Ben Bliss
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Opera San Luis Obispo launches this year's salon series on Sunday, February 10, at 2pm with the Valentine's Day theme of "That's Amore." The recital will be held in the elegant Garden Room of the Madonna Inn. Guest artists include Ben Bliss, tenor; D'Ana Lombard, soprano; and Kosta Popovic, piano.
Tenor Ben Bliss, a member of the Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program, made his LA Opera debut in 2011 as Benvolio in Romeo et Juliette. In 2012, he performed the role of Parpignol in La Boheme and Daniel in the LA Opera's Cathedral production of The Festival Play of Daniel. He has appeared in Krenek's The Secret Kingdom and in Ullmann's The Emperor of Atlantis. Bliss has also been tenor soloist in Bach's Magnificat with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and in Bach's St. Matthew Passion, with the La Jolla Symphony.
D'Ana Lombard is a lyric soprano from Garden City South, New York. She recently graduated from the master's program at Mannes College of Music, where she performed Donna Anna in Mozart's Don Giovanni. Past performances include Iris in Lee Hoiby's The Tempest, the Mother in Amahl and the Night Visitors and the title role in Puccini's Suor Angelica. She has received the Metropolitan Opera National Council Rohatyn Great Promise Award, the Licia-Albanese Puccini Foundation Encouragement Award and the Gerda Lissner Foundation Encouragement Award.
Kosta Popovic
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Yugoslavian-born pianist Kosta Popovic has worked as an assistant conductor with the Metropolitan Opera for 11 seasons, including 6 (2002-08) in which he served as an assistant chorus master. He has collaborated with many opera companies in Europe, the United States and South America.
OperaSLO's Salon Series is designed to bring performers, especially rising young artists, together with opera fans in more intimate venues where the singers can perform and engage in conversation afterwards with audience members.
Tickets for That's Amore are $65 single admission or $520 for a table of eight, and may be purchased at Opera SLO. Watch this space for the latest information about the next salon recital, featuring Café musique, on March 9.
The Met Live in HD
Two operas by Verdi are scheduled for broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera's "Live in HD" series during February. Rigoletto will be seen in an encore performance on Sunday, February 17, 2pm; and Un ballo in maschera, also in an encore performance on Sunday, February 24, 2pm.
Rigoletto is generally regarded as a work inaugurating a new phase in Verdi's career, one in which his mastery as a musical dramatist is fully achieved. The story, based on a play by Victor Hugo, Le roi s'amuse, is about a court jester, Rigoletto, ironically a hunchback and a man embittered by life; he hates the Duke he serves, who is a complete libertine and leads a life of debauchery, and the courtiers, whom he regularly insults. But this physically and emotionally deformed man has another quite different side: he is a father who passionately loves his only child, his daughter Gilda, and seeks to protect her from the Duke.
Another father, Count Monterone, has denounced the Duke for dishonoring his daughter, and Rigoletto mocks him, whereon the Count pronounces a curse on Rigoletto. The jester is haunted: it's the curse of one father upon another father.
In the end, Gilda falls prey to the Duke's charms. Rigoletto vows to have him killed, but Gilda, knowing of her father's plans, decides to save the Duke. It is she, not the Duke, who is slain by the assassin's knife; it is she, not the Duke, who lies dying. Rigoletto is horrified to find his daughter in the sack that was to have contained the body of the Duke. She dies quietly, but Rigoletto rages at the curse.
Verdi rightly receives credit for having virtually created the role of the dramatic baritone, and Rigoletto is a prime example of that voice type. He also created especially powerful father figures in his operas, none more powerful than Rigoletto. He was drawn to this character in the original story by its peculiarities. "A hunchback who sings?" he asks. Well, "why not?" In a letter protesting censorship of the proposed libretto, he asserted "the idea of this character, outwardly ridiculous and deformed, inwardly filled with passion and love, is superb."
Verdi poured into this character the full range of his dramatic artistry and gave him exceptional music. In so doing he created much more than an Italian romantic opera; he created a musical and dramatic masterpiece.
Censorship was a fact of life for European writers and musicians – especially opera composers – in the 18th and 19th centuries. Unflattering stories about noblemen or monarchs were always suspect and generally had to be revised to disguise any resemblance to any living persons. Stories about violence committed by or upon a monarch were thought seditious and likely to arouse public sentiment against the ruler. Understandably Verdi had to be careful with Rigoletto, with its portrait of a debauched Duke of Mantua. But if Verdi thought he had trouble with the censorship over the libretto of Rigoletto, he was in for an even rougher fight over the story of Un ballo in maschera.
That story is loosely based in historical fact. In1792 King Gustav III of Sweden was assassinated at a masked ball by an officer named Anckarstrom. The connection with fact ends there. Verdi and his librettist Antonio Somma worked from a libretto by the French master Eugene Scribe. Scribe had introduced various fictional elements to make a good theater piece, chief among them an affair between Gustav and the wife of his close confidant Anckarstrom. Upon discovering the affair, Anckarstrom joins a conspiracy to murder the king.
This libretto had already been composed as an opera by Daniel Francois Auber, one of the leading composers of French grand opera in the 1820s-30s.
Obviously the story of an assassinated monarch less than a hundred years previously was a touchy subject. Add to that a recent attack on a sitting monarch, Emperor Napoleon III, and there was no way Verdi and Somma's libretto would be approved by the censorship, despite their tactful changes in time and place. There was much wrangling on both sides. In the end, Verdi himself suggested the story be moved to North America, Boston colony specifically, and the king transformed into Riccardo, the governor of Boston. In this form it was first performed at the Teatre Apollo in Rome.
And in its "American" form Un ballo was generally performed for some time thereafter. More recently there has been a movement to restore the original setting and characters, and it is in that form that the Met presents it this season.
Enrico Caruso - La donn' e mobile
