three of her greatest "hits", the song to the moon from Rusalka , "Summertime" by Gershwin and Ave Maria by Schubert , performed with flawless ease and vocal health.
Renée Fleming thus remains a great opera voice, a star, a diva (even the American Diva), which is why the Metropolitan Opera House in New York asked her to launch its new series of pay-per-view recitals. -view just after Jonas Kaufmann (in the Rococo Abbey of Polling in his native Bavaria: our report ), just before Roberto Alagna and Aleksandra Kurzak at the Château de la Chèvre d'Or in Èze in the South of France (visit you for that next August 16) and many other big names (complete program at the bottom of this article). Adding to the pleasure of finding this great artist in a new setting, in a new place that is both more intimate and more nostalgic, Renée Fleming performs with no other audience than Internet users in front of their screens, the four cameras (two of which are robotic) present. in the intimate and historic Dumbarton Oaks Music Room in Washington DC and his accompanist Robert Ainsley at the piano. This keyboard artist demonstrates such a wide palette as an accompanist as that chosen by Renée Flemingin the immensity of its song and its repertoire, that is to say. Robert Ainsley offers support and constant concern to accompany the singer, to punctuate a death knell, as to follow her thin lines, as to establish her more lyrical-supported vocal thicknesses (sometimes all in one and the same tune) . This pianist's training as a violinist is revealed by his concern for the melodic line, his chamber music training is at the service of his listening and understanding with the singer, his practice as an organist further reinforces the richness of his timbres (and he borrows also to the ornaments of a harpsichordist) and he is even a conductor in his intention and attention to directions and nuances. This concert is a new symbol of rediscovered music and still resonating whatever the tragic situation, once again the whole program - of joy and nostalgia - intensifies this feeling, and the chosen place too: Dumbarton Oaks is a historic site built in 1801, now a museum and research library for Harvard, it hosted a diplomatic conference in 1944 which led to the founding of the United Nations (add to this that this salon hosted chamber music creations by Stravinsky and Copland ). This recital opens with a new piece by John Corigliano created by Renée Fleming during confinement and could not be better chosen: " And the people stayed home ", an a cappella in the form of a new hymn to confinement filled with culture and optimism ("and the people were healed, and the earth began to heal").
