SUNDAY JULY 1ST Bernstein, Candide

SUNDAY JULY 8TH Offenbach, La Grande Duchesse de GerolsteinThis French opera bouffe touched off a craze for operetta all over the Western world. Offenbach wrote it to coincide with the splendid Paris Exhibition of 1867. The cream of Europe's aristocracy and intelligentsia turned up at Offenbach's own Varietes theater to see the most chic musical entertainment in town. Even the emperor Napoleon III had a box reserved for him at the Varietes. La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein was revived again and again throughout Europe. The Viennese in particular were crazy about it. Today it's Die Fledermaus that gets all the glory. That classic of Viennese operetta, however, is derived from a French play by Meilhac and Halevy, the team who wrote the libretti for all the best of Offenbach's lyric stageworks. The recordings of this one, which I presented on Sundays in July of 1985 and 2009, both featured some wonderful singers, but they were abridgements or downright corruptions of Offenbach's original score. All of Offenbach's scores require careful reconstruction. On this July Sunday you get to hear Gerolstein pretty much as Offenbach intended it to be performed in 1867 with the restored scene of the conspiracy, the knife-grinder's song and the Grand Duchess's meditation. The orchestral scoring takes advantage of the larger group of musicians employed in those productions staged in Vienna. La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein was revived yet again for staging at the Festival delle Valle d'Itria Martina Franca in July of 1996. Emmanuel Villaume conducts the Orchestra Internazionale d'Italia and the Bratislava Chamber Choir. This production stars soprano Lucia Valentini- Terrani as the Duchess. Gerolstein is a sendup of the military, with all the associated bombast and nutty disciplined posturing. The role of General Boum is thought to be a charicature of Otto, Prinz von Bismarck, the Prussian "Iron Chancellor," wearing that characteristic Prussian spiked helmet.

 

SUNDAY JULY 15TH Mozart, La Finta Giardiniera In the eighteenth century the way to wealth and fame as a composer lay through the writing of operas. Mozart the adolescent prodigy was fascinated with opera. He yearned to write anything he could in the genre to advance himself. Previous operas he wrote while sojourning in Italy with his father did not make a lasting mark with the public or with aristocratic patrons. Mozart jumped at a commission to compose an opera buffa for the midwinter carnival in Munich. This was La finta Giardiniera or "The Girl in Gardiner's Disguise," K.196 (1775). The carnivalgoers loved it, but when the festivities were over young Wolfgang did not get the court appointment he was hoping for. The music for La finta Giardiniera is as fine as a nineteen year old genius could create. Despite the silly amorous flirtations of the comedy, the musical settings at certain moments touch a depth of feeling that looks forward to the great operas of Mozart's maturity. "The Girl in Gardiner's Disguise" was first performed in Italian language and later in German translation with spoken dialog, making a Singspiel out of the original opera buffa. I have broadcast two different recordings of the German Singspiel version with the title Die Gartnerin aus Liebe on Sundays in 1988 and 1990. Then on Sunday, May 12, 2002 came the complete score of the Italian opera buffa as recorded in 1991, live in performance in Vienna at the Konzerthaus. The late great pioneer in period instrumental practice, Nikolaus Harnoncourt was conducting the ensemble he founded, the Concentus Musicus. The Czech soprano Edita Gruberova sang the leading role of Sandrina, the "disguised" girl, who turns out to be a noblewomen. This Sunday you get to hear once again that Teldec release of La finta Giardiniera on three compact discs in the Das Alte Werk series.

 

SUNDAY JULY 22ND Handel, Acis and Galatea Every summer I try to include in the programming mix something pastoral in nature. Over the decades several recordings have been made of George Frideric Handel's delightful masque in two acts Acis and Galatea (1718), which like Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (1689) vies for consideration as the first true opera in English language. The libretto was written by John Gay, who a few years later would write The Beggar's Opera, the enormously popular lyric comedy. Handel's original Cannons scoring for this pastoral entertainment called for pairs of violins, cellos and oboes or recorders with harpsichord. The five singers Handel required sing in solo capacity as characters in the mythic drama. They join voices to form a mini- chorus. Such were the musical resources available to the composer on the country estate of his patron the Duke of Chandos. This intimate, small-scale version of the work was the one released in 1988 by Newport Classics on two compact discs. Johannes Somary conducts the tiny period instrument Amor Artis Orchestra. I last broadcast this recording on Sunday, July 20, 2008 and before that on Sunday, June 4, 1995. The English masque was rendered into a German language secular oratorio, Handel's music adapted for a larger orchestra and rescored in high classical style by none other than Mozart in 1788. The 1991 DGG Archiv recording of the Handel/Mozart Acis und Galatea, with Trevor Pinnock conducting the English Concert, I broadcast first on Sunday, May 21, 2006 and again on Sunday, July 14, 2013.

 

SUNDAY JULY 29TH Gilbert & Sullivan, The Grand Duke I usually program one or another of the comic operas of William S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan on a Sunday in late July. The Grand Duke,or The Statutory Duel (1896) was Gilbert and Sullivan's last collaboration. They referred to this operetta as "the one that failed." It didn't fail totally. It just did poorly, although it was mounted in a lavish production. The plot is absurdly complicated (what probably did the production in), but Sullivan's music is as good as most of what he wrote for the other more well known operettas that are counted in the G & S canon. In radio broadcast it's not the staging but the music that matters. The Grand Duke was never professionally performed again after its first run until 1975, when the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company recorded it for Decca under the supervision of the legendary troupe's founder Richard D'Oyly Carte's daughter Dame Bridget D'Oyly Carte. London Records released The Grand Duke on two stereo LP's which I broadcast way back on Sunday, August 12, 1984. Nobody has a lock on the G & S canon, since amateur theater companies of considerable talent all over the world perform these works, like our own Simsbury Light Opera Company. (The renowned Savoyard Martyn Green coached them at the very end of his career.) On a more professional level, the Ohio Light Opera Company staged The Grand Duke at its Summer festival in 2003. Founded in 1979, the OLO is the resident lyric theater institution at the College of Wooster (Ohio), a school with a strong emphasis on the performing arts. Albany Records released the live-in-performance recording of the OLO production on two compact discs. The recording is musically complete and includes Gilbert's witty dialog. ( That classic 1975 Decca/London Savoyard recording has no dialog at all.) I have previously broadcast OLO recordings of The Sorcerer, Princess Ida and Utopia,Limited.

 

SUNDAY AUGUST 5TH Kalman, Die Bajadere There was another Hungarian composer of operetta besides Franz Lehar who was in circulation in Vienna during the Silver Age of Viennese operetta in the early twentieth century. That man was Imre or Emmerich Kalman (1882-1953). Kalman's Die Czardasfuerstin premiered in Vienna in 1915 and immediately became a staple of the operetta repertoire. Kalman had other stage successes, too, notably Grafin Maritza (1924). I have broadcast recordings of both of those Kalman favorites on bygone August Sundays. Also, I presented an obscure Kalman operetta Die Herzogin von Chicago (1928) on Sunday, December 23, 2008. Kalman himself considered Die Bajadere (1921) to be the one of his works that came closest to actual opera. Die Bajadere or 'The Temple Dancer" employs some oriental tonal exoticisms, as well as popular American dance rhythms of the Roaring Twenties. The story involves an Indian prince, Parisian nightlife, wife swapping and an operetta within an operetta. Die Bajadere was produced for radio broadcast by West German Radio Cologne in February, 2014. Richard Bonynge conducted the West German Radio Broadcast House Orchestra and Cologne Radio Chorus, with eight vocal soloists, the speaking role of the wife of the theater director taken by Kalman's daughter Yvonne, who although quite elderly, was still very much alive in 2014. cpo Records released Die Bajadere on two CD's in 2016. Frau Kalman thought the WDR Cologne production was wonderful and did her father's music full justice. "With this release," she writes, "Die Bajadere will grant us many years of pleasure."

SUNDAY AUGUST 12TH Mayr, Amore non soffre opposizione It was a German composer, Johann Simon Mayr who brought Italian opera from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century. Born in Bavaria in 1763, Mayr was a little younger than the Austrian Mozart and a little older then the Rhineland native Beethoven. He long outlived both of them, dying in 1845. Mayr's career was spent largely in Italy. He Italianized his name. His operas continued to be performed in Italy and elsewhere in Europe up to circa 1850. For a while his works rivaled in popularity those of Rossini. It is therefore hard to believe how Mayr's operas in later times could be so completely forgotten. Now in the twenty first century a conductor from Bavaria, Franz Hauk has championed the cause of Mayr's music. He has already recorded three of Mayr's oratorios, released through the Naxos label. In 2017 Naxos came out with Hauk's recorded interpretation of Telemaco (1797), an opera seria in the style of Gluck. That recording I broadcast on Sunday, November 12 of last year. Mayr also composed works in the genre of the Italian opera buffa. In 2016 Naxos gave out the world premiere recording of the comic opera Amore non soffre opposizioni ("Love Will Not Tolerate Opposition," 1810) on two compact discs. This is a tender-hearted lyric comedy in the form of the "sentimental drama" in vogue at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Mayr's music is progressive in that there's no recitative passages. Franz Hauk was conducting from the harpsichord when Amore was recorded at Neuburg on the Danube in Bavaria in 2011. He directed the East-West European Festival Orchestra and six vocal soloists.

 

SUNDAY AUGUST 19TH Lehar, Die Juxheirat There was a Golden Age of Viennese operetta in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the age of the "Waltz King" Johann Strauss, Jr. and Die Fledermaus. It was followed by a Silver Age in the early twentieth century. The Hungarian Franz Lehar (1870-1948) was the preeminent composer of that later period. Of course, he wasn't quite so eminent early on in his career, before the phenomenal international success of his "Merry Widow" in 1905. Lehar's operetta Die Juxheirat ("The Mock Marriage" or 'Marriage As A Joke") came just before 'The Widow" in 1904. According to Bill White, a reviewer for Fanfare magazine, the libretto of Die Juxheirat was quite progressive and rather kinky. "Written by Julius Bauer, one of Vienna's most influential theater critics, the story seems to be well ahead of its times, combining elements of feminism, homoeroticism, cross-dressing and same-sex marriage, subjects overtly titillating and perhaps thought even a bit naughty by the staid turn of the century Viennese. The story is set in America, the first two acts in the Hamptons..." Bill White was reviewing for Fanfare the very recent cpo compact disc release of Die Juxheirat. This Lehar rarity was staged at the 2016 Lehar Festival at Bad Ischl in Austria. It was recorded live in performance there, with Marius Burkert conducting the Franz Lehar Orchestra and Chorus. Mr. White praises the cpo release on two compact discs. In concluding his review (Fanfare, May/June,2018 issue) he notes that "As far as is known, the only previous recording of any of this music was some eight sides [on 78 rpm shellac discs?] by the original cast in 1905. This operetta...may not soon again see another recording. Even if it were not performed nearly so well as here, it would be highly recommended..."

SUNDAY AUGUST 26TH Delius, The Magic FountainThe last Sunday in August I customarily reserve for broadcast of one of the seven operas of Frederick Delius (1862-1934), who has been called "The English Debussy." I program them now because Delius' exquisite impressionistic style is so evocative of the lazy, hazy end of Summertime. Delius' second attempt at writing opera, The Magic Fountain (1895) never saw the stage in his lifetime. The English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham befriended Delius and championed his music. Beecham planned to have The Magic Fountain staged in 1953, but its actual premiere came over BBC Radio in 1977 without need of visible staging. Delius so captures the spirit of nature you can see in your mind's eye the setting: the Everglades in the time of the Spanish conquistadores. In seeking the Fountain of Eternal Youth and Life in South Florida a Spanish nobleman falls in love with a Native American princess. He dies for her sake by drinking the fatal waters. Delius knew the scenery of the land of this story quite intimately. In his youth he spent time managing a small citrus plantation near Jacksonville. His deepest artistic inspirations go back to that place. The world premiere recording of Delius' The Magic Fountain heightens with environmental sound effects the balmy atmosphere the music has already created. Norman Del Mar leads the BBC Concert Orchestra with vocal soloists. I have broadcast the 1985 BBC Artium CD release four times before in my long ongoing cycles of Delius opera presentations, on Delius Sundays in August of 1987, '91, '99 and 2007. Keep listening for a recording of Delius choral masterpiece Seadrift(1904), a setting of the poetry of Walt Whitman.

   All the featured recordings I am presenting during this two month period of Summer programming come from my own collection of opera/operetta on silver disc.