SUNDAY FEBRUARY 2ND Campra, L'Europe Galante Andre Campra (1660-1744) was one of the most esteemed masters of the opera of the French baroque to follow in the footsteps of Lully, the founder of the genre of the tragedie en musique. In times long past I have presented two of Campra's eight lyric tragedies in their world premiere recordings: Tancrede (1702) on Sunday, March 3, 1991 and Idomenee (1712,rev. 1731) on Sunday, May 9, 1993. The French opera-going public also wanted lighter weight lyric theatrical entertainment with plenty of dance divertissements. Campra was among the first composers in the new genre of the opera-ballet. His L'Europe Galante (1697) remained enormously popular decades after its premiere well into the eighteenth century. Unlike the Lullian lyric tragedy, which tells one entire story over five acts, in this opera-ballet there are four acts telling four separate stories. All four vignettes set forth the concept of love in four different European countries: France, Italy, Spain and Turkey. (The Turkish act became particularly popular on its own.) There's an old historically informed recording of L'Europe Galante in abridged form made in 1973 with Gustav Leonhardt conducting La Petite Bande. In its 1990 reissue on compact disc it was paired with Lully's incidental music for Moliere's comedy Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670). I have broadcast that Harmonia Mundi recording a couple of times along with Lully's music for the play. The HM release gave us less than an hour of Campra's music. Today you get to hear the complete opera-ballet: a tad more than two full hours of music presented on two Chateau de Versailles Spectacles CD's. Sebastien d'Herin is one of a younger generation of conductors who specialize in the performance of the music of the French baroque. He leads the period instrumental forces of Les Nouveaux Characteres. This new L'Europe Galante was recorded in 2017 in the magnificent opera house of the Royal Palace at Versailles.

 

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 9TH Benjamin, Lessons in Love and Violence, Spears, Paul's Case Both of the twenty first century operas featured today have a gay sensibility. Both of them show us the life and death of a gay male in a time long ago when homosexuality was taboo in Western Christian society. It's only been in the past generation or two in the later twentieth century that such stories can be told in operatic terms in a sympathetic way. So the theme of today's programming could be stated as "death in the closet." The Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe did indeed deal with the character of a fourteenth century "gay" monarch in his play The troublesome reign and lamentable death of Edward the second King of England, with the tragical fall of proud Mortimer (1594). The British team of composer George Benjamin (b.1960) and librettist Martin Crimp (b. 1956) came up with a contemporary take on King Edward and Earl Roger de Mortimer in their third operatic collaboration, Lessons in Love and Violence, which premiered at Covent Garden in May of 2018. It's an operatic tragedy, to be sure, and Edward ends up dead, but he isn't tortured to death in the horrible way the gay king is in Marlowe's original play. It's Mortimer, who wanted to separate the king from his male lover Piers Gaveston and who wanted Edward dead and deposed, who gets executed. Following closely on the Covent Garden production, Lessons in Love and Violence was staged again by Dutch National Opera at the Holland Festival in the Summer of 2018. The opera was commissioned by an international group of famous opera houses headed by the Royal Opera of London. Benjamin and Crimp's Lessons in Love and Violence was recorded at the Holland Festival and issued through the Nimbus record label of the UK in 2019 on two compact discs.

     American novelist Willa Cather (1876-1947) was a lesbian who wrote perceptively about gay men in her closeted bygone era. Her story "Paul's Case" was first published in McClure's magazine, of which she was editor, in 1905. Paul is a rebellious aesthete of a youth. Today we might think of him as stereotypically queer. He breaks away from his stifling homelife in Pittsburgh for freedom in New York City. But this brief escapade ends tragically in Paul's suicide. An American composer of our time, Gregory Spears (b. 1977) has made Paul's Case into an opera. He worked up a libretto for himself with major input from playwright Kathryn Walat. With the backing of American Opera Projects Paul's Case was first staged by Urbanarias, conducted by Robert Wood. In 2018 it was recorded in the recital hall of the Performing Arts Center at the State University of New York's Purchase College. Again Robert Wood was conducting the vocal team of Urbanarias and the American Modern Ensemble chamber players. A National Sawdust release on two silver discs.

 

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 16TH Cimarosa,Gli Orazii e I Curiazii Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801) was a prolific composer of opera in the classical style of the later eighteenth century. He wrote at least sixty operas-mostly comic works, the most famous of them being Il Matrimonio Segreto (1792). I have broadcast a couple of recordings of 'The Secret Marriage." The old 1977 Deutsche Grammophon LP recording with Daniel Barenboim conducting went over the air on Sunday, April 21,1985. Long thereafter came a new recording made in Florence,Italy in 2017. That latter one was my pre-New Year's Eve presentation for Sunday, December 30, 2018. Cimarosa also wrote Italian opera seria. A specimen of his serious operatic output is Gli Orazii e I Curiazii (1796). The title really doesn't accurately translate as 'The Capulets and The Montagues" or 'The Hatfields and The McCoys," but that kind of storied family conflict is very familiar in this opera. For the story of this feud we reach back into ancient times, to the early days of the Roman Republic during the city state's war with neighboring Alba Longa. Cimarosa's obscure azione tragica received both its first modern staged revival and world premiere recording in 1983. Gli Orazii e I Curiazii was performed at the Teatro Chiabrera in Savona, Italy. Massimo de Bernart leads the Orchestra Sinfonica di Sanremo and the Coro del Teatro dell' Opera Giacosa, with the late and much esteemed mezzo Daniela Dessi in the breaches role of the Alban leader Curiazio. The Italian label Bongiovanni released Gli Orazii e I Curiazii on two compact discs in 1984.

 

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 23RD Thomson, Lord Byron In the course of nigh on four decades of opera broadcasting I have aired recordings of Virgil Thomson's Four saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947) more than once, most recently the 2016 BMOP Sound recording of Four Saints on Sunday, November 24th of last year, with Gil Rose conducting the singing and playing resources of his Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Neither of those operas could be considered familiar to the public's ears. There's another Thomson opera that is even less known. Much later in his career, after Four Saints and Mother, he wrote an opera about the renegade English poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824). Byron's life as an artistic and political revolutionary insured that upon his death he would not be buried in the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. Yet in Thomson's opera his body reposes there. The Met commissioned Thomson to compose Lord Byron in 1966, but the huge new stage at Lincoln Center made performance of it there problematical. The actual premiere came about after much delay in 1972 at the Julliard School. The world premiere recording of Lord Byron was released in 1992 through the Koch International Classics label. The recording was made here in New England in Wilton, New Hampshire with the Yankee orchestral ensemble Monadnock Music under the direction of James Bolle. I last broadcast this same recording on Sunday, November 14, 1993.