By Thomson Smillie
A Wilder Night
Presenting world premieres is privately regarded in the opera business as a “hiding to nothing,” a lost cause, though people continue to do it. Virtually none of the thousands of new operas written since World War II has entered the standard repertory, unless you count Peter Grimes in 1945 and The Rake’s Progress in 1951. The recent and star-studded Met premiere of Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy was greeted with a wave of public and critical apathy, and you have to admire the generosity of those critics who strained to find a good word to say of it.
Why bother then? Conventional belief is that if opera is to be anything other than a museum art form, it needs new works. I don’t really buy that, never having had much problem with museums or their role in preserving our cultural heritage. There are plenty of great lyric-theater pieces being written — pieces like The Light in the Piazza, The Producers and Billy Ellio — but they’re being written for Broadway, not opera houses.
I mention all this because you might consider a trip to Indiana University at Bloomington on Feb. 24-25 or March 4-5 for what will be the premiere, and we hope not the derniere, of a new opera by acclaimed American composer Ned Rorem. It is called Our Town and is based, of course, on Thornton Wilder’s wonderful play of the same name. The strong story, the rich cast of character types and the play’s proven theatricality all bode well. So do the experience and proven skill of the composer, once the enfant terrible of American music and now one of the Grand Old Men. The opera house at Bloomington is a revelation; it has a stage that is a 90 percent scale model of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City but only 800 seats, allowing the young voices of the student cast to project. The visual side and production values are always excellent, so maybe Louisville’s corps of devoted modern opera-lovers might consider cramming into two compact sedans and making the trip. Tickets may be purchased from Ticketmaster at (812) 333-9955.
The Light Fantastic
The racy and glittering opening to Mendelssohn’s Fourth Symphony, nicknamed “The Italian,” is a sovereign remedy for the blues in what the Pirate King called “the beastly month” of February. (It also has been used in recent years in commercials to market everything Italian, from pasta to fast cars.) So it will be good to hear the pristine original in a Louisville Orchestra concert at the Whitney Hall on Feb. 10 under the baton — as the saying goes — of another runner in the Great Louisville Orchestra Conductor Stakes, Mischa Santora. The concert opens with two Mozart works, as seems appropriate within days of the 250th birthday of the Salzburg wunderkind, contains a short work by the French mystic and composer Olivier Messiaen, and concludes with the Mendelssohn symphony. This is a light and bright program with lots of the tuneful stuff, so it is good to note that it will be repeated at the Comstock Hall of the University of Louisville Music School at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 12. The light scoring for these works should pay dividends in that very bright acoustic. The number to call is 585-7777.
For the Record
You can now buy the new CD of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde I anticipated in my October arts marketing piece as possibly the last major big-studio opera recording that will ever be made. If so it is a worthy swan song: Placido Domingo’s burnished bronze voice sounds undimmed by age (he is even older than I am, poor fellow) and there is a stunning new (to me) Isolde in Nina Stemme, whose voice gleams and soars throughout this killer role. The supporting men include my current candidates for world’s best tenor, baritone and bass: respectively Ian Bostridge, Olaf Bar and Rene Pape. Yet it is good to note that the overwhelming impression made is by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House under their music director Antonio Pappano. That is only appropriate; with Wagner, the real action, the real heroes and villains, are in the orchestra pit and not onstage.
Final Thought
I have occasionally recommended and quoted the Lebrecht Weekly Index for the iconoclastic writings of Norman Lebrecht, music critic of London’s Daily Telegraph. Google the phrase “Lebrecht Weekly Index,” then scroll to “Too much Mozart makes you sick” for a savage antidote to the saccharine outpourings of the Amadeus industry. I vigorously disagree with him on most points, but enjoy the polemics.
