Opera Spotlight: L'Italiana in Algeri, La Boheme, and Handel's Hercules

NPR World of Opera features Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri, with Lawrence Brownlee.

WETA is playing the Castleton Festival's La Bohème

July 9, 2011, 1:00 pm conducted by Lorin Maazel

And Chicago Lyric's broadcast of Hercules (Handel) is on WFMT at 12pm CT (1pm ET).

Opera Spotlight: Il Trittico, Lohengrin, and Semele

WETA is featuring Puccini's Triptych this Saturday at 1pm. Listen on the livestream to this performance from last July, conducted by Lorin Maazel. IMSLP has the scores:
http://imslp.org/wiki/Suor_Angelica_(Puccini,_Giacomo)
http://imslp.org/wiki/Il_tabarro_(Puccini,_Giacomo)
http://imslp.org/wiki/Gianni_Schicchi_(Puccini,_Giacomo)
and the libretti are at Operaglass:
http://opera.stanford.edu/Puccini/IlTabarro/libretto.html
http://opera.stanford.edu/Puccini/SuorAngelica/libretto.html
http://opera.stanford.edu/Puccini/GianniSchicchi/libretto.html

Lohengrin is this week's Chicago Lyric broadcast, with Sir Andrew Davis conducting a great cast headed up by Johan Botha and Emily Magee. WFMT also runs a live stream - Lohengrin plays at 12:00pm Central Time (1pm Eastern). Here's the score, from IMSLP, and the libretto.

NPR World of Opera will be featuring Handel's Semele from the Champs-Elysees Theatre. Here's the libretto and the score at IMSLP.

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!