• SUNDAY AFTERNOON AT THE OPERA
• your "lyric theater" program
• with Keith Brown
• programming for the month of January 2022
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• SUNDAY JANUARY 2ND Rimsky-Korsakov, Christmas Eve According to the old unreformed calendar still followed in the Russian Orthodox faith, Christmas has not yet arrived. (Orthodox Christmas Day falls on January 7th.) On Sunday, December 24, 1995 I presented one of two recordings I have of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's  Christmas Eve (1895), for which the composer prepared his own libretto based on a comic tale about amorous carryings-on in a village in oldtime Ukrainia. The story comes from the same collection by Gogol about peasant life that Modest Mussorgsky drew upon for his unfinished comic opera The Fair at Sorochinsk. Rimsky-Korsakov was known as a brilliant orchestral colorist, so the score of this peasant opera is brightly colored with references to Ukrainian folk melodies, particularly the koliadki or Slavic Christmas carols, as well as echoes of Russian Orthodox chant and even some quotations from the works of other contemporaneous Russian composers. There are elements of pagan Slavic folklore in the characters of the opera, one of whom is a witch. Christmas Eve was recorded in Moscow in 1990 for Saison Russe, with Mikhail Yurovski conducting the "Forum" Theater Orchestra and Yurlov Academic Choir. The French Harmonia Mundi record label picked it up for distribution in the West. HM France issued it on two CD's in its "Le Chant du Monde" series in 1991. I also have an earlier mono recording of this opera from 1948 which has been digitally upgraded for CD release through the Italian Arlecchino label. Nicolai Golovanov directed the Moscow Radio Choir and Orchestra in what must have been the aircheck of a broadcast performance. That historic recording, in a remarkably good sonic transfer, went over the air on Sunday, January 3, 1999.  
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• SUNDAY JANUARY 9TH Harbison, Winter's Tale You heard Shakespeare's original play on the last Sunday of 2021. Keep it in mind as you listen this Sunday to a twentieth century operatic treatment by American composer John Harbison (b. 1938). He adroitly edited Shakespeare's text into the more concise form of an opera libretto, cutting the five acts of the play down to two, and retitling it simply Winter's Tale. This the first of Harbison's three operas premiered in 1974 in a chamber version tailored for San Francisco Opera's American Opera Project. Harbison revised and expanded upon his score in 1991. Interpolated into the operatic action are six "Dumbshows" or pantomimes inspired by Elizabethan theatrical practice. Boston Modern Orchestra Project revived Winter's Tale in 2005 on stage , and again in 2009 as an unstaged recording made at Mechanics' Hall in Worcester, Mass. Gil Rose conducts the BMOP orchestra with a cast of thirteen vocal soloists. The proprietary BMOP Sound label released Winter's Tale on silver disc in 2012. Harbison's opera was the featured work presented on Sunday, January 13, 2013. It makes for great Wintertime listening again today.  
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• SUNDAY JANUARY 16TH Gibson, Violet Fire, Lang, Prisoner of the State If there was ever an opera that was "made for radio" in the highest sense, it's Violet Fire: an opera about Nikola Tesla (2006), by contemporary American composer Jon Gibson about the life of Tesla (1856-1943), the illustrious inventor. To the American public he was a veritable wizard who could conjure up violet fire in his demonstrations of alternating electric current. Tesla also promoted the potential power of radio waves that could deliver electric power to the masses,and envisioned a World Broadcasting System. That noble project failed and Tesla faded from the popular consciousness. He spent his last years in obscurity like a recluse, feeding pigeons in the park. One particular white pigeon became the object of his affections. In Gibson's opera she is personified as the White Dove, sung by  Marie Mascari, opposite tenor Scott Murphree as Tesla, with other singers and instrumentalists conducted by Mick Rossi. Violet Fire comes to us on a single compact disc released in 2019 through Orange Mountain Music, the proprietary label of the dean of contemporary American composers: Philip Glass. The late Jon Gibson (1940-2020) played in the Philip Glass Ensemble.
•    I have broadcast recordings of Beethoven's one-and-only opera Fidelio now and again over a period of several decades. Fidelio is the favorite opera of another of Philip Glass' colleagues, David Lang (b. 1957), founder of the Bang on a Can contemporary music collective, which includes Hartford's own string bass player Robert Black. "Prisoner of the State," says Lang,"is built on the skeleton of Fidelio." Lang's opera is definitely NOT, however, a knockoff of Beethoven. Lang's take on the story redirects the center of interest from Florestan and Leonore to the entire prison population. So the one prisoner of the title of Lang's opera, sung by Jarrett Ott, is an extension of the prisoners portrayed by the voices of the men of the Concert Chorale of New York. Jaap Van Zweden conducts the New York Philharmonic for the recording of Prisoner of the State, made in David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, NYC in 2019. The New York Philharmonic is signed on with the Decca Gold label.
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• SUNDAY JANUARY 23RD Rameau, Le Temple de la Gloire Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) is the greatest composer of the French baroque. Certainly the greatest musical theorist of his day, and a prolific composer of opera later in his career. He should rank alongside Bach and Handel in the pantheon of eighteenth century composers. Only in the past few decades of the later twentieth and the early twenty first century have Rameau's numerous lyric theater works received definitive recordings in historically-informed performance practice. I have broadcast as many of those recordings as I have come across. Le Temple de la Gloire (1745) was the first one I ever broadcast way back on Sunday, December 11, 1983. Rameau collaborated with the greatest literary figure of the age: Voltaire, who was the librettist for "The Temple of Glory," which was commissioned to celebrate the French victory in the War of the Austrian Succession. In its purpose it parallels Handel's Occasional Oratorio of 1746, a similar celebratory piece for an English military victory. Rameau's "Glory" opera must have been a grand and glorious spectacle indeed when it was first staged privately for king Louis XV at Versailles, but at the public theater in Paris it was a flop because Voltaire's libretto, while it was full of high-minded allegory and praise for the monarch (who actually didn't like its preachy implications), it had no love interest. Even when reworked with a more amorous subplot it still did not meet with the public's favor. In my first broadcast of Le Temple de la Gloire I drew upon a 1982 CBS Masterworks release of this French opera-ballet as interpreted by one of the pioneering figures in period instrument performance, Jean-Claude Malgloire, who led his own ensemble La Grande Ecurie et la Chambre du Roy. That recording has many cuts to Rameau's score, perhaps to accommodate it on two stereo LP's. Then along came a much more complete recording of something resembling the 1746 revision of the opera, made in 2013 under the auspices of the Center for Baroque Music at Versailles. Guy van Waas directed a Belgian period instrument group called Les Agremens, with the Chamber Chorus of Namur. I broadcast the 2016 Ricercar release of "Temple of Glory" not long ago on Sunday, April 15, 2018. Normally I would not program the same opera again for at least five years, but I do so now after about three because a remarkable American recording of "Glory" has come into my hands. Recorded live in performance in 2017, it documents a staged production given in Zellerbach Hall at Ucal Berkeley. Another pioneer in period practice, the Brit Nicolas McGegan directs the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Chorale, the preeminent musical organization of its kind on the West Coast. This organization has its own proprietary label, through which Le Temple de la Gloire was issued on two compact discs. I wrote this program note for an intended broadcast on Sunday, April 26, 2020, but the Covid shutdown on the UHA campus prevented that.
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• SUNDAY JANUARY 30TH  Cannabich, Electra, Pugnani, Werther There's a spoken-word offshoot of eighteenth century lyric theater: the melodrama, as it is called, which attracted the attention of Mozart's elder contemporaries. This subgenre employs dramatic declamation with synchronized orchestral accompaniment. The Bohemian Georg Benda (1722-95) wrote several works of this kind. His Medea and Ariadne (both 1775) and Pygmalion (1778) were recorded for the Naxos label and went over the air on this program on Sunday, November 19, 1997. Young Mozart saw Benda's Medea staged at Mannheim in 1778 and was much impressed by it. Christian Cannabich (1731-98) was then director of the trend-setting Mannheim Orchestra. He composed primarily orchestral music- symphonies and such- but he,too, tried his hand at writing melodrama with his Electra (1781). It was recorded live in performance in 2019 in co-production with Southwest German Radio and was released on a single compact disc through Hannsler Classic the following year. Isabelle Redfern stars in the tragic role of the daughter of Queen Clytemnestra. Electra's brother Orestes has a brief speaking part, and there's a Greek chorus of women's singing voices commenting on the murderous action. Frieder Bernius conducts the period instrument players of the Hofkapelle Stuttgart.
•    Cannabich's Electra has a German language text. The melodrama seems to have taken off in German-speaking lands where sung German opera was struggling to gain recognition in a musical artform overwhelmingly dominated by the Italian language. An Italian violin virtuoso and composer Gaetano Pugnani (1731-98) wrote an orchestral score for a staged production of one of the most famous novels of the time in German language: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers ("The Sufferings of Young Werther," 1774, revised 1786). The production seems to have taken place in Vienna's Burgtheater in 1796. Pugnani's score was presumed lost. When in the mid twentieth century it was rediscovered in the library of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna it was mistakenly thought to be a symphony. Musicologist Alberto Basso recognized it for what it really was. He restored the proper passages from Goethe's story in Italian language translation. Styled a melologo in Italian, the reconstructed Pugnani Werther, the first ever adaptation in the history of music, was recorded in 1997 and released on two compact discs through the French Opus 111 record label as Volume 4 in the series "Treasures of the Piedmont." Graziano Piazza speaks in the role of Werther. There's a narrator's voice, too, and one sound effect: the pistol shot that ends young Werther's life by suicide. I last broadcast Pugnani's Werther on Sunday, April 18, 2004.