The incoming music director of the Metropolitan Opera, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, has told his hometown newspaper, Le Devoir, that he can make the new job work without giving up either the Philadelphia or the Orchestre Métropolitain in Quebec.
He also plans to tour a lot with the Met Opera orchestra:
Je peux vous révéler que la direction du MET et moi pensons refaire tourner l’Orchestre du MET avec des projets concrets de programmes vocaux. Dans mon monde idéal, il y aurait donc trois territoires : l’Amérique, l’Europe et l’Asie avec une rotation de mes trois ensembles [MET, Philadelphie, Métropolitain] sur ces trois secteurs. Je suis à l’aise avec ça.
He goes on to attack the higher level of subsidy that Nagano’s Montreal Symphony Orchestra receives in comparison to his own. Yannick says his orchestra truly represents French Canada, whereas Nagano’s is made up 50 percent of outsiders, including many US musicians.
‘La différence est énorme. Je ne veux pas être nationaliste ou chauvin : il s’agit simplement d’adéquation entre notre fierté à propos des conservatoires et l’excellence de la formation musicale et le fait que le grand orchestre du Québec, quand il fait des auditions nationales, plus personne n’y va tant tout le monde sait très bien désormais qu’ils ne vont prendre personne pour aller recruter à l’international.
‘Je ne veux pas avancer une statistique saugrenue, poursuit le chef, mais l’OSM a probablement 50 % de l’orchestre qui n’est pas du Québec avec un bon 30 % d’Américains. Je n’ai rien contre cela, c’est la règle internationale.’ À Rotterdam, lui-même compte beaucoup de Russes, de Français et de Belges. ‘Mais si on en arrive à la francophonie, votre question touche au fait de mettre les ressources nationales [ou d’une province] au profit d’un ambassadeur qui représente toutes les valeurs dont on s’enorgueillit dans cette province. Sans avoir besoin d’aucune béquille, d’aucune aide, nous sommes arrivés à prouver qu’on pouvait être non seulement d’un niveau international, mais aussi véhiculer des dimensions uniques québécoises.’
Family and friends are reporting the death of Joey Corpus, a sought-after teacher whose Broadway studio was equidistant between Juilliard and Manhattan School of Music.
In the car accident that killed his mother when he was 11, Joey was left paraplegic. At 15, he won a scholarship to study with Dorothy DeLay at Julliard but was unable to accept for medical reasons. Later, he went to Philadelphia to work with Jascha Brodsky.
His students include Lara St John, Wen Qian and Katherine Gowers.
The cause of death is not yet known. Our sympathies to his young family.
Hilde Zadek was evacuated from Poland as a German at the end of the First World War.
She fled Germany as a Jew to Palestine in 1934.
Thirteen years later, she joined the Vienna State Opera as one of its Golden Age cast, singing there for 20 years.
She is still going strong. This Friday, Hilde will turn 100.
seen recently with Christa Ludwig.
The Romanian soprano Adela Zaharia saved Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the Bavarian State Opera this weekend.
Diana Damrau called in sick and Zaharia just breezed it in a cast that included Piotr Beczala, Nicolas Teste and Ludovic Tezier. Antonino Fogliani conducted. Zaharia, Domingo’s 2017 Operalia winner, is a member of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein ensemble.
Damrau will be off for the rest of the run, replaced by Olga Pudova.
From my front seat at La Scala:
The annual carnival that dances round La Scala’s opening night on December 7 has very little to do with the art of opera. The date was fixed by Saint Ambrose, 4th-century bishop of Milan, and it is a public holiday so the general populace either heads for the ski slopes or mills around waiting to see if anything is going to happen on the giant screen in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele.
Getting to the opera house is a bit of an ordeal. An anti-capitalist demonstration blocks half of the piazza under the slogan People Before Profit. Fireworks burst in the air. Hundreds of police maintain a 100-metre security cordon around La Scala, demanding to see tickets and identity before they let me through. The main doors are choked with paparazzi, snapping away like toy dogs at anyone who wears an air of celebrity. Superannuated journalists jabber non-stop on live television, accentuating the artifice of existential hypertension.
Inside, a tall woman in a mink-and-satin cape displaying the 1900 Tosca playbill vies for attention with the likes of Donatella Versace and a few dead-eyed blondes who look as if they have turned up with a bald hedge-funder in tow from one of Silvio Berlusconi’s bunga-bunga parties. A soprano, Silvia Colombini, walks around with ‘Rinassi della dignita’ (rebirth of dignity) inscribed in pink lipstick on her chest. Dignity is not the first noun that sprang to my mind.
All this and opera, too, and with high stakes to play for. Riccardo Chailly, the music director, has discarded the big guns – Rossini, Verdi, Puccini – in favour of a pistoletto that has never won a firm foothold in the repertoire. Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chenier stands or falls on the calibre of its tenor. Pertile, Gigli, Del Monaco and Corelli once owned the title role. But between Corelli in 1960 and José Carreras in 1982 the work was not staged here at all and it then vanished once more for the next 32 years. Chailly himself conducted the last Scala performance in July 1985.
He has brought it back both as a matter of personal conviction and as a launchpad for Yusif Eyvazov, an Azerbaijan tenor famed for his marriage to the Russian diva, Anna Netrebko. Eyvazov has never sung before at La Scala. Netrebko is here to support him in the heartbreak role of Madeleine de Coigny, an aristocrat who goes to the guillotine, unable to live without her poet, Chenier. There is more than one head on the block in the already sulphurous atmosphere of a Scala opening night.
First blood goes to the baritone. Luca Salsi is formidable as the rebellious major-domo Carlo Gerard who wrecks the nobility’s party with a rant against oppression. Beside him, the poet Chenier looks undernourished, as poets should. Eyvazov, in long sideburns and a high collar, could pass for Elvis Presley, just out of the army, still to regain his swagger. In the tug for Netrebko’s love, Salsi appears the more credible contender on stage. Eyvazov lacks enough physical authority until the heart-rending march to the scaffold. As for Netrebko, she is immaculate as ever, her voice deepening gracefully to lower, darker registers. A suspicion dawns that she has been slightly down-staged in Mario Martone’s traditional production to give Eyvazov his best chance to shine.
Happily, there is no need to craft a review when an independent measure exists to assess operatic merits. The distinguished newspaper Corriere della Sera has taken to giving Scala artists the same marks out of ten as it does for the footballers of Inter Milan. In its first-night ranking, Chailly scored a 9 for his ‘profound analysis and forceful communication’, Netrebko and Eyvazov scored 8 each and Salsi came up short with 7.5. Eleven minutes of applause was adjudged a triumph. Eleven million Italians watched at least a few minutes of the opera on Rai-uno. Against such numerical verdicts, criticism is redundant and context is all that remains to discuss.
Chailly, at the end of his first year as music director, has changed the pecking order at La Scala. The chorus and orchestra were the true stars of Andrea Chenier, exemplifying the horror of mob rule with a gloss of refined, all-too-persuasive logic. Principal cello Sandro Laffranchini should have received a curtain call all to himself for four exquisite solos. In the past La Scala was a domain for divas set inside a bear-pit. These days, the company has raised its game in every department.
I heard mutterings about Chenier being unworthy of a night when Italy expects a masterpiece. There is some justice to the claim. At just over two hours, Chenier is a stand-up espresso. The score, apart from five big arias, is humdrum and the libretto – by Luigi Illica who, the same year, wrote La Bohème for Puccini – has all the literary finesse of Google Translate.
Still, Chailly is right to stick to his pistols and keep challenging expectations. The success or failure of one tenor or another is irrelevant to the survival of opera. The quality of La Scala’s performance is, however, quintessential. Chailly, who spent his teens in the house when his father was artistic director, grasps that priority better than any living maestro. Fashionistas may come and go on opening night. La Scala is forever.
She takes the great leap off the battlements.
And then…
It’s playtime.
Posted by the soprano Jennifer Rowley.
photo (c) Luc Bondy production, Metropolitan Opera
The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho has offered one million Euros to the Helsinki Music Centre.
Her one condition is that the hall instals an organ.
A decision is being announced this morning. We think the answer is yes, thank you very much.
Serena Leland of New York City thinks the board of the Metropolitan Opera should allow its emeritus music director to return to work. So she has put up a petition.
Part of her reasoning:
This petition is not asking the Metropolitan Opera to employ Mr. Levine till the end of his life. It is not asking the Metropolitan Opera to allow him to fulfil his engagements as Emeritus Music Director if any criminal allegation against him goes to court. It is simply demanding the free right of an extremely devoted musician to be able to continue creating great performances as a free citizen of the United States until or unless he is pronounced guilty by a criminal court or at the very least sued in civil court.
