Rufus Wainwright's First Opera

Prima Donna by Rufus Wainwright premieres at the Manchester Festival tonight. It will be performed in Melbourne and Toronto, that's official.
I've heard some snippets and have to say its not as bad as people made it out to be. It is set in Paris in 1970 and is to a French libretto. Wainwright has assimilated a mish-mash of post French sounding Ravel music into what I have heard, lots of jolly woodwind a la Poulenc and Ibert. Janis Kelly, as the Prima Donna Régine sounds very impressive too. Via You Tube Rufus in Paris in June sings an aria from Prima Donna (believe me Janis Kelly is much, much better)

Update: Reviews are in...

The Guardian 12 July "The score itself comes clothed as Strauss, Massenet and Puccini; Wainwright would seem to be on a mission to drag opera back into the late 19th century. But his gift as a melodist and an orchestrator are in no doubt, having been proved on a series of albums which are mini-operas in their own right."

The Independent "Musically Prima Donna is at best banal, at worst boring. The orchestral writing is lumpy, leaden and repetitive, so that the merest flash of inspiration – a dashing musical signature for example – is welcomed with relief as an original idea. Wainwright didn't need to pay homage to all those dead composers he adores by including so many fragments of their scores in his own opera."

Jonathan Summers (left) and some piece of totty in Prima Donna

Jonathan Summers appears to have the choice part as the "sleazy, bullying, Mephisto-type butler" (all in a days work when your bread and butter consists of Scarpia, Iago and nasty Verdi baritones).
The New York Times is very insightful and - shock horror! written by someone who knows something about music! (and who agrees with me about the Poulenc influences) "As a longtime admirer of his music, I wish I could report that “Prima Donna” fulfilled his ambitions for writing a fresh and personal new opera. He certainly brings deep talents and potential to the challenge."

The Manchester Confidential Not an insightful review but it gives the best synopsis of the opera and commentary on the illustrative nature of Rufus's music.

Bloomberg Hates it!

Pity Rufus is such a nong about the artform he claims to love so much. In the slurry of interviews and advance publicity for the opera he claims that "there's no opera about an opera singer ... It doesn't exist in the repertoire.”

Yes there are operas about opera singers, Tosca and The Makropulos Case have leading characters who are opera singers although the plots feature little about their actual professions as both Floria and Emilia are caught up some heavy personal stuff. What Rufus probably means is that there is no opera about being an opera singer.

Interested parties might like to add to the list of operas about or featuring characters who are singers that we can send to Rufus.

Dominic Argento - The Aspern Papers (Juliana Bordereau) clip at YouTube [Elisabeth *sigh* Soderstrom and Neil Rosenshein]
Dominic Argento - Postcard from Morocco (An Operetta Singer, A Foreign Singer, An
Operetta Singer)

Arthur Benjamin - The Prima Donna (Olympia & Fiammetta)
Robert Russell Bennett - Maria Malibran (Maria Malibran)

Daniel Catan - Florencia en el Amazonas (Florencia Grimaldi) also at Wikipedia

Katherine Davis - The Unmusical Impresario (Madame DaCapo, a failed opera singer)
Donizetti - Le Convenienze Ed Inconvenienze Teatrali or Viva la Momma! (Daria Garbinati, Luiga Castragatti, Guglielmo Antolstoinoff & Donna Agata Scanagalli, don't ya love those names!?)
Joseph Haydn - La Canterina (Gasparina)
Paul Hindemith - Cardillac (The Lady, a Prima Donna at the local opera)

Sydney Hodkinson - St Carmen of the Main (Carmen, a Country & Western singer)

Adriana Hölszky - Giuseppe e Sylvia (Giuseppina Strepponi)
Janáček - Věc Makropulos (Emila Marty) clip at YouTube [Raina Kabaivanska]
Leoncavallo - Zaza (Zaza, a cafe singer)
Siegfried Matthus - Farinelli or the Power of Singing (Farinelli)
Mozart - Der Schauspieldirektor (Madamoiselles Herz & Siberklang, Monsieur Vogelsang) clip at YouTube [Yvonne Kenny & Judith Howarth]
Michael Nyman - The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (Dr. P) youtube clip not from the original film
Offenbach - La Pericole (Pericole, a street singer [also featured in operas by Henri Busser and Lord Berners)

Offenbach - Les Contes d' Hoffmann (Stella)
Offenbach - Monsieur Choufleuri restera chez lui - (Henriette Sontag, Giovanni Battista Rubini & Antonio Tamburini are impersonated)
Offenbach - La Leçon de chant électromagnétique (Jean Matois, a tenor whose voice is created by the elctro-magnetic method of the singing teacher Pacifico Toccato)
Thomas Pasatieri - Frau Margot (Margot)

Inspired by the story of Helene Berg's attempt to keep the third act of her husband's incompleted opera Lulu under wraps, Frau Margot is the widow of a famous composer and was a famous singer herself.

Laurent Petitgirard - Joseph Merrick dit Elephant Man (La Colorature, Celena [this role reputedly supplants Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos as the most difficult and high flying role for a coloratura soprano])
Ponchielli - La Gioconda (Gioconda)
Jonathan Sheffer - The Mistake (Ariel)

Set during the interval of a vocal recital, the soprano Ariel is upset over having made a mistake during the first part of her recital. She is trying to work out how and why she went wrong, is reassured by her friends and vocal coach, has an agrument with her boyfriend, Sandy, regains her composure and resturns for the second half of her concert.

Puccini - Tosca (Floria Tosca)
Antonio Salieri - Prima la musica e poi le parole (Eleonora & Tonina)
Domenico Scarlatti - La Dirindina (Dirindina & Liscione)

Comic intermezzo along the lines of Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona. An old music master, Don Carissimo, overhears the soprano Dirindina and the castrato Liscione as they rehearse a love scene from an opera Didone Abbandonata. He misunderstands the situation and thinks they have actually made love, interrupts them and, thinking Dirindina will become pregnant, tries to make them agree to marriage for the sake of the child. In the closing trio he sings "Give me your hand, Liscione, give me yours Dirindina, for your little child will be legitimate. " Liscione and Dirindina respond "Stop -- I'm a capon! Stop -- I'm a hen! A pair like that doesn't get together and never lays an egg."

Richard Strauss - Ariadne auf Naxos (Prima Donna)
Richard Strauss - Intermezzo (Christine Storch, based on Strauss's singer wife Pauline)
Richard Strauss - Intermezzo (a singer)
Richard Strauss - Capriccio (two Italian singers)
Richard Strauss - Der Rosenkavalier (an Italian singer) clip at YouTube [Piotr Beczala]

Review - Happy Days - Malthouse

Slaved By The Bell
The Beckett estate seem to have relaxed a little over the author's instructions and stage directions (permission for the Belvoir Street production of Waiting for Godot was nearly withdrawn when music was played at a point where the author had not prescribed it). In Michael Kantor's new production of Happy Days the famous mound of earth consuming the central character Winnie across the two acts is interpreted as a jumble of black metal plates surmounted with jagged rocks and looking as though Emil Pretorius's sets for a pre-war Bayreuth Walküre has mated with Ron Robertson-Swann's sculpture Vault . In any Beckett play(and in particular the big three dealing most with existence in a world where existence has ceased to exist, Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Happy Days) audiences look for clues and meanings about what Beckett is suggesting in his settings, let alone his words. In any Beckett play the story is clouded and the language dense and nihilistic and audiences look for clues and meanings about what Beckett suggests in his settings, let alone his words. Winnie is usually considered ‘up to her neck in it’. Here she is ‘on the rocks’ as well; another metaphor for the desperate situation she is so blissfully unaware of.

Originally Happy Days was to be a technological travesty in a technological world gone awry, Beckett even calling the set a 'battlefield' where Winnie ("one female lavatory attendant spared") and Willie were war survivors. In the current production the pre-performance mood music - popular songs from the 1930s and 1940s - and Winnie's costume reinforces the suggest the action could take place in a World War Two devastated place. Winnie's new prison of metal and rock is surrounded by yet another, and ultra-theatrical, prison; a turquoise curtain topped with an Art Deco lid which could be a scaled up version of her precious music box or even a carnival booth, with Winnie bobbing inside like a travesty of the plaster gypsy that should know all but now can barely remember the end of a sentence. As the curtain draws open a composite of mechanical, military and orchestral sounds is heard like sound scape of a civilisation under siege and which falls silent when all that remains, Winnie's knoll is revealed. The 'holy light' is a circular rack of carnival lights glaring down from inside the lid. Beckett requested a 'pompier trompe-l'oeil' back cloth depicting the desert wilderness, here he gets gigantic three-dimensional pompier prop, telling as much about Winnie's ruined society as the few props in her handbag.

As Winnie Julie Forsyth is a marvel and ought to be added to the list of actors (Peggy Ashcroft, Irene Worth, Madeleine Renaud, Billie Whitelaw and Fiona Shaw among them) who have given memorable Winnies. Forsyth is at once comical and pathetic without seeming to force either, a cross between Margaret Rutherford and Giulietta Massina in La Strada. The programme note reminds us that the text is littered with 150 pauses, all as important for the actor playing Winnie to decipher as much as the multi-layered speeches. Forsyth fills the pauses brilliantly with grimacing comedy or chilling, momentary, desperation. In the second act where only her head, like a loaf of white bread left in the rain, is visible and is though Winnie's physical world has disappeared and only her fading thoughts remain. Happy Days is a classic piece of theatre, a great existential comedy and at the same time a great existential tragedy and that feeling comes across in this production. The rampaging sexual innuendo in Beckett's text bounces off her and she speaks innuendo-laden lines like "having to give you a hand Willie" with the same innocence that masks Winnie's desperate situation with such cheeriness.

She spends her day under a glaring and relentlessly bright sky happily sorting through her handbag and going about her daily routine of prettying herself while chatting to her mostly unseen and unspeaking husband Willie. When Willie does appear it is briefly to rub his privates with vaseline, sunbath for a while and then slither into a cave behind Winnie’s mound. While being the usual Beckettian scenario of spiritual and societal desolation the play bubbles with absurd sexual connotations like these rather like an intellectual Carry-On movie.

Peter Carroll is luxury casting for such a thankless role as Willie. Mostly unseen and silent when Willie is visible it is with his back to the audience until the end of the play. When he does speak Carroll can make the most of absurd one-word utterances like 'formication'. A quick YouTube search locates some quite striking interpretations of Beckett's locale for Happy Days. Anna Cordingley's set is as good as any and the semi-circular placement of the audience around the semi-circular stage gives the production an extra intimacy (rather like watching a Punch and Judy show). Kantor's realisation of the play is very creative and perhaps disciplined by the requirements of Copyright when compared to recent productions of Public Domain works like Optimism (Happy Days makes a brilliant companion piece to the ironic optimism of Optimism), Woyzeck and Tartuffe.

Happy Days (1961) by Samuel Beckett
Winnie - Julie Forsyth
Willie - Peter Carroll
Director - Michael Kantor
Set and Costume Designer - Anna Cordingley
Lighting Designer - Paul Jackson
Sound - Russell Goldsmith
Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse
3 - 25 July 2009
Belvoir Street, Sydney
4 November - 16 December 2009

Review - Affection - Ranters Theatre

Affection or Affectation

Forsaking a night in sitting on the couch with a few friends, listening to music and talking about nothing much, I took in Ranters Theatre’s latest play Affection. To my surprise it consisted of little more than a few friends sitting on a couch, listening to music and talking about nothing much! Written by Raimondo Cortese and directed by his brother Adriano, Affection is set in a room where three people sit on a couch. One drinks from a takeaway coffee cup and the three make small talk for an hour or so while musician Anastasia Russell-Head plays music by François Couperin, Handel or The Ramones on a harpsichord. Occasionally all four sing, Russell-Head sings an Italian folk song and the female character twice asks one of the men if he would like a kiss and eventually gives him a massage. Relaxed (and perhaps dulled by the banal hour of nothing) he falls asleep on the sofa. All I know is that this play is not as good as Waiting for Godot because nothing happened only once.

As was the case with Ranters earlier, and highly praised, Holiday, this builds on the ideas from Holiday forming a performance ethos for the company. In a recent interview two of the actors Patrick Moffatt and Paul Lum, suggested Affection is deliberately open to interpretation and that the audience fill in the details about what is happening through the mundane conversations to create a drama from their own perceptions. Adriano Cortese suggests this approach is "not about serving the script, it's about serving the production,” his interest being “in something happening in front of an audience and for an audience to receive that rather than literature." The baroque music, according to Cortese, frames the dialogue, “abstracting the conversation and concentrating attention on the dialogue. Rather than frame the dialogue, the severe structure of formulaic classical music sits at odds with the banality of the play and the relationship between the musician and the characters, who acknowledge her presence, remains unclear.

The other musical additions and their relevance are equally up to interpretation. Where are they anyway? Is it someone’s living room? Cortese recalled that audiences for Holiday thought the two characters were in a mental home. Perhaps the setting of Affection is a visiting room in a psychiatric hospital (which would explain the appearance of a take-away coffee cup and why the conversations are so uneventful so as not over tax recovering patient), where one of the three is visited by the other two. Replacing an indisposed actor Beth Buchanan, script at hand, invests the dialogue with meaning and purpose at every point, unwittingly perhaps, defeating the Corteses’ purposes by developing her character across the play and engaging the audience by suggesting a motive. True, asking to kiss another character and giving him a massage, provide an oasis of thought and action compared with the rest of the play. As experimental writing and theatre Affection also initiates experiments in audience perception. The banality left me cold although some could argue that theatre dialogue has been banal ever since those endless conversations about the fate of a cherry orchard.
Blackbox, The Arts Centre. 1 -11 July 2009

Opera Australia Appoints Lyndon Terracini as Artistic Director

Not since Eberhard Waechter controlled the Vienna Staastoper have baritones held so much power in an opera company. Two baritones now hold the highest creative and administrative posts in opera in Australia with Opera Australia’s appointment of baritone and administrator Lyndon Terracini to the newly created post of Artistic Director. The company’s CEO Adrian Collette is also a baritone singer by training. As an administrator Terracini has been artistic director of the Queensland Music Festival and more recently the 2006, 2008 and 2009 Brisbane Festivals.

As a singer Terracini (pictured left sometime in the 1970s as a member of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music Renaissance Players and displaying an impressive pair of nakers) made his operatic debut with Opera Australia (then called The Australian Opera) as Sid in Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring and sang a variety of roles with them as a career baritone ranging from Strephon in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe to Tarquinius in Britten's The Rape of Lucretia. One of his last roles with the company was Lord Byron (doubling with the role of the Monster) in one of their most impressive contemporary commissions Mer de Glace by Richard Meale. An early example of barihunk Terracini had respectable career singing the standard repertory with the national and state companies but it is his contemporary music performances that established him here and overseas. At the 1976 Adelaide Festival and subsequent Melbourne, Perth, Barossa and Darwin Guitar Festivals he gave outstanding performances in Hans Werner Henze’s solo theatre work El Cimarron. He was invited by the Henze to create the role of Sancho Panza in the world premiere of his adaptation of Paisiello’s opera Don Quichotte at the first Montepulciano Festival in 1979. Terracini stayed in Italy for over a decade but returning to Australia to perform and create new work including the lead role in Brian Howard’s adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis in 1983. Other important premieres included The Ghost Sonata by Aribert Reimann after Strindberg's play for the Opera Factory, Zurich in 1983. Terracini (third from right) still in knee high boots but tighter tights in Opera Australia's production of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia)

Terracini returned to Australia taking the title role in the Australian premiere of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd for the State Opera of South Australia, one of the earliest stagings of the 'opera house' version of the musical. He continued to sing overseas, still working with leading composers and theatre makers. The most notable was the title role in the world premiere of ROSA - A Horse Drama by Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway in 1994 for the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam where, performing nude, he displayed his nackers in earnest.

In 1993 he founded Northern Rivers Performing Arts (NORPA) and in 2002 was awarded the Myer Foundation Group Award. Terracini's appointment is an inspired and inspiring one. As a performer he has worked solidly and, to me, constantly as a musician looking all the time for interesting and unusual music to perform rather than follow the beaten path of - for want of a better word- a hack baritone (have Don Giovanni will travel!). And as a member of the Australia Council’s music committee of the Performing Arts Board and his commitment to securing performances of contemporary music would enable Terracini to have a keen understanding of the issues surrounding the commissioning, creation and performance of new 'performance' works. Interviewed on ABC Radio National the following day Terracini spoke of new works being part of the company repertoire at a modest rate, suggesting one new opera per season. He also enthused about digital technology being applied to opera production. Terracini's appointment commences in October.