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Musical America, November 29, 2012 |
by James Jorden |
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1st annual JJ Opera Awards (Auszug)
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In order to gather as many important operatic events of the recent past as possible in one place, I have prepared not so much a roundup as a stampede of 18 months’ duration, extending back from the present to May 2011. |
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Grandest Opera Production Less intellectually lofty, but
hitting every button on the “You had to be there” board was Francesco
Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur at Opera Orchestra of New York on November 8,
2011. Oh, everyone was there, including people you had long since assumed
were dead. Who knows, maybe they were dead, but just had to come back this
once. Angela Gheorghiu and Jonas Kaufmann cooed and roared and sighed and
swooned, looking like Nouvelle Vague film stars the whole time. The mere
presence of the cancellation-prone Gheorghiu was enough to transform the
concert into an operaphile’s best dream. Even if her wispy performance of
“Io son l’umile ancella” provoked less than flattering comparisons to Scotto
or Tebaldi, nobody could fault her fluttering of that white silk caftan in
her death scene.
Most Vitally Important Tenor You
could say a lot of nasty things about the listless, pointless, cheesy
staging of Faust by Des McAnuff at the Met (see how easy that was?). But you
have to admit even so ghastly a night as November 29, 2011 had one saving
grace: the clear demonstration that Jonas Kaufmann can sing practically
everything. What’s more, he sings it all in a superbly musical and personal
way, and what’s even more than that, every moment he’s on stage, he is
intensely and viscerally engaged from his toes to the tips of his tousled
sable curls. It’s a tribute to Peter Gelb’s casting acumen that Kaufmann
features so prominently in (rumored) casting for the Met over the next five
to seven years, beginning with the (confirmed) title role of Parsifal in
February 2013. |
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