Lorenzo da Da Ponte News
Italian opera librettist, poet and Roman Catholic priest (1749–1838)
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2024-03-19
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2024-02-25 13:31:28
Wales Millennium Centre, CardiffWelsh National Opera’s production maxes out on farce in the bet on female infidelity, but the absurdly lovely music antidotes any excess wackinessLa Scuola degli Amanti – The School for Lovers – was always the subtitle of Mozart’s and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte’s third collaboration and, accordingly, director Max Hoehn sets Welsh National Opera’s new production in a school. As an educational establishment, it’s decidedly unprepossessing and as cash-strapped as WNO.Forget any sun-drenched Mediterranean vistas: the single set combines assembly hall, gym and canteen, fish and chips high on the menu. Cut-out Adam and Eve, fateful fruit and serpents suggest the Fall in the Garden of Eden, while biology class is focused on reproduction, pollination via bee and hummingbird, and ancient diagrams of male and female sexual parts. Urinals, wash basins, and changing-room lockers are later wheeled on. So a lot of stuff, plus muddy rugby players, but […]
2024-02-21 18:49:00
Le nozze di Figaro, Deutsche Oper, 20 February 2024
[…] case now: not only between but sometimes within acts. Current directors would do it differently, no doubt, but different is sometimes just different, not necessarily better or worse. Cherubino (Meechot Marrero), Countess Almaviva (Maria Motolygina), Count Almaviva To questions concerning the opera are to what extent knowledge of the play and indeed of its sequel are expected. At one level, none: many of us saw and loved it before proceeding to Beaumarchais in either incarnation. Did Da Ponte and/or Mozart, though, expect any such knowledge, in the first instance by not having to show something that might have caused trouble with the censor; or, milder still, does one gain further insight from having done so? Here, rightly, the question was left open. No one was compelled to have extra knowledge, but we had both a sense of difference from the corresponding play that suggested purpose rather than mere accident, and one […]
2024-01-17 17:37:00
Così fan tutte, Komische Oper, 14 January 2024
[…] by Don Alfonso is corrected to ‘Così fan tutti,’ tellingly ‘girlish’ hearts atop the ‘i's a further turn of the dialectical gender-screw (as it were). And yet, this remains a deeply disillusioning experience for all, the modern anomie of what are either hotel rooms or a modern apartment so fashionable it might as well be, not the least of the bridges constructed between deeper meanings to be drawn from Mozart (to a lesser extent, Da Ponte too) and Serebrennikov’s conception. Both women have incomplete, neon-lit crucifixes above their beds: probably only a ‘design feature’, but extending into something more in Fiordiligi’s case, allied to her little shrine (to what, though?) assembled for ‘Per pietà’, when she drags it across the floor, failing twice to maintain the electric connection. For Mozart, these parodies of opera seria have a message that is, among other things, deeply theological; that may or may […]
2023-12-08 08:53:00
An Englishman, Frenchman, Spaniard, Italian and a German find themselves on a desert island: Bampton Classical Opera explores Alcina's Island
[…] by BREMF [see my review]. Caccini's opera treats the subject quite lightly, and it is clear that Ariosto's characters were regarded as entertainment, with a moral perhaps, but definitely something to be enjoyed and not worried over. In 1772 another Alcina-inspired opera, L’isola d’Alcina, was premiered at the Teatro San Moisè, Venice, this was by ;Giuseppe Gazzaniga (1743-1718). Gazzaniga is now perhaps best known for his 1787 opera, Don Giovanni, whose text inspired Mozart and Da Ponte's opera. Gazzaniga's Don Giovanni was definitely comic, and his treatment of Alcina is similar.In Gazzaniga's opera an Englishman, Frenchman, Spaniard, Italian and German get washed up on Alcina’s magical island where the seductive and beautiful sorceress (although 800 years old) has a habit of discarding her lovers and turning them into rocks or animals. Gazzaniga's music is fluent, cheerful and graceful, propelling the story forward with restless energy.The opera was a success, it […]
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