Opera Spotlight: The Mikado

Hear this week's opera at http://www.wfmt.com/streaming. Times:

PREFEED:  Friday, June 17, 2011 - 1500 ET

LIVE FEED: Saturday, June 18, 2011 - 1300 ET

Also, check out: Washington WETA (thanks Michelle!) 
http://www.weta.org/fm/listenlive

Bastille Opera's performance of Francesca da Rimini (by Zandonai)
June 18, 2011, 1:00 pm


Chicago Lyric's broadcast this week features the beloved Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, The Mikado. With a native English-speaking cast (more about that in a minute) featuring James Morris and Stephanie Blythe, I anticipate a great performance experience. I've seen Morris live (as Filippo II at Tanglewood, my first live opera) and he is a very handsome, charismatic performer whose voice has a real growl to it.

G & S operettas were part of my introduction to opera (chorus roles in Pirates of Penzance and Patience) and I saw Mikado performed live at the Portsmouth Music Hall in 2003. The satire of these works is wrapped in marzipan music and is still valid today, as the bureaucrats and "nobility" Gilbert lampooned in the Victorian era still walk among us. Mikado features one of my favorite tenor pieces, "A Wand'ring Minstrel I" and many other favorite excerpts. Here's a decent (though more Broadway than G & S)  recording of Simon Gallaher from YouTube.

Finally, a word about native speakers. I  have nothing against artists performing roles in a foreign language, and some of my favorite artists would never have become world-famous if they had been restricted to operas by composers of their nationality. (Sad but true: there are many excellent composers from Bulgaria, for instance, and Bulgaria gives the world many truly excellent singers like Vesselina Kasarova, Nicola Ghiuselev, and Nicolai Ghiaurov, but the big opera houses such as Covent Garden or the Met are not very likely to feature a Bulgarian opera when pieces like Tosca pay the bills.) BUT my caveat: I recently listened to a recording in mono from the 50s of Poulenc's opera Dialogues des Carmelites sung by a French cast - and it was a mind-blowing experience. French is a beautiful language and when sung by a native-speaker cast, the attention to detail and deep understanding of the sounds and associations of the vocabulary is amazing. Here's hoping this week's Mikado is at least half as idiomatic and fluent as that recording!