SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 6TH Gordon,The Grapes of Wrath For opera programming on WWUH this has certainly been the year of Ricky Ian Gordon (b. 1952). Today will be the third time in 2015 that I will be broadcasting a recording of one of his operas, not to mention airing various recordings of his many songs. First, on the Sunday of the Memorial Day weekend, came his Civil War ballad opera Rappahannock County (2011), as produced by Virginia Opera (Naxos CD's). Then, in celebration of Christopher Street Liberation Day I broadcast on the 46th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion, Sunday June 28th, what Gordon simply calls "27",setting forth the story of those iconic lesbian lovers Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. The world premiere recording of "27" in its 2012 St. Louis Opera premiere production came out on Albany Records. Out as of 2008 on three PS Classics compact discs is Gordon's operatic take on the famous novel by John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath. Michael Korie wrote the libretto: you may remember his name as the librettist for Stewart Wallace's historical/biographical opera Harvey Milk (1997).

     I broadcast the Telarc CD's of Wallace's work as special gay pride programming on Sunday, June 20th,1999. PS Classics offers us the audio part of the 2007 Minnesota Opera production of The Grapes of Wrath. It was recorded live in performance at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts. Grant Gershon conducts the Minnesota Opera Orchestra and Chorus. The large singing cast includes Met veteran mezzo Rosalind Elias and baritone Robert Orth, who took the title role in Harvey Milk. This lyric theatrical treatment of Steinbeck's book makes perfect listening on the Sunday of the Labor Day holiday weekend.

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 13TH Mozart,Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail ("The Abduction from the Seraglio,' 1782) This Mozart opera is the greatest example of a special subgenre of lyric theater in the eighteenth century; the "Turkish" opera. Often comic in nature, such operas presented a love story/rescue melodrama and were set in some Levantine location. Practically every composer of any stature in Mozart's time tried his hand at Turkish opera. Mozart's 'Abduction" is also a Singspiel, an 18th century form of German popular musical comedy with spoken dialog. There are plenty of good recordings of "The Abduction" around. On Sunday, October 4,1992 I broadcast a Sony Classical release recorded in Vienna in 1991. Bruno Weil conducted the Vienna Symphony and the chorus of the Vienna State Opera. An American soprano Cheryl Studer sang the role of the abducted European girl Konstanze. The British label L'Oiseau Lyre (a subdivision of Decca) came out with a recording of Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail on two CD's in 1990. Recorded in London that year, a British soprano Lynn Dawson was cast as Konstanze. The most interesting character in this Mozart opera is Osmin, the overseer of the Pasha's harem. Here the role is taken by a German basso, Gunther von Kannen. Writing for Fanfare magazine (Mar/Apr,'92 issue), James Kamner was forced to admit he really liked the L'Oiseau Lyre "Abduction." "It is by far the best performance on records...I have never been a proponent of original instruments, nor do I worship at the altar of "authenticity." But...for this reviewer, L'Oiseau Lyre's Entfuhrung represents the first completely successful recording of a Mozart opera utilizing original instruments. Chief credit for its success must go to the conductor Christopher Hogwood..." Hogwood leads the period instrument ensemble he founded, the Academy of Ancient Music Orchestra,as well as the Academy's Chorus.

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 20TH Rameau,Castor et Pollux Jean Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) should rank alongside Bach and Handel as their equal and a true musical genius of the eighteenth century. He is surely the greatest composer of the French baroque. I have broadcast as many recordings of his operas as I could find. Although he began writing for the lyric stage in France at the advanced age of fifty, his output of tragedies lyriques,ballet divertissements,etc. was prolific right to the very end of his long life. He had a background as a musical theorist. He wrote a famous treatise on harmony. He is also credited with discovering overtones. Rameau marked the path leading to the modern science of acoustics. As a composer he was a musical progressive stylistically advanced beyond his colleagues Bach and Handel. Central to his operatic output is the tragedie en musique in five acts Castor et Pollux (1737). Twice in years long past I have broadcast the 1972 Telefunken recording of the original 1737 version of the lyric tragedy, first on LP's (Sunday, June 12,1988) and again in the 1987 CD reissue (Sunday, November 8,1992). That pioneer in baroque "period" performance practice Nikolaus Harnoncourt was directing the period instrument ensemble he founded, the Concentus Musicus Vienna and the Stockholm Chamber Choir. Rameau radically reworked his score for Castor et Pollux for its 1754 staged revival. He cut the lengthy prologue altogether. It was by then a royal courtly holdover from the Lullian past, no longer relevant in the public theaters of Paris. He provided a completely new first act and upgraded the rest of the music into an even more progressive mode. Along came a Naxos release in 2004 of the 1754 Castor et Pollux, with Kevin Mallon leading a Canadian period instrumental group, the Aradia Ensemble. The 1754 version went over the air on Sunday, May 22,2005. And now a new recording of the 1754 version has appeared, made live in broadcast performance over Radio France Montpelier in 2014. (The two previous recordings were done in studio.) Raphael Pichon directs the orchestra and chorus of Pygmalion. Harmonia Mundi of France released Castor et Pollux this year on two compact discs.

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 27TH Keiser,Pomona Apples and pears are ripe now and dropping from the bough. Pomona is the name the ancient Romans gave to the fruit tree nymph. There is a Tuscan legend about her and her male consort, the shape-shifter spirit Vertumnus. These two figures, along with the more familiar classical deities, were taken up into a delightful baroque operatic pastorale,"The Triumph of Fruitful Pomona" (1702) by Reinhard Keiser (1674-1739). Keiser helped to bring German opera into being. He wrote operas for Hamburg's "Goose Market" theater, but this pastoral piece, styled an operetta, was written as a celebratory entertainment for the birthday of Friedrich IV, King of Denmark. (The Free City of Hamburg cultivated good relations with Denmark.) Scored for nine singers and nine instrumentalists, this is really a chamber opera in scale. It may remind you of the masque Acis and Galatea (1718) by Handel. What is presumably the world premiere recording of Keiser's Der Sieg der fruchtbaren Pomona was made in 2010 in co-production with Deutschlandradio Kultur. The singers and players of the Capella Orlandi Bremen were directed by Thomas Ihlenfeldt. The German cpo label released Pomona in 2014 on two compact discs. Pomona follows my broadcast on Sunday, June 27th,2004 of Keiser's Croesus (1710/rev 1730), performed by the Clemencic Consort (Nuova Era CD's, 1990).

SUNDAY OCTOBER 4TH Schumann, Genoveva From opera of the German baroque we spring forward in time to the romantic era in mid nineteenth century Germany. Genoveva (1850) was Robert Schumann's one and only opera. It was staged in Leipzig with moderate success. Despite the decline of his physical health and mental powers, Schumann managed to put a lot of his finest music into Genoveva. The overture has been frequently performed and recorded on its own. On the face of it, Genoveva is a medieval romance, but Schumann insisted his opera was "...not the sentimental tale of old." As a lyric drama it is psychologically quite modern, more along the lines of Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande, a work of the early twentieth century. Genoveva was recorded in its entirety for the first time in 1976 in the city where it originally premiered. Kurt Masur conducted the orchestra of the Leipzig Gewandhaus and chorus of Radio Berlin. Soprano Edda Moser sang the title role. Genoveva is the wife of Count Siegfried of the Palitinate.The Count was the late legendary baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Other contemporaneous vocal greats were in the cast. Tenor Peter Schreier was one of them. Just this year the Dutch label Brilliant Classics reissued Genoveva on two compact discs, licensed to do so by the German record company Edel.

SUNDAY OCTOBER 11TH Rossini,La Gazza Ladra The magpie is a European bird resembling a crow that has a chattering, screeching call and a curious habit of flying off with small, shiny objects. 'The Thieving Magpie" was the title given to a French melodrama about a humble servant girl who was sentenced to death for a theft she did not commit. The mischievous birdie screeches out the girl's name in accusation. In the end it's revealed that the magpie was the real culprit. "The Thieving Magpie" or "The Servant Girl of Paliseau" was enormously popular in Napoleonic times. In short order the play was adapted for the operatic stage. Gioacchino Rossini set it to music to an Italian language libretto as La Gazza Ladra (1817). Rossini's operatic version of the story has the obligatory happy ending and injected some comic and folksy elements, hence the Italians thought of it as an opera semiseria. Rossini's music for La Gazza Ladra is admired today for its pathos, highlighting the tragic over the buffo component of that hybrid form. There's a new recording of La Gazza Ladra in circulation. It was made live in performance at the twenty first annual Rossini in Wildbad Summer Festival in 2009. The recording was co-produced by Southwest German Radio on location in Bad Wildbad, Germany. Alberto Zedda leads an orchestra brought in for the production from the Czech Republic, the Virtuosi Brunensis who hail from the city of Brno or Brunn in what was once the province known as Moravia. Zedda has prepared a new critical edition of Rossini's score for "The Magpie." The Classica Choir of Brno also took part in the musical proceedings. The cast of vocal soloists assembled for this production was truly international. This is a long opera, put into a three-CD Naxos set which hit the market earlier this year. An older recording I have broadcast twice previously, in 1991 and 2002, likewise filled out three Sony Classical compact discs (Gelmetti, Radio Turin co-prod.,Teatro Rossini).

SUNDAY OCTOBER 18TH Vinci, Catone in Utica Leonardo Vinci (1696?-1730) lived an even shorter life than Mozart, but he wrote many more operas than the Austrian child prodigy: at least forty works for the lyric stage, some of them comedies in Neapolitan dialect that were the forerunners of the Italian opera buffa. A musical progressive, Vinci developed a style that was moving from the late baroque into the pre-classical. His twenty-or- so opere serie have long lain forgotten. I was overjoyed to discover one of them has received its world premiere recording for the Decca label, released this year on three silver discs. Catone in Utica (1728) has a libretto by Pietro Metastasio, who back then was also considered a progressive. This particular opera seria was intended for an opera house in Rome, where the Pope had banned female singers from the stage. So the entire cast of Catone consisted of male voices. The female roles were taken by the soprano-voiced castrati. It's amazing to me that, I guess for reasons of historical authenticity, the six cast members in the Decca recording are all men. Three of them are countertenors in place of the 18th century geldings. The cast is backed by an Italian period instrument ensemble, Il Pomo d'Oro, directed by Riccardo Minasi. Lovers of baroque opera will remember my broadcast on Sunday, November 17, 2013 of Vivaldi's Catone in Utica (1737), in its reconstructed score by musicologist Alessandro Ciccolini (Opus 111 CD's in their 'Vivaldi Edition" series).

SUNDAY OCTOBER 25TH Wagner,Der fliegende Hollander ("The Flying Dutchman,"1843) My Halloweentide offering tells the tale of the cursed and storm-tossed Dutch sea captain whose tortured soul is redeemed by the sacrificial love of a merciful young woman. As with all his operas, Wagner wrote his own libretto for 'The Dutchman," taking elements from a gothic romance about a phantom ship. (An English language play on that subject seems to have inspired the German poet Heinrich Heine.) This is one Wagner opera that is not too long for my 210 minute timeslot. It was only three years ago at Halloweentide that I last broadcast "The Dutchman," employing one of the German Pentatone label's issues of all the famous Wagner operas in celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the composer's birth in 2013. All those Pentatone releases were recorded as concert productions at the Philharmonie hall in Berlin,with Marek Janowski conducting the musical forces. These productions were broadcast over Radio Berlin. Now listen to another recent concert production of Der fliegende Hollander from the Concertgebouw hall in Amsterdam. It was recorded live in performance there in May of 2013. Thinking of the phantom ship's docking at Sandviken in Norway, it's a Norwegian baritone Terje Stensvold who portrays the Dutchman. A young Latvian conductor, Andris Nelsons directs the famous Concertgebouw Orchestra, joined by the combined choruses of Bavarian Radio, West German Radio Cologne and North German Radio. The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of the Netherlands issued the opera under its own RCO label on two compact discs.

     The PS Classics recording of Ricky Ian Gordon's The Grapes of Wrath is one of the three recordings of Gordon's operas that Rob Meehan has loaned to me for broadcast this year. Rob is a former classics deejay at WWUH and a specialist collector of recordings of classical music of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. From my own collection of opera on disc comes Mozart's 'Abduction," Rameau's Castor et Pollux, Keiser's Pomona and Vinci's Catone in Utica. Rossini's "The Thieving Magpie" and Wagner's "Dutchman" are recordings recently added to our WWUH classical music record library. As always I must thank our station's operations director Kevin O'Toole for mentoring me in the preparation of these notes for cyber-publication.

  

The Musical Club of Hartford is a non-profit organization founded over a hundred years ago, in 1891. Membership is open to performers or to those who simply enjoy classical music, providing a network for musicians from the Greater Hartford area.

 

The 125th Anniversary Celebration begins Thursday September 24 with an open house and reception.

 

Concerts

New England Jazz Ensemble presents the premi-ere of a jazz interpretation of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf at Conard High School. Pianist Mariangelo Vacatello and her organist husband Adriano Falcioni will give a joint concert at St. John's Church featuring a collaboration on Stravinsky's Firebird.

 

Musical Exploration

Musical Club history will be on the program, including a film from the 1980's with interviews of and performances by of some past and present members. In another program we will also examine some promising dynamic teaching methods for music students of the future.

 

Member Programs featuring autographed programs from the past

Throughout the year, Musical Club member performances will welcome some famous visitors of the past, as seen through the programs they presented.

 

For further information: http://www.musical-club-of-hartford.org/