Italian barihunk Pietro Di Bianco will sing Osmida in Saverio Mercadante's rarely performed "Didone abbandonata" at the Innsbrucker Festwochen der Alten Musik.
Encouraged by Rossini, the composer had a number of successful operas early in his career, including Violenza e Constanza, Maria Stuarda: Regina di Scozia and Elisa e Claudio. Rossini invited him to Paris in 1836, where he composed I Briganti for four of the best-known singers of the time, Giulia Grisi, Giovanni Battista Rubini, Antonio Tamburini and Luigi Lablache. While in Paris, he was influenced by the operas of Meyerbeer and Halévy and began to stress greater drama in opera.
Mercandante became part of the "Reform Movement" after the publication of Giuseppe Mazzini's Filosofia della musica. During this time, he composed his greatest works, including Il giuramento, Elena da Feltre and Francesco Florimo. These works made him one of the most popular composers of the time, before being eclipsed by Giovanni Pacini and the early works of Giuseppe Verdi. After his death in 1870, his operas began to fade in popularity, unlike his contemporaries Donizetti and Bellini.
Ettore Bastianini sings Mercadante's Sogno:
Didone abbandonata is part of his early period and is based on a classical libretto by the great poet Metastasio. The opera contains many of the trademarks of early 19th century operas, including scenes with cantabile and cabaletta for all the main characters, rousing ensembles, thrilling duets and grand finales. The suicide of the Carthaginian Queen Dido, abandoned by Aeneas and betrayed by Jarba, is composed as great death scene.
There will be performances on August 8, 12 and 14 at the Tiroler Landestheater. The cast also includes Viktorija Miškūnaité as Didone, Katrin Wundsam as Enea, Carlo Allemano as Jarba, Diego Godoy as Araspe and Emilie Renard as Selene. Tickets are available online.
In October, the Wexford Festival Opera will perform the composer's Il bravo.
German bass-barihunk Georg Festl, who is part of the ensemble at the Staatstheater Darmstadt, was suggested to us by one of our readers.
This season he has performed the lead role in Messiaen‘s Saint François d’Assise, Papageno/Speaker in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, Tom in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera, Pietro in Verdi's Simon Boccanegra andFigaro in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro. On November 15th, he will begin a run as Frank in Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus, which runs through December 9th.
From 2015-2017, he sang at the Theater Augsburg, where he performed in Zemlinsky's Der König Kandaules, Verdi's Macbeth, Les contes d’Hoffmann, Die Csárdásfürstin, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Tosca and the children's opera Ritter Odilo und der strenge Herr Winter by Mareike Zimmermann.
Georg Festl was born in Nuremberg, Germany and studied English and American studies at the University of Music Würzburg. After graduating, he was cast as Artie Green in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard at the Mainfrankentheater Würzburg.
He is a recipient of the Richard-Wagner Society scholarship and the Da-Ponte Society scholarship.
Kelly Markgraf and Sasha Cooke (Photo: Brooklyn Academy of Music)
The real-life married couple of mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke and barihunk Kelly Markgraf have made Laura Kaminsky's opera "As One" a bit of a calling card since premiering the work at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2014. The couple will perform the work for one night only on August 7th at the Chautauqua Opera. They will be joined by the Fry String Quartet, who premiered the work with them.
Markgraf has performed the work with Opera Colorado and the San Diego Opera, while Sasha Cooke performed it at the Hawaii Opera Theater.
Kaminsky was inspired to write the opera after reading an article in the New York Times in 2008 about a New Jersey marriage in which one of the parties transitioned from male to female, transforming the couple from heterosexual to homosexual.
As One provides insights into both the personal and philosophical questions at the core of how personhood is defined, as well as into the compromised civil and humans rights of transgender individuals in the broader societal framework.
The opera can also be seen at the Cincinnati Opera with Matthew Worth and Amber Fasquelle on July 30th.
The Barihunks family lost one of its favorite people in the music industry this week, Glen Roven, a multi-talented composer, conductor, arranger, producer and two-time Emmy Award-winner. He was a fan of our site from day one and always dreamed of producing a barihunk concert, which he recently accomplished when he joined Steven Labrie, Jarrett Ott and Tobias Greenhalgh at Carnegie Hall.
Roven was a tireless promoter of music across all genres, including for his beloved friend Florence Henderson, as well as Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Julie Andrews, Melissa Etheridge, Aretha Franklin, Leon Fleisher, Kenny G., Whitney Houston, Dick Hyman, Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, Kermit the Frog, Patti LaBelle, Liza Minnelli, Diana Ross, Paul Shaffer, Martin Short, TRAIN and others.
His collection of three-dozen song cycles and art songs are performed all around in the world, including concerts by Daniel Okulitch, who would devote a half-program to his music and Mark Stone who performed an all-Roven set at Carnegie Hall. He loved translating great works into English and wrote a version of Schubert's Winterreise for David Adam Moore and had his English version of Mahler's Kindertodenlieder performed by Christopher Herbert. Randal Turner made his West Coast recital debut singing Roven's "Four Melancholy Songs, Opus 16, No. 1" based on poetry by William Butler Yeats. The list is endless, which is a testament to his prolific abilities.
Daniel Okulitch recorded "Stop all the Clocks" from Roven's "Songs From the Underground,"
based on Auden's famous poem in 2011. However, Roven could never
perform the piece again after his partner Robin died as he got too
emotional. You can listen to Okulitch and Roven perform it HERE.
When we met with Roven in New York in 2015, he was about to premiere Songs That Make Grown Men Cry, Opus 41, based on texts from a collection of poetry edited by Anthony Holden and Ben Holden. The concert featured barihunks Jonathan Hare, Kenneth Kellogg and Jarrett Ott along with the NY New Music Collective and tenors Andrew Fuchs, Glen Seven Allen and Myles Mykkanen and a choral quartet. He would tear up whenever talking about the text.
Speaking of text, Roven had an undying love and devotion to poetry, and produced "Poetic License: 100 Poems/100 Performers," which became the best selling poetry album of all time. The album included readings by Catherine Zeta-Jones, Patti LuPone, Jason Alexander, Cynthia Nixon, Florence Henderson, Christine Baranski, Brent Barrett, Barry Humphries, Daniel Okulitch, Tyne Daly, Doug Carpenter and Glenn Seven Allen.
After the election of Donald Trump, the composer needed a way to channel is anger, so he wrote The Hillary Speeches, based on the announcement of her candidacy on January 7, 2007, and her presidential concession speech on November 9, 2017. The concert was streamed from the National Sawdust and included performances by David Adam Moore, Kyle Ketelsen, Nathan Gunn, Sidney Outlaw, Daniel
Sumegi, Lester Lynch, Andrew Garland, Michael Kelly, Isabel Leonard, Patricia Racette, Lawrence Brownlee, Matthew
Polenzani, Carin Gilfy, Laquita Mitchell, Glenn Seven Allen, Dominic
Armstrong, Jonathan Blalock and others.
Roven also tirelessly devoted his time to penning music for charitable
causes, including "An AIDS Quilt Songbook: Sing for Hope," a recording
that raised funds for amfAR and featured Joyce DiDonato, Jamie Barton,
Isabel Leonard, Matthew Polenzani, Susanne Phillips Yo-Yo Ma, Ansel
Elgort, Sharon Stone and others.
One of our favorite compositions by Roven is a setting of wine tasting notes that was written for bass Aaron Sorensen and performed in California's Sonoma County wine region.
Roven was always busy doing something, and at the time of his death, he was at work on a new movie-musical for Dolly Parton for Netflix, had just completed his "Symphony of Songs," penned a new opera called Addressee Unknown, wrote a new Broadway Musical World War Me, and produced an all-Verdi aria CD for Hui He.
A funeral service will be held Friday, July 27th at Riverside Memorial Chapel, 180 West 76th Street in New York City at 11 AM, with a memorial tribute being planned for Fall 2018.
Edwin Crossley-Mercer and Heiko Pinkowski (Photo: Wilfried Hösl)
Barihunk Edwin Crossley-Mercer is singing the role of the boastful and arrogant King Rodomonte in Haydn’s most popular opera, Orlando Paladino. The opera is being performed at the Munich Opera Festival under the baton of Ivor Bolton and also features the rising tenor star David Portillo as Pasquale.
The opera plays into all of the 18th-century stereotypes and conventions of the time, including the title character literally going crazy over love and the tenor having to sing some ridiculously high falsetto notes.
Haydn composed Orlando Paladino in 1782, basing it on Ludovico Ariosto's 16th-century epic, Orlando Furioso, which inspired a few operas by Handel, Vivaldi and other composers of the time. The opera did not receive its first U.S. performance for two centuries, when it was performed in Philadelphia in 1982.
On a side note, Rodomonte's name is the source of the expression rodomontade, meaning "boastful, bragging talk"
Remaining perfomances are on July 25, 27, 29 and tickets and cast information is available online.
Christopher Maltman as Don Alfonso(Marty Sohl/The Metropolitan Opera)
Christopher Maltman will be featured in the upcoming broadcast of Mozart's Così fan tutte from the Metropolitan Opera as part of its Great Performances Series on Sunday, July 29, 2018. The broadcast begins at 12 PM EDT/9 AM PST.
The Met version of Mozart’s comedy about the sexes is set in a carnival-esque, funhouse environment inspired by 1950s Coney Island—complete with bearded ladies, fire eaters, and a Ferris wheel. Maltman stars as Don Alfonso, while Broadway star Kelli O’Hara takes on the role of the scheming maid Despina in a rare appearance on an operatic stage.
Upcoming broadcast's include Verdi's Luisa Miller and Massenet's Cendrillon with Joyce DiDonato.
Roberta Mantegna and Artur Rucinski in I masnadieri in Rome(Photo: Yasuko Kageyama)
Few composers wrote more great baritone and bass parts than Giuseppe Verdi. Many of his operas are named for low male voice leads instead of the usual soprano or tenor leads, including Falstaff, Rigoletto, Nabucco, Attila, Macbeth and Simon Boccanegra.
While it is his middle and late period operas that are both most performed and most popular today, his early period operas include some of the best vocal writing for low male voices. Those operas reflected his sympathy with the Risorgimento movement which sought the unification of Italy and produced the chorus "Va, pensiero" from Nabucco, which became the unofficial anthem of the movement.
His early works echo the dominant style of "aria, duet, ensemble and finale" common with composers of the era, including Rossini and Donizetti. The aria centered on a soloist generally singing three sections, including a cabaletta featuring some bravura singing. His finales often feature soloists, ensemble and chorus, usually culminating with an exciting stretto section.
Dmitry Hvorostovsky sings "Vecchio! Spiccai...La sua lampada vitale...Tremate. o miseri!"
July 22nd marks the 1847 premiere of one of his lesser known early operas, I masnadieri, his first opera composed for a foreign theater, London's Her Majesty's Theatre. The opera with its themes of fratricide, patricide, treachery, betrayal and a doomed love interest, was unpopular with London audiences and never truly found its place in the repertory. It basically disappeared from the performance archives until a 1951 revival broadcast on RAI with Sesto Bruscantini and Renato Capecchi.
Edita Gruberova sings "Tu del mio Carlo":
The opera is probably his most "male dominated" opera, with six of the seven leads being male and the chorus consisting of male bandits. Despite that, the operas most enduring piece is Amalia's aria and cabaletta "Tu del mio Carlo al seno...Carlo vive? O caro accento," a bravura piece that appears with some frequency on soprano recordings.
Nonetheless, the men get some real showstoppers, including Francesco's dramatic finale “Pareami che sorto da lauto convito.” In the aria, Francesco contemplates his judgment day and the terror it will bring, imagining that he will not be allowed into heaven because of his cruel deeds.
Dmitry Hvorostovsky sings "Tradimento! ... Pareami, che sorto da lauto convito":
One of the key characters in the operas is the bass role Count Massimiliano, who is featured in the Act 1 quartet “Sul capo mio colpevole” and sings the Act III aria “Un ignoto, tre lune or saranno.”
Bonaldo Gaiotti sings "Un ignoto, tre lune or saranno":
Upcoming performance of the opera are at the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia with Artur Rucinski as Francesco and Michele Pertusi as Massiliano from February 6-17, 2019, and at the Teatro alla Scala with Massimo Cavalletti as Francesco and Michele Pertusi as Massimiliano from June 18-July 7, 2019.
