• SUNDAY AFTERNOON AT THE OPERA
• your "lyric theater" program
• with Keith Brown
• programming for the month of December,2021
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• SUNDAY DECEMBER 5TH Schuller, The Fisherman and His Wife, Holst, The Cloud Messenger  The Christmas holiday season, it's often said, is a magical time meant for the delight of the children. It's the time of year to listen to opera written with the age group in mind. There is indeed a whole genre of such lyric theater music. One excellent specimen is Gunther Schuller's The Fisherman and His Wife (1970)., commissioned by the Junior League of Boston to celebrate its sixtieth anniversary. They approached Professor Schuller of Boston's New England Conservatory to write the music. Literary great John Updike was engaged to update the 19th century Brothers Grimm fairytale for modern staging. The Opera Company of Boston premiered it. It was televised on Boston's WBZ. The Boston Modern Opera Project revived the opera in 2015 in celebration of Schuller's 90th birthday, but he did not live quite long enough to witness the new production. Gil Rose conducts BMOP and Odyssey Opera of Boston. Released in 2020 on CD through the proprietary BMOP Sound label.
•    Gunther Schuller's The Fisherman and His Wife is an operatic parable about greed. Since it runs for merely an hour, there's time remaining for a choral setting by Gustav Holst of a love story drawn from ancient Sanskrit epic poetry. Holst completed composing The Cloud Messenger in 1910 just before he started work on his famous orchestral suite The Planets. Holst prepared his own English language text. He tweaked the old story somewhat for his own modern musical purposes. He conceived a gigantic oratorio-style opus, which was a disappointment at its first performance, so it was put aside: that goes to explain why The Planets became Holst's best known work, and why nobody has ever even heard of its predecessor. There's a scaled-down arrangement of The Cloud Messenger for chamber orchestra and voices, recorded in 2019 with the Choir of King's College, London and the instrumentalists of the Strand Ensemble, conducted by Joseph Fort, who is also the arranger. It was released last year through the Scottish Delphian record label.
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• SUNDAY DECEMBER 12TH Wuorinen, Haroun and the Sea of Stories  Following his death in 2020 American composer Charles Wuorinen (b. 1938) left us at least 270 compositions, among them two operas: Brokeback Mountain (2014), after the same short story by Anne Proulx that inspired the 2004 movie by that name, and the fanciful, fairytale-like Haroun and the Sea of Stories, based on the book by Salman Rushdie. Haroun was premiered, also in 2004, by the New York City Opera, but had to wait until 2019 for its world premiere recording by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Chorus, Gil Rose conducting. On the surface of it, Haroun seems like a children's opera, pure and simple, but underneath all the lighthearted highjinks there is a parable about censorship- something Rushdie knew about all too well as a writer from personal experience. Of the BMOP Sound recording, Fanfare magazine's reviewer Andrew Desiderio wrote, "The music's rich palette does justice to the magic of Rushdie's story, and meshes with a libretto [by James Fenton] filled with ingenious wordplay and tongue-in-cheek allusions that Lewis Carroll would have been proud of. It's a joy to hear the playful side of Wuorinen... The performers are not only impeccable in diction and musicality, they sound like they're having an absolute blast embodying the opera's over-the-top characters and haunted poignancy. The BMOP romps along with them... a wonderful recording of a delightful opera." (Fanfare, Sept/Oct, 2021 issue). The recording was kindly donated for broadcast by my colleague, WWUH classics deejay Larry Bilansky.
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• SUNDAY DECEMBER 19TH Paisiello, Le Gare Generose The Wuorinen opera was a lot of fun for the kiddos last Sunday. Now for an opera that's amusing for adults. At Christmastime adults are supposed to be as generous in gift giving as Santa Claus. With that cliche in mind, listen to a comic opera called in Italian Le Gare Generose, which translates something like "The Rivals in Generosity" by Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816). Paisiello composed some eighty operas in his long career- way more than his younger contemporary Mozart. Most of Paisiello's operas fall within the genre of the Italian opera buffa, and they sound very much like the famous comic works of Mozart. Paisiello even wrote a "Barber of Seville" opera, first produced in 1782, that was enormously popular until Rossini's "Barber" came along in 1816. Le Gare Generose, first staged in Naples in 1786, was also very popular right up to the beginning of the 19th century, and was produced all over Europe. Mozart himself saw a production of it in Prague in 1787. "The Rivals in Generosity" is a middle class comedy, with no characters of noble rank, and is set not somewhere in Europe, but in America- Boston, to be exact. The story centers upon a not-so-pious Quaker gentleman's household and his servants. There are serious elements in this lyric comedy, like slavery, which-remember- was still quite legal back then in America. This work therefore borders on the genre of opera semiseria.Le Gare Generose was recorded live in performance in 2018 at Taranto, with Giovanni di Stafano directing the Giovanni Paisiello Festival Orchestra and a cast of six singers. This was the first staging of the opera in modern times for the sixteenth annual Paisiello Festival. The Italian Bongiovanni label released the presumed world premiere recording on two compact discs in 2019. Over the years I have broadcast several of Paisiello's recorded works, especially his "Barber," and a couple of his serious or semi-serious operas, too.
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• SUNDAY DECEMBER 26TH Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale Christmas has come and gone, and with the passage of the Winter solstice on the 21st we embark upon the Winter season in earnest. So put another log on the fire, draw closer to the hearth with its flickering light, and listen to The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare, recorded complete and uncut in the text of The New Shakespeare, edited by the renowned Shakespeare scholar John Dover Wilson. The Winter's Tale (1611) is one of the Bard's late tragicomedies. The paranoia of King Leontes sets off a chain of events, the results of which stretch out over sixteen years. As the Bard works it out on stage, what was sown in sorrow and discord is eventually reaped in joy and reconciliation. The Argo Records complete series of Shakespeare's plays and poems on stereo LP vinyl discs, recorded in studio between 1957 and 1964, has long been out of print. British Decca launched this monumental recording project to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth. During that same period Decca was also recording Wagner's Ring cycle complete for the first time in stereo sound. The Decca Solti Ring cycle cycle has subsequently gone from vinyl disc to CD reissue. In 2016, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Bard's death, Decca finally reissued the entire Argo Shakespeare project on silver disc in a deluxe 100 CD boxed set. I have broadcast The Winter's Tale on LP on two previous Sundays in January of 1993 and 2005. Hear it again today as presented in the silver disc reissue. George Rylands directs the voices of the Marlowe Dramatic Society and Professional Players. The voice of Britain's veteran Shakespearean actor Ian McKellen is heard at the start of his career in two small roles.  
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