From Summer Opera…an Answer to the Opera Houses’ Predicament?

Bard Music Festival

Euryanthe From left, Peter Volpe, Ryan Kuster, William Burden and Ellie Dehn, at Bard SummerScape . Photo Cory Weaver.

From Summer Opera…an Answer to the Opera Houses’ Predicament?

August 30, 2015Michael Miller

Permit me to indulge in a one-sided argument…or a rant, as I believe it's called in the blogging world—which is not ours at New York Arts and The Berkshire Review! Opera in the United States is particularly unsettled at the moment, if not in trouble. Both audiences and sources of funding are on a downward curve, although the better-managed companies seem to be coping. The biggest beast of all, The Metropolitan Opera, compromised by the bad judgement of its General Director, Peter Gelb, is the most worrisome of all.

Bard Music Festival

Clytemnestra (Liuba Sokolova) sacrifices a ram in Taneyev's Oresteia at Bard. Photo Cory Weaver.

Sergey Taneyev’s Oresteia at Bard — a Review

September 1, 2013Michael Miller

In his introductory lectures, Leon Botstein is almost always engaging and enthusiastic, except when, to make an instructive point, he discusses music he knows to be inferior , and then he is at least amusing. However, before the Sunday matinee of Taneyev's Oresteia, he conveyed a certain Cheshire Cat-like excitement, as if he had something really exceptional in store for us. The air in and around the Fisher Center was charged, and one could feel it. We were not disappointed.

Bard Music Festival

Chabrier’s Le Roi malgré lui, a Forgotten Comic Masterpiece, at Bard Summerscape, July 27-August 5, 2012

July 27, 2012Michael Miller

This year Bard Summerscape’s annual opera and operetta are fused into one in Emmanuel Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui, a true opéra comique, written for the homonymous theater in Paris. In this genre, with which Leon Botstein indulged New York audiences with Bizet’s Djamileh this past spring, the effervescent humor we associate with operetta meets the more careful writing and construction of opera. As delightful as Djamileh was—and it did offer something more substantial than the Strausses, Offenbach, and Gilbert and Sullivan—Le roi malgré lui is in a different league. Chabrier painstakingly worked over a worse than mediocre play of the 1830’s, transforming it into a psychologically convincing and witty libretto and setting it to original, even daring music, such as only he could write, to create a sophisticated, forward-looking operatic work. As I go through what has been written about the opera and its composer, everyone who knows it exudes a warm affection and intellectual respect for both.

Bard Music Festival

Marie Lenormand as Urbain in Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots

Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots: French Grand Opera Comes to Bard.

August 10, 2009Michael Miller

The summer festivals have been proceeding creditably, but now the Important Events are beginning to turn up, mostly in New York State, it seems—not that a cycle of Beethoven violin sonatas by Christian Tetzlaff isn’t important! First came the Oresteia at Bard, then Rossini's rarely performed Semiramide, and now, once again at Bard, Giacomo Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots. Probably the most popular opera of all during the nineteenth century (It exceeded 1,000 performances at the Paris Opera), it fell rapidly from favor with, it seems, the First World War.