Countertenor Nicholas Spanos

In search of countertenor versions of the late 19th century French chanson repertoire, I encountered the gorgeous voice of Nicholas Spanos. His repertoire embraces all the usual standbys of modern countertenors - Baroque and older opera, with a good showing of French chanson, some Handel oratorio in English, Spanish folk songs, and Schubert lied. As well as possessing a beautiful timbre and well-chosen vibrato, Spanos is also a very handsome fellow (a necessary trait for fame in this media age, I am sorry to say), with the properly "exotic" tall-dark-handsome look of a leading tenor heartthrob. In short, I hope to see much more of this young singer in the future!  Check out plavos's channel on Youtube for the extensive collection of his repertoire.
Now if only I could hear him sing "Lascia ch'io pianga"......

Listening to 20th century music: spotlight on a favorite blog

 I studied the Quartet for the End of Time in Professor Lori Dobbins' class last year at UNH and loved Messiaen's language. Here is an excellent guide to the work from Michael Barry's blog. Thanks for posting!

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!

History through the Operaglass

When I found this book, about 4 years ago, I was thrilled that one of my favorite subjects had been addressed and compiled at such length. Opera tends to tap the most dramatic of stories, so there are plenty of fictional or mythological plots, but many librettists have seen dramatic potential in real stories. That is not to say that "historically based" operas are always accurate: sometimes they can have more legend in them than those based in myth.George Jellinek guides the reader through approximately 1800 years of opera plots, from Giulio Cesare to Tosca and many others in between. Google Books also has a preview and e-book available.

Perhaps someday this book will be updated to the modern era.

Concert: Allentown PA

This week I traveled to Allentown, PA to visit family and friends. We went to a recital at St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Church, featuring local organist Stephen Williams and the Monocacy chamber orchestra. This is the program, recreated from YouTube links (not with this ensemble).

Toccata Festiva - Samuel Barber
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC4zz5tP22M&feature=related

Concerto in F - Josef Rheinberger
The Trinity Cathedral is similar to St. John's, though the organ set-up seems larger and more prominent in these videos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Xfe_Y-1IJo Movement I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhrYOZVyQ-Y Movement II
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExT8N4JhmO0 Movement III

Divertimento in D, K.136 - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Tough choice of recordings - the  Youth Orchestra of the Americas is represented on YouTube, but the recording is a bit fast for my taste. That recording is here if you want to take a look http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXzWjaTCO38 Here is a different recording at a more laid-back pace. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb5d5qQpCdA and the IIIrd movement http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y447ddkRNM4

Concerto in G minor - Francois Poulenc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yiq-QcBHXM

Opera blog : Likely Impossibilities

http://likelyimpossibilities.blogspot.com/ A great read about all things opera- thanks for posting!

The Lost Operas of Palais Garnier

It all started for me with Phantom of the Opera.  I have always loved Broadway shows (and operetta, starting in 2003) and after listening to the original cast soundtrack and reading Phantom 3 times in a row cover to cover, decided to try listening to a real opera. The first operas available to me were Lucia di Lammermoor,  Don Giovanni,and Dido and Aeneas.  But as soon as I could get to a Borders bookstore, I bought myself a copy of Faust,  because this opera is central to the plot of Phantom.  Christine sings the role of Marguerite, Faust's virginal victim, in this most famous of Gounod's operas (or entire works). Faust was the most popular and first opera at the Metropolitan Opera House when it opened in 1883, and continues to be performed today because of its dramatic story and archetypal characters. But there were other operas mentioned in Leroux' novel: La Juive,  by Halevy; Le Prophete, by Meyerbeer; and more. These operas, blockbusters in their day, survive today on excerpts albums or curiosity revivals. If Meyerbeer is thus represented, what of the countless other operas  which premiered in this era of luxury and grand 5 act dramas only to be forgotten by the newer trends? 

This question has intrigued me since I first listened to Faust,  in 2006. Some time I would like to find a list of performances in the 1870s-1900s at the Paris Opera, and research the scores and composers who have become obscure. There may be better reasons for their disappearance than changing tastes, but the librarian in me would love to properly archive them in order to facilitate research and possible revivals. 

Here is an aria which made it out of obscurity into recent renown when Placido Domingo performed it at the original Three Tenors concert, 1990.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TscVCfHAJvc  O Paradis, from Meyerbeer's L'Africaine sung by 20th c. tenor Jussi Bjorling

Consonance: Different Approaches to Organum in Paris and Aquitaine - Spring 2011

The innovative expansion of music into polyphony forever changed the face of Western music and widened the horizon for composers of the future. Two major schools of free organum have had a lasting legacy which continues to influence music today in overt and hidden ways: the Parisian school at Notre-Dame, the great Gothic cathedral; and the manuscript tradition preserved at the abbey of St. Martial, at Limoges. These traditions date from an era when music was created largely in religious context and preserved in both functional memory and print; the ideas of “composer” and “genius” had

Leo Treitler on oral traditions - Spring 2011

In his 1974 article Homer and Gregory: The Transmission of Epic Poetry and Plainchant, Leo Treitler discusses the dissemination of chant through the Holy Roman Empire, which was prompted by Charlemagne’s desire for uniformity in liturgical practice. Charlemagne arranged for official chanters to teach far-lying dioceses the official chants, and viewed divergence from these as corruption of the music. The chants which we know as Gregorian were ascribed to the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, which taught them to Pope Gregory the Great. Because these chants were believed in this way to be divinely prescribed, corruption was to be purged and the authoritative canon to be fixed. Treitler postulates that this is the first occurrence of our modern view on the musical canon, and points out that the co-incidence of the Carolingian reforms and the origins of notation for chant seems intentional (that Charlemagne resorted to notation in order to fix the correct repertoire for the entire empire and for future generations). This causality is complicated, however, by several factors. Elucidating these factors takes Treitler through an explanation of Bartlett’s theories on memorization, and an exploration of the process by which a chant is transmitted orally.

            Oral transmission of chant has several important consequences: the workings of memory mean that chant remembered is not simply reproduced, but rather reconstructed, and if the method of transmission of chant is oral in the absence of scores, the method of composition is also oral (in some ways, similar to improvisation, but different in the details and purpose). Formulas and formulaic systems in chant both constrict and aid the singer in creating/recreating chants for various parts of the service. These conclusions are drawn from the studies of oral transmission which have their beginning in Homeric studies, yet another nested explanation in this article. Treitler’s necessary digressions and detours follow eachother seamlessly and without superfluity.

            Treitler shows how Homeric epic, as presented by Parry, makes sense as seen within the tradition of oral epic, and how what we know/study about Homer helps our knowledge of chant and other oral repertoires. One major commonality is the use of formulas as both aide-memoires and compositional techniques: for instance, the beginning and end of lines tend to be memorized easily, and so this lends itself to formulas for these components. Treitler shows examples of chants (Gregorian and Old Roman) which start and end similarly or contain other melodic formulas, and similarity in single chants – Tracts, which are long antiphonal chants – where each strophe begins and ends the same way. A famous example from oral poetry is the Homeric epithet, a naming formula for the various gods, goddesses and heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey; e.g. gray-eyed Athena, or swift-footed Achilles.

Finally, Treitler speculates about the possible decline in oral composition and greater use of what we would normally consider memorization (with more tradition of specific melodies rather than general formulas), preceding the beginnings of notation. These melodies could have become more fixed with the passing of time, or in accordance with the prevailing tradition, becoming a prescribed canon for liturgical observance. Whether the Carolingian reforms caused this trend towards canon before notation, or used notation to bring about a unified canon is not clear.

The differences in style between the Gregorian and Old Roman chants are explored in light of oral transmission: Treitler presents three possible scenarios regarding the reliance of each tradition on oral transmission and concludes that it seems most plausible that Old Roman chant shows more evidence of oral transmission because it was oral longer, rather than that it was “more oral” or that the Gregorian chants had these aspects of oral transmission purged from them editorially. Other authors have concluded that Old Roman chant is “more primitive” and therefore older; Treitler does not rely on the duality of primitive and advanced to explain the relative age of these traditions. Treitler ends the analysis with three different angles from which to examine the uniformity of chant: 1) the Carolingian reforms caused uniformity; 2) the chants show this uniformity because of a common ancestor, so to speak, which can be traced; and 3) oral transmission causes and makes use of this uniformity in composition. It is difficult to examine Old Roman chant and Gregorian chant from before the Carolingian reforms, because the only notated examples we have of Old Roman postdate these reforms. For this same reason, it is difficult to obtain evidence of a common ancestor tradition of chant, either in written examples of the ancestor itself, or in older examples of Old Roman and Gregorian chant. The third angle is likely to be the most fertile for future study: oral transmission, though increasingly difficult to encounter in today’s world, is still present, as well as studies cited in Treitler’s article which rely on Eastern European traditions which may no longer be extant. Further study of oral transmission may give us textual analysis techniques which can probe Old Roman and Gregorian chant for their DNA, so to speak, and determine (as modern DNA testing can now tell us so much) details about their ancestry.

Machaut's Modernity - Spring 2011

     Guillaume de Machaut was known to his contemporaries as Guillaume; that appellation strikes us as incomplete or unfamiliar, because of our modern conception of surname.  There are many aspects of his music which seem ancient to us – the harmonies, the “double leading tone” cadence formula, the rhythms – and after all, he did write in two languages which are now “dead” (Latin for the religious music, and Medieval French).  The aspects of Machaut’s character and career that seem the most striking to us, however, are those which seem to foreshadow aspects of modern art and music.  Machaut was the first composer to take pains to ensure his music’s legacy, and to cement his role as composer and author of his own works; his oeuvre is dominated by secular music, as opposed to religious; and he can be considered usefully the forerunner to the modern “singer-songwriter” type.  His music, religious and secular, has a strong sense of identity and unity, especially the Mass of Notre-Dame, and the unity in the Mass is unusual for works of this time both for its single author and his undoubtedly conscious design for this piece. 

     Machaut’s influence, as discussed in class, would still be relevant today if he had never written or been associated with music.  He was a renowned poet and inspired Chaucer, and is a great representative of French literature in the 14^th century.  But his approach to music and words unified further ensures his value to modern culture: Machaut, though perhaps not actually singing his own poems as a roving artist, is considered the last link in the cultural-artistic troubadour lineage.  He brought this tradition forward into his era by enhancing the traditional style with a close attention to forms which are both complex and flexible in his hands.  The troubadour music was already a secular genre mainly concerned with courtly love, but the combination in Machaut of talented poet, fluent composer, and sole author gives his “troubadour” songs a stronger sense of being art music, as opposed to a performing tradition.  Machaut knew how to set “silly love songs” (pace Paul McCartney) in an educated polyphonic idiom, and the words he set were his own.  The most modern aspect of Machaut is his deliberate act of identifying his music with him, as composer and author; the majority of music before him comes to us in varying degrees of anonymity, which is the prevailing characteristic of early music composers. 
     Machaut’s focus on secular music, or rather, the bias in his complete surviving works towards secular music, contrasts with what we know of his predecessors and influential composers before the 18^th century.  The church of his day was still the Roman Catholic church, the Reformation being two centuries in the future, but there is a trend (beginning with the writing of secular motets, and later the work of Philippe de Vitry – composer of the Roman de Fauvel) of religious subversion or dissidence in music at this time.  Machaut’s appointments were courtly, not religiously affiliated positions, so the need to write Masses or other service music is absent (compared to Bach, for instance, or the works we identify as written by Leonin).  This shows that by the 14^th century, patronage still held the key to stable musical employment, but patronage could be non-religious and still furnish a viable opportunity for a composer or poet.  Machaut’s cyclic setting of the Mass also represents a divergence from previous composers: he wrote the piece himself, conceived it as having unity among the movements, and made sure it was identified as his for posterity and performed at his endowment.  This kind of identity – identifying as an individual, not as a Christian subject or clerk in an establishment – is very forward looking, and takes centuries to take permanent hold.