Your "lyric theater" program

with Keith Brown

programming selections

for the months of July and August,  2015 

Sunday 1-4:30pm

SUNDAY JULY 5TH  MacDermot,The Human Comedy The proximity of the Fourth of July holiday calls for opera programming that is trueblue American. The Human Comedy (1984) is a particularly operatic piece of American popular musical theater. It has music, however, by a Canadian lyric theater composer, Terrence Galt MacDermot (b. 1928),  with lyrics by Bill Dumaresq. Galt MacDermot gave the world Hair (1967), the hippie rock musical. The Human Comedy is based on the novel by the same name by American author and playwright William Saroyan (1908-81). Saroyan's story is set in a small town in California called Ithaca in 1942, in an era in American life when people and goods travelled much more by rail than highway. We look in on the joys and sorrows of the Macauley family and other townspeople on the home front in World War Two. News arrives that one of Ithaca's soldier boys has been killed in action. Communications by telegraph figure importantly in the drama. The Human Comedy is a heartfelt tribute to hometown America, with all the nostalgia that clings to the concept. It was produced on Broadway by Joseph Papp and the Shubert Brothers organization. Kilmarnock Records issued the Broadway cast recording on two compact discs. I had originally intended The Human Comedy for broadcast as a "harvest home" presentation on the Sunday before the Thanksgiving holiday of 2014 (Sunday, November,23rd), but that broadcast was preempted on short notice. I think this Broadway show will work perfectly well next to the other great American holiday, Independence Day. 

SUNDAY JULY 12TH Bernstein, West Side Story

Even though it was intended for the popular American musical theater, Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story (1957) is a major contender for the title of The Great American Opera. (Gershwin's Porgy and Bess is, of course, another serious contender.) I have broadcast the entire musical only once before, on Sunday, July 13, 2003, presenting a 2001 studio recording with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, conducted by one of Bernstein's old musical pals, Kenneth Schermerhorn. The Naxos CD release gave us the opportunity to hear Bernstein's complete and more nearly operatic score prior to its subsequent Broadway and film alterations. Today you get to hear West Side Story in a 2013 concert production recorded live in performance in San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall. Michael Tilson Thomas was directing the San Francisco Symphony and members of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. Starring in the cast are singing actors Alexandra Silber as Maria and Cheyenne Jackson as Tony. Bernstein himself did not conduct West Side Story until 1984, when he recorded it for Deutsche Grammophon with a cast of operatically trained singers. Michael Tilson Thomas followed much of the 1984 DGG recording of the work, employing a beefed up adaptation of the Broadway orchestration. So this is a basically a Broadway-style West Side Story with considerable crossover elements of opera. It comes to us on two CD's courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony's own record label.

SUNDAY JULY 19TH Offenbach,Fantasio Viennese operetta actually arose from the mid nineteenth century French opera comique. Jacques Offenbach (1819-80), a German by birth, became the prolific master composer in that Gallic genre in the 1850's. So many of these light operas, first produced in Paris, went directly to the operatic stage in Vienna. The composer himself is quoted as commenting, "I write my music in Paris, but it is in Vienna that I hear it played." Orphee aux Enfers (1858) is certainly one of his most famous works in the bouffe mode. But "Orpheus in the Underworld" is a zany satire, somewhat removed from the true French comic opera. Offenbach's classic creation in that line is Fantasio (1872). Not that Mousset and Nuitter's libretto is any less frivolous than what you'd expect of the genre. Fantasio is a young student who disguises himself as a jester, and in so doing manages to gain the love of a princess. The title role was originally taken by a mezzo, Celestine Galli-Marie, who would shortly go on to become the first Carmen in Bizet's immortal opera. Offenbach's complete score for Fantasio was pieced together from widely scattered and fragmentary source material. The world premiere studio recording, complete with spoken word dialog in French, was released on two compact discs last year by Opera Rara, the British record company dedicated to recovering, restoring, recording and performing the forgotten operatic heritage of the nineteenth century. Sir Mark Elder directs the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightment and Opera Rara Chorus, with a cast of British singers.

SUNDAY JULY 26TH Barry,The Importance of Being Earnest ,Weill,One Touch of Venus Norrmally I reserve the last Sunday in July for broadcast of one of the comic operas in the Gilbert and Sullivan canon. This time around I decided to go with a lyric theatrical entertainment by a contemporary composer from the British Isles with a talent for satire. On Sunday, June 6, 2004 you heard a sendup of Handel's oratorio The Triumph of Time and Truth, turned on its head in BBC TV production as The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit (1993) by Gerald Barry (b. 1952). Barry has adapted Oscar Wilde's comedy The Importance of Being Earnest into an opera that was recorded live in performance by BBC Radio Three in 2012.I aired an old Angel LP recording of Wilde's complete play, starring Sir John Gielgud and Dame Edith Evans, on Sunday, May 17, 1992. Barry's satirical tweaking of the original play allows for some gender variant wackiness. The allegorical figure of Beauty in his Handelian sendup was a tenor,that is to say a fey and vainglorious male vocalist in place of a pulchritudinous female. In his takeoff on Wilde's comedy the dowager Lady Bracknell is a bass, ie. a mature male vocalist wearing a kilt. Barry's Importance craziness got its perfect treatment from seven Brit singing soloists, with one speaking role, backed by the instrumental ensemble of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. The singers and players were conducted by Thomas Ades, a composer in his own right, the creator of an operatic satire dealing with the British aristocracy, Powder Her Face (1995), the world premiere recording of which went over the air on this program on Sunday, June 16, 2002, with the composer conducting. Earnest the opera was released on a single compact disc through the British NMC label.

   There will be time remaining this afternoon to hear some of the best of American musical theater from its golden age in the 1940's. No, not Rogers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma, which opened on Broadway in 1943. No,something much more classy that opened at the Imperial Theater later that same year: One Touch of Venus, with music by Kurt Weill, the book and lyrics by S. J. Perelman and Ogden Nash. The story of this musical centers upon a statue of Venus, goddess of love, that comes to life. Weill wanted his fellow exile from Nazi Germany, Marlene Dietrich, to play Venus. Much to his chagrin, Dietrich turned the role down. A new Broadway star-on-the-rise, Mary Martin, was chosen instead. For this first complete recording of One Touch of Venus it was Melissa Errico who portrayed the goddess. She was part of the Encores! Troupe who revived One Touch of Venus in our time. This show was the closest approach of the American popular musical to European operetta. Opera North produced it for the first time ever in the UK in 2004. Jay Productions, Ltd. Of the UK released One Touch of Venus on two silver discs in 2014. Taking part in the recording was the National Symphony Orchestra conducted by John Owen Edwards and James Holmes.   

SUNDAY AUGUST 2ND  Rossini, La Pietra del Paragone  The seventh opera of Gioacchino Rossini, La Pietra del Paragone ("The Touchstone," 1812), was his first truly great opera buffa. It catapulted the composer into international fame. In Italy the fact that it premiered at the nation's foremost opera house, La Scala in Milan, assured that Rossini would become the leading opera composer among all other rivals in the field. Rossini was only twenty years old at the time. He could have been drafted into the Napoleonic army, but it seems Napoleon's viceroy in in Italy specifically exempted the young musical genius from military service. Although audiences all over Europe raved about this comic opera, it and so many other Rossini operas fell out of the repertoire for more than a century. La Scala revived it in 1959. There's a studio recording of it made in 1973 for the Vanguard label. The recording followed a staging at Lincoln Center in New York City, which was the first complete and authentic performance of "The Touchstone" since circa 1812. The Vanguard studio production works from Rossini's autograph score, with all the musical numbers in proper sequence. The singing cast features a young tenor Jose Carreras as Giocondo the poet. Newell Jenkins conducts the Clarion Concerts Orchestra and Chorus. I last broadcast the three Vanguard stereo LP's way back on Sunday, August 18,1985. I employ those same vintage vinyl discs again today.    

SUNDAY AUGUST 9TH Leo,Amor Vuol Sofferenza The origins of the Italian opera buffa can be traced to Naples in the 1730's, where three young progressive composers, Leonardo Vinci,Leonardo Leo (1694-1744) and Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, were creating a new style of Neapolitan comic opera. Leonardo Leo's Amor Vuol Sofferenza ("Love Requires Suffering," 1739) was enormously popular and was revived again and again in the mid eighteenth century. Furthermore, it served as a model for later Neapolitan opera composers like Paisiello and Cimarosa. Amor Vuol Sofferenza received its world premiere recording during a live performance given in commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the birth of the composer. Leo's commedia per musica was produced for the twentieth annual Festival della Valle d'Itria in 1994. Daniele Moles conducts the Nuova Orchestra Scarlotti di Napoli with a cast of seven singers. It's been almost exactly fourteen years since that Sunday in August when I aired Amor Vuol Sofferenza. Almost exactly four years ago I broadcast another comic opera by Leonardo Leo, L'Alidoro (1740), which was recorded for the Italian label Dynamic at another festival-the one at Reggio Emilia. I hope you will enjoy hearing "Love Requires Suffering" again this Sunday as brought to you on two Nuova Era compact discs.                        

SUNDAY AUGUST 16TH Strauss,Jakuba This is Johann Strauss' "Serbian" operetta, the fourteenth of his sixteen works for the lyric stage, its composition inspired by the quintessential Bohemian comic opera,Smetana's 'The Bartered Bride." Jakuba,oder Das Afpelfest (1894) was commissioned for Vienna's public celebration of fifty years of Strauss' career as a composer. The Waltz King incorporated polka and mazurka tunes into his Slavic operetta, and it has some splendid choruses, too. The setting of Jakuba is in the Balkans, in a little town in Serbia, where matchmaking goes on at the annual apple festival. According to custom, a girl bites into an apple, gives it to her chosen suitor and, if he,too, takes a bite they are considered partners.The staging of Jakuba during the 1894 Strauss Week was a triumph. The dances from Jakuba were played all over Vienna and beyond. However, over time Strauss' Serbian operetta became obscured by the international fame of Die Fledermaus and "The Gypsy Baron." Jakuba received its world premiere recording in 2005 in the Czech Republic. The native Viennese operetta specialist Christian Pollack was called upon to lead the European Johann Strauss Orchestra (actually members of the Brno Symphony Orchestra) and the Gaudeamus Choir of Brno. The entire singing cast was brought in from Vienna. Naxos Records issued Jakuba on two CD's in 2007 in its "Operetta Classics" series. 

SUNDAY AUGUST 23RD Lehar, Wo die Lerche Singt Among Franz Lehar's many bittersweet operettas of his later period, this one is really obscure. It is the only one of his twenty two stageworks to premiere not in Vienna or Berlin, but in Budapest. Titled in Hungarian A Pacsirta, its 1918 production in the capital city of Hungary was an immediate hit and shortly thereafter it went on to Vienna, where it was reset in German language as Wo die Lerche Singt and became even more popular. War weary Hungarian and Austrian audiences alike found in "Where the Lark Sings" a sweet diversion from the woes of the collapsing Hapsburg empire. (Thinking of birds, Lehar's librettists Willner and Reichert also wrote the German language original of Puccini's La Rondine, "The Swallow.") For an awful long time there had been only one recording ever made of Wo die Lerche Singt. Of great historical interest, it documents a studio performance broadcast over ORF Radio Austria in 1942, with Lehar himself conducting. The WWII era broadcast was preserved on very early Magnetophone magnetic tape. The old aircheck tapes were digitally upgraded and issued in CD format through the Bel Age record label. I broadcast the Bel Age discs on Sunday, March 9,1997. It was a joy to discover that there's a new German cpo label recording of the operetta, available as of 2014 on two silver discs. This one captures the audio part of a revival stage production at the 2013 Lehar Festival in Bad Ischl, Austria. Marius Burkert conducts the Franz Lehar Orchestra and Lehar Festival Chorus, with a  cast of Central European vocal soloists. The Hungarian-style melodies Lehar wrote for "Where the Lark Sings" are ravishing. Let your ears savor them on a laidback late summer's afternoon.

SUNDAY AUGUST 30TH Delius, Koanga  Every year at this time I make sure to broadcast one of the seven operas of Frederick Delius (1862-1934), in part because I think the music of this, "The English Debussy" so beautifully evokes the mood of the lazy, hazy end of summertime. Since I began lyric theater broadcasting back in the Summer of 1982 I have gone through several complete cycles of the Delius operas. This summer we come back to Koanga (1904), in which Delius fashioned a Creole tragedy for the lyric stage based upon American writer George Cable's book The Grandissime. Delius introduced the element of conflict between Christianity and the Voodoo religion into the libretto he himself prepared. Delius spent a crucial period in his artistic development in the American Southland. He was tremendously inspired by the hymnsinging of the humble Black folk. Koanga premiered in Germany with its libretto translated into German by Delius' wife Jelka. The English language libretto was never entirely satisfactory to begin with, and the opera has suffered for it. Koanga, for all its lush, humid atmospheric beauty, was quickly forgotten. The Washington Opera Society revived it in 1970 with a revised and improved wordbook. Two of the vocal principals in the staged revival sang for the world premiere recording released through EMI on Angel LP's in the United States in 1974. Baritone Eugene Holmes held forth in the title role as Koanga, the African prince and Voodoo priest. Soprano Claudia Lindsey took the role of the mulatto slave woman Palmyra. Bass Raymond Herincx portrayed Don Jose Martinez the plantation owner. Sir Charles Groves conducted  the London Symphony Orchestra and John Alldis Choir. In EMI's vaults there exists another previously unreleased live recording of Koanga made at the Camden Festival in England in 1972. Again Groves leads the London Symphony. This is in fact the earlier of the two potential world premiere recordings of the opera. Sonically it is slightly inferior, with its occasional audience noise, when compared to the later studio taping. It has, however, the excitement and immediacy of live performance in its favor, and it has the lead voices of Holmes and Lindsey. An Italian record label, Intaglio, obtained access to the Camden Festival tapes, and issued the 1972 English production of Koanga on two compact discs in 1993. This will be the sixth time in my broadcast cycles of the Delius operas that I have presented this work, the fifth time being on Sunday, August 30, 2009. Keep listening for a recording of Delius' masterpiece Seadrift (1908), a setting of the poetry of Walt Whitman, for chorus, orchestra and

baritone soloist.

    The majority of the featured recordings in this two month period of programming come out of my own collection of opera on disc: Offenbach's Fantasio, Weill's One Touch of Venus,Amor Vuol Sofferenza by Leonardo Leo, Jakuba by Johann Strauss and "Where the Lark Sings," the Lehar operetta, not to forget this year's Delius opera, Koanga. Borrowed for broadcast from the record collection of Rob Meehan are Galt MacDermot's The Human Comedy and The Importance of Being Earnest by Gerald Barry. Rob Meehan is a former classics deejay here at WWUH and a specialist in the alternative musical stylings of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. That leaves only Bernstein's West Side Story, which is derived from our station'sever-growing library of recorded classical music. Thanks as always to Rob Meehan and thanks yet again to our station's operations director Kevin O'Toole for mentoring me in the preparation of these notes for cyber-publication.