vilaine fille

Gianmaria Testa

Gianmaria Testa, one of today’s finest singer-songwriters, makes a rare visit to New York on Sunday, May 25, when he plays Joe’s Pub. Here is my advance on the joint concert by Gianmaria and flugelhorn virtuoso Paolo Fresu from Time Out New York. At Gianmaria’s site, you’ll find part of my 2004 review of his album Altre latitudini.

My 2005 report on a Montréal concert by Gianmaria is one of vilaine fille’s most frequently visited posts. Listen to his music at goear.com—I especially love “Manacore,” “Extra-muros,” and “’Na stella”—and on YouTube.

* * *
One of the very first articles I wrote back in 1997 was on Gianmaria Testa. (In fact, I believe I was the first North American journalist to interview him.)

For the past eleven years, my professional goal has been to land a full-time writing position at a magazine, newspaper, or other publication. Such a position has not materialized, so vilaine fille is closing up shop and moving on to new pursuits. Warmest thanks to all who have visited and supported this site.

vilaine fille will stay live through Labor Day—and “permanently,” if I can obtain free hosting beyond that. I am hanging on to the domain name.

I’m still blogging, but not in English, and only incidentally about music. If you would like to stay informed about my writing projects, please drop me an e-mail at vilaine [{d0t}] fille [{at}] gmail [{d0t}] com. I do plan to launch a new music-related blog in 2009.

To all, thanks and bon vent!

Pensée du dimanche 27 avril

WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
—Walt Whitman

Giuseppe Filianoti: Proust Questionnaire

One of this opera season’s most eagerly anticipated events is just around the corner: the March return to the Met of tenor Giuseppe Filianoti as Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor, the role of his sensational 2005 company début.

Filianoti, who opened yesterday as Tom Rakewell in Palermo (his role début), has been to hell and back since his last local appearance, in OONY’s L’Arlesiana in February 2007—and I’m not referring only to the diabolical operas in which he has sung. On the heels of an acclaimed Rome run of Werther, Filianoti fell gravely ill with peritonitis following an appendectomy and was forced to withdraw from some six months of engagements.

His first performances after his illness—as Hoffmann in Hamburg and in Verdi’s Messa da Requiem in Torino—were popular and critical successes, though Il Corriere della Grisi’s Adolphe Nourrit expressed reservations about the Hoffmann. Opera Today’s critic, instead, praised Filianoti’s “balls-to-the-wall phrases,” of which vilaine fille says: Wow, that must hurt.

Last month’s Mefistofele in Palermo reportedly found the tenor in fine fettle. (Yes, that’s Mefistofele in the photo and not That ‘70s Show). And, as all the world knows, Filianoti will open the 2008-09 La Scala season in the title role of Verdi’s Don Carlo (Italian-language, four-act version) under Daniele Gatti. (vilaine fille’s birthday is the day after Sant’Ambrogio; she is SO there.)

Werther, Hoffmann, Faust, Don Carlo… That’s mighty heavy rep for a young singer. (Soon after his Met début, Filianoti opined that it was “too soon” for him to undertake Don Carlo.) And Edgardo’s tessitura is killing…

En tout cas, we wish Don Peppino a hearty in bocca al lupo and bentornato a New York! Alas, what with the silly set in the new Lucia, he probably will not be able to make his entrance running, with his cape swirling behind him—one of vilaine fille’s most cherished memories from thirty years of opera going. Filianoti also portrays Edgardo in San Francisco later this year. His upcoming performances include, as well, Werther in Genova, La clemenza di Tito in Torino, and Nicias in Thaïs (venue TBA).

Since Don Peppino is that rare tenor who reads Borges and Sgalambro, we thought it only fair to have him answer a version of the Proust questionnaire. (The Italian-language original will appear in print in coming weeks; if it makes its way to the web, I’ll post the link.)

Buona lettura!

Your most marked characteristic?
Determination.

The quality you most like in a man?
Courage.

The quality you most like in a woman?
Intelligence and intuition.

What do you most value in your friends?
Good faith.

What is your principal defect?
Being an introvert.

What is your favorite occupation?
Reading.

What is your dream of happiness?
Living in total serenity.

What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes?
Losing those I love.

What would you like to be?
Alight with wisdom.

In what country would you like to live?
Southern Italy.

What is your favorite color?
Brown.

What is your favorite flower?
All of them.

What is your favorite bird?
The phoenix.

Who are your favorite prose writers?
Too many, I couldn’€™t decide.

Who are your favorite poets?
Dante, Shakespeare, Leopardi, Montale.

Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
Edgardo, Achilles, Aeneas.

Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?
Desdemona, Anna Karenina, Dido.

Who are your favorite composers?
All those whose music I’ve sung along with Britten, Debussy, and Monteverdi.

Who are your favorite painters?
Mantegna, Leonardo, Raffaello, and Caravaggio.

Who are your heroes in real life?
I have none.

Who are your favorite heroines of history?
Joan of Arc, Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

What are your favorite names?
Arianna, Flavio.

What is it you most dislike?
The abuse of power.

What historical figure do you most despise?
Hitler.

What event in military history do you most admire?
None.

What natural gift would you most like to possess?
The ability to read my own soul.

How would you like to die?
I don’€™t think about it.

What is your present state of mind?
In progress (answered in English).

To what faults do you feel most indulgent?
Those belonging to the people dear to my heart.

What is your motto?
Don’€™t borrow trouble.

* * *

Update: La sor romana answers the ever-pressing question, How many tenors does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Francesco Maria Testa

I am so proud and happy to direct you to the new site of Francesco Maria Testa, who is an extraordinary photographer and an even more extraordinary human being.

Hurry—it’s a feast for the eyes and the soul. (Above you see Asciano, in the province of Siena.)

Pensée du dimanche 27 janvier

…Non so chinare la testa,
che non si china la testa,
e non si regala l'intelligenza e la compagnia,
e non è il caso di aspettare,
non è il caso di aspettare
mai più.
Perché la vita non va così,
è la disciplina della Terra…
—Ivano Fossati

Rinat Shaham

I fell in love with Rinat Shaham the artist in 2003, upon seeing her daffy, tender Dorabella in BAM’s Così fan tutte. I fell in love with Rinat Shaham the woman soon after interviewing her for Time Out New York in 2004. She is an earthy, deeply kind, winsome, well-grounded, and (yes) dazzlingly beautiful human being.

Rini is now a cherished friend, so I no longer write about her when I am paid for my scribblings. In 2006, I could not bring myself to blog about her Carmen at New York City Opera—Rini was wonderful, but the show as a whole evinced avert-your-eyes-and-ears awfulness. (I wish that the Met and City Opera would drop Carmen and, for that matter, all French operas from their repertory, until and unless they make a solemn effort to stop doing violence to French music.)

In any event, over the weekend, along with drinking the best coffee I’ve had outside of Italy and visiting not one but two great yarn shops, I once again had the privilege of hearing Rini sing. With the Philadelphia Orchestra, she performed Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 1 (“Jeremiah”), which she repeats Tuesday at Carnegie Hall and Wednesday and Friday in Philadelphia.

Rini lived Bernstein’s music in a way that I’m at a loss to describe. I want to focus on two key words: first, Y’rushalyim (“Jerusalem”), whose sins and widowhood the prophet bemoans. As Rini sang Y’rushalyim, it was sinuous, graceful, and radiant, like a princess—yet mournful. It was at once covered with ashes and lit from within. How many artists can convey such complexity of feeling?

Similarly, the symphony’s penultimate word—Adonai (“Lord”)—unfurled from the hush of veneration to a searing reproach, ever shimmering with awe.

I was so spent after Rini’s performance that I could focus only intermittently on Jennifer Higdon’s The Singing Rooms, a new work for violin, chorus, and orchestra. Jennifer Koh (like Rini, a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music) played with extraordinary ferocity and a kaleidoscopic range of colors.

Higdon set a series of beautiful poems by Jeanne Minahan, and I quote from one of them:

Three windows offer two versions of the day,
the first: cool and sweet, a blue cascade
of watered light,
the second: bright heat barely held back
by the venetian blind…

Both are here, though you
cannot be:
that heat, that long shade of blue.

At Curtis, Rini sang in an alumni recital Brahms’ “Zwei Gesänge,” Op. 91. In “Gestillte Sehnsucht,” her voice took on the rich, dappled colors of the forest, lush in the sunset’s golden glow. In “Geistliches Wiegenlied,” we heard a different voice—maternal, virginal, yet fervently protective of the infant Jesus.

In coming months, Rini repeats her Carmen in Stuttgart, portrays Cherubino in Valencia, reprises the Bernstein in Paris, and makes her La Fenice début as Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia.

Juan Diego Flórez: Arias for Rubini

Here is my Time Out New York review of the latest CD by Don Juan Diego, Arias for Rubini.

Strangely enough, for the xenophobic United States market, the disc seems to have acquired an additional title, Voce d’Italia. (I mean, let’s give credit where it is due: Voz del Perú, no? Yeah, well, that probably wouldn’t appeal to the Fendi-and-Lambrusco crowd.)

View the trailer here. Go here to read the booklet note by the great Philip Gossett. Listen to Arnoldo’s cabaletta from Guglielmo Tell here. Read reviews and articles at the indispensable Voce di tenore site.

Grazie, Don Juan Diego!

Best of 2007

Maestro Luisi con la splendida Leonie

Newsday asked me to put together lists of 2007’s best opera performances and CDs. As published on the Web, the two lists became intermingled and scrambled, so I offer you here a corrected and illustrated version.

My top pick was easy:

Verdi, Simon Boccanegra, the Metropolitan Opera
To hear Fabio Luisi conduct Verdi is a musical highlight not only of a season but of a lifetime. To hear him lead one of Verdi’s supreme masterworks with a superb cast (Hampson, Gheorghiu, Furlanetto, Giordani) is a gift beyond price. Please, Mr. Gelb, bring back Luisi early and often.

Puccini, Suor Angelica, the Metropolitan Opera
Within the Euro Disney treacle that was Jack O’Brien’s staging of Il trittico, Barbara Frittoli shone as Suor Angelica, turning in a performance that was vocally radiant and dramatically sober yet shattering.

Puccini, Madama Butterfly, the Metropolitan Opera
In New York, Madama Butterfly is an opera mounted with mind-numbing regularity and without distinction. This fall’s revival of Anthony Minghella’s Met production proved an exception, showcasing Patricia Racette’s for-the-ages portrayal of the title role, sung fearlessly, with a wide-open heart and devastating impact.

Barber, Vanessa, New York City Opera
Samuel Barber’s 1958 score is a hothouse flower among operas—fragrant, fragile, swooning—that deserves a hearing from time to time. City Opera’s rock-solid cast, starring Lauren Flanigan, Katherine Goeldner and Richard Stilwell under Anne Manson’s probing leadership, made the strongest possible case for this mid-century artifact.

Verdi, Macbeth, the Metropolitan Opera
Some of the twentieth century's greatest Verdi baritones—including Piero Cappuccilli and Renato Bruson—sang infrequently at the Met. Zeljko Lucic, a below-the-radar Serbian artist, was a soulful, vocally faultless Macbeth worthy of comparison with the best in Adrian Noble’s trainwreck of a production.

Contre mon gré, I had to make a pick for worst opera of 2007. You can read about it here. (By the way, the word I used, advisedly, was “dreck,” not “rubbish,” though I suppose “dross” would have been the best choice.)

And now for the recordings. (I was not allowed to choose DVDs.) Again, the first choice was a no-brainer.

Karlheinz Stockhausen: Stimmung, Paul Hillier, Theatre of Voices (Harmonia Mundi)
“Stimmung” in German can mean “tuning” or “vibe.” Hillier and his forces bring to hypnotic life this trippy, magical work from 1968 exploring the boundaries between music and noise, meaning and nothingness.

Cecilia Bartoli, Maria (Decca)
She yodels, she spits out machine-gun-style coloratura, she floats and soars in some of the most sublime music written for the female voice: Cecilia Bartoli pays tribute to the irrepressible nineteenth-century diva Maria Malibran. Your ears will never be the same.

Osvaldo Golijov, Oceana, Robert Spano, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus (Deutsche Grammophon)
The prize of this collection of Golijov’s music is soprano Dawn Upshaw’s fierce, blindingly beautiful performance of “Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra” (2001-02), including the haunting “Lúa descolorida.”

Maria Callas: Complete Studio Recordings (EMI Classics)
A 70-CD set, attractively priced at $169.98 (with sharp discounts available online), offering more than two dozen complete operas and scores of arias sung by the greatest musical interpreter of the twentieth century: What’s not to like?

Trio Mediaeval, Folk Songs (ECM)
Best known for their cool, diaphanous performances of ancient and contemporary sacred works, Oslo’s Trio Mediaeval here let their hair down in earthier, more percussive music from their native Norway, sung with their trademark flawless intonation and rapturous beauty.

Finally, I made three hot picks for 2008. Buon ascolto!

Verdi, Ernani, the Metropolitan Opera (March-April)
Verdi’s seething youthful masterpiece, last heard at the Met in 1985, promises to blaze with a blockbuster cast led by Sondra Radvanovsky, today’s finest Verdi soprano, and the patrician bass Ferruccio Furlanetto under Roberto Abbado.

Bernstein: The Best of All Possible Worlds (September–December)
When Leonard Bernstein died in 1990, New York’s light and soul dimmed. Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic bring back some of the great man’s glow in what would have been his 90th year and the 50th anniversary of his appointment as the Philharmonic’s music director. Dozens of concerts, film screenings, musical theater, and educational and family offerings include gala events led by Michael Tilson Thomas, Marin Alsop and future Philharmonic music director Alan Gilbert.

Beethoven, Complete String Quartets, Miller Theatre (February – March)
The Pacifica Quartet complete their traversal of Beethoven’s mind-bending, life-changing works for string quartet with nine free lunchtime concerts at Columbia University's Philosophy Hall: at 12:30 pm on February 11–13, 25–27, and March 10–12.

What I did during my blog vacation

Sorry for the thin posts of late! I’m very busy these days, with a nearly two-hour daily commute to “work,” a new and passionately absorbing avocation, and the resumption of my former gym-bunny ways (must… get… that… endorphin… fix!).

Oh, yes, and I’m trying to have a bit of a life.

Some of my recently published work:

• My Newsday review of NYCO’s Vanessa
• My Newsday advance on the Berlin in Lights festival
• My Newsday review of the Met’s Macbeth
• My Newsday review of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Miller Theatre Composer Portrait (now in the archives, zut)
• My TONY roundup of monster deals in classical music, including Juilliard’s upcoming Comte Ory, New York’s operatic event of the year as far as I’m concerned. (Note that I haven’t recently heard Cheryl Evans, to whom I extend best wishes, and that I try never to mix food and music. An editor added the bit about Caffè Taci.)
• My TONY review of Mozart’s Don Giovanni led by René Jacobs. It did not rock my world à la the Jacobs Nozze di Figaro.
• My TONY roundup of sights and blights among New York classical and opera venues. I like Japan Society best. How about you?

A younger friend persuaded me to sign up for Facebook. Here’s how I’m doing:

Please forgive the crowing: On days when I’m dragging and discouraged, this immensely silly thing rejoices the cockles of my heart. Thank you.

I hope to post soon about Rufus Wainwright’s “Release the Stars” tour (which I caught in Montréal, back in August!!) and Patricia Racette’s overwhelming portrayal of Madama Butterfly. I’m doing my best here!

P.S. Did I mention laryngitis? Blech.

Pensée du dimanche 11 novembre

Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.
—Walter Pater