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Post by tmesis on Feb 23, 2019 11:16:11 GMT
This is the Mozart opera I love the most, which, since I love Mozart's operas above all, possibly makes it the single opera I love the most. Act 1, in particular, is an absolute miracle. Mozart drives the action forward with the most sublime music, and, interestingly, they are nearly all ensembles. Because Act 1 sets such an impossibly high standard, Act 2 is not quite as compelling, and I think that's because Mozart gave into his singers' demands for too many solo arias, but it's still on a level that other composers could only dream of, and the finale, with its wonderful canon is fantastic.
I can go back a fair way with numerous excellent performances at ROH and ENO. My very first outing at The Garden was one of the best - a 1979 John Copley production with Brigitte Fassbaender, Herman Prey and Geriant Evans conducted by Karl Bohm.
What a pity the current production is not as satisfying as that first one. I first saw it two years ago, didn't like it much then, and disliked it more yesterday. The 'shtick' is that it's a 'play within a play.' I get this, after all half the cast are 'play acting' with their disguises and assumed identities but this is done in such a heavy handed way that it works against the drama and makes the character motivation confusing. It's quite an achievement to confuse one of the simplest plots in all opera.
Anyway, musically things are much better. Thomas Allen, still in good voice, was Don Alfonso. He was joined by five excellent young singers. They blended particularly well in their ensembles. Paolo Fanale was a superb Ferrando - his Un'aura Amorosa was gorgeous (one of the best I've ever heard) and Salome Jicia was a totally secure Fiordiligi (a really thrilling Come Scoglio.)
Stefano Montanari conducted, from the fortepiano, the fastest ever Cosi I've heard but, in the main, it wasn't hard driven. His continuo playing though was HORRIBLE. He added lots of tricksy twiddles with much unnecessary arpeggiating and at times seemed to muck about with the harmony producing an almost Stravinsky-like neo-classical sound world that made it sound like The Rake's Progress. At the start of Act 2 he started playing bits of the overture to Figaro! Why? Most of it smacked of gratuitous showing-off and completely distracted from the music.
ps. I was at the Friend's Dress Rehearsal - it doesn't actually open until Monday.
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Post by Dawnstar on Feb 23, 2019 13:17:35 GMT
I can go back a fair way with numerous excellent performances at ROH and ENO. My very first outing at The Garden was one of the best - a 1979 John Copley production with Brigitte Fassbaender, Herman Prey and Geriant Evans conducted by Karl Bohm. ps. I was at the Friend's Dress Rehearsal - it doesn't actually open until Monday. I'm envious of you seeing that cast. All singers who had retired before I started operagoing so I've only seen on video. I thought there were a remarkable lack of reviews if it had opened! I won't be seeing it myself - apart from Allen I've not heard of any of the cast & the reviews of the production when it was new didn't make me want to see it - but I follow enough opera critics on Twitter that it's usually hard to miss when anything opens. |
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Post by tmesis on Feb 23, 2019 19:10:28 GMT
I can go back a fair way with numerous excellent performances at ROH and ENO. My very first outing at The Garden was one of the best - a 1979 John Copley production with Brigitte Fassbaender, Herman Prey and Geriant Evans conducted by Karl Bohm. ps. I was at the Friend's Dress Rehearsal - it doesn't actually open until Monday. I'm envious of you seeing that cast. All singers who had retired before I started operagoing so I've only seen on video. I thought there were a remarkable lack of reviews if it had opened! I won't be seeing it myself - apart from Allen I've not heard of any of the cast & the reviews of the production when it was new didn't make me want to see it - but I follow enough opera critics on Twitter that it's usually hard to miss when anything opens. Yes - apart from Thomas Allen I hadn't heard of any of the cast but they really were excellent. Latterly, I prefer Mozart sung with purer voices; something you usually get with a younger cast. Because of the cast I really enjoyed it, but was happy I only paid £6 for my ticket since the production is so poor. Over the years I've been lucky enough to hear some fantastic singers in Cosi; in addition to the ones I've mentioned these include: Fiordiligi: Kiri te Kanawa, Felicity Lott and Margaret Price Dorabella: Agnes Baltsa, Ann Murray Ferrando: Stuart Burrows Margaret Price was one of my favourite Mozart singers. Annoyingly she was rather overlooked by The Garden and made her career mainly outside the U.K. where her considerable qualities were fully appreciated. Also I think underrated was Stuart Burrows; post Fritz Wunderlich there has not been a finer Mozart tenor - he had a peerless, honeyed tone, fabulous legato line and phenomenal breath-control. Also he was a superb (the best) Lensky in Onegin and I was lucky enough to hear him in that role at ROH. Thankfully this performance is preserved on the Solti/Decca recording. |
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Post by Dawnstar on Feb 24, 2019 12:50:14 GMT
Yes - apart from Thomas Allen I hadn't heard of any of the cast but they really were excellent. Latterly, I prefer Mozart sung with purer voices; something you usually get with a younger cast. Because of the cast I really enjoyed it, but was happy I only paid £6 for my ticket since the production is so poor. Over the years I've been lucky enough to hear some fantastic singers in Cosi; in addition to the ones I've mentioned these include: Fiordiligi: Kiri te Kanawa, Felicity Lott and Margaret Price Dorabella: Agnes Baltsa, Ann Murray Ferrando: Stuart Burrows Margaret Price was one of my favourite Mozart singers. Annoyingly she was rather overlooked by The Garden and made her career mainly outside the U.K. where her considerable qualities were fully appreciated. Also I think underrated was Stuart Burrows; post Fritz Wunderlich there has not been a finer Mozart tenor - he had a peerless, honeyed tone, fabulous legato line and phenomenal breath-control. Also he was a superb (the best) Lensky in Onegin and I was lucky enough to hear him in that role at ROH. Thankfully this performance is preserved on the Solti/Decca recording.
More envy! I've seen Lott, Murray & Te Kanewa live but only towards the end of their careers when they were all long past singing young lovers. Baltsa I've seen videos of while Price 7 Burrows I really only know as names.
As I saw OHP's Cosi last summer, with a cast most of whom I knew & liked from seeing previously and in a nice production, I don't intend to see the ROH's version. While I like Cosi as a piece it's not one of those operas that I love so much that I want to see it at every possible opportunity. My favourite Mozart is Nozze di Figaro.
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Post by tonyloco on Feb 24, 2019 13:03:13 GMT
May I just second tmesis's views on the perfection of Mozart's music in Così fan tutte.
It was one of the first operas I ever saw back in Sydney in 1953 (when I was 16) with Betty Fretwell as Fiordiligi and John Shaw as Don Alfonso, and I was soon exploring enthusiastically the complete 1935 Glyndebourne recording on twenty 12-inch 78s (bought cheaply second-hand).
Interestingly, soon after seeing the professional production, I went to a student performance at the Sydney Conservatorium at which the skill, beauty and brilliance of Mozart's orchestration became a lot clearer to me, sitting as usual in the front row and being dazzled as phrase after phrase bounced back and forth among the woodwind and passages for the inner strings revealed themselves. Perhaps the whole thing was not as well-balanced as it might have been, but it certainly gave me a superb picture of Mozart's genius with the orchestra, even before considering what the singers were doing on the stage!
And to throw in a tonyloco anecdote, the 1962 EMI recording of Così fan tutte conducted by Karl Böhm and featuring Schwarzkopf's Fiordiligi, was one of the company's first releases in the new Angel Series (AN/SAN) where for the first time a complete multi-lingual libretto was included in the box with the LPs, although the price per LP was slightly higher then the previous sets without a libretto, which were a multiple of the CX/SAX or ALP/ASD LP prices. The Böhm Così with Christa Ludwig and a young Alfredo Kraus has also given me much pleasure.
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Post by Dawnstar on Feb 24, 2019 13:52:20 GMT
And to throw in a tonyloco anecdote, the 1962 EMI recording of Così fan tutte conducted by Karl Böhm and featuring Schwarzkopf's Fiordiligi, was one of the company's first releases in the new Angel Series (AN/SAN) where for the first time a complete multi-lingual libretto was included in the box with the LPs, although the price per LP was slightly higher then the previous sets without a libretto, which were a multiple of the CX/SAX or ALP/ASD LP prices.
So previously there were no libretti at all available with records? Or was the original rext included but no translation? |
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Post by tonyloco on Feb 24, 2019 16:05:21 GMT
And to throw in a tonyloco anecdote, the 1962 EMI recording of Così fan tutte conducted by Karl Böhm and featuring Schwarzkopf's Fiordiligi, was one of the company's first releases in the new Angel Series (AN/SAN) where for the first time a complete multi-lingual libretto was included in the box with the LPs, although the price per LP was slightly higher then the previous sets without a libretto, which were a multiple of the CX/SAX or ALP/ASD LP prices.
So previously there were no libretti at all available with records? Or was the original rext included but no translation?
I am looking at EMI's 1962 Alphabetical Catalogue, which is a mine of information about all records then available on all the EMI labels in the UK. I'm not sure about DGG, but back in the 1950s when LPs first arrived, both EMI and Decca, who had by far the most complete operas on their catalogues, operated a similar system.
The opera sets were available on several single LPs with a note on the back of each sleeve although these notes might not be much more than the cast list. These LPs could be purchased separately (I bought the Furtwangler Tristan und Isolde as six separate HMV ALP LPs as and when I could afford them) or you could buy them all at the same time in paper sleeves and get a free 'presentation box' that included a small leaflet with the cast list and a brief note.
As regards librettos, these always had to be purchased separately and in 1962 in the UK cost anything between three shillings (Lucia di Lammermoor, Idomeneo, Die Kluge, etc) and seven and sixpence (Capriccio, The Decembrists, Der Rosenkavalier, etc) depending on the length of the work and whether it was in copyright. They were always the sung text in the original language and an English translation. Decca's English translations were generally of a high quality and presented in parallel columns but EMI continued to sell some appalling 'line-by-line' English singing translations that dated back to the days of 78s and were a disgrace. The EMI and Decca librettos were roughly the same dimensions (whatever a quarto page folded over is called, or something like that) and the system of selling separate librettos came to an end during the 1960s after EMI's Angel Series paved the way for the inclusion of a multi-lingual libretto, albeit initially at a higher price. I guess Decca followed EMI around the same time.
The new multi-lingual librettos generally included the text in the original language (usually Italian, French or German) with translations into English plus French, German and Italian as necessary. I should point out here that before the CD era, LPs were generally pressed locally for the main markets in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, USA and Japan and the accompanying packaging was also in the local language. The arrival of the multi-lingual librettos meant that even when the LPs were pressed locally, the librettos could be printed from sets of films imported from the centre or wherever the multi-lingual libretto booklets were originated. They were 12 inches square, the same size as the LPs, and the texts were usually laid out in parallel columns. Works in other languages like Russian and Czech caused special problems as to whether the librettos should be printed in the original Cyrillic as well as transliterations, which of course would vary as regards English, German, French, etc, as well as the actual translations into those languages. This work on multilingual librettos caused a major expansion in the editorial department of EMI's central classical division as well as its design centre in the USA, until the CD era when it was eventually farmed out to outside companies. The outside company in the UK was actually set up by what used to be Decca's editorial department and EMI soon got on board and sacked most of its inhouse editors at the time, which was not a very popular move as they were mostly my pals!
But in the heyday of multilingual librettos for LPs and then CDs, there was some very interesting work done, especially when the booklets became the place for original research and new notes written by various experts, for example John Steane's brilliant series of notes on Maria Callas and her repertoire that Warners are still recycling with the latest Callas reissues!
End of lecture!
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Post by Dawnstar on Feb 24, 2019 17:06:25 GMT
Thank you very much for the lecture tonyloco . It's really interesting. I didn't realise that records for a complete opera were still sold separately in the LP era, I thought that this was only done back when it was 78s. I have a couple of interesting books from the 1920s, picked up in my local Oxfam bookshop, called Opera At Home and The Victrola Book Of Opera that are sort of record catalogues. Most of the operas are listed as only having some arias avaiable on record but Cav & Pag are both available complete, on 10 records apiece. One can understand why no-one tried recording a complete Ring in those days! I thought that LPs had always come with large booklets including libretti, as I've read comments from older opera listeners bemoaning that CD booklets have smaller type & cover pictures than LP ones did. I didn't know that these booklets had only come in part-way through the LP era. I had previously read about LPs being pressed locally. I think I may have read somewhere that Japanese pressings were often considered superior to European ones, though I presume it would vary between record companies.
PS Apologies for wandering your thread off topic tmesis. |
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Post by tmesis on Feb 24, 2019 17:10:39 GMT
Fantastically interesting tonyloco . I didn't realise the box set for vinyl operas didn't exist to begin with and you could purchase separately complete opera sets. I remember fondly buying the famous Bohm 1962 recording on vinyl in around 1976 form a wonderful, classical only, record shop near Eton College (I was living in Windsor at the time.) I have since bought it on CD and feel that in many ways it's never been bettered. That's why I was so excited that my first hearing of it at The Garden was conducted by Dr. Bohm himself. This was such an important moment in my life I actually splashed out on a top price grand tier seat (which I think cost me the outrageous amount of £4!) I must have struck lucky because Bohm hardly ever conducted at The Garden. Anyway, he didn't disappoint - what a wonderful Mozart conductor he was. |
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Post by TallPaul on Feb 24, 2019 17:23:13 GMT
Blimey, Tony, that was a long one, even by your standards. 🙂 Fascinating, though, as always.
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Post by Dawnstar on Feb 24, 2019 18:01:00 GMT
Fantastically interesting tonyloco . I didn't realise the box set for vinyl operas didn't exist to begin with and you could purchase separately complete opera sets. I remember fondly buying the famous Bohm 1962 recording on vinyl in around 1976 form a wonderful, classical only, record shop near Eton College (I was living in Windsor at the time.) I have since bought it on CD and feel that in many ways it's never been bettered. That's why I was so excited that my first hearing of it at The Garden was conducted by Dr. Bohm himself. This was such an important moment in my life I actually splashed out on a top price grand tier seat (which I think cost me the outrageous amount of £4!) I must have struck lucky because Bohm hardly ever conducted at The Garden. Anyway, he didn't disappoint - what a wonderful Mozart conductor he was. This thread is making me feel rather young: Bohm's death & the birth of the CD both happened before I was born! I've just looked up the Bank of England's inflation calculator & it says that £4 in 1979 is equivalent to £19.88 today. The ROH's website has Grand Tier tickets for Cosi available for £150-£175. Talk about ticket prices rising above inflation! |
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Post by tonyloco on Feb 24, 2019 18:59:42 GMT
Yes, apologies tmesis for launching one of my lectures off the back of your thread about Così fan tutte although I did pick up on that as well as my comments about libretti.
So here I go again off thread a bit to say to Dawnstar that I have several copies of different editions of Opera at Home (in addition to several Victor & Victrola versions) and both the UK versions have a strapline at the bottom of the title page that says:
'Published by THE GRAMOPHONE CO., LTD., 363 Oxford Street, London, W.1'
Apart from the plethora of punctuation, the sad thing about that is the fact that almost as we speak, 363 Oxford Street is ceasing to be an HMV Record Store (again) and another chapter in the history of what was once 'the finest recording organisation in the world' (it must be true because they used to say so themselves in their publicity) has now come to a close.
And to tmesis, I think Walter Legge did well to get Böhm to record Così for EMI in 1962 after Böhm had already made a musically excellent but badly cut version for Decca back in the 1950s. I think this is partly explained by the fact by 1962 Schwarzkopf had reduced her stage roles to a mere handful but Così was among her party pieces. She had been singing it in Vienna and Salzburg just before the recording and I think both Böhm and Ludwig came along as part of the package, which was great for EMI!
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Post by Dawnstar on Feb 24, 2019 19:10:29 GMT
So here I go again off thread a bit to say to Dawnstar that I have several copies of different editions of Opera at Home (in addition to several Victor & Victrola versions)
Do the operas included change much over the editions? I find it very intesting in the copies I have (dated 1928 for the former & 1919 for the latter) to see which operas were popular enough at the time to have had selections recorded compared to what is still in the reprtory nowadays. There are a few operas included in there that I had never heard of previously, such as Goyescas, The Perfect Fool and The Violin Maker Of Cremona. |
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Post by tmesis on Feb 24, 2019 19:34:49 GMT
Dawnstar ticket prices: Of course memory could be playing tricks but I'm sure £4 is all I paid for Cosi. I think in those days there was less of a difference between amphitheatre and stalls prices. I know that for years an upper slips ticket cost just £1 and the whole of the balcony at The Coliseum for ENO was just 90p !
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Post by Dawnstar on Feb 24, 2019 21:09:42 GMT
tmesis I was evidently born at the wrong time from a ticket price point of view (something I have already thought on many previous occasions).
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Post by oxfordsimon on Feb 25, 2019 1:30:02 GMT
I am now humming the opening trio from Cosi!
I bought the Bohm Cosi early on in my CD collecting career - and it is still my favourite version. It is one of those recordings that seems impossible to beat - conducting/singing/production all near perfection.
Remembering back to the Penguin guide - I always sought out those with a rosette - and that was very much one of them to get as an essential recording.
My other favourite Mozart recordings are the Solti Figaro - which just fizzes for me. Giovanni - which is probably my favourite of the operas - has not always been that well served on record/CD - my favourite of them is the Ostman recording. Flute - that one is even harder to bring off successfully in the recording studio. I have many and each have good points and bad points - I like the Norrington a lot and the Bohm recording is thoroughly enjoyable (as is the companion recording of Der Schauspieldirektor.
I would love to direct Cosi at some point - and sing Alfonso!!
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Post by tmesis on Feb 25, 2019 7:54:41 GMT
oxfordsimon another good Cosi is Solti's with Renee Fleming as Fiordiligi. Solti got better and better at conducting Mozart and found the ability to relax into his music. His earlier Flute is not good overall but does have a masterclass in how to sing Tamino in Stuart Burrows. I'm not much of a fan of the much-lauded Klemperer recording. My favourite Flute is the William Christie Erato recording. I agree the best Figaro is Solti's. He has an unbeatable cast and Te Kanawa passes that ultimate test for a Mozart soprano - the two cruelly exposed arias - with flying colours. Whenever I see it live these days no soprano seems to sing them in tune! I agree that Don Giovanni is the most difficult to find a decent recording of (I've not come across any I really like.) I have Solti's with Bryn Terfel but that's the most disappointing of all.. The role of Donna Anna seems to be the hardest to cast; you need a big dramatic voice but one that is also able to relax for the more subdued moments. Sutherland does this well in the classic Giulini/EMI recording but she doesn't quite sound 'right' in Mozart. I think, on the whole, I like the Davis/Phillips recording best.
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Post by Distant Dreamer... on Feb 25, 2019 8:39:12 GMT
I'm seeing Cosi next week I believe, but ironically I am not a fan of Mozart's operas at all. I agree that Cosi is the better of a rather dull group. I'm mainly going to see Thomas Allen again, but I may not look at the stage as the production is dreadful!
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Post by tonyloco on Feb 25, 2019 11:37:38 GMT
So here I go again off thread a bit to say to Dawnstar that I have several copies of different editions of Opera at Home (in addition to several Victor & Victrola versions)
Do the operas included change much over the editions? I find it very intesting in the copies I have (dated 1928 for the former & 1919 for the latter) to see which operas were popular enough at the time to have had selections recorded compared to what is still in the reprtory nowadays. There are a few operas included in there that I had never heard of previously, such as Goyescas, The Perfect Fool and The Violin Maker Of Cremona. Going off thread again, I would like to answer Dawnstar's question about how much the operas in Opera at Home and the American Victor/Victrola versions changed from edition to edition and the answer is quite a lot. Of course all the standard repertoire remains the same, but various rarities do pop up and disappear. For example, in the 1921 UK edition, there is an opera called Quo Vadis by Jean Nouguès, represented by three arias sung by Battistini. This opera had a big success at its premiere in Nice in 1909 and was subsequently performed numerous times in Paris, London, New York and elswehere but seems to have disappeared to the extent that Opera Grove does not even list it although it is mentioned in the entry on the composer. That opera would disappear from Opera at Home when the three Battistini titles were deleted since I doubt that anybody else ever subsequently recorded anything from the opera. But of course the true glory of the Opera at Home books lies in the wonderful full-page photographs of famous singers in their various roles. |
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Post by Dawnstar on Feb 25, 2019 18:53:31 GMT
tonyloco That's certainly another one I've never heard of, nor the composer for that matter.
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Post by gibbo1956 on Feb 26, 2019 15:00:30 GMT
Turning to the ROH production itself, which I was at last night...
Perfectly good production, lovely singing, exemplary playing... and the new Covent Garden is an absolute delight to go to: loads of space, bars, seats, room in general; escalators , even.
The only thing about this is, that brilliantly tuneful and delightful and genius-like as Mozart is, (and he is all of those things, I've seen the movies) -- after about an hour or so you know that nothing else is going to surprise you much for the rest of the evening.
And the evening is three hours long.
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Post by theatrefan77 on Mar 2, 2019 18:56:14 GMT
I found this painful to watch on Thursday. It was well sung but the production is a mess. The play within a play thing makes it really confusing when the plot is actually quite simple.
The set is just hideous and the direction abysmal with the performers just standing there singing in the same place for long periods of time. They do very little acting and this makes a funny plot look really boring.
To top things up a big piece of scenery got stuck and couldn't be lifted up for a while so the performance had to stop. It looked amateurish and underrehearsed. Finally the conductor shouted "Ready?" and the performance continued when that ugly piece of scenery was finally lifted.
It looked like we were attending a Dress Rehearsal instead of a proper performance. The music sounded great though so I guess one could close the eyes and just listen to it.
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Post by tmesis on Mar 3, 2019 11:53:15 GMT
It's a shame ROH ditched the excellent, previous Jonathan Miller production which was a simple, clear updating with elegant Armani costumes.
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Post by theatrefan77 on Mar 3, 2019 13:12:48 GMT
It's a shame ROH ditched the excellent, previous Jonathan Miller production which was a simple, clear updating with elegant Armani costumes. I loved that production! Saw it years ago at Shaftesbury theatre when ROH was close for refurbishment. |
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