10.24.05 (AP) Back in 1991, the Classical music world threw itself into a virtual frenzy to honor the 200th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's death. In New York, Lincoln Center committed to performing each of his 835 compositions, and the METROPOLITAN OPERA staged all his mature operas over a couple of seasons. Flash forward, and 2006 will mark the 250th anniversary of the musical prodigy's birth. This time the METROPOLITAN OPERA is taking a more modest approach, presenting three of his masterpieces in the current season. The first, "Cosi Fan Tutte," opened its run Friday night with results that were indeed worth celebrating. The company has put together a cast of six terrific performers who take advantage of their individual moments to shine while never losing the delicate ensemble balance the work requires. The cynical libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte tells of two young officers who make a bet that their sister sweethearts will resist temptation and remain faithful to them. To test them, they pretend to be drafted off to war but reappear in disguise and take turns wooing each other's fiancee - both, to their dismay, successfully. True identities are revealed at the finale, and all is more or less forgiven, though it's open to the director's interpretation how the pairing of the four lovers sorts itself out. As befits an opera whose subject is the fickleness of women, the female singers held the greatest claim on the attention of the enthusiastic audience. Soprano Barbara Frittoli as Fiordiligi and mezzo Magdalena Kozena as her younger sister, Dorabella, made a nice contrast vocally and histrionically. Kozena has a warm, vibrato-charged voice and a mischievous look that contribute to her easy charm; Frittoli, playing the more determined holdout, acts with grace and elegance and sings Fiordiligi's two showpiece arias with remarkable skill. As their meddling maid, Despina, soprano Nuccia Focile was not the usual light-voiced soubrette but a potent soprano with good comic timing. The persuasive suitors were tenor Matthew Polenzani, a young METROPOLITAN OPERA favorite whose voice seems to be maintaining its bloom as he progresses to more demanding roles, and baritone Mariusz Kwiecien. Veteran Thomas Allen rounded out the cast as Don Alfonso, mastermind of the wager. His voice is becoming perilously dry, but he brings such authority to the portrayal that it matters little. Music director James Levine conducted the orchestra at occasional breakneck speed in some of the ensembles, but his expert cast was astonishingly good at keeping pace. The current production was introduced in 1996, when Cecilia Bartoli made her METROPOLITAN OPERA debut as Despina. Michael Yeargan's sets continue to impress, especially for the ease and speed with which one scene shifts to the next, from seashore to house to garden and back again. Next up in the Mozart tribute is "Le Nozze Di Figaro," opening November 2nd, with "Die Zauberfloete," in the Julie Taymor production, returning January 21st.

10.13.05 (AP) A working manuscript of one of BEETHOVEN's final compositions has been rediscovered in a seminary library in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, and could fetch more than $2 million at auction. The 80-page manuscript of BEETHOVEN's "Gross Fuge" for piano duet was created when he was deaf and is filled with editing and notations from the composer's own hand. Never before seen by scholars, it was written a few months before the composer's death in 1827. It was found by a librarian clearing out old archives at the Palmer Theological Seminary, and displayed briefly at the seminary Thursday in a glass case and under the eyes of several plainclothes guards. The discovery was kept hidden since July while the bound manuscript, roughly the size of a magazine, was authenticated and appraised. "That has been the toughest part - keeping this all a secret till now," seminary president Wallace Smith said. Long-time librarian Heather Carbo, whom school officials said did not wish to speak with reporters Thursday, found the manuscript on the bottom shelf of an old cabinet in the library. Months earlier, an electrical fire had damaged many items in the library archives but the manuscript was not touched by fire, smoke or water. "There is no doubt that it was a providential act," Smith said. University Of Pennsylvania musicologist Jeffrey Kallberg, who authenticated the manuscript, said its condition was pristine because it has not been touched or moved for so many decades. "It's a very important discovery," he said. "This was a controversial and not understood work because it was so ahead of its time. It sounds like it was written by a dissonant 20th-century composer." The manuscript was last mentioned in an 1890 auction catalog from Berlin. No documents were ever located to indicate who had purchased it then, but seminary officials now believe that the buyer was industrialist and hymn composer William Howard Doane. His daughter, Marguerite Treat Doane, donated a collection of documents to the seminary in 1950, including musical manuscripts that likely included the BEETHOVEN, to pay for construction of a chapel. Somewhere along the way, it was forgotten. "In all the Beethoven literature, it's described as lost," said Stephen Roe, a Sotheby's expert in charge of the December 1st sale. "There are lots of alterations, changes, revisions that no one has ever seen." It marks the second such discovery in recent years at the seminary, which is part of Eastern University just outside Philadelphia's city limits. Original manuscripts by Mozart, Haydn, Strauss, Meyerbeer and Spohr were found in a safe in 1990. They were also part of the Doane gift. The collection from 1990 - seminary officials dubbed it the "Mozart miracle" - fetched nearly $1.6 million at auction by Sotheby's in London, who also will sell the BEETHOVEN manuscript. Sotheby's estimates that the current find could bring as much as $2.6 million. The proceeds from the sale of what Smith called the "Beethoven blessing" will be used to pay debts, build up the scholarship program and expand initiatives, including a training program in West Virginia, he said.

10.10.05 (AP) When ELVIS COSTELLO was asked three years ago by Denmark's Royal Theater to write an opera about Hans Christian Andersen, his first thought was, "Why didn't they choose a Danish composer?" "Then I recalled that Andersen belongs to the world," Costello said. On Saturday, his work "The Secret Arias" - based on Andersen's unrequited yearning for Swedish soprano Jenny Lind - debuted at Copenhagen's new waterfront opera house, with Costello himself playing two lead roles. The opera is being performed in connection with the 2005 bicentennial of the Danish fairy tale writer's birth. Renowned for his children's classics such as "The Little Mermaid," "The Ugly Duckling" and "The Red Shoes," he died in 1875. For the musical chameleon Costello, it marks yet another expansion of his artistic range. After emerging from Britain's early New Wave scene, he has dabbled in everything from orchestral symphonies to harmonious Pop. He has recorded with Swedish soprano Anne Sofie Von Otter and the Brodsky Quartet, but this is the first time he has written an opera. His story tells a three-way drama between Andersen, Lind - nicknamed the "Swedish Nightingale" - and her American impresario, P.T. Barnum, who brought Lind to New York for her first U.S. concert tour in 1850. "The songs tell a story that I have imagined existing between the lines of Andersen's biography and some of his most famous tales," Costello told reporters this week. "They speak of a misfit's love for an unattainable woman and a struggle between a huckster and someone who composes music in secret." It's widely believed that Andersen wrote his tale "The Nightingale" with Lind - who lived from 1820-1887 - in mind. Last week, Costello had been rehearsing with Swedish soprano Gisela Stille at the new opera house, which opened earlier this year. Costello plays both Andersen and Barnum, while Stille portray Lind. The duo will also perform this week in Aarhus, Denmark's second-largest city in the western part of the Scandinavian country. Next season, the Copenhagen Opera will stage a longer version of "The Secret Arias" with other performers. Costello says his work, is basically a traditional opera, but with some exceptions. "We don't have a symphonic orchestra," he said. Instead, four musicians accompanied Costello and Stille at the opera's main stage, which can seat as many as 1,700 people. Costello said he was inspired by Andersen's way of expression, adding that "many translations of (Andersen's) works miss the really good elements - the macabre, the weird and the social critique." Many of Andersen's fairy tales are rather gruesome. In "The Little Mermaid," one of his best known stories, the mermaid becomes mute after a witch cuts off her tongue in exchange for legs to replace her fish tail. In "The Two Baronesses," Andersen writes about marital infidelity and life in a brothel - something he personally experienced when living in Copenhagen. "The Traveling Companion," published in 1835 as part of a fairy tale collection for children, is about death. Kasper Holten, the Royal Theater's 32-year-old opera director, said asking Costello to write an opera was a way to bring a broader repertoire to the $406 million opera house, instead of merely focusing on the big classics.
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[Classical News: September 2005]