Performances to Stream August 19-20, 2023
This weekend brings us performances from Salzburg, London, Lenox, Copenhagen, Saarbrücken, and Aspen as the summer festival season begins to ebb.
Bohuslav Martinů’s The Greek Passion from the Salzburg Felsenreitschule on Ö1
This opera from a post-Romantic modern Czech composer was presented as part of the 2023 Salzburger Festspiele. It was originally composed between 1954-57, but its premiere was delayed until 1961, and it was initially shown in Zurich, not England where Martinů had first pitched the work to some interest from the Royal Opera House. Sadly, the premiere was not in time to occur during the composer’s lifetime, and it would not be seen at England’s Royal Opera House until the year 2000. Martinů’s compositional output was somewhat limited, but his career presents us with 15 operas and 6 symphonies today. Like many of the Czech composers around this time from the late Romantic era onward, Martinů was keen to utilize local and historic folk melodies in his compositions.
The plot for this opera is rather an interesting concept. A Greek village prepares to mount a Passion Play performance for the observance of Easter; villagers are chosen by the local priest for specific parts in the play. Naturally, some villagers are overjoyed at their assignments, and some are not. As the villagers consider their parts in the play and the connection these characters surrounding Christ have in their lives, a group of Greek refugees comes to their village seeking aid. Grigoris, the priest, does not wish to assist them as he fears they may carry infectious diseases, but a local woman, Katerina, gives them aid with the help of some of her friends and helps them make a camp near a local mountain. Manolios, who will portray Christ in the play, discovers from Katerina that she loves him and wishes to become romantically involved. Manlios rejects this idea, which leaves Katerina downtrodden and sad. Yannakos, who was entrusted with the role of Peter, the disciple, sees an opportunity to make a quick buck at the expense of the refugees near the village. However, upon his arrival there he “sees the light” and decides better of his actions, giving all he has to the poor refugees who are forbidden from staying in the village due to Father Grigoris’s edict. After he has a dream about recent happenings in the village, Manolios approaches Katerina to assure her that the love they feel between themselves must only be spiritual, like the love between Mary Magdalene and Jesus in the Bible. Manolios also initiates a campaign to acquire more aid for the refugees from his neighbor villagers. Village elders are concerned with the refugee numbers and the influence Manolios might have among them; they decide they must do something to silence him. Father Grigoris wastes no time and warns the village about Manlios and his teaching of late during a wedding feast. Manlios appears in town and professes that the suffering in the world will be met with dire consequences as the refugees descend from their mountain camp. Father Grigoris uses this to his advantage to remind the villagers of how Manlios cannot be trusted anymore. Panait, a local who was cast as Judas in the Passion Play, is angered by this turn of events and Manlios’s seeming foretelling of this arrival, so he murders him on the steps of the church as a crowd watches. Villagers and refugees alike weep at this ending for Manlios, and the opera ends with the refugees searching for a new home.
The cast for this performance from August 13, 2023, featured Gábor Bretz as Priest Grigoris, Luke Stoker as Patriarcheas, Matthäus Schmidlechner as Michelis, Alejandro Balinas Vieites as Kostandis, Charles Workman as Yannakos, Sebastian Kohlhepp as Manolios, Julian Hubbard as Panait, Aljoscha Lennert as Nikolio, Matteo Ivan Rasic as Andonis, Sara Jakubiak as Widow Katerina, and Christina Gansch as Lenio. Maxime Pascal led the orchestra and choruses. This performance is scheduled to air at 5:30 PM GMT on Ö1’s Opernabend. It will be available for listening following the broadcast.
Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 in D Minor from the Royal Albert Hall on BBC Radio 3
The BBC Proms are still in full force as many of us settle into the end of summer with the arrival of school semesters and even the dawn of the ‘23-’24 classical music season, and the world’s largest classical music festival brings us one of Mahler’s masterpieces as it speeds through its final quarter or so of musical gifts for discerning audiences and newcomers alike. Mahler’s third symphony is his longest work and was composed in a period of almost three years with the primary bulk of composition during 1895. It was not heard in its entirety until 1902 with the composer at the helm of the orchestra. With its multiple choirs, the use of a soloist, and the length of the work, it is a difficult piece to program or record except for the world’s largest orchestral entities, but even so it is often found on programs around the world. However, uncommon for most symphonic works, Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 often lends singular movements to various concerts; the first movement alone is some forty minutes of music, and the fourth and fifth movements are occasionally heard on concerts with other vocal music from Mahler.
The musical forces for this live performance include mezzo-soprano Jenny Carlstedt, the Trinity Boys Choir, the BBC Symphony Chorus, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Sakari Oramo. This performance is scheduled to air on BBC Radio 3 at 6:00 PM GMT on Saturday, August 19, 2023. It will be available for future listening afterward.
Sarah Nemtsov’s Ophelia from the Saarländisches Staatstheater on SR 2 Kulturradio
If world premiere opera is something you enjoy within the art form, this performance broadcast caters to your delight. This new work from composer Sarah Nemtsov casts Shakespeare’s Ophelia in a new light. Nemtsov did not care for the treatment she receives in Shakespeare’s play and elsewhere in literature, so she decided to give her the power to overcome these confinements of the limitations of others’ opinions and actions toward the character and instead choose her own fate. The result is an opera in 12 scenes with use of electronic musical elements in addition to 12 soloists, choir, and orchestra. One of the hallmarks of Nemtsov’s compositional style is the confrontations with literature they exploit; this work continues in that vein and helps us imagine familiar characters in new ways. Whether this is a welcome addition to the world of opera remains to be seen, but this work came about through a commission from the Saarländisches Staatstheater in 2019. Operating under a suggestion to relate the new work to Shakespeare and inspired by her manager at Ricordi, Nemtsov took the idea to center the opera around Ophelia instead of Hamlet and chose to give the queen a second chance at her story after the events of Shakespeare’s play. Instead of being one character, there are four different Ophelias who represent different facets of the same character. Nemtsov also chose this approach to pay homage to the first mothers of Judaism and four modern authors whom she admires. The work was composed between 2020 and 2021 and received its premiere earlier this year in Saarbrücken.
The cast stars Valda Wilson as Ophelia, Max Dollinger as Horatio, Alois Neu as Gray King, Hiroshi Matsui as Claudius, Liudmila Lokaichuk as Gertrude, Christian Clauß as Prince Hamlet, Markus Jaursch as Polonius, Bettina Maria Bauer as Second Ophelia, Pauliina Linnosaari as Third Ophelia, Judith Braun as Fourth Ophelia, Melissa Zgouridi as Laertes, Georg A. Bochow as Rosenstern, and Konstyantin Matslov and Benjamin Schmidt as Fortingbras in this recording from May 13, 2023. Stefan Neubert conducted. The performance is scheduled to air at 6:00 PM on SR 2 Kulturradio on Saturday, August 19, 2023. I am not sure if this will be available for listening afterward, but here is a link to the radio station’s library of on-demand programming.
Countertenor Steffen Jespersen Performs Baroque Arias from Christians Kirke Copenhagen on DR P2 Klassisk
If Baroque music is more to your fancy than modern opera with electronic music elements, this concert from the Copenhagen Opera Festival is precisely the entertainment you will enjoy this weekend. I am not certain of the exact program, but countertenor Steffen Jespersen is scheduled to perform selections from at least Handel, Heise, and Purcell during this hour long concert. He is joined by the Herresangere fra Roskilde Domkirkes Drengekor and a chamber ensemble for this concert.
This live broadcast is scheduled to air at 6:30 PM GMT on DR P2 Klassisk’s Operaaften on Saturday, August 19, 2023. It will be available for future listening following the broadcast.
Franz Josef Haydn’s Die Schöpfung from the Benedict Music Tent at the Aspen Festival
During Haydn’s visits to London in the 1790’s he heard some of George Friedrich Handel’s oratorios still in performances from the time of Handel’s sojourn in England some decades earlier. Haydn was impressed with the form and sought to bring such magnitude of work into the Classical Era with its more “mature” compositional style. Interested in delivering a result that bore equal weight of merit to Handel’s works, Haydn looked to the Biblical story of creation as his source material for his oratorio’s text. While there are some theories as to who wrote the libretto, the true author remains anonymous at least to most musciologists today; nevertheless, Haydn had an English libretto which Handel had turned down sent to Baron Gottfried van Swieten, who translated the work into German. The work premiered in Vienna on April 29, 1798. Between this organized performance for potential sponsors of the work and a sold out public premiere a year later, Haydn’s attempt at an oratorio was an instant success, and its success was not confined to Austria alone; indeed, Die Schöpfung would be performed throughout Europe and even in the United States during the remaining decade of the composer’s life! While other composers have eclipsed Haydn in popularity throughout the years, this work can be often heard almost anywhere in the world where a choir and singers exist.
Our soloists for this performance include the talents of soprano Maeve Höglund, tenor Matthew Polenzani, and bass-baritones Joseph Park and Vinicus Costa. Members of Seraphic Fire, the Seraphic Fire Professional Choral Institute, and the Apsen Festival Orchestra are led by maestro Robert Spano. The roster of Seraphic Fire for this concert includes sopranos Elisse Albian, Sarah Moyer, Rebecca Myers, and Nola Richardson, altos Alexandra Colaizzi, Amanda Crider, and Emily Marvosh, tenors Aaron Cates, Brad Diamond, and Michael Jones, and basses James K. Bass, John Buffett, Marques Ruff, and Steven Eddy. The roster of artists in the Seraphic Fire Professional Choral Institute for this concert includes sopranos Charlotte Botha, Sh’dai Forrester, Patricia Kopko, Grace Hancock Parry, Willow Janine Pedersen, Yina Qiao, and Eliza Stucki, altos Mengda Jiang, Ingrid Johnson, Leah Rosenman, Shayna Singer, Madeline Tokman, Carmen Voskuhl, and Hana Yiu, tenors Elliot Kloninger-Stever, Gabriel Lugo, and Xiao Shi, and basses David Caldarella, Seth Charles Hobi, Omer Aziz Kayhan, Gabriel Rice, Blake Wayment, and David Womack. This webcast is scheduled to air at 10:00 PM GMT on Sunday, August 20, 2023, on the Aspen Music Festival website. It will not be available for viewing following the livestream.
Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor from the Koussevitzky Music Shed on WCRB Classical
The Tanglewood Festival brings us this magnum opus from Beethoven on a Sunday evening, which seems a fitting day for such a work to be performed. Personally, I go back and forth between this symphony and Beethoven’s Fifth as the most famous symphonies of all time. Some will look upon this comparison with an air of disbelief and wonder how there could be any contest. Who on the earth has not hear the thunderous beginning and conversation of the 5th? However, I would respond by asking, who on this earth has not heard the final chorus of the 9th used in something somewhere or on its own?! Perhaps now you have your own questions as to which symphony is the most popular of all time! Composed between 1822 and 1824, this is in Beethoven’s late period as his hearing and health were sadly in decline. After an hiatus from composing, Beethoven decided he had more to say in the pages of music than his early and middle periods left on their own, which was already impressive. Whether he knew it or not, the music of his late period would cement him in history as a composer without equal in many minds, and every composer who came afterward would have to come to terms with whether they had surpassed Beethoven or even whether or not such a fate was what they wanted for their work. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony would also have an unintended consequence for how an entire generation of music lovers would hear music in their lives. When Sony and Philips brought the CD to market in 1981, they were quick to enlist the aid of maestro Herbet von Karajan in marketing the new format. He agreed to showcase the new technology at a press conference in Vienna, but his agreement came with one technical requirement. The new CD format must be dense enough to contain a single recording of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Worried that von Karajan would back out over a technicality and sink their hopes for widespread adoption of the new format, Sony decided to hedge their bets on von Karajan’s participation with a bit of well-invested research. They needed to be sure the entire symphony could fit on one disc, so they looked for the slowest recording of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 they could find. It was Wilhelm Furtwängler’s 1951 recording at a slow 74 minutes. While this was not the initial limit for the format, it was the target length to be hit during the production lifecycle, and Beethoven from the grave influenced modern audiences’ ideas for an appropriate length for music consumption if one does not attribute any validity to whole-beat metronome theory, which is a musicology discussion for another day.
The soloists for this work feature soprano Amanda Majeski, mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges, tenor Stephen Costello, and bass Jongmin Park. They are joined by the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Susanna Mälkki and James Burton, who conducts spirituals from Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time. This broadcast is scheduled to air on Sunday, August 20, 2023, at 11:00 PM GMT on WCRB Boston. It will be available for future listening following this initial airing.