Home : Blogs

Blogs

“right and final”

Submitted by dramma per musica on Fri, 03/04/2011 - 13:23
In preparation for next month’s production of L’heure espagnole and L’enfant et les sortilèges with the Portland Opera Studio Artists, I’ve been going through A Ravel Reader, Arbie Orenstein’s marvelous collection of correspondence, articles, and interviews. I’m just enough of a creative process geek to find all of this stuff endlessly fascinating anyway, but with Ravel there’s an added bonus because his music often half conceals what it half reveals. I’ll be posting random quotes from the book between now and the first week of April, when the two shows open; many of these will relate to the operas, while others will–I hope–provide a more general background to Ravel’s compositional art. To start, here’s Elliot Carter, writing about Ravel in 1937:

I belive in miracles.

Submitted by Portland Opera To Go on Wed, 03/02/2011 - 16:40

I believe in miracles. Especially the theatrical miracle. Over and over our LaGrande residency has proved that the theater owner in "Shakespeare in Love" was right when he answered the desperate question, “How will it be alright?” with, “I don’t know. It’s a miracle.”

Last week, POGO loaded up into the van on Monday morning and drove to Eastern Oregon University in LaGrande. The plan was to arrive early to mid-afternoon, check into the hotel and have time for a deep cleansing breath before I headed over to the university with David, our accompanist for our first rehearsal with the children’s choir for the second act of La Boheme. Oh, did I forget to tell you? We were going to stage the entire second act of La Boheme in just under 4 hours. As Christopher Mattaliano, our GD told me when he heard that that was my plan, “You do realize that that is the most difficult 20 minutes in all of opera to stage, right?” Well, Chris, I do now. But, then fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and, while I don’t think I am a fool, I am no angel!

Anyway, the Grande Ronde Community Choir, the children’s choir, three of the university students (thank you, Keil, Renee and Jon!), one university professor (thanks, Peter!) and the intrepid cast of POGO pulled it off. I cannot believe we did it, but we did. Granted, I pulled the principals into about 4 hours of rehearsal away from the chorus, but still. I was very impressed with the hard work and dedication that made it happen.  

And I need to give a huge thanks to Michael Frasier—he pulled together the minimal props and built me a platform so I could get some of the bodies off of the floor. His efforts were heroic, and I appreciate him more than I can say!

Filed under:

knight errant

Submitted by dramma per musica on Sun, 02/27/2011 - 09:19
Georges Rochegrosse's poster for Don Quichotte (1910) I’m heading north to catch today’s matinee of Jules Massenet’s 1910 comédie-héroïque, Don Quichotte, at Seattle Opera. Originally conceived as a vehicle for the great Russian basso, Feodor Chaliapin (1873-1938), several other outstanding singers have performed and/or recorded the title role since its premiere in Monte Carlo, including Boris Christoff, Jerome Hines, Nicolai Ghiaurov, Ruggero Raimondi, Samuel Ramey, José van Dam, and Ferruccio Furlanetto. (Seattle’s Gold Series Don Quixote is John Relyea, and his Silver Series counterpart is the young French bass-baritone, Nicholas Cavallier.) In this pair of clips, we can see and hear two of those noted interpreters in action. First off is van Dam, who in this 201o production from Brussels, attempts to do battle against a giant windmill blade at the end of the second act. His hapless Sancho is Werner Van Mechelen. And from a 2002 concert performance in Moscow, Nicolai Ghiaurov sings Quixote’s moving Death Scene in Act 5, with his wife, Mirella Freni, providing the off-stage voice of Dulcinée.