A Belated Mozart Valentine

In a letter written to his wife toward the end of his life, Mozart (who would have celebrated his 256th birthday last week) writes:

“Get your dear and lovely nest ready and most prettily, for my little fellow indeed deserves it. He has behaved very well and desires only to possess your beautiful […]. Picture to yourself the little rogue who, even as I write, creeps up onto the table and looks up at me questioningly. On guard, I give him a smart slap…but the rascal only burns yet more and can hardly be controlled.”

As Robert W. Guttman notes in his Mozart: A Cultural Biography, this letter hints at the phallic glory and references in Così fan tutte. will be a highlight of Christopher Alden’s staging of the work for New York City Opera this March.

Honey Badger Cares

In her continued and well-deserved cleanup of competition and grand foundations pockets, soprano Angela Meade was today named the seventh winner of the Metropolitan Opera’s annual Beverly Sills Award and takes home $50,000 for furthering her titanium career. Below, her earth-shaking performance of “Casta Diva” from Norma. I’ll have the scoop on WQXR this Friday when she sings Ernani at the Met opening Thursday (in the meantime, you can check out my project from today, a flowchart of Philip Glass’s recorded operas in advance of the composer’s 75th birthday).

Speaking of Hannibal Lecter…

 

Anthony Hopkins releases his first CD, Composer, next week in the UK on the Classic FM label. You can hear all nine tracks in their entirety on the Telegraph’s website starting today, however. It’s easy to write off such discs as these in the same category as classical attempts by Billy Joel and Paul McCartney, but I find something rather beguiling about Hopkins’s compositional style. There’s a clear trajectory in the 5 minutes of Orpheus, and it takes the time to navigate from Hans Zimmer to Richard Strauss in bombastic brass and soothing chorals, a sort of Hollywood-esque Confutatis and Voca Me in the Mozart Requiem. Hopkins moves into lusher, more Romantic territory in the warm cello work Stella, before going full folk in Evesham Fair. Perhaps And the Waltz Goes On treads too far into cliche, but it’s no less enjoyable to hear alongside organ-tainted Amerika and the full-length, three-movement 1947. What I can’t stop listening to on this gloomy, wet day, however, is Margam, a piece that belies Hopkins’s history as a broody thesp (with some tinseltown violins thrown in for added glamor), one who left me enthralled after his performance in the BBC’s miniseries adaptation of War & Peace.

It may not be the most profound thing you’ll hear all year—especially coming the day after I marvelled to the multiculti assemblage of solo harp works performed by Bridget Kibbey at (Le) Poisson Rouge last night (she repeats the concert on Sunday, go if you haven’t already…and even if you have)—but I wouldn’t mind seeing Hopkins’s name on a New York Philharmonic program, perhaps cozied up to some more 20- and 30-something composers, per Zachary Woolfe’s emphatic and essential New York Times piece.

Fava Beans and a Nice Puccini

Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

I’ll freely admit that I went to the Met’s revival of Tosca last night (in descending order of importance) to finally see Roberto Alagna sing an Italian role live and in person, rekindle my love for Patricia Racette’s Puccini prowess and experience the continuing Finnish invasion with conductor Mikko Franck’s Met debut.

All three of those elements held up in spades—Alagna’s “Vittoria”s didn’t disappoint, Franck held a sure hand over the orchestra and Racette unfurled an entire galaxy in her “Vissi d’arte”—but what stuck with me most was, unexpectedly, tenor Joel Sorensen’s Spoleta (pictured, with George Gagnidze as Scarpia). Spoleta is one of those roles that fascinates me, because he has so few lines but plays such an essential part. There wasn’t anything particularly revelatory in Sorensen’s interpretation, but he was no less mesmerizing to watch. His is a Spoleta intoxicated by power and sadism, gleefully signaling Cavaradossi’s torturers to continue and looking as let down as a pauper boy on Christmas morning when Scarpia calls a halt. Whether it was planned or not, he took no fewer than three spills, being thrown across the stage by Scarpia, falling down the stairs in Act II and tripping up the steps leading to the roof in Act III (I’d say the roof of the Castel San’Angelo, but no one needs to reiterate the point that this production is more “Blah, Tosca” than “Va, Tosca”) and made each one look convincing.

Like most of the audience members, Sorensen is almost developmentally disabled around his employer’s prostitutes, but then sneaks some lascivious sniffs of Tosca as she enters. There’s a lot going on in that second act from the three leads, and to compete with not only that but the dismally-dull menstrual and lavatorial set of piss yellow, shit brown and blood red and remain one of the most intriguing visual aspects of the performance is no mean feat. I often wonder if Spoleta is happy with his lot in life or not, and here Sorensen made us see how disturbingly enamored he was of his work, even if his inability to shrewdly see the big picture would prevent him from ever rising to Scarpia levels of power. It was like watching Hannibal Lecter as a Roman lackey. It may even be enough or me to watch this production again on DVD.

Not All of the Gods Love Nubia

Photo: Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera

In a bit of a reversal of the recent Ocean Marketing fiasco, Prospero Bertani (whose descendants are surely now Metropolitan Opera subscribers) wrote to Giuseppe Verdi on May 10, 1782, requesting a refund for his expenses to see Aida. Upon the first viewing, he wrote: “I admired the scenery, listened with great pleasure to the excellent singers, and took great pains to let nothing escape me. After the performance was over, I asked myself whether I was satisfied. The answer was in the negative.” Upon a second viewing, he said “It will fill the theatre a few more times and then gather dust in the archives.”

Verdi’s response was to reimburse Bertrani for his two tickets (“This isn’t the entire sum for which asks me, but… to pay for his dinner too! No. He could very well have eaten at home!!!” he writes to his publisher), noting that in return he expected from Bertrani “a receipt for that sum and a note, by which he promises never again to go to hear my new operas, to avoid for himself the danger of other specters and for me the farce of paying him for another trip.” He saw to it that the letter was published in several newspapers.

The best part is Bertrani’s response: “If Maestro Verdi reimburses me, this means that he has found what I wrote fim to be correct.”

The full exchange can be read at Letters of Note. Aida continues to gather dust this spring at the Met, with a recent casting change announced for Marcelo Álvarez’s final few appearances in the run being shared by Riccardo Massì and Marcello Giordani.

(In other news: Hi, it’s 2012 and I’m going to make a better commitment to the newly rechristened Daily Klang before the world ends in 11 months.)