r/opera

Interview (in German) with tenor Benjamin Bernheim. Take it to a translator for your language of choice.

we planned a trip for 3 of us to Santa Fe Opera on August 4 (Magic Flute) and August 5 (Lilli Elbe) and one person cant go. Santa Fe Opera does not accept returns. Anyone with ideas on best way to handle this without eating the entire cost of friends tickets?

Any working discount codes for the upcoming Met Opera season?

Thanks to the Tutto Vivaldi project and Naive Classique's Vivaldi Edition we've finally got a chance to hear a lot of Vivaldi's operas. Many years ago I picked up a recording of L'incoronazione di Dario and that didn't do anything for me. Times have changed though. What's your favourite Vivaldi opera? I've been really enjoying Ercole su'l Termodonte in Fabio Biondi's recording.

Have any of you sung the (living) sailor opera chorus for Der Fliegende Holländer? You know, all the ho-jo-HE stuff. Any tips? Any fun stories?

I know it's an understatement to say Wagner can be a vocal challenge but I'm sweating this one a little bit. I love it! I'm happy I got the job! And it's a stretch of my abilities for sure.

I remember watching an opera called Goplana when I was young (in polish, based off the book Balladyna, I think composers name started with a Z?) and I tried to look for it online but couldn't find anything aside from 3 recordings on a pay-walled site. Does anyone know where else to look?

To be honest, I was quite confused about the production by Stefano Poda for most of the opera. I did not feel like it added anything to the story, in fact, I found it pretty confusing to follow, though it did have some beautiful visuals. I generally try very hard to see a director's vision and I couldn't really tell what Poda was trying to do with this. The production opened during the sinfonia with people coming onstage and constructing a rocket ship before carrying it away and it never being seen again. There were two rotating kidney-shaped structures that included lights at the back of the stage. Throughout the production they would move back and forth toward and away from each other, though this did not seem to be connected to anything specific in the text. I was wondering when the two kidneys would meet to create a sphere, and indeed they did at the very end of the opera. The fighting in the opera was fencing, and the idol of Baal was what looked like a big gem that said "VANITAS" across it (meaning "vanity" in Latin). When Nabucco declares himself a God in Act II, a large firework emitted from the stage, which was also pretty cool. I would say the most breathtaking technical moment, however, was when the costumes of the entire ensemble lit up and started glowing. There was an audible gasp from the audience, as well as murmurs of applause. I thought this moment should be saved for the famous chorus "Va, pensiero", but alas, it was still a striking visual.

Though the production was technically interesting and pushed the capabilities of the Arena, it was plagued by technical problems. First and foremost, the entire action of the opera takes place on a translucent and hollow raked stage. When the stage lit up, it was beautiful and added to the drama of the piece, but there seemed to be one section of the stage that was disconnected from the lighting grid or something. This one square had lights emitting almost the entire opera and was not even fixed at intermission. The projections on the staircase leading to the top of the arena on the back of the stage also had some glitches. The other major technical flaw in Poda's production was the sound the stage made. There was a lot of running and jumping in the choreography, and as you can imagine, hundreds of people running on a hollow acrylic stage is not quiet. At times, it even drowned out the music. I found this highly distracting and something that Poda probably should've anticipated when conceptualizing this project.

Maestro Michele Spotti conducted the piece with grace and ease, and the orchestra and chorus sounded top-notch. Of course, when performing "Va, pensiero" for an Italian audience, the chorus really has no choice but to be absolutely perfect.

Amartuvshin Enkhbat was the real highlight of the evening. He was the most audible voice from where I was sitting (a good 200 feet away from the stage, if not more). Nabucco is not an easy role—it requires beauty of tone, stamina, and a wide range of colors and emotions—and he sang with a power that I have never heard live. I am looking forward to hearing more of him in the future - hopefully I will be able to catch his Scarpia at the Met next season.

Maria José Siri was a bit disappointing. Of course, Abigaille is essentially an impossible role to sing well for anyone who was not Giuseppina Strepponi. Verdi (her husband at the time) wrote the role for her voice only, and it has been next to impossible for anyone to recreate since. However, there have been people who have done real justice to the role (Callas, Dimitrova, and Saioa Hernández). Siri was difficult to hear and had a noticeably slow and wide vibrato cycle, as well as the fact that her coloratura was lacking, but her pianissimi and ability to hit the high notes work to her advantage. I enjoyed the few times she dipped into her chest voice. Compared to the recording from the Met Opera on Demand with Maria Guleghina (who seemed to be struggling with the many high Cs present in the piece), Siri was able to hit the high notes with relative ease.

Simon Lim as Zaccaria was impressive but hard to hear from 200+ feet away—the Arena is not a very friendly acoustic though, and he was fully capable of singing the role. I will be seeing him as Ramfis later in the season (a role and opera I am more familiar with), so I will come back with more thoughts.

Annalisa Stroppa was not good as Fenena. She suffered from a lack of connection to her chest voice, making her lower range almost completely inaudible. She also had a distinct wobble. Luckily she was not onstage for much of the opera.

Another highlight of the evening was the young Mexican-American tenor Galeano Salas as Ismaele. He made a meal out of a less-than-thankless role, had an impeccable technique, and was completely audible, even from the back of the arena. His is a voice I will definitely be seeking out in the future, and I would love to hear him sing roles along the lines of Il Duca di Mantova and Alfredo Germont.

All in all, despite the disappointment with the soprano and mezzo and the production's technical flaws, it was a satisfying first night at the Arena di Verona, and I look forward to returning for a couple more operas this summer!

This will be for a young dramatic soprano’s audition to a conservatory. Her voice is massive and very powerful, but as expected of a young dramatic soprano, it is rather unwieldy and not very agile.

Too bad no German art song is sought, as we could have easily gone with Wagner’s Wesendonck or any of Strauss’ Four Last Songs.

Would appreciate any advice. Thank you.

[edit: I updated the link permissions in Google Drive; I apologize if you tried to access it and couldn't. It's my first time sharing through Google Drive and I though just including the link was enough. It wasn't.]

Good morning,

Intro

You may have seen a version of this post on r/composer. On a suggestion from u/65TwinReverbRI, I'm posting here as well, with hopes of getting feedback on my new composition.

( r/composer has a rule re: using AI to craft post text. I'll mention here: as with my other post about this opera, I again did not use AI to craft any of this post. My text likely seems over-written and formal, and that's a consequence of me being me; I apologize.)

Also on a suggestion from u/65TwinReverbRI, I changed the links in this version of the post to point to Google Drive rather than Dropbox.

Background

The other day I posted here (in r/composer) reporting I'd completed a new opera and asking what should I do next. I learned a lot from the responses. As it turns out, I knew nothing about how to craft a piece with any hopes of getting it produced.

Regardless, I would like to share with you three audio clips and the relevant parts of the score from my opera Betrayal: A Tragedy. I might have over-done it (in length) with the excerpts I'm sharing -- please excuse me ... it isn't my intent to exhaust any of you who do { listen to, read } any of it!

I use r/Dorico as my notation software, and it facilitates creating MP3s of whatever you've written; this is how I got the MP3s. One consequence of this, though, is that the vocal lines are just the software's samples and not the opera text. (Technically, NotePerformer's samples, not Dorico's.)

This is the main link for the files. Here's what I've included:

1. MP3: Overture. (3'13"). Vocal lines, such as they are, start at 1:26.
2. MP3: Discovery. (2'08"). This is just an excerpt, as the scene is more than twelve minutes long. (What's going on in the action: a clandestine meeting in a foreign country has been attacked and a bunch of people were murdered. Now, the field is calling CIA headquarters to report the attack.)
3. MP3. Intermission. (4'12"). At the end, there is a vocal repeating a reveal that occurs at the end of Act I.
4. PDF. Excerpted Score covering the three MP3s. I don't know, friends, I probably over-did this PDF in that it's 60 pages long. Obviously feel free to skim, but I thought it necessary to cover what I'm actually sharing as audio. I apologize for the length.

I am sincerely open to all criticism. And if you happen to have any questions about the work, I will happily entertain them!

Aside from family (and anyone from r/composer who chose to click through), you are the first to see or hear anything from this piece, and so I'd be extremely grateful to read what you care to write.

Thank you so much for engaging with me here and on my previous post. I appreciate this community, as well as the responses I got to my original posts on r/composer.

When I first had couple teacher and didn’t understand cord closure or onsets I kept blowing tons of air in an attempt to create an unrestrained sound. After all these years I realize that proper singing has closure and a sense of restrained of air created with the body. In he past I just kept blowing more and more and trying not to hold the sound.

Excellent Wagnerian singing. Klaus Florian Vogt is also an excellent Lohengrin (he should be experienced live, he’s better live than on recordings)

I've a cast-iron rule for my internet use. It's this: don't post a negative comment about a living artist (you armchair critic, you).

This is mainly because I don't want the artist happening across my comment. I mean, they probably won't, but -- since everyone has the internet -- they could. And, yes, they just might have more to worry about, professionally or personally, than this rando's opinion... but that's kind of the point too.

So that's my rule, for me. But sometimes a rule which works fine for yourself would be disastrous if followed by everyone.  E.g. I rarely dine out. If everyone else did the same, the hospitality industry would collapse overnight. 

My question is this: If redditors were to stop posting criticisms of living opera singers (their technique, their choice of roles, their over-the-hillness, etc), what effect would this have? What would change?

The tenor Clay Hilley has gone viral by singing his bad reviews online — including the one that said he was overweight and sounded like a meat slicer.

What began as a silly diversion has taken on a life of its own, Hilley tells me from his home in Berlin, before two concerts of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Barbican conducted by Antonio Pappano — a full-throttle climax to the London Symphony Orchestra’s season. “Colleagues come up to me in person, people who have been in the business way longer than I, and they’re like, ‘Man, I wish I had thought to handle critics the way you do.’ Some are quite emotional about it — they’re telling me that it’s [the effect of] seeing someone fight back.”

Hilley isn’t out for blood. “I’m not calling for a reviewer to be fired or to be censored,” he says. “But, you know, I also have the right to speak back. Everybody in the world with a Facebook or Instagram, they have a platform — so why not use it?”

Read the full interview ^