[Attenzione! Tenor rave alert. Yes, another one...but please don't look away this time. You want to know about this guy.]
Yesterday our dear Fabio Armiliato was in hotter water than I'd thought. He was ill and didn't make it to the Wigmore after all. Cue a Rosenblatt Recitals call to a particular favourite of theirs who's done two of these very special concerts before, but isn't a household name among British opera buffs, never having sung in a British opera house (to the best of our knowledge) and certainly not at the Royal Opera House. He's a Sicilian bel canto tenor with no hair and an earring and his name is Antonino Siragusa. Above, in L'Elisir d'amore with Patrizia Ciofi...
He zipped over from Italy sometime around midday and is off to Japan this morning. And, wowing the hall with Italian songs in the first half and a range of magnificent virtuoso arias in the second, he won himself a standing ovation.
We thought about going backstage to spirit him off to Covent Garden, where we would have him sing "Ah, mes amis" from the rooftops, and we'd chain ourselves to the railings and wave placards until someone there books him. He sings pretty much everywhere else - the Met, Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, La Scala, Barcelona, Vienna, Tokyo (here's his current schedule). But not here. This is very odd.
He isn't your typical Wigmore performer. Unfazed by the last-minute gig, the hallowed space or anyone in it, he worked the hall with sunny mien, jokes, poise and evident delight. The little "Wiggy" is an interesting acoustic for big operatic voices - at first you think it's going to be way too loud - but once you've acclimatised, it's a treat to be at close quarters with the knock-em-dead high notes and the pianissimo serenades alike.
This voice is at the higher, stronger end of bel canto. He may not have the honeyed heavenliness of Florez, but his vivid, bright personality owns a sound to match, with an edge of stainless steel about it. He is a Rigoletto Duke, a Count Almaviva and a Guillaume Tell Arnoldo, to say nothing of Tonio from La fille du regiment - after keeping up the thrill for a whole evening, it then takes a special confidence and security in technique to wander on and ring out those nine jackpots as your final encore.
The programme in some ways could have looked topsy-turvy - the Tosti Neapolitan-type songs, de Curtis's 'Non ti scordar di me', 'Granada' and so forth took up the first half, while 'Una furtiva lagrima' opened part 2 the way he meant to go on. It worked, though; and maybe it makes sense to warm everyone up with the seductive stuff before moving on to the operatic numbers.
'Firenze' from Gianni Schicchi suited him from shiny crown to toe, as did the one French number of the evening, 'Ah! leve toi soleil' from Gounod's Romeo et Juliette. (And how nice to learn that Flotow's Martha involves a heroine in disguise going to, er, Richmond - my neck of the woods.) Lovely, convincing characterisation; communicative diction - the programme notes contained short synopses but no translations, given the shortness of notice, and you don't need them if you can hear the words and all their emotions; it was all well chosen and wonderfully performed.
The pianist, the doughty Marco Boemi, who played brilliantly at short notice and received much grinning praise from his singer along the way, announced he was taking a break for the penultimate aria, 'Se il mio nome saper voi bramate' from Il barbiere di Siviglia - Siragusa strolled back in carrying a guitar and accompanied himself through Almaviva's serenade. 'Asile hereditaire' from Guillaume Tell finished the programme, but we didn't want to let him go, and along came the encores...
My Italophile pal was so overcome that she asked to be introduced to Ian Rosenblatt and gave him a very big hug.You've brought us so much joy by putting on this concert, she declared. She's right. This series is what enlightened philanthropy is really all about. And fortunately, with Sky Arts now on board to broadcast the Rosenblatt Recitals, there'll be a chance for many, many more to sample the joy of great singing close to.
Let's hope that Covent Garden wakes up sometime soon and brings Siragusa in from the cold.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Monday, January 14, 2013
Fabio Armiliato gets into hot water
Fabio Armiliato is the tenor in Woody Allen's shower - in To Rome with Love. UPDATE, 10.30am: Tonight he should have been in the Rosenblatt Recital Series, singing Italian verismo and more, though this time minus the soap bubbles, but we've just heard he's off sick. Antonino Siragusa will replace him.
In today's Independent, Fabio Armiliato tells me what it was like to work with Woody...
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/when-a-wet-tenor-wowed-woody-allen-8449579.html
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Orfeo goes to Docklands, wearing headphones
Yesterday morning I was still so high on the aftermath of the Calleja concert that I forgot to check the Independent for my own work. They ran my piece about Silent Opera, the go-ahead young company that is determined to bring opera to the iPod generation and is busy doing just that with a brand-new version of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo.
Why shouldn't this work receive radical treatment? It is radical: it was pretty much the first opera ever written. And incidentally, if opera is Gesamtkunstwerk, just imagine what could have happened if Wagner had had a computer.
A short version of the article was printed, and below is the director's cut. Get yourself over to Trinity Buoy Wharf and try a 21st-century route to JD's favourite Green Mountain.
First, here's a video about what they do...
Isn’t it
rather a grandiose claim? Think “opera” and you probably imagine a plush seat,
a dark theatre, a stage many metres away and exorbitantly priced gin and tonic.
Here none of those apply, according to Tim Wilson, Silent Opera’s executive
producer. “Opera used to be the big thing, didn’t it?” he says. “Today, why is
it not? Because it’s behind a wall. But turn it into zeros and ones and you can
send it down a fibreoptic cable. Then the sky is the limit.”
Buy a ticket for L’Orfeo – an operatic snip at £25, or £35 to attend performances featuring arrival by a chartered boat – and your experience begins when you are handed a pair of wireless earphones at the door. At once, you’re in Orfeo’s world. You don’t have to wear the headphones if you want only to hear the live performance taking place around you: the choice is yours at all times. And the performance is around you, not in front of you: in this intimate setting, the singers will be no more than five metres away, and you may find yourself being directly addressed when not being shepherded through a sonic tunnel to hell and back.
The live performance is fed into the headphones and mixed with a pre-recorded soundtrack. The composer Louis d’Heudieres has produced a soundscape in which Monteverdi is filtered through his imagination and also our own: an ambient world including everything from the rest of Monteverdi’s orchestration to suggested spoken thoughts and sampled sounds from the music and elsewhere – plus a whole new ending.
Each night, one unsuspecting member of the audience will receive a “golden ticket”, which bestows the right to choose which ending the company should perform: Monteverdi’s or d’Heudieres’. The performers won’t know in advance. In the 17th-century opera, the demigod Orpheus is forgiven for his failure when trying to lead his beloved Euridice out of hell and is allowed to live as god. But the new ambient ending goes back to the original myth: Orpheus is torn to pieces by the Furies.
“It’s a very immediate way of experiencing the story,” says Silent Opera’s artistic director, Daisy Evans. “It grabs you and makes you part of it.” Evans, in her mid-twenties, has been cutting her directorial teeth with English National Opera and Glyndebourne, where she was an assistant director for Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in 2011, and has won crucial support for her Silent Opera project from Sky Arts Ignition: Futures Fund and Blitz Communications. The company’s first production, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, quickly showed that an appetite exists for a radical rethink of what opera can be in the 21st century. Now it seems that the only way is up.
The proof is in the ticket sales. When Silent Opera staged La Bohème last year in the Vault Festival underneath Waterloo Station, they sold around 3000 tickets without producing any printed material to advertise the event. “Everything happened online,” says Wilson. “Every one of our shows sold out.” Sixty per cent of the audience, he adds, were under 30. Fifty per cent had never attended a live classical music performance before.
L’Orfeo is the first production in Silent Opera’s ongoing project to perform all of Monteverdi’s three great stage works. It is an ideal choice for this treatment, not least because it is inherently edgy, being one of the first operas ever written. The composer unveiled it at the court of the Gonzagas in Mantua in 1607. Additionally, it was intended for a performance space that in no way resembled today’s vast opera houses, where sometimes you can feel you need a telescope to see the action.
Experiencing live operatic performance at close quarters is both true to Monteverdi’s vision and also a rare treat for audience and performers. “You can change the emotions in a few seconds, because you can ‘read’ them so much more easily when you’re close to people,” says Evans. “The audience will be a huge part of this concept and no two performances will be the same.”
And for those who might protest that opera with headphones, pre-recorded elements, extra noises and a warehouse setting isn’t opera at all, Wilson has a simple message: “Bullshit! If people are so monolithic about an art form, no wonder it has been backed into a corner. Here it’s coming out fighting.”
“It’s about the iPod generation,” says Evans. “We all have an entire orchestra in our pockets a lot of the time. You can sit on the Tube and listen to Stravinsky or Wagner, yet a lot of people wouldn’t necessarily think ‘I’m enjoying that, I’ll go and listen to it live’. Either they don’t make that jump for financial reasons, or it’s not there for them to attend. We’re shifting this concept into the performance sphere.”
But the company insists there is no compromise on standards: with a project like this, the musical and dramatic end result has to be top notch to justify the experimental means. “We’re pitching well above our age and experience in terms of the singers and musicians with whom we’re working,” Wilson admits.
And why ever not? Opera, according to Wagner, was the complete art form (Gesamtkunstwerk) in which music, drama, design and more joined forces to provide an all-encompassing artistic experience. Of course, neither he nor Monteverdi had computer technology. Imagine what might have happened if they had. In today’s world, there’s no excuse for leaving such art-enhancing capabilities to one side any longer. “Where technology will be in five years time we don’t know,” says Wilson. “But wherever it is, we’ll bloody well be there.”
Why shouldn't this work receive radical treatment? It is radical: it was pretty much the first opera ever written. And incidentally, if opera is Gesamtkunstwerk, just imagine what could have happened if Wagner had had a computer.
A short version of the article was printed, and below is the director's cut. Get yourself over to Trinity Buoy Wharf and try a 21st-century route to JD's favourite Green Mountain.
First, here's a video about what they do...
We’re in
uncharted territory, staring at a crystal ball. This glass globe adorns a
table at Trinity Buoy Wharf – the
Docklands river peninsula devoted to the arts and creative industries where
anything can happen and often does. But am I really looking into the future of
opera?
The team behind Silent Opera thinks so. This young company, spearheaded by artistic director Daisy Evans, has made it its mission to bring an art form often misunderstood as stuffy and inaccessible to the cutting edge of adventurous, technologically-enhanced theatre. Later this month they open a new production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo in a converted warehouse.
“Silent” in this context means “digital”. Taking their cue from theatre companies like Punchdrunk and dreamthinkspeak, they aim to create a brand-new, individual and completely immersive experience out of opera, combining technological potential with live performance. “The opera world will never look back,” declares the mission statement.
The team behind Silent Opera thinks so. This young company, spearheaded by artistic director Daisy Evans, has made it its mission to bring an art form often misunderstood as stuffy and inaccessible to the cutting edge of adventurous, technologically-enhanced theatre. Later this month they open a new production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo in a converted warehouse.
“Silent” in this context means “digital”. Taking their cue from theatre companies like Punchdrunk and dreamthinkspeak, they aim to create a brand-new, individual and completely immersive experience out of opera, combining technological potential with live performance. “The opera world will never look back,” declares the mission statement.
Isn’t it
rather a grandiose claim? Think “opera” and you probably imagine a plush seat,
a dark theatre, a stage many metres away and exorbitantly priced gin and tonic.
Here none of those apply, according to Tim Wilson, Silent Opera’s executive
producer. “Opera used to be the big thing, didn’t it?” he says. “Today, why is
it not? Because it’s behind a wall. But turn it into zeros and ones and you can
send it down a fibreoptic cable. Then the sky is the limit.” Buy a ticket for L’Orfeo – an operatic snip at £25, or £35 to attend performances featuring arrival by a chartered boat – and your experience begins when you are handed a pair of wireless earphones at the door. At once, you’re in Orfeo’s world. You don’t have to wear the headphones if you want only to hear the live performance taking place around you: the choice is yours at all times. And the performance is around you, not in front of you: in this intimate setting, the singers will be no more than five metres away, and you may find yourself being directly addressed when not being shepherded through a sonic tunnel to hell and back.
The live performance is fed into the headphones and mixed with a pre-recorded soundtrack. The composer Louis d’Heudieres has produced a soundscape in which Monteverdi is filtered through his imagination and also our own: an ambient world including everything from the rest of Monteverdi’s orchestration to suggested spoken thoughts and sampled sounds from the music and elsewhere – plus a whole new ending.
Each night, one unsuspecting member of the audience will receive a “golden ticket”, which bestows the right to choose which ending the company should perform: Monteverdi’s or d’Heudieres’. The performers won’t know in advance. In the 17th-century opera, the demigod Orpheus is forgiven for his failure when trying to lead his beloved Euridice out of hell and is allowed to live as god. But the new ambient ending goes back to the original myth: Orpheus is torn to pieces by the Furies.
“It’s a very immediate way of experiencing the story,” says Silent Opera’s artistic director, Daisy Evans. “It grabs you and makes you part of it.” Evans, in her mid-twenties, has been cutting her directorial teeth with English National Opera and Glyndebourne, where she was an assistant director for Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in 2011, and has won crucial support for her Silent Opera project from Sky Arts Ignition: Futures Fund and Blitz Communications. The company’s first production, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, quickly showed that an appetite exists for a radical rethink of what opera can be in the 21st century. Now it seems that the only way is up.
The proof is in the ticket sales. When Silent Opera staged La Bohème last year in the Vault Festival underneath Waterloo Station, they sold around 3000 tickets without producing any printed material to advertise the event. “Everything happened online,” says Wilson. “Every one of our shows sold out.” Sixty per cent of the audience, he adds, were under 30. Fifty per cent had never attended a live classical music performance before.
L’Orfeo is the first production in Silent Opera’s ongoing project to perform all of Monteverdi’s three great stage works. It is an ideal choice for this treatment, not least because it is inherently edgy, being one of the first operas ever written. The composer unveiled it at the court of the Gonzagas in Mantua in 1607. Additionally, it was intended for a performance space that in no way resembled today’s vast opera houses, where sometimes you can feel you need a telescope to see the action.
Experiencing live operatic performance at close quarters is both true to Monteverdi’s vision and also a rare treat for audience and performers. “You can change the emotions in a few seconds, because you can ‘read’ them so much more easily when you’re close to people,” says Evans. “The audience will be a huge part of this concept and no two performances will be the same.”
And for those who might protest that opera with headphones, pre-recorded elements, extra noises and a warehouse setting isn’t opera at all, Wilson has a simple message: “Bullshit! If people are so monolithic about an art form, no wonder it has been backed into a corner. Here it’s coming out fighting.”
“It’s about the iPod generation,” says Evans. “We all have an entire orchestra in our pockets a lot of the time. You can sit on the Tube and listen to Stravinsky or Wagner, yet a lot of people wouldn’t necessarily think ‘I’m enjoying that, I’ll go and listen to it live’. Either they don’t make that jump for financial reasons, or it’s not there for them to attend. We’re shifting this concept into the performance sphere.”
But the company insists there is no compromise on standards: with a project like this, the musical and dramatic end result has to be top notch to justify the experimental means. “We’re pitching well above our age and experience in terms of the singers and musicians with whom we’re working,” Wilson admits.
And why ever not? Opera, according to Wagner, was the complete art form (Gesamtkunstwerk) in which music, drama, design and more joined forces to provide an all-encompassing artistic experience. Of course, neither he nor Monteverdi had computer technology. Imagine what might have happened if they had. In today’s world, there’s no excuse for leaving such art-enhancing capabilities to one side any longer. “Where technology will be in five years time we don’t know,” says Wilson. “But wherever it is, we’ll bloody well be there.”
L’Orfeo with Silent Opera,
Trinity Buoy Wharf, 23 January – 10 February. Book online:
http://www.silentopera.co.uk/shows.html#book
Saturday, January 12, 2013
CALLEJA!
[NB: Tenor rave alert. If you don't like tenor raves, look away now.]
If Pavarotti had been making his Royal Festival Hall recital debut, you'd want to be there, and later you'd want to know you had been there, even if it was one of those multi-lollipop Gubbay gigs, and you'd go. And it might have sounded a bit like Joseph Calleja did last night. I've heard of great voices, but this is ridiculous.
A friend wrote to me afterwards wanting to know whether he projected OK in the RFH, which can be a tricky acoustic for voices. Projected? If they'd opened the doors, you'd have heard him all the way from Crystal Palace to Kenwood.
Take several thousand volts of personality, a tone so focused and powerful that it can flatten you in two notes, a technique so strong that you'd like to make musical instrument cases out of it, and the effortless confidence to convey passion for music and singing in a truly universal way - and that might just be the biggest opera star of the next few decades grinning at you off the platform.
You know how much I love Jonas Kaufmann and Juan Diego Florez, of course, and to think that we're lucky enough to have all these guys around to hear at the moment is gratitude-inspiring. Different types of voice, different kinds of personality, different purposes, different fates, all miraculous to hear. For a few minutes in the first half, with the Puccini arias from Tosca and the Flower Song from Carmen, I nearly dared to miss Kaufmann's subtlety, the emotional darkness, the variety of colour. Calleja is 50-degree Maltese sunshine all the way.
Yet the shadows were soon gone. Do we love him? Oh boy, do we love him. A bit of Mascagni, a spot of Verdi and some delicious Mario Lanza numbers by Brodszky, and the Golden Age of Singing is alive and well and sipping the conductor's bubbly for the 'Brindisi' final encore.
Spare a thought for the guest soprano, Indra Thomas - fortunate to share a platform with him, but unfortunate in that her vocal technique is nowhere near as strong as his, despite a lovely tone quality at its best in "Pace, pace mio dio" from La forza del destino (as usual, "the best is the enemy of the vaguely OK"). She seemed thoroughly caught up in the enchantment of Calleja's stagecraft, though, as he led her purposefully out of sight for the last phrase of 'O Soave Fanciulla', and who can blame her? The Philharmonia fizzed away happily under the baton of Andrew Greenwood and the evening flew by in a whirl of heady delights and Italianate winter sparkle.
You can follow Calleja on Twitter, where he is @MalteseTenor and describes himself as
If Pavarotti had been making his Royal Festival Hall recital debut, you'd want to be there, and later you'd want to know you had been there, even if it was one of those multi-lollipop Gubbay gigs, and you'd go. And it might have sounded a bit like Joseph Calleja did last night. I've heard of great voices, but this is ridiculous.
A friend wrote to me afterwards wanting to know whether he projected OK in the RFH, which can be a tricky acoustic for voices. Projected? If they'd opened the doors, you'd have heard him all the way from Crystal Palace to Kenwood.
You know how much I love Jonas Kaufmann and Juan Diego Florez, of course, and to think that we're lucky enough to have all these guys around to hear at the moment is gratitude-inspiring. Different types of voice, different kinds of personality, different purposes, different fates, all miraculous to hear. For a few minutes in the first half, with the Puccini arias from Tosca and the Flower Song from Carmen, I nearly dared to miss Kaufmann's subtlety, the emotional darkness, the variety of colour. Calleja is 50-degree Maltese sunshine all the way.
Yet the shadows were soon gone. Do we love him? Oh boy, do we love him. A bit of Mascagni, a spot of Verdi and some delicious Mario Lanza numbers by Brodszky, and the Golden Age of Singing is alive and well and sipping the conductor's bubbly for the 'Brindisi' final encore.
Spare a thought for the guest soprano, Indra Thomas - fortunate to share a platform with him, but unfortunate in that her vocal technique is nowhere near as strong as his, despite a lovely tone quality at its best in "Pace, pace mio dio" from La forza del destino (as usual, "the best is the enemy of the vaguely OK"). She seemed thoroughly caught up in the enchantment of Calleja's stagecraft, though, as he led her purposefully out of sight for the last phrase of 'O Soave Fanciulla', and who can blame her? The Philharmonia fizzed away happily under the baton of Andrew Greenwood and the evening flew by in a whirl of heady delights and Italianate winter sparkle.
You can follow Calleja on Twitter, where he is @MalteseTenor and describes himself as
"Maltaholic, opera singer, father to a princess and terminator, fly fishing enthusiast and St Emilion fanatic." And he blogs about life on the singing superhighway, here.
Above, hear "Joe" singing the title track from his Mario Lanza tribute album, Be my Love.
Be warned, though, that listening to Calleja on disc is a little like
watching a Wimbledon final on TV. You appreciate some of the marvels -
but to grasp the full power of it, you need to be there...
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Ever wondered what musicians think of critics?
Now's your chance to find out.Peter Donohoe has written a substantial piece on the topic - a jolly brave thing for a pianist to do, if I may say so - and it is admirably honest. For instance, if you want to believe the good reviews, he says, then you also have to believe the less pleasing ones. And he doesn't hesitate to present examples of the type of stories that give us all a bad name, while also acknowledging that some of us say useful things now and then. Read the whole thing here.
(PS - I think this is the first time I've been mentioned in a "good guys" list alongside Hans Keller, and it may be the last, but it's better than never.) [above: portrait of Peter by Sussie Ahlburg.]
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