Performances to Stream October 21-22, 2023
This weekend brings us performances from The Netherlands, Sweden, England, France, Italy, and Switzerland.
Francis Poulenc’s Stabat Mater from The Concertgebouw on NPO Radio 4
Francis Poulenc may be a modern composer according to his date of arrival in 1899, but his compositional style belongs to the post-Romantic era. His parents forbid him from seeking an education in music at a conservatory in hopes that he might continue the family business of pharmaceuticals, but it was not enough to stop Poulenc from becoming a gifted pianist and seeking instruction in composition. He fell in with the right crowd for his hopeful profession and began his career as a collaborative pianist with singers and occasional composer. He wrote an extensive catalog of vocal works in addition to the operas and choral pieces for which he is better known today. Poulenc composed his setting of the Stabat Mater in 1950 after having become an established composer and pianist in his time. He composed this setting of the medieval text after the death of a friend, artist Christian Bérard, and the work was immediately well-received both in Europe and America following its premiere at the Strasbourg Festival in ‘51.
Soprano Sarah Brady joins the Netherlands Radio Choir and the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra for this live concert of Poulenc compositions from Amsterdam. Stéphane Denève conducts. This performance is scheduled to air on Saturday, October 21 at 12:15 PM GMT on NPO Radio 4, and it will be available for listening following its broadcast.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni from the Malmö Opera on Sveriges Radio P2
While it is common these days for people to lament the fact that Don Giovanni remains in the repertoire of opera houses due to the exploits of its titular character, I see it as a testament to generations of audiences enjoying a tale in which a hedonistic heathen receives his just reward. Personally, I am far more interested in Donna Elvira’s role in the action, but for those fixated upon Giovanni, Mozart shows that crime and nefarious pleasures do not reward you in the end. The opera found immediate acclaim in Prague, where it premiered in 1787 with Mozart conducting the orchestra. It was such a celebrated work that Mozart brought it to Vienna with a few artistic revisions to the score the following year.
Our cast for this live performance stars Jacques Imbrailo as Don Giovanni, Henning Von Schulman as Leporello, Matilda Sterby as Donna Anna, Joel Annmo as Don Ottavio, Rachael Wilson as Donna Elvira, Viktoria Karlsson as Zerlina, Nicolai Elsberg as Masetto, and Taras Shtonda as Commendatore. Maestro Wolfgang Wengenroth conducts. This performance is scheduled to air on Saturday, October 21, 2023, at 4:50 PM GMT on Sveriges Radio P2. It will be available for further listening following the performance.
Giuseppe Verdi’s La Forza del Destino from the Royal Opera House on BBC Radio 3
This opera premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia at the Bolshoi on October 29, 1862. In the following year, Verdi oversaw a production in Rome with a revised score. Madrid audiences were next to see it before it traveled abroad to the United States, Brazil, Austria, and England. However, despite this success, Verdi was not yet finished revising the opera; in fact, the version most commonly performed today is the one with the reworked ending from the opera’s premiere at La Scala in 1869. Whether these changes came as a result of a contract Verdi had with the company for producing “new” work or due to the fact that he was merely unhappy with the state of the story is a matter for further study than I have done on the opera and Verdi’s life.
For those unfamiliar with the work, Alvaro is a young nobleman from Peru who loves Leonora, daughter of a wealthy nobleman in Seville. Her father vehemently opposes a union between the two and catches them planning an escape for an elopement one evening. In the commotion that ensues, Alvaro’s pistol discharges and kills the marchese, and the lovers separately escape with their lives while the marchese puts a curse upon his daughter with his dying breath. Carlo, Leonora’s brother and the marchese’s heir, searches for those responsible for his father’s death and catches up with Leonora’s whereabouts about a year after the fatal confrontation. Leonora takes refuge in a mountain cave under the care of a local monastery to avoid being found. Alvaro, however, has taken an assumed identity and joined the Spanish army. On the eve of the Battle of Velletri, Alvaro saves a new commander from an assassination plot and becomes friends with this new brother in arms; nevertheless, his new friend is Don Carlo under the guise of Don Felix, who does not know Alvaro’s true identity. When Alvaro is wounded in battle, the truth about their identities is revealed to each other, and the two comrades in arms become mortal enemies. Their fighting abates as other soldiers intervene, and Alvaro escapes, this time becoming a monk and returning to the monastery near Seville. Carlo follows him there, and the two duel again. Their fighting takes them near Leonora’s cave where Carlo enters to receive last rites upon being mortally wounded by Alvaro. Alvaro is hot on his heels when he and Leonora both recognize each other. Alvaro recounts what has transpired between the two men, and Leonora rushes to embrace her dying brother. Carlo cannot abide dying without one final act of treacherous justice, however, so he stabs his sister as she seeks to comfort him. Padre Guardiano arrives and sees the death Alvaro carries with him between the siblings. In the original version of the opera, Alvaro feels guilty for what his love has caused, and he hurls himself from a cliff to his death as Padre Guardiano pleads with him to reconsider. In the 1869 version Guardiano chastises Alvaro for his constant temptation of fate and demands he humble himself before God. Leonora echoes the hope that he will do so, and Alvaro declares that he is finally redeemed.
This all-star cast features Sondra Radvanovsky as Donna Leonora, Brian Jagde as Don Alvaro, Etienne Dupuis as Don Carlo di Vargas, Evgeny Stavinsky as Padre Guardiano, Vasilisa Berzhanskaya as Preziosilla, Rodion Pogossov as Fra Melitone, Carlo Bosi as Mastro Trabuco, James Creswell as Marquis of Calatrava, Chanae Curtis as Curra, and Thomas D Hopkinson as Alcalde. Mark Elder conducted. This performance was recorded last month in London. It airs at 5:30 PM GMT on BBC Radio 3’s Opera on 3 on Saturday, October 21, 2023, and will be available for future listening once the broadcast concludes.
André Cardinal Destouches’s Télémaque et Calypso from the Ambronay Abbey on France Musique
For those unfamiliar with this composer, he was born a merchant’s son and found his penchant for music during his enlistment in the French army in his 20’s. A few years after the death of his father, André left his military service and began to pursue a career in music. The following year, 1697, saw one of his operas performed for Louis XIV, and the monarch was so pleased with the work that he declared he enjoyed Destouches’s music just as much as he did Lully’s. This word of confidence from the king propelled André to a lengthy career as a prominent composer and eventually head of the French royal academy of music. The first performance of this Baroque opera was on November 29, 1714, at the Paris Opera. It follows the tale of Telemachus’s search for his father Odysseus following the Trojan War. Telemachus becomes shipwrecked in his quest and must resist the advances of the goddess Calypso.
This work’s modern world premiere was recorded on September 29, 2023, at the Ambronay Festival and boasted a cast of Isabelle Druet as Calypso, Antonin Rondepierre as Télémaque, Emmanuelle de Negri as Eucharis / Antiope, David Witczak as Adraste, Basse-taille, Hasnaa Bennani as L'amour / Cléone / Prêtresse de Neptune / Nymphe / Matelote, Dessus, Adrien Fournaison as Apollon / Idas, Basse-taille, Marine Lafdal-Franc as Minerve / Grande Prêtresse de l'Amour, Dessus, David Tricou as Arcas / Un des Arts / Un Plaisir, Colin Isoir as Grand Prêtre de Neptune, Taille. Sylvain Sartre led the performance with Les Chantres du Centre de musique baroque de Versailles and Les Ombres. This work will be broadcast on France Musique on Saturday, October 21, 2023, at 6:00 PM GMT. It will be available for future listening following its initial airing.
Christoph Willibald von Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurydice from the Teatro La Fenice on RAI Radio 3
This opera from Gluck is considered a reformation of the art form. Rather than dramatic works requiring theatrical skill in addition to vocal prowess, operas tended to focus more on star singers and how they could sing starry da capo arias over and over again. Instead of an opera, you had something more akin to a concert with an orchestra and background vocalists as other characters. Stars would determine how many times they would sing an aria before they would proceed to the next part of a score, and other elements that made opera grand, such as the inclusion of ballets within the work, bowed out in favor of this new approach to the art form. Gluck was weary of this and as the Baroque era waned he composed a few operas that would challenge the dominance of opera seria in Europe. Orfeo ed Euridice in 1762 was the first of these, and one of the radical shifts he executed was to do away with secco accompaniment of recitative to unify the recitative and aria together for the audience and advancement of the score. Today we take this sort of thing for granted to the extent that audition arias are often presented with recitative now. Gluck’s reforms would continue in his later works and would eventually become the popular choice among working composers in every opera center of Europe.
The cast for this opera includes the talents of Cecilia Molinari as Orfeo, Mary Bevan as Euridice, and Silvia Frigato as Amore. Ottavio Dantone conducts from the harpsichord for this performance from April 28, 2023. This will air at 6:00 PM GMT on RAI Radio 3’s Il cartellone on Saturday, October 21, 2023. The broadcast will be available for future listening following its conclusion.
Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, BWV 232, from the Salle de Musique, La Chaux-de-Fonds on RTS Espace 2
The last of Bach’s significant works, the B Minor Mass is a collection of music and revisions for a missa tota. Scholars diverge upon the date of Bach’s last work on the collection, but they believe it to have been either 1748-49. There is no record of the complete work ever having been performed during the composer’s lifetime as he died the following year (1750), and his work fell out of favor very quickly among the nobility, church, and common audiences for the reason that other composers were quick to fill his positions and compose their own works that would be performed in place of Johann Sebastian’s through the next hundred or so years. It was not until the arrival of Mendelssohn and his rediscovery of Bach that his catalog of work began its return from exile to a place of reverence among musicians and musicologists alike, an office it has retained ever since. Composed or purposed for the Catholic tradition, the B Minor Mass is a departure from Bach’s standard Lutheran mass settings comprised of merely Kyrie and Gloria movements. Nevertheless, it began its life as just such a work that Bach submitted when he sought to become the royal composer for King Augustus III of Poland following his tenure in Leipzig at the Thomaskirche. The B Minor Mass was finally commercially published in 1845 with the first complete performance given in 1859 in Leipzig.
The soloists for this live offering of the mass are sopranos Gunta Smirnova and Anna Piroli, alto Carlos Mena, tenor Jakob Pilgram, and bass Tobias Berndt. La Cetra is conducted by Andrea Marcon. This performance is scheduled to air at 3:00 PM GMT on Sunday, October 22, 2023, on RTS Espace 2’s Concert Nomade. It will be available for listening again following the broadcast.