Metropolitan Opera Preview: Falstaff

Verdi has the last laugh in this new production.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Falstaff (Ambrogio Maestri) goes out on the tiles in this new
Des McAnuff production, coming to the Met on Nov. 6.
Photo by Catherine Ashmore © 2012 The Royal Opera House at Covent Garden.

For most of his long career Giuseppe Verdi was known for writing tragedies, from the family drama of his first opera Oberto to his masterpiece Otello. For his final opera and last musical utterance, he finally turned to comedy. Working with librettist Arrigo Boito (his collaborator on Otello), he created Falstaff from the Shakespeare play The Merry Wives of Windsor. 

Opera Review: Destination: Nowhere

Washington National Opera takes on La Forza del Destino.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

She wants YOU: Preziosilla (Ketevan Kemoklidze) summons the troops in La Forza del Destino.

Photo by Scott Suchman © 2013 Washington National Opera/The Kennedy Center.

.

It is a bold stroke for new Washington National Opera artistic director Francesca Zambello to tackle Giuseppe Verdi's La Forza del Destino in a new production for the composer's bicentennial year. Forza is Verdi's great theatrical experiment, crossing a Spanish revenge tragedy with the sprawling worldview of a Schiller play. The sprawling plot gleefully demands abandonment of Aristotelian unities (and even logic) to tell a story that amounts to an interconnected series of unfortunate events. It is also the opera world's equivalent of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Whispered backstage stories tell of ill fortune--even death--befalling those who dare to sing its three leading roles.

Happy Birthday, Maestro Verdi!

The composer turns 200.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

It's not every day a composer turns 200.

Today marks the 200th birthday of Giuseppe Verdi, whose long career and vast output make him the dean among Italian opera composers. So what are we celebrating here, apart from a number?

Verdi's body of work continues to have depth and resonance for the contemporary listener, who can choose from the composer's different career phases. Let's start with the vocal virtuosity and patriotic fervor of his early period, featuring oom-pa-pa rhythms and rousing choruses, music that shaped the conscience of a nation. It was his third opera Nabucco that caught the public's imagination, as the chorus Va, pensiero became an unofficial anthem of the Risorgimento movement that gripped Italy during Verdi's lifetime.

DVD Review: It's Not Delivery

It's Un Giorno di Regno, Verdi's second opera.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The wife of bath: Anna Caterina Antonacci as the Marchesa in Un Giorno di Regno.
Image © 2012 C Major Entertainment

(Ed. Note: This is the second step in a planned Superconductor celebration of Verdi's 200th birthday. The idea is to write about different recordings or DVDs of all of the Verdi operas plus the Requiem, ideally ending with Falstaff in October. The series started in January with a review of Oberto.)

Un Giorno di Regno ("King for a Day") was Verdi's second opera and his first attempt at comedy. It was also the first catastrophic failure of his career, premiering to hisses and boos at La Scala in 1840. Faced with a choice of libretti, the young composer selected a text originally titled La Finta Stanislao. This was an attempt at madcap, Da Ponte style comedy, the story of a a young nobleman who has to pretend to be a Polish king at a French court so the real King can slip off to Warsaw and legitimize his reign. And yes, it's based on historical incident.

This DVD was shot at the Teatro Regio di Parma in January of 2010. It is the first release of Un Giorno for home video, and the second of Tutto Verdi: a series of DVDs of all the Verdi operas on the C Major label. With a young cast of singers and an energetic conductor in Donato Renzetti, one had hopes that this lost Verdi comedy might be the latest of his many operas to be rehabilitated for the world stage.