SUNDAY MAY 5TH Saint Saens, AscanioCamille Saint-Saens composed thirteen operas over the course of his career, but only Samson et Delilah (1877) continued to hold the stage after his death in 1921. Ascanio was written in 1888 along the traditional lines of nineteenth century French grand opera a la Meyerbeer. The opera is in the expected five acts or seven tableau (scenes), with the requisite ballet sequence. When it was first produced at the Paris Opera in 1890 the theater's management decided it was entirely too long, so they made extensive cuts to the score without Saint Saens' knowledge or consent. He saw and heard his work only in its mutilated form during his lifetime. Ascanio is based on the novel of the same name by Alexandre Dumas, senior, published in 1843. The story is really about the famed Italian renaissance artisan Benvenuto Cellini. Saint Saens stuck with the title Ascanio so as not to confuse the public with Berlioz' 1837 opera about Cellini. Ascanio is a handsome young apprentice on Cellini's staff. In 1539 Cellini and crew came to Paris to cast a monumental statue for the French king Francis the First. Master and apprentice both get caught up in amorous intrigues in the French royal court. Cellini's love interest in the court comes to a tragic end. Saint Saens' complete 1888 manuscript score was employed in a concert performance of Ascanio given in the Grand Theatre in Geneva, Switzerland in 2017. It was recorded live there for B Records, who released this the presumed world premiere recording of Ascanio in a deluxe book-style package containing three CD's. Guillaume Tournaire conducted the orchestra and chorus of the Haute Ecole or High School of Music of Geneva, augmented by the Chorus of Geneva's Grand Theatre, with a big singing cast. The full length Ascanio fits very tightly into the three-and-a- half hour lyric theater timeslot.

 

SUNDAY MAY 12TH Michael Haydn, Die Wahrheit der Natur, Edwards,Requiem for My Mother Johann Michael Haydn (1737-1806) was the younger brother of the famous Franz Joseph Haydn. Like 'Papa" Haydn, Michael Haydn wrote symphonies (forty or more), much church music, etc. He also wrote a small amount of lyric theater music. From 1763 onwards he resided in Salzburg, where he was well acquainted with young Wolfgang and the rest of the Mozart family. It was for the Benedictine academy in Salzburg that he composed a German language Singspiel, "The Truth of Nature" or Die Wahrheit der Natur (1769). The school customarily gave two staged musical productions at the end of each academic year: one serious work, followed by something comic. Yes, "The Truth of Nature" is a rather ribald lyric comedy, but it is also didactic in that its libretto handles the question of what makes for truly good, high quality artistic creation, specifically in poetry, music and painting. Haydn even throws some "bad music" into the Singspiel as a sendup and by way of comparison. The goddess of Nature and three of the Graces/Muses weigh in on the subject. Die Wahrheit der Natur was recorded at the Mozarteum University of Salzburg in 2015. Wolfgang Brunner leads the period instrumentalists of the Salzburger Hofmusik, with seven vocal soloists. The German cpo record label released this charming work on a single silver disc in 2018.

   This Sunday also happens to be Mother's Day, so keep listening for an additional feature, Requiem for My Mother (2017) by Stephen James Edwards (b. 1972). He's a prolific composer of film scores who has taken on the traditional Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead, his setting scored for full symphony orchestra, chorus and vocal soloists. The premiere performance of Edwards' Missa pro Defunctis was given as part of the Musica Sacra Festival in Vatican City/Rome. The studio recording of Edwards' requiem was made in Prague in the Czech Republic under contract with the City of Prague Philharmonic, with an American vocal ensemble, the Continuo Arts Symphonic Chorus. The three vocal soloists are American, too, as is the conductor, Candice Wicke. The world premiere recording of Requiem for My Mother was issued on a single compact disc through Sixfeetfive Music. Edwards dedicated his mass setting to his mother, the late Rosalie Savarino Edwards, who was an accomplished musician. I dedicate my broadcast of Edwards' requiem to the memory of my own mother Olga Dorochin Brown (1920-2015).

 

SUNDAY MAY 19TH Verdi, Don Carlo This opera is Giuseppe Verdi's answer to the music dramas of Wagner. As Verdi originally wrote it in 1867 it was planned as the grandest of French romantic grand operas, surpassing the works of Spontini and Meyerbeer in that line: five full acts plus ballet music. Verdi was forced to scale it down for subsequent performance outside Paris. The four-act Italian language version of 1884 has a discography going back to the LP era. The story of the opera is taken from the German poet Friedrich Schiller's drama of political intrigue and national aspiration. Don Carlo has been the vehicle for many operatic stars. Superstar tenor Placido Domingo took on the title role, with the reigning diva of the day, soprano Monserrat Caballe as Elizabeth of Valois. EMI recorded the Italian version in 1971 with Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the musical resources of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. That Angel issue on digitally remastered vinyl discs went over the air on Sunday, September 28, 1986. Then along came another Don Carlo from the Royal Swedish Opera House production of the 1999-2000 season. That Naxos CD release I broadcast on Sunday, May 23, 2004.In the early twenty first century Sony Classical issued on compact disc an exclusive series "The Metropolitan Opera" derived from airtapes of Met radio broadcasts in the Met's audio archives. On Sunday, November 4, 2012 I drew upon that series with a now historic Met broadcast of Don Carlo from March 7, 1964. Franco Corelli starred as the Don, opposite Leonie Rysanek as Elizabeth. Kurt Adler directed the Met's orchestra and chorus. All those Don Carlo recordings are to be found in our WWUH classical music record library. There's yet another historic recording of Don Carlo in our library that goes back to the LP era. It's on four British Decca/London stereo discs from 1966 and captures for posterity a different Don Carlo production from that bygone era at Covent Garden, conducted by Georg Solti. Carlo Bergonzi is the Don and that great Italian diva of the 1950's and '60's, Renata Tebaldi is Elizabeth. Other great voices of the era were in the cast: the Bulgarian bass Nicolai Ghiaurov, the German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and the American mezzo Grace Bumbry. I have coordinated my broadcast this Sunday of this vintage vinyl Don Carlo so as to echo the staged production of the Verdi masterpiece by Connecticut Lyric Opera under the direction of Adrian Sylveen, given in four performances, May 10, 11, 17 and 26. Today's radio presentation gives the Italian language version in five, not four acts, minus the ballet music but restoring some of Verdi's cuts to the score.

 

 

SUNDAY MAY 26TH Telemann, Kapitansmusik

The free city of Hamburg was one of the largest and most important seaports in all of Europe. In the eighteenth century the self-governing municipality had fortifications bristling with cannons and guarded by a large militia. It amounted to a small army commanded by officers or "captains." This force was run like a fraternity. For many years the fraternity celebrated its existence with an annual banquet, for which musical entertainment was required. For the 1738 celebrations the captains commissioned the city's resident composer Georg Philipp Telemann to provide an oratorio in praise of the city and a serenata reflecting upon the glories of the home guard, with references to current threats to European peace, such as the Turks. Telemann didn't emphasize the militarism of the occasion in composing his Kapitansmusik. There's a little bluster of fife and drum at the opening of the Serenata, but no more. Otherwise, Telemann's music is pleasingly tuneful throughout and colorfully scored for orchestra, wlth chorus and six vocal soloists. Telemann's Kapitansmusik 1738 was revived in 1965 in the former German Democratic Republic of East Germany. For the revival the music was considerably revised, the libretto de-militarized and the whole affair was styled a "Peace Oratorio." The complete original "Captains' Music" was recorded in 2007 with Hermann Max leading the period instrument players of Das Kleine Konzert and the choral forces of the Rheinische Kantorei. The German cpo record label released the Telemann Kapitansmusik 1738 on two compact discs in 2010. There's just enough of the military and home defense in this work of Telemann's, I say, to make it appropriate for broadcast on the Sunday of our American Memorial Day holiday weekend.

 

SUNDAY JUNE 2TH Donizetti, L'Ange de Nisida Get ready for a truly ear-opening opera experience on radio! A lost opera by Gaetano Donizetti has received its world premiere recording through the agency of Opera Rara, the record company in the UK whose declared mission is "to rediscover, restore, record and perform the forgotten operatic heritage of the nineteenth century." We think of Donizetti as a composer of Italian opera, but he also wrote operas in French language for production in Paris. L'Ange de Nisida was Donizetti's follow-up creation for the highly successful French Lucie de Lammermoor (1839) at the Theatre de a Renaissance. But the theater shortly went bankrupt and Donizetti's work was no longer needed. Opera composers have long been accustomed to recycling their own material. For L'Ange de Nisida Donizetti borrowed a lot of material from his Adelaide, and from L'Ange de Nisida he moved on to take pages from that music to apply to La Favorite and Don Pasquale. So there isn't a complete autograph score of L'Ange de Nisida. It had to be reconstructed like a jigsaw puzzle from pieced-together pages of music paper. But of the written-down music on paper about 97 per cent has been recovered. The rest was orchestrated and partially composed by Mark Fitzpatrick. The Italian musicologist Candida Mantica has prepared the complete performing edition of L'Ange de Nisida. Nisida is another one of those idyllic little islands off the coast of Naples, like Capri. The title of the opera could be loosely translated as "Falling in Love on the Isle of Nisida." The opera's story in part concerns the onetime king of Naples and his mistress. Despite the French language libretto, this opera falls like Adelaide into the genre of Italian opera semiseria. It has its comic elements. Two acclaimed concert performances of L'Ange de Nisida were given at the Royal Opera House, London in 2018. Sir Mark Elder conducts the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House and the Royal Opera Chorus, with a five member singing cast. Opera Rara wasted no time in making the live-in-performance world premiere recording available to the public. The entire opera fits onto two generously timed compact discs, issued earlier this year.

 

SUNDAY JUNE 9TH Waschka, St. Ambrose Mazzoli, Song from the Uproar, Brady,Three Cities

This Sunday I will be presenting a trilogy of short lyric theater pieces on the general theme of wanderlust. First, there's Saint Ambrose (1998-2001), a chamber opera in one act for saxophonist/actor and recorded electronic computer music. Internationally acclaimed sax player Steve Duke commissioned composer Rodney Waschka II to craft a biographical stagepiece about the American author Ambrose Bierce (b. 1842). Bierce, you could say, never officially died. In 1913 he wandered over the Mexican border into the desert and was never seen again. His body was never found. In this lyric presentation we're led to believe Bierce is not dead: he has appeared in public to deliver a lecture. Ambrose Bierce witnessed first hand the horrors of the American Civil War. Bierce's stories, essays and journalism are full of cynical wit and dark satire. In The Devil's Dictionary he defines a saint as "a dead sinner." Capstone Records of Brooklyn, NY released Saint Ambrose on a single silver disc in 2002.

   Second in the lineup is Missy Mazzoli's Song from the Uproar:The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt (2012). Like Saint Ambrose, this is a biographical piece, dealing with the Swiss adventurer (b. 1877). This brilliant, convention-defying woman, who dressed as a man, led a nomadic existence, documenting her travels in her journals and short stories. She drowned in a flash flood in the North African desert in 1904. Mezzo soprano Abigail Fischer portrays Isabelle. Five other solo vocalists, male and female, take part in the studio recording. The five instrumentalists of the Now Ensemble are directed by Steven Osgood. Mazzoli's chamber opera is, like Rodney Waschka's work, so compact it fits easily onto one compact disc.

   The third and last small-scale opera presents us with yet another strange biographical portrait. How could one of North America's most prominent surgeons end up on the march with Mao Tse Tung's army fighting the Japanese in rural Northern China? The Canadian doctor Norman Bethune (1890-1939) was a man of many parts: inventor, artist, writer and passionate humanitarian activist. Over the last five years of his life he went from Montreal to Madrid to Chin Ch'a Chi. Those are the Three Cities in the Life of Dr. Norman Bethune (2003) by Tim Brady. He put together his own libretto, drawn from Dr. Bethune's letters and poetry, plus poems by Montreal's own Dorothy Livesay and song lyrics about the Spanish Civil War. Three Cities was recorded in 2005 in the studios of Radio Canada Montreal. Baritone Michael Donovan portrays the good doctor, backed by the eight members of the Bradyworks instrumental ensemble. Tim Brady himself plays electric guitar. Three Cities was released in 2005 on a single Ambiances Magnitiques compact discs. Thanks to Rob Meehan, former classics deejay here at WWUH and a specialist collector of the recorded "alternative" classical music of the twentieth and twenty first centuries, for the loan of all three discs for broadcast.

 

SUNDAY JUNE 16TH Rossini, La Donna del Lago In the early nineteenth century Gioacchino Rossini wrote opera buffa better than any other Italian composer of his day, but he really made his mark a little later in his career as a writer of operatic melodramas. They were popular, to be sure, but they all fell out of the repertoire by mid century, only to be revived in the mid twentieth century. La Donna del Lago (1819) is the most beautifully melodic of them all. This opera comes at the dawn of the bel canto period. The action is set in the Scottish Highlands, the story taken from a narrative poem by Sir Walter Scott. Interest in Scottish lore was running high then all across Europe. "The Lady of the Lake" offers hospitality to King James the Fifth of Scotland, who is travelling in the Highlands in disguise. Although her father is the leader of a clan of rebellious Highlanders, the king intervenes on her behalf. The rebels are pardoned and Ellen, "The Lady of the Lake" is free to marry her true love. La Donna del Lago was given at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, the composer's hometown in Italy, in 1983. The production made use of the then new critical edition of Rossini's score. The opera as recorded therefore sounds pretty much the way it was intended to be sung in the early nineteenth century. Soprano Katia Ricciarelli is Ellen or Elena, "The Lady." Douglas of Angus, her father, is baritone Samuel Ramey, and mezzo Lucia Valentini-Terrani sings in the breeches role of Malcolm, Ellen's true love. The world premiere recording came out in 1984 on three CBS Masterworks digital LP's. I have broadcast these same LP's before on two occasions, Sunday, September 15, 1985 and Sunday, May 18, 2008.

 

 

SUNDAY JUNE 23RD Harrison,Young Caesar It's Stonewall Sunday across the nation and much of the world. The lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender community in the United States and worldwide is now celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the historic gay rebellion in New York City's Greenwich Village. Year by year on the fourth Sunday in June I mark Stonewall Sunday with the presentation of an opera by an openly gay male or lesbian composer, or some recorded lyric theaterwork on a gay-related theme. This year the gay composer is Lou Harrison (1917-2003). For years he was named grand marshal of San Francisco's gay pride parade. We know that before the Roman Empire was Christianized attitudes toward homosexuality were different- more flexible in Roman society. The Roman historian Suetonius records that Rome's famous general Julius Caesar as a young man had a homosexual dalliance with Nicomedes, the king of Bithynia in Asia Minor. It was Lou's longtime male lover Bill Colvig who suggested this as the subject of a gay opera. In 1970 Harrison composed his second opera Young Caesar, which he scored for his American gamelan orchestra, augmented by some typical Western instruments. Also included in his conception were Indonesian-style shadow puppets, an onstage orgy and flying penises. The premiere 1972 staging at Caltech Pasadena was a flop. Young Caesar confused its audience. Frankly, the show was regarded as pornographic. Young Caesar thereafter went through a series of remakes, each one bringing Harrison's original conception a little closer to our conventional occidental concept of opera. On the centenary of Harrison's birth the opera was produced by The Industry in collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was performed and recorded live at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles during Gay Pride Month of 2017. Marc Lowenstein was director of music. (The puppets were still part of the show.) The Industry released Young Caesar through its own record label later that year on two compact discs. What you will hear certainly couldn't be visually pornographic, but it is surely a hoot to listen to! It's the highest of high camp! This recording, too, was loaned for broadcast by Rob Meehan.

 

 

 

SUNDAY JUNE 30TH Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus Spoken word presentations have always been part of my broad spectrum concept of lyric theater programming. I have broadcast recordings of many of William Shakespeare's plays. In the more distant past these were on early stereo Decca/Argo LP's. These studio recordings, made between 1957 and 1964, were part of Decca's series of the complete recorded works of Shakespeare, issued in commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of his birth. It was an audio project of historic significance equal to Decca's series of Wagner's Ring cycle of operas made during the same period with Georg Solti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and a singing cast of some of the greatest operatic voices of the mid twentieth century. Decca's Shakespeare project engaged renowned director George Rylands and the Marlowe Dramatic Society of Cambridge University, plus other "professional players," who were some of the best Shakespearean actors and actresses that Britain possessed. Many of them remain famous names even now in the twenty first century. In 2016 the entire Decca Shakespeare series- all thirty seven plays, the sonnets and narrative poems- was reissued on compact disc to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the playwright's death. I have acquired the 100 CD Decca/Argo boxed set. I draw upon its discs again this Sunday as I did most recently on Sunday, November 4th of last year with my broadcast of the famous tragedy Macbeth. Titus Andronicus (1589?) is the Bard's first essay in the mode of tragedy. It follows the five-act model established by the Roman playwright Seneca, and allows for Senecan verbal bombast and blood n'guts horror. Thomas Kyd's Senecan-style The Spanish Tragedy (1594) was enormously popular at the time when Shakespeare was just beginning his career. All the playwrights of that time were writing Senecan tragedies of murder and revenge. John Marston's Antonio's Revenge (1599) is yet another example. This play has many similarities to Hamlet. It was staged here at the University of Hartford in 1968 by the University Players under the direction of Edgar Kloten. I was part of that production and took the role of the ghost Andrugio, who is the hero Antonio's deceased father. I was also one of the disguised conspirators who stab the Macchiavellian tyrant Piero Sforza to death. The blank verse of Titus Andronicus gives us intimations of those tragic Shakespearean works of genius to follow.