Florentine Opera Company Blog

William Florescu

It gives me great pleasure to share with you our 2013-2014 Season. As the nation’s 6th oldest opera company celebrates the Italian heritage that gave birth to the world’s finest art form and Milwaukee’s professional opera company, I encourage you to consider a season subscription to the Florentine.

We will begin our 80th season with one of opera’s most captivating tales by its most treasured composer: Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata (November 8 & 10, 2013). We continue our season with a Valentine’s Day weekend concert of cherished Italian arias and Italian-American songs: Festa Fiorentina (February 14, 15 & 16, 2014). Next, we bring you Handel’s most iconic opera in a brand new production: Julius Caesar (March 28 & 30, 2014). This monumental season will come to its finale with Puccini’s tragic tale of young love: La Bohème (May 9 & 11, 2014).

As a season ticket subscriber, you will receive the best seats at the best prices. Early purchases will receive the highest discount available. You won’t want to miss a moment, so subscribe today for our 80th anniversary season of Italian opera classics.

- FO General Director William Florescu will stage direct productions of La Traviata and La Bohème in 2013-2014.

Le Nozze di Figaro was composed in 1786, based on a stage play by Pierre Beaumarchais, and is subtitled La folle journée, or the day of madness. After writing this successful opera, Mozart reused musical phrases within the overture to Cosi fan tutte, the second act of Don Giovanni and within the Agnus Dei of his Coronation Mass.  In recent years, the opera The Ghosts of Versailles used elements from both Beaumarchais and Mozart. Recycling was in fashion long before we thought about it!

This would lead me to say that everything old is new again, and that would certainly be true of this opera. The themes of loves folly and fidelity are as much a part of our romantic journeys as they were in Mozart’s day. The lovesick Cherubino, the arrogant Count, the long suffering Countess and the sexually harassed Susannah can be found in any of today’s entertainments or in the next cubicle at your office.

I’m often asked, “What do you want the audience to take away from this performance?” My answer to that is always, “What they wish!” My task and joy as a director is to tell the story well and let the audience find their own moments of identification. Whether you see this opera when you are about to become engaged, are recovering from a nasty break-up or are celebrating a loving long-standing relationship, you will find your own messages. That’s the timelessness of great art and it’s always worth ‘recycling.’

I look forward to making my Florentine opera debut with the spectacular work!

For a biography of Ms. Evans click here.

William Florescu is General Director for the Florentine Opera Company and the Stage Director of this new production of ALBERT HERRING.

This piece and its composer hold special significance for me, and I would like to share what may seem like some random reasons why – so please bear with me.

1) I have been a confirmed anglophile for more years than I can remember. The first phase of this culminated in a year of post-graduate study in London.  It was only after studying there that I learned from my parents (I am adopted) that I am actually half English – this certainly explained why they had been so supportive of me going there to study.

2) The old “six degrees of separation” reason.  One of my teachers, John Shirley-Quirk, sang in most of Britten’s important premieres from the mid-sixties on, so I feel that I am connected to that tradition closely.  In addition, I had the privilege of singing for and getting to spend some time with tenor Peter Pears (the original Albert Herring, and Britten’s life partner).

3) I had the pleasure of singing the role of Sid in Albert Herring, directed by my directing mentor Roger Stephens, who passed away recently.  This fact gives this opera added poignancy for me.

4) David Lloyd, the long time General Director of Lake George Opera, was one of my predecessors at my last company before coming to the Florentine.  He sang the title role of Albert in the American premiere at Tanglewood in 1949.  He also passed away recently, so these performances have added significance for me in that way as well.

Even without the above reasons, I would love this piece, because of all of its intrinsic value as a piece of music theatre.  Indeed, I believe it to be one of the, if not the best comic opera of the 20^th century.  I believe this because, just like those other great operatic comedies – Falstaff, The Marriage of Figaro (our next opera), and Die Mesitersinger, the comedy is infused with and informed by, real human emotion.  Comedy is able to speak to the human condition in a way that tragedy is often not able.

For video excerpts and comment from the director click here.

A Note from the Florentine’s guest lecturer

by Corliss Phillabaum

The tremendous success of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes at its 1945 premiere by London’s Sadler’s Wells Opera prompted many critics to hail the emergence of Britain’s first major opera composer since Henry Purcell. Britten was certainly eager to build on this success but he was faced with the grim reality that the market for new operas in England and elsewhere was limited, especially in a world just emerging from the devastation of World War II. Internal politics at Sadler’s Wells made new operas unwelcome and England’s only other opera company with the resources to produce full-scale operas, Covent Garden, also showed no interest in new works. However Britten was not only a multi-talented musician (composer, pianist, conductor), he was also a resourceful and talented administrator, and he drew on all of these skills to create his own solution: together with two associates, he founded his own opera company, the English Opera Group.

The concept of a touring opera company devoted to performing new operas written for small forces was suggested by Britten’s next opera, The Rape of Lucretia, which was written for a small cast of soloists, no chorus, and a chamber orchestra of a dozen players. It had been produced in 1946 in the intimate opera house of the Glyndebourne Festival. The possibilities of such a ‘chamber opera’, as Britten called it, shaped the ideas of Britten and his two associates, Eric Crozier (director of the first production of Peter Grimes) and the designer John Piper in forming their new company.

For his next opera, to be written with touring in mind, Britten wanted to write a comedy. Crozier suggested adapting a French short story by Guy de Maupassant, Le Rosier de Madame Husson, with the action transplanted to Britten’s native Suffolk, and ended up writing the libretto himself. Britten scored the opera for the same vocal and instrumental forces as Lucretia, and it was first produced at the Glyndebourne Festival in 1947. Both operas were subsequently staged in repertory by the new English Opera Group and toured in England and on the Continent. In addition to more operas by Britten, the company also commissioned and produced eleven new operas by other British composers over its three decades of activity and had a major influence on opera in England.

As in virtually all of Britten’s operas, the central character in Albert Herring is an outsider, someone who doesn’t fit in with the norms of a conservative society. In this case, however, a repressed mama’s boy is praised for his extreme ‘purity’ as (apparently) the only virtuous young person it town, with the unexpected result that he overcomes his inhibitions and breaks out for a wild night on the town. In de Maupassant’s original story the outcome is tragic as his Isidore becomes a hopeless alcoholic, but in Crozier and Britten’s version the ending is strongly positive.

Crozier’s libretto is both witty and singable and Britten’s music vividly characterizes the various town leaders both vocally and in the imaginative orchestration. The opera is a true ensemble work in which every singer has rewarding musical and dramatic moments and every instrumentalist has significant moments in the musical spotlight. Britten and his librettist poke affectionate and sharp-witted fun at their self-important pillars of small town society, but the serious overtones of the story and the treatment of Albert and his friends are both warm-hearted and genuinely moving. Britten’s comedy, created out of necessity, has deservedly become one of the most frequently produced of all 20th Century operas.

A Note from the Maestro

by Maestro Joseph Rescigno

The great familiarity that audiences have with a beloved work like Carmen results in their bringing steamer trunks of baggage to it. The ongoing challenge for performers—especially for those who have performed it many times—is to cut through this familiarity and re-present the magic that caused this opera to become the most popular in the French repertoire. If you love Carmen, you are not alone. Johannes Brahms is reported to have attended Carmen twenty times in 1876 alone. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky called it “one of the most perfect operas of our day” in an 1878 letter.

The Maestro will conduct for CARMEN on October 26 & 28, 2012 at the Marcus Center

It is a difficult piece to perform, not so much in a technical sense, but stylistically and emotionally. It has elegance and calls for restraint, particularly in its many evocative, descriptive passages for the orchestra and for the chorus with orchestra. Rousing music surrounds the bullring, and Micaëla’s innocence could not be clearer in Act I. Yet we can contrast that innocence with the intensity of the Act III music in which she challenges not only José but also Carmen and the smugglers. The greatest intensity pervades the final confrontation between José and Carmen, of course.

The gift that Bizet gives the performers, on the other hand, is utter timelessness. Directors have moved the time and place of its setting but, even when unchanged on the surface, audiences take to it instantly and wholeheartedly. There are simply no temporal or geographic barriers. The story that so shocked the audience of l’Opéra-Comique on opening night, and the rebellious and wanton character of Carmen, have lost none of their dramatic power.

The opera’s unifying “fate motive” appears in the overture and is repeated often to restore our sense of foreboding. No reprise is more astonishing, however, than the one we hear immediately before José swears his love and describes his obsession with Carmen in Act II (“La fleur que tu m’avait jetée” [The flower that you threw to me]). In this reprise, the melody is instantly recognizable, but Bizet’s choice of the English horn turns it into an ardent, yearning love song. This choice of a single instrument dramatically alters the mood, which just goes to prove that there are no “small” choices in composition.

The Act II English horn solo is one of many opportunities for individuals in the pit to shine. Also listen for the first cello and first violin in Act I as Zuniga interrogates Carmen after her arrest. Take note as well of the oboe in the Act IV prelude. The flute has several lovely solos. It shines most obviously in the opening of the Act III prelude, but it is also important before Carmen’s Act I “Séguedille.” In fact, the flute is very much Carmen’s instrument. When she is in full seductress mode, the flute often accompanies her, along with very light strings.

The most basic contribution the conductor makes lies in clarifying a work’s structure (by which we primarily mean the relationships among its sections), and this is accomplished in large measure by judicious pacing. For example, the Act II quintet is like a symphonic scherzo-trio-scherzo, and relatively brisk pacing, with only a slight relaxation in tempo in the middle section, helps illuminate that form. (It may be noted, further, that Bizet puns by assigning only three singers to that middle “trio” section whereas the bracketing scherzo sections involve the entire quintet.)

The chorus of cigarette factory girls, on the other hand, is often played a great deal faster than Bizet’s metronome indication, sapping it of some of its color and atmosphere. Bizet’s choice for the opening tempo does a good job of depicting the teasing and sensuality of a group of women returning from a break in factory work on a hot afternoon in Seville. As it happens, if we start too fast, we can also run into something of a conductorial speed trap as we segue into the next section. So I find that Bizet’s tempo is a good one for both technical and dramatic reasons.

In the Act IV final duet, it falls to the conductor to showcase the realism that shocked the Opéra-Comique audience in 1875. We cannot do this without wonderful singing actors, of course, but the challenge to the conductor is to develop a plan across many shifts between speech-like recitative and singing in changing tempos. For me, the structure that mirrors the volatility of Don José before he kills Carmen bears some resemblance to the alternating urgency and calm in the extended dialogue between Tamino and the High Priest in Mozart’s Magic Flute. But the Carmen duet is far more melodramatic, of course. The Fate motive bursts forth periodically to raise the heat, and the toreador’s theme comes from the crowd offstage, adding another layer of musical and dramatic complexity. We want to build toward the most intense moment and maintain discipline until José finally stabs Carmen. The task here is to portray nothing so much as instability, and we can only build toward a great climax with the most rigorous concentration and control.

This brilliant final duet, in what is one of the most important operas of the repertory, only underlines the tragedy of Bizet’s early demise so soon after the opera was written. The growth from Bizet’s astounding Symphony in C, written at age 17, to Carmen, at age 36, is enormous. Therefore, we ask: Would Carmen’s success soon after its poor initial reception have encouraged Bizet to continue exploring a quite-original style that stands now as a harbinger of the verismo school more than a decade before that school took shape in Italy? How would his work have evolved?  A case in point is supplied by the singing that we often hear in the place of Carmen’s original spoken dialogue. Such singing was required by “grand opera”; Charles Gounod wrote his own adaptation for Faust after its premiere, as did Jules Massenet for Manon. While we easily recognize that composer Ernest Guiraud adapted Carmen based on Bizet’s music, we are still left to wonder whether Bizet would have come up with something as completely outside expectations as Carmen itself originally was. And what might that have been? It is, after all, not given to most mortals to be able to divine the answer any more than most of us could conjure up Carmen in the first place. So Bizet’s adaptation of Carmen must be added to the music lover’s list of irretrievable losses along with how Giacomo Puccini might have finished Turandot or how Alban Berg might have completed Lulu, as well as what might have come from the pens of composers like Mozart, Schubert, and Pergolesi who, along with Bizet, died especially young.

My first contact with Carmen was a recording with Risë Stevens, conducted by Fritz Reiner. It still remains one of my favorites, along with the de los Angeles-Beecham recording. But when performers come together to mount a “war horse” like this, we all must strip our minds of the many performances we have heard or even participated in. The goal must be to cultivate a personal connection to the printed page and a deep appreciation of the particular talents of each member of the team. How will Carmen use her voice to meet the enormous challenge of portraying her sexuality without falling into parody? How will José express his volatility and at-least-temporary insanity? As ever, the conductor’s job is to give the artists both breathing room and support while representing the composer to the audience.

- by Maestro Joseph Rescigno, October 2012

Joseph Rescigno has served for 28 years as Artistic Advisor and Principal Conductor of the Florentine Opera Company.

A Note from the Maestro

by Maestro Joseph Rescigno

Idomeneo is unquestionably a masterpiece. It may well be the greatest opera seria ever written. Before Mozart, Gluck had taken the form to its highest peaks. Later, opera seria influenced the dramatic operas of Rossini, and even to some extent Meyerbeer. Idomeneo remained one of Mozart’s favorite compositions, something that is all the more remarkable since he was 25 years old when he composed it and subsequently wrote both The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni.

The Maestro will conduct for IDOMENEO on May 18 & 20, 2012 at the Marcus Center

Yet, for most of its history, Idomeneo was eclipsed by The Magic Flute and the three operas the composer wrote with Lorenzo Da Ponte (The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte). Even in Germany, it was Mozart’s other great opera seria, La Clemenza di Tito, that held the stage more than Idomeneo.

Idomeneo has been gaining ground over the past 30 years, however. It is a vast work with two versions: Munich and Vienna. In his lifetime, Mozart himself changed and/or deleted sections. In the Munich (first) version, there was a major ballet, for example. Mozart also streamlined the vocal writing for Vienna, making it less florid. In addition, two roles were changed in fundamental ways: Arbace was transformed from a tenor to a baritone while Idamante was changed from a castrato to a tenor. This Florentine production is based largely on the earlier Munich version, with its florid vocalism. A tenor will sing Arbace and, consistent with many years’ tradition, the castrato part of Idamante will be sung by a mezzo-soprano.

The glory of Idomeneo lies in its music, of course. It contains some of Mozart’s greatest arias and, apart from some liturgical music, his most extensive and dramatic writing for the chorus. The chorus does not play as big a role in Mozart’s better known works but, as the populace of Crete, the chorus is one of the major players in Idomeneo. The Florentine chorus, therefore, deserves special mention for this production. In addition, Idomeneo’s orchestral writing is forward-looking and virtuosic. Listen to the chorus and orchestra in the storm at the end of Act II, for example. A listener hearing it in isolation could be forgiven for thinking it was music by Beethoven or even an early Verdi work. Mozart’s dramatic flair was evident even in the more stylized genre of opera seria.

The primary challenge for the conductor in this work is remaining flexible. There is a great deal of recitative, or speech-like declamation. In part, these are free-form “continuo recit” passages where the conductor can and should keep a loose hold on the reins. In this production, the continuo recit is in the capable hands of harpsichordist Yasuko Oura and cellist Scott Tisdel. In Idomeneo, though, we also have a great deal of orchestral recit. With the orchestra, the conductor’s leadership is essential, of course. And yet, a great danger in accompanying such relatively monochromatic singing is falling into “just” beating time, which comes off as rigid, pedantic, and just plain dull. With Wagner and Puccini, it pays to remain disciplined; the composer incorporates plenty of emotion into the notes on the page. Here, on the other hand, one must remain alert to every conceivable opportunity for expression, nuance, and flexibility while maintaining tension and propulsion.

A secondary—but non-trivial—challenge in Idomeneo is the language. I am fluent in Italian, but Idomeneo is written in a language closer to what was spoken in the late Renaissance. Opera seria generally took its plots from antiquity, and this language was meant to evoke ancient Greece, whereas Da Ponte’s more modern and naturalistic librettos use contemporary, colloquial Italian. For example, the modern Italian word for brothers is “fratelli,” but “germani” is used in Idomeneo. This is considerably more archaic than we generally see—as when authors toss some “thees” and “thous” into a modern English work in order to evoke an earlier time.

All in all, for many reasons, I am thrilled to be conducting this very important Florentine premiere: it involves intellectual challenges, and immersing oneself in Mozart would be reward enough in any case. Working with singers in challenging repertory is always gratifying. And the joy of leading the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra is only magnified when we get to do music that we have never before performed together.

- by Maestro Joseph Rescigno, April 2012

Joseph Rescigno has served for 28 years as Artistic Advisor and Principal Conductor of the Florentine Opera Company.