Everyone's Opera
  • About
  • Contact
  • Artist Apprezz
  • Everyone's Operas
  • Stage Light
  • Performance Reviews
  • Fiction
  • My Top Recordings
  • New Page

Artist Apprezz: Claudio Monteverdi

11/25/2015

0 Comments

 
Singers and orchestras give the music of the opera world substance and sound, but the hands that keep the stones and waters on their axis belong to a line of musical crazies that some call masters, others genii or gods, who are otherwise known as composers. Some of the greatest of these are Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, Modest Mussorgsky, and Richard Wagner. If you're new or new-ish to opera, though, you're probably wondering what it sounded like wayyyyy back when it first started. Thankfully, I can give you an answer to that with a bit on the music of the first opera composer whose work has survived to be oft performed in the modern century. After plenty of words on some of the planet's best- loved classical music interpreters, please welcome the first music maker in Everyone's Opera's "Artist Apprezz" series, Claudio Monteverdi!

Survival of the Brilliant-est

So, there's not much of Monteverdi's work that made it out of the 1600s, but, lucky for us, what of it has is, according to just about all of the historical articles on him that you can Google, the best of everything he wrote. His madrigals (sung poetry, to put the word in the least helpful but most summary terms) and church music have been the focus of a few entitled classics men/women (musicologists) for their revolutionary style; it was pretty new over four hundred years ago, anyway. Yet it's his "L'Orfeo" on which sits three quarters of his fame's monumental rump, and for good reason, which I'll get to in a minute. "The Return of Ulysses" ("Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria"), the basis of which is obvious enough, and "The Coronation of Poppea" ("L'Incoronazione di Poppea"), based on the life and times of the royal Roman baddie, Emperor Nero, are pretty much legendary, too. You'd think that, like most computer games and cell phones, the first models of true-to-term opera music would be pretty heavy with prototype glitches that might make you want to drop them into the mouth of Mt. Etna from ten thousand feet in the air or repeatedly pound them with a volume of a useless, useless, useless and ridiculously expensive hardcopy encyclope... Okay, back to the point. Monteverdi's stuff was in no way underdeveloped, but it was he who gave music its first push into the Baroque Era, when Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel were One Republic, Sia, and Sean Mendes.

"L'Orfeo"


"L'Orfeo" is, as I've written, Monteverdi's big one, and the reason is very simple, really. It was only the first fully formed opera ever written. There were some operas composed before it, but they were more closely related to plays, the sounds of which several composers had decided to start playing with. Every play was peppered with what's called "incidental music," which is stuff that Shakespeare movie fans know all about. A piece of incidental music would be heard during specific sequences of action. I guess anyone who's ever encountered a soundtrack pretty much gets the idea. There was also the "intermedio," which was a piece of music or group of musical pieces, including songs, that was performed between Acts. Monteverdi did more than any other composer to advance the idea of his predecessors, who figured they could and should expand this material and have players sing their parts instead of just yelling them out, creating a more emotional art. "L'Orfeo," then, naturally, has a rather dramatic theme: the futile hope of a young lover for the return of his finer half from the land of the dead, and his quest to make that hope's reality happen. Of course, Monteverdi's opera doesn't sound as dramatic as late Classical, Bel Canto, and Romantic opera, but Gluck didn't show up until later to really start making music that could tell stories all by itself. We'll definitely be discussing him later.

Resurrection


Monteverdi was one of those composers that time just couldn't keep down. His music disappeared for awhile, but when it finally started receiving performances again in the 1800s, it became an important historical study. I know. It sounds boring, but in the 1960's, performers finally started giving the music all they had, getting the popular bunch of Handel and Mozart operas to bump elbows with "The Coronation of Poppea" in theatres across the planet. Now, the world's first major opera composer continues to bring houses down. They say The Beatles will live on forever, and their state of immortality has only just hit the fifty-five year mark. Let's see if they can make it to four hundred thirty-three.

Every one of the great artists of every genre has been made possible by the work of one master or another that, once upon the spark of a metaphorical light bulb, planted a seed with a pen. I hope you've enjoyed this little something on one of the greatest minds in the history of vocal music, my friends. Check out Everyone's Opera's Facebook page for the best of Claudio Monteverdi. Until next time, happy opera loving!

0 Comments

Artist Apprezz: Angela Gheorghiu

11/11/2015

0 Comments

 
On the tailwinds of her acclaimed performance in Puccini's "Tosca" earlier this month, I present this article in Everyone's Opera's Artist Appreciation series on pro screamer, Angela Gheorghiu. She's been flying at the speed of superstardom since 1990 and has made it very clear to opera crazies everywhere that her aim is Mick Jagger "modern legend" status, which, if she remains steadfast on her stunning musical way, just might end up on her long list of achievements.
Angela, Verdian
Verdian. It's a word I love. It's a reference to a music to which I am permanently bound, which sounds more poetic than it actually is. It's not that I'm trying to hide a secret Annie Wilkes kind of devotion to a dead guy (That would just be... you know... really gross), though I'm certainly not trying to say that I'm anything but a character in a kid's cereal commercial when it comes to all things Giuseppe Verdi. Verdi was 'it' in the Italian music circle back in the 1800's, and, well, he still pretty much is (Sorry, Battiato). He composed one ode after another to everything, from political issues to family problems to, in the case of "La Traviata," the difficulties one faces when trying to move on from one's past (all those club- swinging squares running around...). Gheorghiu has sung in that final category like a pro from the beginning of her career, when the conductor, Georg Solti, picked her to belt "Traviata's" heroine, Violetta Valery, in a fresh production at the Royal Opera House. She pets every phrase of "The Strayed One" like a cat's countess, with grace and a presence the size of life (maybe a little ironic considering the lung problems of the character, but you can't perform opera without singing it. I don't care what Patitucci says.). Maybe she doesn't always make the jump over the traditional high note at the end of the aria, "Ever Free," but it's okay, since Verdi didn't write it in anyway.
Every Composer's Champ
Callas being an inspiration to her (She's got an album to prove it), she is an advocate for the intentions of opera's composers. She may not, therefore, be a consistent favorite of designers and directors, but, nonetheless, the hands and whoop- whoops of her fans remain high and in flight at almost every performance she gives. Seeded in Romania under a state head who would have made the political minds behind Orwell's Big Brother proud, her vocalism backstage has occasionally been as electric as her appearances above the orchestra pit since her break from Communism's grip. She has proven time and again that talent's voice can touch every nerve, and that a soprano doesn't cross a director dedicated to Franco Zefirelli if she doesn't want an Oxford in her costume bustle. "The wig is going on, with or without you," were Joseph Volpe's words to her when she gave the blonde wig of the soprano character in Zefirelli's production of Bizet's "Carmen" an "I spit on you" look while repeating an emphatic and creative, "No." I'm sure that the soprano who wound up on stage in her stead was in no way dishonored by the opportunity that "No" presented her with. By critics, however, Gheorghiu has been acclaimed as an artist who is "sensitive to... the composers" (Martha Duffy) and, to paraphrase William V. Madison's review of her first Tosca, "unfazed" by even the music that pushes the voice to its limits. Whatever the intentions of the composer, she's game, and most don't require a blonde wig, whether or not the Misters and Misses-es Directors-es like it.
A Tenor's Complement
The greatest tenor/soprano duos of the twentieth century are still around thanks to the recording industry. Maria Callas and Giuseppe di Stefano, Renata Tebaldi and Mario del Monaco, Franco Corelli and Leontyne Price, Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti... These are some of the great equations in opera. In new algebra, we have the Anna Netrebko/Rolando Villazon combo, and the Roberto Alagna/Angela Gheorgiu. Sure, Gheorghiu and Alagna were married for a spell of more than ten years, but that's not what put the equals sign between the two. The key to all of opera's polynomials has always been emotional polyphony, and Gheorghiu is one of those sopranos who simply has what it takes to comprise a part of a complete success in collaboration, never pushing to overpower her partners in any way, though from her a listener can always expect a vocal right hook or two.
Autumn at the Metropolitan Opera is rarely as hot as it is when Gheorghiu pays American audiences a visit. "The world's most glamourous opera star," as bloggers and columnists have agreed she is, joined in the Elena Obraztsova ball at the Bolshoi Theatre yesterday, and is scheduled for a few more "Toscas" and a handful of "La Bohemes" this season. Check out Everyone's Opera's Facebook page for plenty of Gheorghiu video content. Until next time, my friends, happy opera loving!

0 Comments

    Author

    I am an opera freak living on a marvelous  downward spiral toward complete musical insanity, writer's burnout, and gigabytelessness.  

    Picture

    Archives

    September 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015

    RSS Feed

    rachdeoperafan@gmail.com
Proudly powered by Weebly