There was great excitement among opera fans earlier this year when the rumor got around that Deutsche Grammophon was about to issue the New York Metropolitan Opera’s Falstaff from 1992 on DVD. This was a legendary production, with such stars as Mirella Freni, Marilyn Horne and Barbara Bonney, and Paul Plishka in the title role. It duly appeared in July, and confirmed the stellar reputation of the performances it records.
Other great names grace the enterprise. James Levine conducts, Brian Large is in charge of the video recording, and the stage production is by Franco Zeffirelli.
Zeffirelli’s New York staging was old even in 1992, but then that is the way with opera. New productions get created and run for maybe 10 performances over a month or so. When the time comes for a revival of the opera with different singers, there’s rarely a question of commissioning new sets, let alone costumes — a notoriously expensive business. And in the case of Zeffirelli’s Falstaff, little would have been achieved. His name, after all, was a selling-point in itself.
James Levine as conductor is also a huge asset. Not only is he unfailingly faithful to any composer’s original intentions, but he also delivers passionately committed renditions recorded with hi-tech fidelity. And Brian Large has long been the one to beat for video versions of live opera performances.
Nothing fails to please in this magnificent DVD. Plishka gives a superb reading of Falstaff himself, as good an actor as he is vigorous a singer. Freni is unimprovable as Alice Ford, and though Marilyn Horne is really too great an artist to undertake as modest a role as Mistress Quickly, she still enters into the comic spirit of the occasion and gives her all. Bonney is sumptuous in the lovely music Verdi wrote for Nannetta, while Frank Lopardo and Bruno Pola are more than adequate as Fenton and Ford, respectively.
Falstaff is a connoisseur’s piece, musically subtle with a quick-silver vitality far removed from the sturdy melodramatics of Verdi’s middle years, wonderful though those are too. This sublime version does it justice in every way — as the New York Times commented at the time, the entire undertaking represented “a milestone in the history of operatic production in this city.” It’s wonderful to have it available at last on DVD, with a BluRay option and subtitles in Italian, English, German, French, Spanish and Chinese.
The Zeffirelli production climaxes, as all productions of this opera must, in the last scene, set
at night in Windsor Forest. The
stage is ablaze with fireworks and multi-colored lights, plus perhaps 200 performers.
This month I also much enjoyed the DGM DVD of Karajan conducting the Brahms symphonies with the Berlin Philharmonic back in 1973, at the peak of his career. The picture is highly traditional, mostly Karajan himself in close-up, plus various featured soloists, also in close-up, from time to time. The sound, too, is slightly boxed-in, but very forceful nonetheless. Karajan had the power to raise performances to an ever higher level simply by his participation, and this plus the stature of Brahms’ four ever-rich symphonies — none of them inferior to any of the others — makes this a very attractive set of two DVDs.
Is Andre Rieu getting cynical, taken over ever so slightly by his own organizational machine? Universal Music in Taiwan has
re-issued an old Rieu concert, Andre Rieu Live at the Royal Albert Hall, unavailable for the last four years. Visually the concert is all colored lights and tinted hair, a confection of pink and blue. But even back then it was possible to catch a sober look is those ever-smiling eyes, as if Rieu were carefully checking everything was going according to plan, that the plants in the audience were leading the dancing in the aisles as arranged, and that the right kind of hilarity was going to take over at just the appropriate moment.
Lastly, this month I belatedly discovered the DVD of Tosca in the film version from Benoir Jacquot. It may not please purists — there are moments when the characters are heard speaking their words rather than singing them, and the church procession that normally concludes Act One so memorably doesn’t feature at all. But all in all I found it a powerful experience.
Antonio Pappano conducts the Royal Covent Garden orchestra and chorus in London’s famous Abbey Road studios, and you see them from time to time, filmed in monochrome, and then return to the drama itself taking place in color. Angela Gheorghiu proves far more powerful as Tosca than you might have expected, her voice more mellow and rounded than previously. Roberto Alagna, too, is a very strong Cavaradossi, while Ruggero Raimondi makes an openly sexual Scarpia.
Each act is slightly less good than the one before, but that’s the case with Puccini’s original. Nothing is as lovely as Act One where the impending tragedy is still mixed with the sense of possibility, and the joyful hopes of young love, before politics intervenes.
In 2020, a labor attache from the Philippines in Taipei sent a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanding that a Filipina worker accused of “cyber-libel” against then-president Rodrigo Duterte be deported. A press release from the Philippines office from the attache accused the woman of “using several social media accounts” to “discredit and malign the President and destabilize the government.” The attache also claimed that the woman had broken Taiwan’s laws. The government responded that she had broken no laws, and that all foreign workers were treated the same as Taiwan citizens and that “their rights are protected,
A white horse stark against a black beach. A family pushes a car through floodwaters in Chiayi County. People play on a beach in Pingtung County, as a nuclear power plant looms in the background. These are just some of the powerful images on display as part of Shen Chao-liang’s (沈昭良) Drifting (Overture) exhibition, currently on display at AKI Gallery in Taipei. For the first time in Shen’s decorated career, his photography seeks to speak to broader, multi-layered issues within the fabric of Taiwanese society. The photographs look towards history, national identity, ecological changes and more to create a collection of images
March 16 to March 22 In just a year, Liu Ching-hsiang (劉清香) went from Taiwanese opera performer to arguably Taiwan’s first pop superstar, pumping out hits that captivated the Japanese colony under the moniker Chun-chun (純純). Last week’s Taiwan in Time explored how the Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) theme song for the Chinese silent movie The Peach Girl (桃花泣血記) unexpectedly became the first smash hit after the film’s Taipei premiere in March 1932, in part due to aggressive promotion on the streets. Seeing an opportunity, Columbia Records’ (affiliated with the US entity) Taiwan director Shojiro Kashino asked Liu, who had
At a funeral in rural Changhua County, musicians wearing pleated mini-skirts and go-go boots march around a coffin to the beat of the 1980s hit I Hate Myself for Loving You. The performance in a rural farming community is a modern mash-up of ancient Chinese funeral rites and folk traditions, with saxophones, rock music and daring outfits. Da Zhong (大眾) women’s group is part of a long tradition of funeral marching bands performing in mostly rural areas of Taiwan for families wanting to give their loved ones an upbeat send-off. The band was composed mainly of men when it started 50
RSS