Performances to Stream July 22-23, 2023
Squarely in summer festival season, this weekend brings us performances from the BBC Proms in England, the Münchner Opernfestpiele in Germany, the Rossini in Wildbad Festival in Germany, and Austria.
BBC Proms: Horrible Histories: ‘Orrible Opera from the Royal Albert Hall on BBC Radio 3
We are into the second week of Proms performances, and the concert series takes a turn toward the humorously informative and educational with stories from the pages (and opera house legend and gossip) of operatic history. In a concert sure to reveal something to even the most ardent aficionado of opera, we have selections from all of the well-known composers and a few new ones you may not know so well. The lineup consists of selections from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Zauberflote, Richard Wagner’s Die Walkure, Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth, Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, Jacques Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers, Georges Bizet’s Carmen, Giachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, Ethel Smyth’s The March of the Women, Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, George Frederich Handel’s Giulio Cesare, and Arthur Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. Performers for this show include both a corps of actors as well as singers. The soloists are sopranos Rainelle Krause, Isabelle Peters, and Gwen-Ann Rand, tenor David Butt-Philip, baritone Charles Rice, and bass John Molloy. They are joined by maestra Keri-Lynn Wilson leading the English National Opera Chorus and English National Opera Orchestra. This live performance will air at 1:00 PM GMT on Saturday, July 22, 2023, on BBC Radio 3. It will be available to listen to following the initial airing of the performance.
Giovanni Pacini’s Gli Arabi nelle Gallie from the Trinkhalle on Deutschlandfunk Kultur
Giovanni Pacini is an opera composer with whom I am entirely unfamiliar. He lived from 1796 to 1867, a period in which Italian opera flourished in a sea of different styles. Pacini composed more than 70 operas in his lifetime, but his work is rarely heard and mostly unknown today because it was criticized even in his own lifetime and by his own admission as being subpar to other famous composers of the same epoch. He was considered to possess less understanding of harmony and instrumentation than his counterpart Rossini, and Rossini himself even took a jab at his musical deficiencies. Pacini, however, felt that composers of the day were all imitating Rossini, so he made a conscious effort to be different in his composing. After taking a hiatus of 5 years to re-examine his compositional technique, he altered his compositional style, but his operas, while moderately successful in his lifetime, were soon surpassed in popularity by the work coming from Giuseppe Verdi and shortly became viewed as passé, which led to them being overshadowed and discarded in the repertoire. Gli Arabi nelle Gallie premiered in 1827 at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala.
Performed as part of the Rossini in Wildbad Festival, our performance stars Serena Farnocchia as Ezilda, Diana Haller as Leodato, Michele Angelini as Agobar, Shi Zong as Gondair, Camilla Carol Farias as Zarele, Francesco Lucii as Aloar, and Francesco Bossi as Mohamud. Conductor Marco Alibrando leads the Krakow Philharmonic Choir and Krakow Philharmonic Orchestra in this live broadcast. It is scheduled to air at 5:00 PM GMT on Saturday, July 22, 2023, on Deustchlandfunk Kultur’s Oper. It should be available for listening following the broadcast.
Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus from the Musikverein on Ö1
“What is an operetta in the Viennese tradition from the king of waltzes,” would be the answer to give on an episode of Jeopardy! in which the clue might be, “This popular stage show’s title is The Flittering Mouse.” As operettas go, the story is a lighthearted, comedic one that centers around a masked ball that has been put on as revenge for a practical joke between friends. As one might imagine, this leaves tremendous room for all sorts of shenanigans between the characters, all of whom are initially clueless about the others’ motives. Noteworthy in this performance from June 29, 2023, the role of Prince Orlofsky, most often performed by a mezzo-soprano these days, is instead entrusted to a tenor, which is something one rarely ever hears today. Our cast of merrymaking revelers includes Mauro Peter as Gabriel von Eisenstein, Christiane Karg as Rosalinde von Eisenstein, Michael Kraus as Gefängnisdirektor Frank, Liviu Holender as Dr. Falke, Michael Schade as Prinz Orlofsky, Ilker Arcayürek as Alfred, Robert Bartneck as Dr. Blind, Daniela Fally as Adele, Mariella Hofbauer as Ida, and Rudi Roubinek as Frosch. Emmanuel Tjeknavorian conducts. This performance is scheduled to air on Ö1’s Opernabend at 5:30 PM GMT on Saturday, July 22, 2023. It may be available for listening following the broadcast.
Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida from the Bayerische Staatsoper on the Bayerische Staatsoper’s Website
As part of its Opera for All initiative, the Bayerische Staatsoper (and BMW for the record) presents a free performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, and you can watch a live video stream of the performance from your home! This performance also exists as one of the events of the Münchner Opernfestpiele 2023. A hit since its premiere on Christmas Eve of 1871 in Cairo, Egypt, this Verdi masterpiece centers around a doomed love between Radamès, a captain of Egypt, and Aida, an enslaved Ethiopian princess in the midst of an Ethiopian uprising against the ancient Egyptians of the Old Kingdom. Radamès inadvertently shares a plan of attack with his enemies and is sentenced to death by entombment at the behest of Pharaoh and the temple priests. Aida chooses to follow her love for Radamès to the grave and hides in the temple vault before Radamès is cast inside it to his death. Aida dies in Radamès’s arms with Amneris and the priests praying as the opera ends.
The cast for this performance boasts the talents of Judit Kutasi as Amneris, Elena Stikhina as Aida, Brian Jagde as Radamès, Alexander Köpeczi as Ramfis, George Petean as Amonasro, Alexandros Stavrakakis as Der König, James Ley as Messenger, and Elmira Karakhanova as Priestess. Maestro Daniele Rustioni conducts this performance. This video livestream is scheduled to air at 5:00 PM GMT on Sunday, July 23, 2023, courtesy of the Bayerische Staatsoper’s website. I do not think it will be available for replay following the stream.
BBC Proms: Helen Grime’s Meditations on Joy and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor from the Royal Albert Hall on BBC Radio 3
This weekend’s live streams concludes with another offering from the BBC Proms festival. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor may be the work you know from this concert, but it is paired with a new comission from the BBC by contemporary classical music composer Helen Grime. Ideal for this concert pairing, Grime chose to focus on one of the most memorable themes of one of Beethoven’s most popular works: the rapturous feeling of joy. The three movements of her work are inspired by a dedicated poem detailing a unique facet of joy. Beethoven’s contribution to this concert seems almost an ironic one when you consider the title alone without knowing of the chorale for which this symphony is famous, for it begins its tale for the listener in one of the saddest of all keys, D Minor. The opening is not content to merely languish in some light passing sorrow either; this is Beethoven, and he must bring the listener to the apex of internal conflict in the first movement. The symphony gradually brings the audience from the melancholy of D Minor and its resistance to the other bright things in the world and to the final chorus based on Schiller’s Ode to Joy; indeed, it is a testament to Beethoven’s compositional genius that audiences have been and remain so captivated by that final explosion of joy in song that it immediately springs to mind when thinking of the 9th Symphony and often defines the entire symphony by its word of explanation and exuberance.
The soloists for Beethoven’s work are soprano Eleanor Dennis, mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill, tenor Nicky Spence, and bass-baritone Michael Mofidian. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Chorus are led by conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. This performance airs live on BBC Radio 3 at 6:30 PM GMT on Sunday, July 23, 2023. It will be available for listening following the concert’s initial airing.