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SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 3RD
For this Sunday of the Labor Day weekend I offer you a "one
hundred percent American Opera on a homespun subject," as one music
critic characterized it. Douglas Moore's Carry Nation (1966) was
commissioned by the University of Kansas for its centennial celebration.
Received enthusiastically at is premiere in Lawrence, Kansas, it
went on to its first professional production by the San Francisco
Spring Opera, then the New York City Opera, in 1968. Mezzo soprano
Beverly Wolff created the title role, and sang it for its world
premiere recording for Desto Records. She portrays the famous teetotaller
whose little hatchet smashed many a bottle of demon rum. Cary lived
for several years in Kansas with her second husband, Dr. David Nation.
As her anti-liquor crusade expanded, she traveled far and wide.
Eventually crowds gathered to ridicule her, her husband divorced
her, and she came to a pathetic end. Douglas Moore's opera is a
character study in fanaticism. I last broadcast the three LP Desto
set on Sunday, March 4, 1984. You hear those same vinyl discs again
today. Samual Krachmalnick conducts the cast, chorus, and orchestra
of New York City Opera.
SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 10TH
In the long history of the genre known as opera all manner
of ethnic variants have developed. Opera was first and foremost
an Italian art form. Then came French opera, German opera, etc.
Today you get to hear Chinese opera, not to be confused with the
traditional entertainment known as "Peking Opera," or politically
correct Maoist pageants. Jason Kao Hwang's The Floating Box: A Story
in Chinatown (2001) shows us the struggles of an immigrant Chinese
family in New York City. Jason Kao Hwang (b. 1957) is a second generation
Chinese American who does not speak his parents' native tongue.
To prepare for writing The Floating Box he collected many hours
of recorded interviews with Chinese immigrants speaking of their
experiences. Hwang's score calls for a hybrid chamber ensemble of
ethnic Chinese instruments, some of the usual Western orchestral
instruments, plus vibraphone and accordion. Catherine Filloux's
libretto is in both Chinese and English. The Floating Box premiered
at the Asia Society in New York City. The Asia Society and the Museum
of Chinese in the Americas jointly commissioned Hwang to compose
the work. New World Records released its world premiere recording
in 2005.
SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 17TH
The Devil's Wall (1882) is Bedrich Smetana's eighth and last
opera. Amazingly, he had been stone deaf for years before he wrote
it. He had already brought forth two operas also without every being
able to hear a note of them. The story of this opera he took from
Bohemian legend: how the Devil tried to stop the founding of a monastery
in the Bohemian forest by damming up the headwaters of the river
Moldau. The devil Rarach is an opera buffa villain and romance is
tangled in the plot. Smetana's score for The Devil's Wall is suffused
with that same wonderful, melodious, pictorial quality to be found
in his famous orchestral tone poem MaVlast. Way back on Sunday,
July 15, 1984 I aired the three LP set that Supraphon, the old Soviet-era
Czechoslovak national record label, issued in 1962 in early stereo
sound, with Zdenek Chalabala conducting the Prague National Theatre
Chorus and Orchestra. I broadcast it a second time on Sunday, September
11, 1994. You get to hear that classic recording a third time today.
SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 24TH
Manfred Trojahn's Enrico (1991) is styled a "dramatic comedy
in nine scenes." The composer (b. 1949) says he crafted his music
along the lines of the eighteenth century Italian opera buffa. But
the play upon which the opera is based, Enrico IV (1921) by Luigi
Pirandello, is no light hearted romp. This so-called comedy is about
madcap appearances that never quite succeed in concealing a truly
insane and ugly reality. Besides which, the storyline includes a
shocking murder committed onstage. Trojahn's Enrico was commissioned
by the Bavarian State Opera of Munich and was first produced for
the Schwetzingen Festival. It was first performed at the festival's
Rococco Theater, where it was recorded live by South German Radio
of Stuttgart. Dennis Russell Davies conducts a chamber ensemble
drawn from the musicians of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra.
A 1993 cpo release on two silver discs.
SUNDAY OCTOBER 1ST
At various points in the course of his brief artistic career,
Franz Schubert attempted to make a name for himself as an opera
composer. Besides the well known incidental music for the play Rosamunde
(1823), Schubert composed at least nine complete operas, three more
in substantial fragments, and three more in rough sketch. Some of
them actually were performed, but none with much success. The grandest
of all his theatrical projects was Fierrabras (1823), a German language
heroic-romantic opera modeled after those by Weber. The libretto
reworks a chivalrous tale from the time of the emperor Charlemange
and the noble knight Roland. Schubert's music for Fierrabras comes
directly out of the song cycle Die Schoene Muellerin and the "Unfinished
Symphony." He finished the score for imminent production at the
Imperial Austrian National Theater. Due to opera politics the production
was scuttled. Schubert never received payment from the theater for
his efforts. The opera had to wait until 1897, the centenary year
of Schubert's birth, for its staged premiere. In more modern times
Fierrabras has been excerpted in recording, broadcast on radio,
and since 1980 has been revived occasionally in theatrical performance.
It got the definitive production it so richly deserved in 1988 in
Schubert's hometown. Deutsche Gramaphon taped a live performance
of Fierrabras at Theater an der Wien, with Claudio Abbado conducting.
Listen again today for the same two-CD DGG recording I first broadcast
on Sunday, March 29, 1994.
SUNDAY OCTOBER 8TH
This will be the fourth time I will be presenting the original
"Barber of Seville," that is the one by Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816),
which was first staged in 1782. Although it ought to be judged by
separate eighteenth-century theatrical standard, it is impossible
not to compare Paisiello's "Barber" with the world famous "Barber"
Rossini wrote in 1816. Composed more than a generation later, Rossini's
masterpiece makes Paisiello's work sound rather bland and lacking
in passion, but you must remember it was conceived in terms of the
smaller scale, less complex, less demanding musical requirements
of opera buffa before Mozart transformed the genre. The score of
Paisiello's Ll Barbiere di Siviglia was recorded essentially complete
for the first time live-in-performance at the eighth annual Festival
of Valle d'Itria in Italy in 1982, that being the two hundredth
anniversary production of this the greatest of Paisiello's eighty-plus
operatic compositions. Paisiello was truly the master of the classic
Italian opera buffa style. The 1985 Frequenz CD release of the bicentennial
"Barber" features the voices of soprano Lella Cuberli as Rosina
and tenor Alessandro Corbelli as Figaro. Conductor Bruno Campanella
made a few little cuts in the secco recitatives. He made a few more
changes in the instrumental parts in order to eliminate certain
nineteenth-century clichés that had corrupted Paisiello's orchestral
writing. Last broadcast Sunday, August 14, 1994.
SUNDAY OCTOBER 15TH
The Fairy Queen (1692) was quite the grandest lyric theater
entertainment London had ever seen. It would be stretching the definition,
however, to call it an opera. England's greatest composer of the
time, Henry Purcell, and her greatest actor, Thomas Betterton, collaborated
in a musical adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Purcell set none of the famous play to music. The operatic portions
of this hybrid theater piece were inserted scenes and ballet numbers
only very remotely related to the dramatic action. With this spectacular
semi-opera Purcell reached the pinnacle of his short career. London's
musical public hailed him as Orpheus Brittanicus. The surviving
music that Purcell composed for the even bigger and better 1693
staging of The Fairy Queen was recorded complete for the first time
for Archiv, the historical division of Deutsche Gramophon, with
John Eliot Gardiner leading the English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi
Chorus. Those Archiv CD's I presented on Sunday, December 4, 1988.
There's a more recent and thoroughly delightful interpretation of
Purcell's semi-opera available through EMI Classics, with Roger
Norrington directing the London Classical Players and Schuetz Choir
of London. Among the vocal soloists Norrington worked with was the
very recently deceased soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. When this
recording was released in 1994, EMI credited her as the yet-to-be-married
Lorraine Hunt.
SUNDAY OCTOBER 22ND
Handel's Rinaldo (1711) has turned out over the years to
be the one opera buffa of his that I have broadcast the most, and
the one Italian baroque opera to which I have given the most frequent
airplay in general. That's because Rinaldo has been frequently recorded
over the past three decades or so. This Sunday will be my fourth
presentation. The first was on Sunday, December 7, 1986, when I
worked from a 1977 recording, made for the French Harmonia Mundi
label and featuring the period instrument ensemble La Grand Ecurie,
conducted by Jean Claude Malgoire. Then on Sunday April 17th came
an Italian Nuova Era recording, made in Venice's historic Teatro
Le Fenice in 1989 and starring American mezzo diva Marilyn Horne
in the title rôle. Most lately, on Sunday, October 5, 2003, I broadcast
Rene Jacob's interpretation on three new French Hamonia Mundi silver
discs. Jacobs led the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. Now our station
has acquired a Naxos three CD set, recorded in Toronto, Canada in
2004. Kevin Mallon directs the singers and period instrument players
of Toronto's Opera in Concert and the Aradia Ensemble. Rinaldo's
enormous success at its premiere in London in 1711 depended, in
large part, upon spectacular stage effects, which you can't see,
of course, in radio broadcast. The Naxos recording partly makes
up for this with special sound effects not heard on any of the other
three previous ones I've aired.
SUNDAY OCTOBER 29TH
I have previously broadcast all of Benjamin Britten's operas,
with only one exception-one of his modestly proportioned chamber
operas The Little Sweep (1949). For a second time I present The
Turn of the Screw (1954), last broadcast on Sunday, February 14,
1999. Britten's eighth opera is an adaptation of a novel by Henry
James. Britten expressed with enormous musical subtlety the moral
struggle with sexual taboos in James' book, which is a species of
ghost story and psychological thriller-hence the Halloween connection
and my rationale for rebroadcasting the opera now. The 1954 mono
recording of The Turn of the Screw with Britten conducting resurfaced
as a London CD reissue in 1990. It reappeared yet again in a 2004
British Decca Multi-CD package along with all of Decca/London's
classic recordings of the Britten operas. The composer directs the
English Opera Group Orchestra and six vocal soloists. Britten created
several operatic rôles for his lover tenor Peter Pears. One of these
was Captain Vere in Billy Budd (1951). In The Turn of the Screw
we hear Pears as one of the two ghosts, the seductive one called
Quint. Again and again over the years I thank record collector Rob
Meehan for loaning to me so many things you've heard on this program.
I thank him yet again this time around for the loan of his recordings
of Hwang's The Floating Box and Trojahn's Enrico, the Norrington
Fairy Queen, and Benjamin Britten's ghost opera. Schubert's Fierrabaras
and the Paisiello "Barber" come out of my own collective of opera
on CD. Everything else featured in this two-month cycle of programming
can be found in our station library's holdings of classical music
on silver disc.
WWUH Program Guide 2006 ©
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