mezzos
David Nice
Send in the clowns, as they sing in this palace-of-varieties first act, not for Pagliacci, Leoncavallo’s sole foothold on today’s operatic repertoire, but for the fool-for-love heroine of a sparkling, swooning rarity. Musically, Zazà is a notch above Mascagni and Giordano for orchestral delights, just below supreme genius Puccini, but its admittedly thinly-spread plot ends by being rather remarkable. Our heroine-artiste may be temporarily broken by her infatuation with a bourgeois theatregoer who turns out to be married, but she’ll return to the stage, and she even manages to expose him for Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Over the past decade Alice Coote has emerged as a singer of rare and exquisite vocal quality. Even when the direction of a project is questioned, there has generally been consensus that she generally sounds gorgeous. The concept of Being Both, a juxtaposition of Handel mezzo arias for both male and female characters, is brilliant both musically and commercially. It allows a fascinating exploration of identity and sexuality in a period when both, in opera, were pretty fluid; and it makes, conveniently, for a programme of Handel’s greatest hits.It’s unfortunate that according to director Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Alice Coote (b.1968) is one of the world’s leading mezzo-sopranos. She grew up in Cheshire, born to two painters, Mark Coote and Mary Moss, and learned her craft at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the Royal Northern College of Music and the National Opera Studio. Her breakthrough came in 2000 when, within the time frame of a fortnight, she sang Ruggiero in Handel’s Alcina at the Edinburgh Festival, and Poppea in Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea at the ENO.Since then she has become a global star of opera, albeit one for whom concert recitals are equally important. She was forced Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
At the end of last night’s giddy, triumphant concert at the Barbican, Joyce DiDonato was presented with a bouquet by a member of the audience. It included, among more conventional flowers, a tomato plant, complete with ripe tomato. That says it all really. Just imagine Netrebko, Gheorghiu or even Bartoli faced with a tomato and the confusion that would ensue. DiDonato simply gave it a starring role in her speech to the audience, and when the tomato fell to the floor during the athletic closing vibrato of “Tanti affetti”, casually bent to pick it up before tossing it into the air – all the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The mezzo-soprano Brigitte Fassbaender, who will be 75 on Thursday 3 July, was unsurpassed for dramatic impact and presence in roles such as Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier and Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus, during a singing career which spanned from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s.Her command of the long lines of Mahler's songs, and the immediacy and understanding she brought to Lieder generally placed her in the very top flight of interpreters alongside Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Peter Schreier and Christa Ludwig.She stopped singing almost two decades ago, and has since forged a career as Read more ...
theartsdesk
It's the genre of gender-bending and cross-dressing, where women play warriors and men sing like women (while playing warriors). But when it comes to opera, who really wears the trousers? For at least 300 years the answer has been pretty definitive. Women have donned breeches and boots to play opera's many "trouser roles" in music from Handel and Mozart to Massenet and Offenbach. This month Irish mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught takes on one of the repertoire's very finest trouser roles, making her Glyndebourne debut as the lovestruck young nobleman Octavian in Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier Read more ...
Mark Valencia
There’s nowt so French as the mélodie and the chanson, but I’m not convinced they make ideal bedfellows. Nor, I suspect, is Anne Sofie von Otter, since she split the salon and cabaret halves of her Douce France recital with an interval (and the CD release of the same name with a change of disc). The art song and the popular tune may spring from the same national sensibility but they have little in common: the one is subtle and born of poetry, the other musically primitive and emotionally blatant. The francophile in me loves them both – an enthusiasm I probably share with the Swedish mezzo – Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Prokofiev: Works for piano 1908-1938 Roger Woodward (Celestial Harmonies)You don't often hear this music articulated with such steely power and intensity. Recently I've spent too much time listening to Prokofiev's more romantically-inclined later output; a few minutes' exposure to this disc will remind you of this composer's ability to dazzle and shock. Many of the early works bristle with demonic energy – I'm thinking of the Suggestion Diabolique, or the four Sarcasmes. But the aggression always seems positive and open-hearted – this is music which demands to be liked, every grimace Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
She’s the Kansas mezzo-soprano whose ruby slippers have now taken her across the globe, singing in all the great opera houses, but who has never lost the common touch. She’s not a diva, she’s a “Yankee Diva” – a contemporary creature who would never dream of throwing a tantrum or cancelling at short notice. She's Joyce DiDonato.One half of an all-American coup at this year’s Last Night of the Proms, DiDonato’s English invasion only starts here. She’ll be returning to the Royal Opera House once again next year (following her hugely successful run in La donna del lago in 2013) to tackle Read more ...
David Nice
What’s the perfect Glyndebourne opera? Mozart, of course, must have first and second places with Le nozze di Figaro – Michael Grandage’s lively production of country-house mayhem is revived again this season – and Così fan tutte. Then comes Amadeus’s greatest admirer, Richard Strauss, and Ariadne auf Naxos - his most experimental collaboration with his then-established house poet for Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier, Hugo von Hofmannsthal.The life-meets-art drama of a mythic opera seria to be staged in the palatial home of "the richest man in Vienna", whose whims mean that a commedia dell’arte Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It may look like a sure-fire hit to let Kansas mezzo Joyce DiDonato rip through the drama-queen repertoire of the Baroque. But last night’s exploration of the dustiest, most overgrown byways of 17th and 18th century Italian opera needed every drop of DiDonato’s star musical talents – not to mention those of her backing band Il Complesso Barocco – to convince us of the worth of these rarities. The audience bought it. I remain on the fence.Prepared in conjunction with that great scholar of this period, Alan Curtis, the concert didn’t disappoint in certain key respects. In mood, narrative flow Read more ...
David Nice
Benjamin Britten would have been 99 on the day of this concert. He died aged 62, nearly six months after the premiere of a masterpiece, the 15-minute "dramatic cantata" Phaedra, ruthlessly sifting key speeches from Robert Lowell’s translation of Racine. The compression of inspired, marble-hewn ideas, the like of which few contemporary composers come anywhere near in operas of two hours’ length or more, places Phaedra on a pedestal. Many of us would be happy to admire it in isolation, especially in the company of Alice Coote, a mezzo as equal to its stature as the original interpreter, Janet Read more ...