The problem with Rossini’s comic operas is that many listeners have been spoilt by familiarity with greater things. Once you know Mozart’s Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), Verdi’s Falstaff or Strauss’ Rosenkavalier, you realize what heights the mixture of high spirits and wistful melancholy can attain. Rossini’s comedies, by contrast, sound like pure frivolity, and consequently appear superficial.
Nevertheless, the new Il Turco in Italia (The Turk in Italy) from the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa tries its best. The production is lively — though neither a character entering through the auditorium, nor a scene involving massed chairs, can be judged original — and reasonably colorful.
Myrto Papatanasiu as Fiorilla is the strongest soloist in an adequate, but nowhere outstanding, cast. Simone Aliamo is Selim (the Turk), Vincenzo Taormina the poet Prosdocimo, and Antonella Nappa sings Zaida, but as the opera progresses Papatanasiu’s preeminence becomes indisputable. The big ensembles, as for instance the finale that ends Act One, are, however, notably effective.
This DVD deserves a measured welcome. The Genoa opera house is a newcomer to DVD offerings, and we must hope for more innovative productions from it in the future. The international competition in this field is, though, very intense.
La Traviata from the Opera Royal de Wallonie-Liege is another example of an acceptable production from a provincial opera house, in this case in Belgium, that nevertheless fails to compete with what the top rankers in the business can offer.
This version of Traviata has no obvious weak points, but it doesn’t have any overwhelmingly strong ones either. Verdi’s score, by contrast, offers strength after strength. I might well have enjoyed this production in the theater, but it doesn’t merit the repeated viewings that the DVD format invites.
Neither Cinzia Forte as Violetta nor Saimir Pirgu as Alfredo thrill. Most effective, rather, is Giovanni Meoni as Germont.
When the CD of Bellini’s opera La Sonnambula (The Sleep-walker) starring Cecilia Bartoli and Juan Diego Florez was first released, controversy erupted. Decca claimed it featured two of the greatest soloists alive and that this was the first recording to use period instruments. Detractors felt Bartoli’s voice was manifestly unsuited to the title role.
I find it impossible to agree with those who praise this product. Bartoli has many and great virtues, but they’re none of them suited to the role of Amina. She’s a mezzo-soprano, and much of the music has apparently been lowered in pitch to accommodate her voice. Florez is indeed a distinctly incisive tenor, but his voice is the exact opposite in character to Bartoli’s mellow tones. As for the period instruments, I suspect few listeners will notice much difference from the usual setup.
This pair of CDs has all the appearance of a confection — a commercial product worked on endlessly in an attempt to embellish something in reality doomed from the start. Bartoli counters her basic unsuitability for the role by elaborate vocal decoration, arguably in accordance with the practice in Bellini’s day. The unfortunate result, to use an analogy with Mozart’s Figaro, is of a Marcellina trying to be a Susanna. Her flustered orotund mezzo tones couldn’t be further from the simple purity Bellini requires.
For comparison, just listen to the youthful Anna Moffo on the old mono, black-and-white DVD of Sonnambula [reviewed in the Taipei Times on March 8, 2007]. For all the more-than-wooden acting by the chorus of villagers, this Italian TV version is affecting and beautiful in a way this glossy new CD version fails to be. (I was unaware, incidentally, when reviewing this DVD that the singer in the minor role of the Notary had the distinction of having created the role of Pong in Turandot in its 1926 premier).
All in all, it seems that Bartoli has been exploited here. The accompanying promotional photos make her appear glamorous in a way she isn’t, thereby masking her real, more amiable, qualities. A similarly artificial glossiness seems to have been applied to Bellini’s opera as a whole.
So, three somewhat disappointing items this month. Luckily it’s not necessary to end on a bleak note. A DVD of highlights from the 2007 Verbier Festival, released last year, arrives to save the day.
For some reason this festival, held every year in the Swiss Alps, attracts the finest artists in the profession. In 2007, for example, you had Martha Argerich, Evgeny Kissin, Mischa Maisky, Thomas Quasthoff, Andrew Davis and Joshua Bell, all of whom appear on this DVD. Here are riches indeed.
Highlights of the highlights are probably Kissin playing Horowitz’s Carmen Variations, Joshua Bell and a very youthful orchestra in the last moment of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, two movements from Schumann’s Piano Quintet (with Maisky as the cellist) and Argerich and Renaud Capucon playing the Allegro from Bartok’s Sonata for Violin and Piano No.1.
This DVD goes to show that the most illustrious people doing what they do best can’t, in the event, really be beaten.
In the next few months tough decisions will need to be made by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and their pan-blue allies in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). It will reveal just how real their alliance is with actual power at stake. Party founder Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) faced these tough questions, which we explored in part one of this series, “Ko Wen-je, the KMT’s prickly ally,” (Aug. 16, page 12). Ko was open to cooperation, but on his terms. He openly fretted about being “swallowed up” by the KMT, and was keenly aware of the experience of the People’s First Party
Aug. 25 to Aug. 31 Although Mr. Lin (林) had been married to his Japanese wife for a decade, their union was never legally recognized — and even their daughter was officially deemed illegitimate. During the first half of Japanese rule in Taiwan, only marriages between Japanese men and Taiwanese women were valid, unless the Taiwanese husband formally joined a Japanese household. In 1920, Lin took his frustrations directly to the Ministry of Home Affairs: “Since Japan took possession of Taiwan, we have obeyed the government’s directives and committed ourselves to breaking old Qing-era customs. Yet ... our marriages remain unrecognized,
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
Standing on top of a small mountain, Kim Seung-ho gazes out over an expanse of paddy fields glowing in their autumn gold, the ripening grains swaying gently in the wind. In the distance, North Korea stretches beyond the horizon. “It’s so peaceful,” says the director of the DMZ Ecology Research Institute. “Over there, it used to be an artillery range, but since they stopped firing, the nature has become so beautiful.” The land before him is the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, a strip of land that runs across the Korean peninsula, dividing North and South Korea roughly along the 38th parallel north. This
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