Tuning in to Opera
GUREWITSCH, M. ANATOLE
On Music TUNING IN TO OPERA BY M. ANATOLE GUREWITSCH One of the science books I had as a boy showed-in an illustration that puzzled and disturbed me-"How Modern Technology Is Shrinking the...
...she replaced the bombastic declamation practiced in Corn-eille and Racine with simpler, more natural delivery...
...The opera begins in the green room of the Comedie Fran-caise, where Adriana's entrance, surrounded with the twangling of harps, interrupts the gay banter of the theater crowd...
...Da capo...
...Previously, soloists had blended voices exclusively in parallel thirds or sixths for the occasional love duet...
...Herbert von Karajan guides the Berlin Philharmonic through its shimmering landscapes, its misty din of trumpets, its gleaming halos of strings, with visionary perfection that touches the celestial...
...The orchestra, chorus and soloists (especially Home), all sound magnificent...
...and the grand recapitulation of the finale, beginning in struggle and ending in ringing affirmation...
...Struggling with the billows, he pledges to Neptune that he will kill the first person he encounters on shore as a sacrifice in exchange for his own life...
...Renatta Scotto, tackling the title role for the first time, has a gift for animating cardboard figures through passionate interpretations, and she made stretches of the action plausible...
...On Music TUNING IN TO OPERA BY M. ANATOLE GUREWITSCH One of the science books I had as a boy showed-in an illustration that puzzled and disturbed me-"How Modern Technology Is Shrinking the Earth...
...Thanks to radio, the Boston Symphony, the Chicago Symphony and the Metropolitan Opera have long belonged to the whole country...
...Scale drawings, nested concentrically, documented the dwindling of the earth as centuries passed and transportation speeded up...
...the wondrous simplicity of the fourth movement's "Urlicht," a magically accompanied song wherein a brave soul defies an officious little angel that tries to block its way home to God...
...He will add a special distinction to the season's star-studded finale...
...Mazurok's first recital disk (Columbia M33120) shows this singer (last heard in the U.S...
...If he is a true specimen of the endangered species of the Heldenbariton, San Francisco can boast a major find...
...if not, we cannot guess...
...Tuning in to find out if the splendors of her voice suit the particular splendors of Strauss' lofty, marmoreal score will be a privilege...
...the sardonic galumphing of the third...
...In Ariadne auf Naxos, Leontyne Price assumes the title role for the first time...
...Surely it exceeds our wildest terrors...
...And the San Francisco Opera, which collaborates with other companies on productions (borrowing three this year from the Met, renting two from abroad), can afford to cast from strength...
...The real Adriana died in 1739, under circumstances that can only be termed nebulous...
...But where music abandons the infinite and numinous expressivity of form to expound Philosophy, I hear mostly bluster...
...travel is not sufficiently fast, convenient or cheap for us to pass up what drops in over the airwaves...
...The Talmud says, "If you want to understand the invisible, look carefully at the visible" (Willy Apel quotes this as an epigraph to the Harvard Dictionary of Music), and the advice seems especially pertinent in the arts...
...And the resurrection...
...While the Chicago Symphony plays these sections virtuosically, Carlo Maria Giulini pounds the phrases in a way that maximizes their relentlessness...
...Now that London records and San Francisco have led the way, the rich score should be heard more often...
...If the world does not exactly come into our living rooms-even live broadcasts do not, after all, supplant being present at an event-radio and television still immensely increase and enrich our experience of the scene...
...and Jose Carreras, Katia Ricciarelli and Yuri Mazurok will sing Riccardo, Amelia, and Renato in Ballo...
...One would not think so tireless and dedicated a music lover as Andrew Porter, who attends concerts and operas everywhere from Lincoln Center to Australia, would ever have an evening at home to switch on the radio, yet in a recent New Yorker article, he reported on broadcasts from Germany he caught in London...
...Poetry and painting that makes the Four Last Things concrete (let's see now: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell) can appeal, through the visual imagination, to the mind...
...But she could not conceal its shallow musical substance...
...The Wagner piece profits from the important new facility of an expanded orchestra pit, and can be performed in its original scoring...
...The list of works that have been or are to be aired includes, Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur, Mozart's Idomeneo, Janacek's Katya Kabanova, Wagner's Rheingold, Gounod's Faust, Verdi's Aida, Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos, Puccini's Turandot, Bellini's I Puri-lani, and Verdi's Un Ballo In Mas-chera...
...Above a caption explaining that it took years to circle, only a segment of the surface fit on the page (a coastline, much ocean and, riding the waves, the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria...
...In addition to following Gluck's innovation of expanding the role of the chorus, he introduced a notable innovation of his own in the form of a quartet...
...John Pritchard conducted a performance of great sweep...
...Idaman-te overcomes the sea dragon Neptune sends to punish the derelict king...
...In the brilliant Rondo, though, he leads his forces with tremendous panache, and in the closing Adagio he achieves ethereal serenity (DG 2707 097...
...In the -performances that remain, Turandot will boast Monserrat Caballe and Luciano Pavarotti in their stage debuts as Turandot and Calaf...
...What is there to say about faith...
...I wondered whether we who dwell here were also growing tiny...
...Two November productions, Das Rheingold and Ariadne auf Naxos-which, due to the exigencies of deadlines, I have not yet heard-promise to offer some points of interest...
...As that little catechism may suggest, I am not much drawn to abstractions that attempt to grapple with the Great Mysteries...
...Beverly Sills will offer her familiar Elvira in I Puritani...
...Ensemble pieces balance star vehicles, rarefies offset the warhorses...
...The opening two movements of Mahler's Ninth are, to these ears, bloated and monotonous, their rhythms so mechanical and thumping that the virtues of the otherwise inventive and industrious score go for nothing...
...Though hardly daring, the repertoire is excellently calculated to attract new subscribers, retain old customers and broaden the scope of both...
...Gianandrea Gavazzeni, for 20 years principal conductor of La Scala, directed a strong cast in an idiomatic reading...
...Mozart set voice against voice in dramatic confrontation, allowing for the first time the particularly "operatic" effect of conflicting emotions expressed simultaneously...
...This is certainly the case in music...
...Communications, too, are widening our horizons...
...The heroine of the first broadcast, Adriana Lecouvreur, was a legendary figure in the history of the French classic stage...
...and the god, appeased at last, dethrones Idomeneo in favor of his son and his beloved, the Trojan princess Ilia, who has found a new home among her enemies...
...Rafael Kubel-ik drew wonderful colors from the orchestra, as it commented eloquently on the action throughout...
...Idomeneo cannot resolve himself to carry out his promise...
...the melodic purity of the second movement...
...The story tells of Idomeneo, king of Crete, whose ship is lost in a storm as he returns home after the Trojan War...
...Alas, who awaits him on the rocky strand but his own son, Ida-mante...
...Electra, her rival, goes mad...
...In a reading at once organic, sensitive and straightforward Abbado welds the moody, prismatic shifts of emotion in the opening funeral march...
...The finest of the three is Mahler's Second Symphony (the "Resurrection"), performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Claudio Abbado, with Marilyn Home (alto) and Carol Neblett (soprano) as soloists (DG 2707 094...
...So did a cast that featured Carol Neblett (Electra), Maria Ewing (Ida-mante) and Christiane Eda-Pierre (Ilia...
...If we have it, we know...
...In 1492, as was plain to see, the globe was at its largest...
...except for Eric Tappy in the title role, unfortunately, their musical polish did not always match their dramatic fire...
...By the 18th century, the entire sphere was in the picture, and with the advent of airplanes in the 20th, I could hide it under my fist...
...Katya Kabanova, a realistic drama of adultery and suicide, marked the return to the American stage of Swedish soprano Elisabeth Soderstrom, who recently recorded the role of Katya for London records in the original Czech...
...Happily, I figured out the conceit before Concorde, and now I believe that our horizons are expanding...
...with his home company, the Bolshoi Opera of Moscow) interprets the Italian repertoire with no less grandeur and authority than the Russian...
...Nevertheless, in three recent Deutsche Grammophon recordings, the portals of the cathedral are spread wide enough to enable an unbeliever, passing by with head unbowed, to catch a glimpse of the glories that blaze there for the faithful...
...In the translation used by the San Francisco production, her English was impeccable-far better than the gauche verbal phrasing deserved-and her beautifully sung portrait of a passionate being stifled by provincialism was moving...
...She fends off the extravagant compliments of her admirers, modestly styling herself the simple handmaiden of Truth...
...Among the participants is a Wotan new to this country: Franz-Ferdinand Nentwig...
...He caught both the score's curious breathless-ness and the expansive grace of its more lyric passages, and the chorus and orchestra responded with conviction...
...In Act 4, she succumbs to a bouquet of poisoned violets, dispatched by a rival in love...
...And the apocalypse...
...Opera seria had passed its heyday long before 1780, when Mozart received his commission for Idomeneo, yet he not only revitalized the form but created, in the opinion of many, its greatest exemplar...
...Specifically, I am debarred by temperament from the agonies and raptures of the perfect Mahlerite or Brucknerite...
...The third recording is Bruckner's Eighth (DG 2707 085...
...This year, the San Francisco Opera accedes to national status as well: In tapes from live performances, the company's entire season is being broadcast by National Public Radio on more than 150 stations around the country...
Vol. 60 • November 1977 • No. 23
