American bass-barihunk Evan Hughes will be performing a recital with Les Grandes Interprètes in Toulouse, France on December 10th with accompanist Hélio Vida.
The program will include selections from Schumann's Kerner Lieder,Hans Christian Andersen Lieder and his Lieder sur des poèmes de Heine, as well as Sibelius' Runeberg Songs, Ireland's Sea Fever, Purcell's Cold Song and Finzi's Earth and Air and Rain. Tickets are available online. Upcoming performances include Theseus in Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream with Opera Philadelphia in February and Citheron in Rameau's Platée with Semperoper Dresden in April.
British barihunk David Jones is reprising his performance of "Unknowing," a turbulent love tale told through the interweaving of two Schumann song cycles: Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe und Leben. He originally performed the piece with Teatime Opera at Cambridge, but on November 29 and December 3, he'll perform the piece with soprano Christine Cunnold at the Tristan Bates Theatre in London.
Olivier-Award winning libretti translator and composer David Parry created the new English translation of Schumann's most well known song cycles.
David Jones performs The Salley Gardens:
Jones studied at Oxford University and Trinity Laban and was prizewinner
in the 2015 AESS Patricia Routledge English Song Competition. He enjoys
a fruitful ongoing collaboration with Cantata Dramatica, with
whom he has given the first performances of four substantial works, most
recently Nick Bîcat’s Red Dragon, White Dragon.
Operatic roles have included Jesus in Jonathan Harvey's Passion and Resurrection at the Voices of London Festival, Edward VIII in the premiere of Josh Spear's That Woman at the Tête-à-Tête Festival, Pritschitsch in Lehar's The Merry Widow with Opera Danube, Jamie in the world premiere of The Sleeper with the Welsh National Youth Opera and Ko-Ko in Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado with Co-Opera Co.
Our 2017 Barihunks in Bed calendar is now on sale. Order your copy by clicking on the LULU button.
French-Irish barihunk Edwin Crossley-Mercer is bringing opera to the Arabian Peninsula in a recital at the One & Only Mirage Resort in Dubai. The May 29th show is entitled "It's All About Love" and will feature famous love songs in German, Russian, French and English.
The show will take the audience to Berlin, Moscow, Paris and New York by featuring pop classics from’40s, songs by Franz Schubert and the 19th century song repertory. Crossley-Mercer, who grew up in the French town of Clermont-Ferrand, is also quite familiar with Berlin, having studied at the Hanns Eisler Hochschule fur
Musik.
Tickets for the show are available online. The singer's next performance also takes him to the Arabian Peninsula, but only musically. He will perform Schumann's Paradise and the Peri at the Festival de Saint Denis, which was inspired by one of the tales of the Arabian Nights. The text mixes enchantments with elements from the Bible, the Koran, and mythology. On March 4, 2016, he makes his much anticipated US stage debut as Lescaut in Massenet'sManon at the Dallas Opera.
You can catch Aussie barihunk Damian Pass on the newest podcast on Radio France. He is performing Schumann's Belsazar Balthazar, Duparc'sLa vie antérieure andHandel's "O voi dell errebo" from La Resurrezione. Click here to play (you'll need to scroll down to find him).
If you want to catch him live, he'll be performing Junius in Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia at the Athénée Theatre in Paris with the emsemble Le Balcon from January 14 – 19. He then appears as Masetto in two productions of Mozart's Don Giovanni. First at the MC93 Theatre in Bobigny from March 22 – 31 and then from May 20 – 27 at the Opera of Toulon.
There are few young singers who we're more excited about than Canadian Barihunk Philippe Sly. If it were possible that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Simon Keenlyside had a love child, we're pretty sure that it would have been Sly. For a singer in his early 20s, his interpretive skills and musicianship is beyond singers with decades more experience.
We've seen him hone his craft in person and it a truly remarkable site. He searches for the perfect tone and mood in every song that he sings. He clearly wowed the judges at both the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and the Concours Musical International de Montreal (MIMC) where he took away top honors. As Radio-Canada host Françoise Davoine has said, "It was impossible not to be completely bowled over by this young man with the golden voice and the luminous expression."
His brother Mathieu Sly has put together a 15-minute documentary "IN DREAMS, EN RÊVES, IN TRÄUMEN" on the making of his latest album. It's a great opportunity to watch him perfect his music making.
The opera world is wasting little time in snapping up this young talent, recognizing that he's the perfect marketing passage: matinee idol looks + an amazing talent. After finishing a year with the prestigious Merola Opera Program in San Francisco, he was signed by by the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. He will also be touring Canada in a recital series with the Debut Atlantic Series.
The San Francisco Opera which got to witness Sly firsthand while he was at Merola also wasted little time in signing Sly and he will appear in their mainstage production of Mozart's Così fan tutte as Guglielmo opposite Heidi Stober, Ellie Dehn, Francesco Demuro and Marco Vinco. Performances will be led by music director Nicola Luisotti and begin on June 9, 2013. Visit the San Francisco Opera website for more information.
You can buy his new album by clicking on our Amazon link to the right or by going to iTunes or Spotify. We can guarantee you that you'll want to add this to your music collection.
We never get tired of singing the praises of Canadian barihunk Philippe Sly, who wowed the judges at both the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and the Concours Musical International de Montreal (MIMC) where he took away the top honors. We're convinced that he's one of the most amazing talents to come along in the last decade. We've posted his intensely moving account of Schubert's Der Erlkönig a few times, which has received a remarkable 45,000 hits on YouTube.
After finishing a year with the esteemed Merola Opera Program in San Francisco, he was signed by by the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. He will also be touring Canada in recital series with the Debut Atlantic Series. He also returns to San Francisco, where he will appear in the mainstage production of Mozart's Così fan tutte under music director Nicola Luisotti.
Overture to "Das Labyrinth" by Peter von Winter aka "Magic Flute 2":
He's currently with the Young Singers Project at the Salzburg Festival in Austria where he is singing Part 2 of the Magic Flute as Sithos in Peter von Winter’s 'Das Labyrinth' under the baton of Ivor Bolton. After Mozart's "Magic Flute" had a successful run of 200 performances, the composer's librettist Emanuel Schikaneder had the idea of commissioning a second part called The Labyrinth, or "The Struggle with the Elements." The opera was successful enough to have 42 performances over the next year. The performance is being recorded and will be broadcast on Unitel Classica at 8:15 PM Salzburg time on August 7th (2:15 PM EST/11:15 AM PST).
Philippe Sly sings Schumann's "Am Leuchtenden Sommermorgen":
Sly recently finished recording his first album "In Dreams," which is schudeled for release on the Analekta label in September. The recording includes Schumann's Dichterliebe, Ravel's Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, Ropartz's 4 Poèmes de l'intermezzo and the world premiere recording of Jonathan Dove's Three Tennyson Songs. If you're like us and you can never get enough of this young singer, you'll be thrilled to know that he's back in the recording studio next month for his next album, which will be of Rameau cantatas.
On another matter related to Unitel Classica, they will be broadcasting the Don Giovanni from Sferesterio wilth Ildebrando D'Arcangelo and Andrea Concetti that features a liberal amount of skin. We previously posted about the sexy production:
Barihunk Kelly Markgraf will be joined by soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke and tenor Matthew Plenk for an evening of music dedicated to affairs of the heart. The program with the Chamber Society of Lincoln Center will feature music by Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, and Berg.
Markgraf will perform Schumann's Selected Lieder for Baritone and Piano and Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzer for Four Voices and Piano, Four Hands, Op. 52 (1868–69). Visit the Chamber Society of Lincoln Center website for tickets and additional information.
Daniel Teadt
Markgraf returns to New York City Opera this season after his huge success in Don Giovanni to perform the pivotal role of Pluto in Telemann's Orpheus opposite fellow barihunk Daniel Teadt in the title role.
Anya Matanovic and Kelly Markgraf sing the Act III opening duet from Le Nozze di Figaro
at a dress rehearsal with Kentucky Opera:
UPDATE: We have a feeling that Kelly Markgraf has a few friends out there. After our post we received a few emails letting us know about other performances that he's involved with. The first is Donizetti's "Don Pasquale" with the Hawaii Opera Theater (HOT - we love the acronym). The American barihunk will be performing the role of Malatesta from Feb 10 through Valentine's Day. Click HERE for tickets or additional information.
Markgraf will also be performing Masetto opposite barihunks Keith Miller and Ryan McKinney with the New York Philharmonic on June 29 and 30. Click HERE for additional information.
The baritone winning streak that we've been covering in international singing competitions suffered a minor setback at this year's Operalia competition. Russian baritone Konstantin Shushakov came in second place after being nudged out by American tenor René Barbera and South African soprano Pretty Yende.
"I was one of the two baritones who were allowed into the finals," Shushakov told Voice of Russia. "I was surprised to see how many tenors reached the finals. That was a real battle of tenors, you know. But all competitions after all are aimed to help singers get access to the world`s best opera stages. Very often those who received second or third prizes become even more successful than top-prize winners."
Barihunk Erwin Schrott is a past winner of the competition.
The annual competition, which was founded in 1993 by tenor Placido Domingo, was held last Sunday. The competition is held in a different city each year. During Sunday's ceremony, Domingo received the Russian Order of Friendship for his work in cultural exchange.
Here are some selections of Shushakov from other performances.
Meanwhile, across the globe at the Utah Festival Opera, Gabriel Preisser was redeeming baritones as he won the final round of the Lirico Concorso Competition and will now advance to the interantional finale in Italy. The Barihunks Team wishes him well.
We posted a clip of Markus Werba in April 2008 dubbed "Goethe-dammerung," which featured him singing from Schumann's underperformed "Scenes from Goethe's Faust." The original clip was deleted by the YouTube user, but a new clip has emerged and we feel that it's worth watching, so we're reposting it with a little bit of history about the piece (excerpted from Wikipedia). You can also hear some very different interpretations by Bryn Terfel, Herman Prey and Christian Gerhaher at the Robert Schumann site.
Written between 1844 and 1853, Szenen aus Goethes Faust (Scenes from Goethe's Faust) has been described as the height of composer Robert Schumann’s accomplishments in the realm of dramatic music.
Schumann's work on what he labeled an oratorio began just over a decade after Goethe’s completion of Part Two of the dramatic poem Faust in 1832, the year of Goethe's death. Many contemporary readers of Faust found Goethe's epic poem daunting and difficult to grasp. Goethe himself declared only Mozart fit to write the music for Faust (though Mozart died in 1791, almost 20 years prior to the completion of Part One of Faust).
Schumann explained the weight of the task before him in an 1845 letter to Felix Mendelssohn: "[A]ny composer would not only be judged by his treatment of one of the seminal and most-widely acclaimed works in German literature, but would also be setting himself up to be compared to Mozart."
Yet despite Schumann's expressed reservations about the work, it has been labeled Schumann's "magnum opus." Schumann opens wide "a manifold musical world" that coherently draws together elements of "lied, horror opera, grand opera, oratorio, and church music."
Schumann's music suggests the struggle between good and evil at the heart of Goethe's work, as well as Faust's tumultuous search for enlightenment and peace. Schumann's restless orchestration brings to the fore Faust's delusions upon hearing of a new world being created and its rapturous promise of an everlasting present.
Although often overlooked within Schumann's impressive oeuvre, Szenen aus Goethes Faust has been deemed among Schumann's most moving works, and a pinnacle of his quintessential Romantic concern with the extra-musical and literary potential of musical expression.
Ivan Ludlow in Les Mamelles de Tirésias (L) and Don Giovanni (R)
Anyone who followed us in 2010 knows that the hottest opera that we featured was Poulenc's "Les Mamelles de Tirésias" with barihunk Gabriel Bermudez. We subsequently featured Troy Cook in the same opera and now along comes Ivan Ludlow from a production at Opéra de Lyon. Although he doesn't perform the "Full Okulitch" like Bermudez, Ludlow is still extremely sexy in this increasingly popular opera.
Ludlow studied at the Guildhall School of Music and the National Opera Studio. In addition to performing with some of the leading opera companies in Europe, he is a founding member of the London Bridge Ensemble. His repertory stretches from Cavalli to Maxwell-Davies, with a good deal of Britten and Mozart.
Here is Ludlow performing Schumann's Liederkreis with the London Bridge Ensemble:
Barihunk Kelly Markgraf received rave reviews for his Schumann recital which we recently posted about. You can read the entire review at the San Diego Union website. Here is the highlight:
"[I]n “Dichterliebe” baritone Kelly Markgraf and pianist Ken Noda offered a carefully calibrated rendering. These 16 songs, each a miniature world unto itself, offer no second chances. You just start to wrap your ears and mind around them and they are gone. Markgraf’s rich, assertive voice seemed to grow in warmth and flexibility as the cycle went on, while Noda seemed to channel Schumann’s unconscious intentions into his sensitive accompaniment."
Kudos to one of our readers who spotted this stunningly hot photo of Kelly Markgraf on Facebook.
You can hear Markgraf perform Schumann's Dichterlibe during the La Jolla Music Society's festival at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, California on Tuesday, August 10, 2010.
Alert readers may recall an earlier appearance by the 31-year-old singer when he performed in New York City Opera's sexy production of Don Giovanni.
