Washington National Opera (WNO) today announced that American soprano Christine Goerke will sing the role of Brünnhilde in the Monday, May 2 performance of The Valkyrie, the second opera in Wagner’s epic Ring cycle, which WNO is presenting for the first time. She is stepping in for British soprano Catherine Foster, who injured her leg during the dress rehearsal of The Valkyrie on Saturday, April 23. Ms. Foster has been advised by her medical team to allow her leg to heal for a few more days before returning to the stage. At this time, she is expected to make her American stage debut in the performance of Siegfried, the cycle’s third opera, on Wednesday, May 4.
“While we are all very sorry to have to delay the introduction of Catherine Foster—the reigning Bayreuth Brünnhilde—to our Ring audience, we are grateful that an artist of the caliber of Christine Goerke has graciously agreed to step in at the last minute,” said WNO Artistic Director and Ring director Francesca Zambello.
Lukas Geniusas (2nd place) and Lucas Debargue (fourth) played the same venue this weekend.
Who won?
Mike Vincent says Toronto did: The point is not the competition itself (musicians are not racehorses, after all), but to compare and contrast the different approaches that make each pianist’s artistry unique.
It was confirmed this morning that Bellowhead-reject Jeremy Corbyn has accepted an invitation to appear at the mud-caked Glastonbury Festival.
We hear some Glyndebourne donors would like to Trump that.
The Republican near-as-dammit nominee names Beverly Sills as a role model. He is fond of quoting the Met soprano’s maxim: ‘There are no short cuts to anywhere worth going.’
The city of Budapest has summarily cut its subsidy to the Budapest Festival Orchestra from HUF 260 million to 60m. The 80 percent reduction leaves the orchestra with the equivalent of less than 200,000 Euros ($220,000) in city support. There was no advance warning or consultation, and no reason has been given.
The orchestra has cancelled three concerts, a tour and a week of outreach concerts including the landmark synagogue concerts.
Ivan has announced a protest rally in Budapest on May 7 under the slogan ‘Budapest deserves more; a leadership that looks after the culture of this wonderful city.’
This weekend he issued a video denouncing the city’s decision. It drew 30,000 viewers in a day.
The orchestra’s much-larger state funding – HUF 1,150 million – is unaffected.
Can’t be done?
Will be done.
In May 2020 at the centenary of the Göttingen Handel Festival. And all 42 in about two weeks.
‘We’re not sure of the finances,’ says intendant Tobias Wolff, ‘but the vision is there.’
The Ukrainian baritone Dmytro Hnatyuk, who has died aged 91, was a member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, 1972-1984, and of the Ukrainian Parliament, 1998-2002.
He was also director of the State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet from 1988.
So why don’t we have more opera singers in Parliament?
Or any at all? There’s quite a few who’d get my vote.
Stephen Lord, the veteran music director of the Opera Theatre of St Louis, has been talking candidly to Kristina Driskill about the singers he looks for when casting an opera and how they should present themselves for audition (no piercings, please).
His reply to the headline question veers towards favouring young singers of apparent versatility rather than, necessarily, the best one for the role at hand. Here’s the reply:
While we don’t discriminate on age, race, size, etc., when all things are equal, and since we tend to promote people from within so often, I try to look toward the potential for future casting. In addition, after the covers have been assigned, we have a huge concert with the St. Louis Symphony where the singers are all featured on stage with the orchestra. I like to be sure the singers will make a good showing. We also try very hard to have a ‘wild card’ singer or two. These are people who are not quite ready but display something different and worth watching. In the end, truth to tell, it is all a shot in the dark but based on experience. Mistakes get made, but mostly things are on the positive side.
The interview as a whole is a must-read for singers. Click here.
Few signs of enthusiasm or confidence have greeted Friday’s appointment of Daniel Kramer, 39, as ENO’s next artistic director.
Kramer, 39, arrived at ENO nine years ago as a protege of the opera-loving actor Simon Callow. He was tasked with directing Harrison Birtwistle’s graphic Punch and Judy and made a decent, if unmemorable, job of it.
What sticks more vividly in mind is his 2009 production of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle at the Coliseum, which was a total car-crash. Kramer set Bartok’s opera in the concrete basements of modern abductors and mass killers. As I described it at the time:
Daniel Kramer, the young American director who added ten degrees of chill to Harrison Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy at the Young Vic, places Bluebeard in a world of sexual abduction and child abuse – the world of Fred and Rose West who buried victims in the foundations of their Gloucester home, of the Belgian paedophile rings and, most explicitly, in the warped world of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian building materials salesman who raped his daughter and kept her family imprisoned in the basement of his Amstetten home.
More than merely unpleasant and exploitative, the production was incoherent, ugly and irretrievably naive. Careers have been ended by less awful shows.
Kramer’s new employers maintain he has matured. The board chose him from a limited field of candidates willing to risk their careers on a failing company, a field reduced still further by the subjugation of the artistic director to a cost-cutting chief exec and a deeply uninspiring board.
No hats are being thrown in the air. This is a very low-key event. Kramer is the board’s last dice left to throw. If he fails, ENO goes.
As we reported last July, the Mellon Foundation has given $900,000 to the Cincinnati Symphony and the local Conservatory to train up minority musicians to take the lead in professional symphony orchestras.
The first five candidates have been chosen – all string players, are area where minorities are most under-represented. The five are:
l-r: CSO concertmaster Timothy Lees, cellist Diana Flores, violist Emilio Carlo, violinist Vijeta Sathyaraj, cellist Blake-Anthony Johnson , double bassist Maurice Todd, CCM dean Peter Landgren
In another blow to the former Toronto Symphony CEO, the Banff Centre – his previous post – has slashed eight percent of the workforce and demolished Jeff Melanson’s much-vaunted restructuring.
His successor says: ‘It was wonderful that the previous administration and the board went through an exercise to see what might be possible in the future for the Banff Centre, but frankly we’ve really now just modified that plan to begin first, and to focus most primarily, on the buildings that we already have on this really extraordinary campus, many of which are very old.’
We hear that the coming week’s issue (cover date May 9) of Canada’s national news magazine, Maclean’s, has as its cover story “The Heiress, the Impresario, and the Juiciest Divorce Ever: How an epic marital meltdown exposed scandal at the top of the Canadian arts world”.
The death has been reported of Alexander Galkovsky, violist of the Shostakovich String Quartet from 1972 to 2004 and later of the New Russian Quartet.
