Little-known fact no. 1: Antonio Pappano made his conducting debut at the Norwegian National Opera, conducting La Bohème in 1987.Little-known fact no. 2: Antonio Pappano was music director of the Norwegian National Opera in the early 90s.These are probably big reasons as to why he chose to come to this part of the world to celebrate his 25th anniversary as a conductor.
Sometimes an eagerly awaited performance starts out brilliantly, more or less how you thought it would, but then it kind of fizzles out towards the middle, only to return with a vengeance at the end. This was more or less the case with Vasily Petrenko and the Oslo Philharmonic this Thursday.
When one thinks of Haydn, opera really isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. It’s the symphonies, the string quartets, even his oratorios you think of first, not his operas. And yet he wrote 15 of them. L’isola disabitata is the eleventh of the bunch, written for the Eszterházy court in 1779, and it was this opera The Norwegian Opera and Ballet (DNO) chose as their 2012/2013 season opener.
What do you get when you mix an old man with a penchant for younger women, a young woman, her equally young lover and a scheming doctor, and set it all sometime around the 1960s, although you wouldn’t really know it had it not been for the petticoats? A rather successful night at the opera, it would seem.
Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia is, as the title implies, not an easy opera subject-wise. It is based on André Obey’s play Le viol de Lucrèce, which in turn is partially based on Shakespeare’s poem The Rape of Lucrece. This was Britten’s third opera, and the first of his so-called chamber operas, operas with small orchestras and small casts.
Last Thursday’s concert with the Oslo Philharmonic featured four pieces with little or no connection to each other, other than three of the pieces being either written by Spanish-speaking composers or actually being about Spain. Yet, apart from one piece, it all came together into a rather coherent whole.The concert began with Jacques Ibert’s Bacchanale.
How very fitting that the Berlin Philharmonic, an orchestra that claims to be made up of 128 soloists, should start Thursday’s concert and their European tour with perhaps one of the most soloistic orchestral pieces ever written: Ligeti’s Atmosphères.
Thursday’s concert with the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra started not with music, but with an award ceremony. It was the Norwegian Sibelius Society that gave away its annual award for the strengthening of cultural ties between Norway and Finland.
Francis Bacon’s painting Blood on the Floor shows a splash of blood on a wooden floor, surrounded by orange walls with a light bulb and switch above it. This painting originally inspired Mark-Anthony Turnage to write this one-movement piece of the same name, commissioned by the Frankfurt-based Ensemble Modern in 1993 and premièred in 1994.
Vincenzo Bellini’s operas are not among those that are played most often in Norway. This Saturday’s concert performance of I Capuleti e i Montecchi at the Norwegian Opera in Oslo was the second ever to take place in Norway, the first being a concert performance in the Oslo Concert House back in 2001.
The Norwegian Opera and Ballet seems to be developing a thing lately for staging Puccini operas as flashbacks and/or dreams. There is Stefan Herheim’s La bohème from last season, telling the story as part dream, part flashback from the viewpoint of Rodoldo.
What do Schubert’s Third Symphony and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde have in common? Not a whole lot, which is why it came across as rather puzzling that the two pieces should be programmed together. Yet, in the Oslo Philharmonic’s September 6 and 8 concerts, they were. The result was a mixed bag of two wildly different works, written almost a century apart.Schubert’s Symphony no.
