SUNDAY JANUARY 5TH Verdi, Falstaff We begin lyric theater programming for the year 2020 with one of the greatest of all operatic comedies. Falstaff (1893) is a marvelous finale to Giuseppe Verdi's career as an opera composer. He regarded it fondly as a labor of love. With an excellent libretto by Arrigo Boito to work from, Verdi handled the dramatic aspects of Shakespeare's comedy with a mastery unparalleled in anything he had previously written. I have previously broadcast two compact disc releases of Falstaff, and a vintage LP release, too. The 1994 Sony Classical CD release came on Sunday, April 30,1995. Baritone Juan Pons starred as the fat knight, with Riccardo Muti conducting the orchestra and chorus of the famed La Scala opera house in Milan. (A recording made live in performance in June of 1993.) Then on Sunday, February 5, 2005 came the LSO Live CD issue, this recording also made live in performance at The Barbican in London in May of 2004. Baritone Michele Pertusi portrayed the ageing reprobate nobleman. Sir Colin Davis was on the podium leading the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. In our WWUH classical music record library there's an old recording of Falstaff on Angel monaural LP's. It was taped at London's Kingsway Hall in 1956 with Herbert von Karajan directing the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus and the members of what was billed as the Philharmonia Opera Company. The star singer in this studio recording was the incomparable Tito Gobbi, arguably the greatest Italian operatic baritone of the twentieth century. Those Angel LP's I drew upon for broadcast on Sunday, October 7,2007. The supporting cast here also consisted of operatic luminaries of the mid twentieth century: Rolando Panerai, Luigi Alva, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf and Anna Moffo. The German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was one of the single most recorded voices in the history of recorded sound. He undertook the role of Falstaff for a production of Verdi's masterpiece staged by the Vienna State Opera in 1966. At the artistic helm of the production was America's star conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein leading the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus of the Vienna Staatsoper. The critics raved about Bernstein's sprightly and concise interpretation of the score. The cast for this Viennese staging could hardly be bettered, all of them eminent vocal artists of the 1950's and 60's such as Regina Resnik, Graziella Sciutti, Rolando Panerai again, Hilde Rossl-Majdan, Erich Kunz and Gerhard Stolze. The recording was released stateside on three Columbia Masterworks LP's in 1966.

SUNDAY JANUARY 12TH Salieri, Tarare Antonio Salieri (1750-1825) advanced his career as an opera composer as a junior colleague of the great reformer of eighteenth century opera, Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-87). No one is certain to this day how extensive a hand Gluck actually had in the composition of the French lyric tragedy Les Danaides (1784), but it seems he graciously allowed Salieri to take credit by name for it. I presented the world premiere recording of the Gluck/Salieri collaboration on Sunday, June 19, 2016. Salieri composed at least forty operas during his long career- many more than his supposed rival Mozart. His early comic opera La Locandiera (1773)was highly successful, and a recording of that work went over the air on Sunday, January 31, 1999. Another later opera buffa, Falstaff (1799) I presented three times, in 1994, 1996 and 2014 in its world premiere Hungaroton recording. Salieri collaborated with the French author Beaumarchais (of "Marriage of Figaro" fame) as his librettist in Tarare (1787), a fantasy parable of an opera set in the Orient like those popular "Turkish" operas of the eighteenth century. Parisians flocked to the premiere of Tarare. Salieri's music was splendid and the noble sentiments expressed in the libretto were said to have inspired the French revolution. The opera's success outlived the revolution and the Napoleonic regime that followed. Tarare made it to Vienna and other European capitals, and it continued to be staged up to 1826. Modern listeners to the world premiere recording of Tarare may well be reminded of Mozart's "The Magic Flute." It was made under the auspices of the Centre de Musique Baroque of Versailles in late 2018 for release through the French Aparte record label on three compact discs in 2019. Christophe Rousset leads the period instrument orchestra he founded Les Talens Lyriques and the choral singers of the Centre, with a cast of ten vocal soloists.

 

SUNDAY JANUARY 19TH Karchin, Jane Eyre This will not be the first time I have aired a recording of an operatic rendering of Charlotte Bronte's famous novel. On Sunday, May 18, 2003 you heard British composer Michael Berkeley's Jane Eyre in its Music Theatre Wales production                   of the year 2000 as co-produced by BBC Radio Three and released on a single Chandos compact disc. Those who love Bronte's novel might complain that Berkeley's opera leaves out way too much of the story. As an opera Jane Eyre gets a much fuller treatment from American composer Louis Karchin (b. 1951). Diane Osen's libretto can be credited with a more literarily in-depth adaptation of Bronte's book. In recorded form Karchin's Jane Eyre is a longer work, clocking in at two hours and ten minutes spread out over two Naxos compact discs. The gestation of Karchin's work spread out over a long period: four years, 2010-14. It won the 2012 award in composition from the Center for Contemporary Opera. Its premiere staging came in 2016 at the Kaye Playhouse in Manhattan, and subsequently it was recorded in 2017 with Karchin himself conducting the Orchestra of the League of Composers. There's a singing cast of nine characters. Jane is soprano Jennifer Zetian. Edward Rochester is tenor Ryan MacPherson.