Performances to Stream July 8-9, 2023
This week is a light one for vocal performances, but the summer festival season is ramping up this month! Performances hail from England, France, Spain, and Italy this weekend.
Joby Talbot’s Everest from the Barbican Centre on BBC Radio 3
This is a new opera based on one of the boldest feats of endurance, determination, and skill known to man, which is to conquer the peak of Mt. Everest, the world’s tallest mountain. Talbot’s opera follows a small expedition near the summit between May 10-11, 1996. The year’s climbing season has been negatively affected by poor weather conditions, and guide Rob Hall is trying to ambitiously bring multiple clients to the once-in-a-lifetime peak in stages on the same day. Traffic jams of climbers set everyone behind schedule, and a blizzard is on the way without the knowledge of Hall’s group. Hall gets caught in the start of it at the peak with client Doug Hansen while another of Hall’s clients, Beck Weathers, is unconscious on the South Col. Will they be trapped in the storm? Will Doug and Rob be able to find Beck and rescue him? Will they all make it out alive? It is difficult in a world of smartphones and ubiquitous GPS systems to believe that anywhere can be as dangerous today as it was 200 years ago, but Everest lingers as one of those hazardous places in defiance of technology.
This performance was recorded on June 23, 2023, and the cast featured Daniel Okulitch as Beck Weathers, Craig Verm as Doug Hansen, Siân Griffiths as Jan Arnold, Andrew Bidlack as Rob Hall, Matilda McDonald as Meg Weathers, Jimmy Holliday as Guy Cotter, and Charles Gibbs as Mike Groom. The BBC Singers and the BBC Symphony Orchestra were conducted by Nicole Palement. This performance is scheduled to be broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Opera on 3 at 5:30 PM GMT on Saturday, July 8, 2023, and will be available for future listening following the broadcast.
Antonio Caldara’s Maddalena ai piedi di Cristo from the Auditorio Nacional de Música on Radio Clásica
Italian composer Antonio Caldara is perhaps best known for having a few arias in the Schirmer and Ricordi compendiums with which almost every emerging classical singer begins instruction, but his works are scarcely heard upon the opera stage today, which makes this performance perhaps the greatest treat of this weekend’s offerings. Caldara was an Italian composer in the Baroque era, but he is often associated with Spain because he was the composer who brought the very first Italian operas to the Iberian peninsula. Ultimately, his works were overshadowed by his contemporaries, but René Jacobs and the Freiburger Barockorchester specialize in breathing new life into Baroque rarities for modern audiences. If you could only own one orchestral ensemble’s recordings of operas, a case could be made for the Freiburger Barockorchester for unrivaled artistic excellence. As the title suggests, Caldara’s oratorio tells the Biblical story of Mary Magdalene washing the feet of Jesus Christ. Notably, Caldara composed more than 100 operas and oratorios during his lifetime.
This performance from April 10, 2023, starred soprano Giulia Semenzato, mezzo-soprano Marianne Beate Kielland, tenor Joshua Ellicott, countertenor Alberto Miguélez Rouco, contralto Helena Rasker, and baritone Johannes Weisser. This performance will air at 6:00 PM GMT on Radio Clásica’s Fila cero. It should be available for listening after the broadcast.
Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125, from the Piazza San Marco, Venezia, on RAI Radio 3
If one was to place a friendly wager they would be certain to win amongst colleagues at the office, one might well predict that they could ask any random person to name a choral selection from a symphony. More than 9 times out of 10, your randomly selected subjects would respond with the final chorus from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The last of Beethoven’s symphonic works, his Ninth Symphony has endured in the canon of classical repertoire for almost two hundred years; 2024 will be the centennial of its premiere in Vienna. By the time Beethoven premiered this work, he was quite deaf, and, despite a mishap with his continuing to conduct following the end of the work, his last symphony was enormously well received and has continued as one of the best known masterworks in all of music with a just place of honor among all compositions known to man.
Conductor Juraj Valchua led the choir and orchestra of the Teatro La Fenice with soloists soprano Federica Lombardi, mezzo-soprano Veronica Simeoni, tenor Michael Schade, and bass Mark S. Doss. This recorded performance will be presented on RAI Radio 3’s Il Cartellone at 7:30 PM GMT on Saturday, July 8, 2023. It will be available for future listening following this initial airing.
Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette from the Opéra National de Paris on France Musique
While Gounod was a prolific composer of church music during his lifetime, he is best known today for his operas. We are fortunate today to have seen a resurgence in some of his works on the stage, but for much of the 20th century only his Faust and Roméo et Juliette were performed of the 12 operas he composed during his career. Gounod lived during the height of the Romantic era, and his operas most certainly advanced this lavish, opulent musical style. Unlike later works by Strauss and Wagner in which a listener can occasionally feel overwhelmed by sound and competing aural textures, Gounod’s work takes a simpler elegance that is much easier on the ear and strives for appreciable beauty above all else. Like the classic Shakespeare play it conveys, Roméo et Juliette remains a favorite among audiences even to this day and advances the idea that love is truly the universal language that transcends generations.
While I utterly wish we might hear the cast of this production that features mezzo-soprano Marina Viotti as Stéphano, we are treated to an earlier performance from June 26, 2023, today. The cast features Elsa Dreisig as Juliette, Lea Desandre as Stéphano, Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo as Gertrude, Benjamin Bernheim as Roméo, Maciej Kwasnikowski as Tybalt, Thomas Ricart as Benvolio, Huw Montague Rendall as Mercutio, Sergio Villegas Galvain as Le comte Pâris, Yiorgo Ioannou as Grégorio, Laurent Naouri as Le comte Capulet, Jean Teitgen as Frère Laurent, Jérôme Boutillier as Le duc de Vérone, Antoine Foulon as Frère Jean, So-Hee Lee as Manuela, Iaabella Wnorowska-Pluchart as Pepita, and Vincent Morell as Angelo under the direction of maestro Carlo Rizzi. This performance is scheduled to air on France Musique’s Le Concert du soir at 6:00 PM GMT on Saturday, July 8, 2023. It will be available to hear following the initial broadcast.