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Masters of the Podium—Charles Dutoit


2011
11.30

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Charles Dutoit [b. 1936], a native of Lausanne, Switzerland, has enjoyed a long and highly acclaimed career as a conductor after starting as a professional viola player in 1957 with several European and South American orchestras.  Best known for his 25 years as artistic director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra [1977–2002], his interest in foreign travel has led him to perform in nearly every country in the world; at last count, his globe-trotting exploits have him reportedly visiting 190-plus nations.

His touring schedule notwithstanding, Dutoit spent the years from 1959 to 1977 quite close to home.  He made his conducting debut with the Radio Lausanne orchestra, led the Radio Zurich Orchestra until 1967, and then spent eleven years as leader of the Bern Symphony Orchestra.  All the while, however, he enjoyed fairly lengthy guest conducting stints in locations as diverse as Mexico City, Gothenburg [Sweden], and Minneapolis.

While with the Montreal Symphony, Dutoit helped turn them into one of North America’s leading ensembles, one that recorded extensively during his tenure, almost exclusively on Decca/London.  He is credited with two Grammy Awards, several Juno Awards—the Canadian equivalent of the Grammies—as well as close to 40 other recording prizes from such countries as Germany, Japan, France, and his homeland of Switzerland.

Dutoit has elected not to specialize in a particular era or style of music, instead presenting an eclectic range of conducting that has encompassed works from the Baroque to the post-modern eras, and has included both orchestral pieces and operas.  Starting in 1990, Dutoit has been artistic director and principal conductor with the Philadelphia Orchestra’s annual summer festival, which is held in Saratoga Springs, New York.  In 1998, he was chosen music director of Tokyo’s NHK Symphony Orchestra, and he led that group on a number of tours across the United States, throughout Europe, and to China and parts of Southeast Asia.  He remains as that organization’s music director emeritus.

His interest in conducting opera has brought him to lead performances at London’s Covent Garden, Berlin’s Deutsche Oper, the Vienna State Opera, and New York’s Metropolitan Opera.  One of his most notable operatic endeavors involved conducting an acclaimed production of the monumental Berlioz work, Les Troyens [“The Trojans”] in Los Angeles.

Dutoit currently fulfills three contractual conducting positions.  He is chief conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra (through 2012), principal conductor of London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and music director of Switzerland’s Verbier Festival Orchestra.

Charles Dutoit conducts the National Orchestra of France in Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major (complete), with pianist Martha Argerich [1990]:

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Modern American Composers—Philip Glass


2011
11.28

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Philip Glass [b. 1937] is an American composer whose voluminous output in multiple genres has made him one of the most prolific classical composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.  A native of Baltimore, Glass’s early studies took place at Juilliard and the University of Chicago.  He also spent time in Aspen as a student of the French modernist composer, Darius Milhaud.

Glass was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in 1964 and used those funds to finance two years of study in Paris.  His composition teacher was the legendary Nadia Boulanger, but Glass admits to being influenced more by the New Wave movement in art, film and theatre that was sweeping out the older, more staid generation in those fields.  Prior to returning to the States in 1967, Glass spent time in northern India with sitarist Ravi Shankar—the pair had met in Paris and composed a film score together—where he identified strongly with the Tibetan exiles living there, as well as with their Buddhist religion.  This spiritualism would eventually become one of the most significant influences on his music.

He formed the Philip Glass Ensemble upon his return to New York City, a collection of seven keyboard and woodwind musicians who served as the ideal vehicle for disseminating his early compositions.  At this point considered a post-modernist, Glass began to solidify his sound as one of “repetitive structures,” a musical format that has continued to evolve throughout his career.  Several critical analyses have compared his compositions to “a wall of sound” and “a total immersion in musical notes.”

In 1976, Glass premiered his first major work.  His opera Einstein on the Beach opened in France at the Avignon Festival that summer, followed by a brief run at the Metropolitan Opera in November.  This was to be the first of his “portrait trilogy,” followed by Satyagraha (a biographical sketch of Mohandas Gandhi) in 1979 and Akhnaten (a story of the life of Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep IV) in 1983.  The Gandhi opera was composed to a libretto entirely in Sanskrit—the Metropolitan Opera has revived it for its 2011–12 season—while Amenhotep’s story is sung in Biblical Hebrew, Akkadian and Ancient Egyptian.

His orchestral works include two violin concertos as well as concertos for cello, piano, and even one for two tympanis plus orchestra.  Glass weaves a number of outside musical influences into his music; for example, his Piano Concerto No. 2 [2004] is subtitled “After Lewis and Clark” and features a Native American flute as one of the prominent solo instruments.  He is also highly regarded as a composer of film scores, including Koyaanisqatsi [1982], a movie with no dialogue or narration that is simply a series of images from across the United States set against a typical wall-of-sound Glass score.  His more conventional film work has included compositions for several documentaries—The Thin Blue Line (about a man convicted for a crime he did not commit), Kundun (a biography of the Dalai Lama), and The Fog of War (an extended interview with former defense secretary Robert McNamara about the Vietnam War)—as well as feature films such as The Illusionist, The Truman Show, and No Reservations.

The composer performs the opening (piano) movement to his 1982 composition “Glassworks”:

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Opera Stars of Today—Elīna Garanča


2011
11.25

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Elīna Garanča [b. 1976] is a Latvian mezzo-soprano from Riga.  She comes from a highly musical family; her father is a choral director and her mother is a voice teacher and also a professor of music.  Garanča began her own vocal studies at the age of 20 [1996] at the Latvian Academy of Music, with follow-on instruction in Vienna and the United States—the latter with former soprano Virginia Zeani, who was named [Voice] Teacher of the Year in 2010 by Classical Singer magazine.

Early in her professional career, Garanča won a singing competition in Finland [1999] and another in her home country [2000], after which she was engaged by the Frankfurt Opera to appear in several productions.  Her most striking performance there was as Rosina in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Sevilla, also the role she sang in her Metropolitan Opera debut in January 2008.  In 2001, Garanča was a finalist in the Cardiff Singer of the World Competition, but her true operatic breakthrough came in 2003.  That year, she sang Annio in Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito at the Salzburg Festival and also enjoyed a guest appearance alongside Anna Netrebko in an extended selection from Lucia di Lammermoor that was being recorded for the Russian soprano’s debut CD, “Opera Arias.”  The two women have continued their professional relationship, most recently appearing together as Anna Bolena (Netrebko) and Giovanna Seymour (Garanča) in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena at the Vienna Staatsoper in May 2011.

[The pair were to reprise their respective roles at New York’s Metropolitan Opera to open the 2011–12 season, but Garanča was forced to withdraw due to pregnancy.  She and her husband, conductor Karel Chichon, welcomed a daughter on September 30, 2011.]

Mezzo-soprano roles in opera are fewer and generally lower-profile than those of the soprano voice, but one of the most famous in the repertoire is the title role in Bizet’s Carmen.  The naturally blonde Garanča donned a raven-haired wig for the Met’s new production in 2010—seen around the world thanks to “The Met in HD,” a program that offers satellite broadcasts to movie theaters—and performed to rave reviews for her singing as well as her acting.  The production has been preserved on a Deutsche Grammophon DVD (for whom Garanča records exclusively), as was an earlier performance as Cinderella in the Rossini opera La cenerentola.

Garanča sings the “Seguidilla” from Bizet’s Carmen (tenor Roberto Alagna is Don Jose) at the Metropolitan Opera  [2010]:

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Famous Soloists—Jean-Pierre Rampal


2011
11.23

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Jean-Pierre Rampal [1922–2000], a native of Marseilles, France, was a classical flautist whose musical talent and sparkling personality is often credited for reviving interest in the flute as a solo instrument.  His father taught the flute at the local conservatory and played first-chair flute in the orchestra, but the younger Rampal instead embarked on a career in medicine.  During WWII while enrolled in his third year of medical school, he was in danger of being conscripted as a forced laborer for transport to Germany.  Instead he joined the underground and resurfaced in Paris under an assumed name, attending the National Conservatory as a flute player.  When the war ended, a Parisian orchestra hired Rampal as its principal flautist.

The late 1940s marked Rampal’s debut as a soloist, where he toured extensively with a close friend from his conservatory days, keyboardist Robert Veyron-Lacroix.  Together they performed a string of highly acclaimed flute–piano recitals, a rarity in the days when “chamber music” almost always involved at least some sort of stringed instrument.  The duo enjoyed rising popularity after performing on French national radio, which was followed by a series of international tours that ultimately led them to make their U.S. debut in 1958.  At the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., Rampal and Veyron-Lacroix performed a program of works by Mozart, Beethoven and Poulenc.

Much of Rampal’s early popularity has been ascribed to the fluidity of his playing technique, a strong contrast to the vibrato-laden methodology favored during his father’s generation and one that stretched back into the 19th century.  Although he did not shy away from more modern pieces, Rampal preferred to perform music from the Baroque period, notably works by Bach, Handel, Telemann, and Scarlatti.  He also recorded a significant amount of flute music by Mozart.

His nickname, “The Man with The Golden Flute,” was not an allusion to his magical prowess, but instead derived from the fact that he owned a solid gold (18K) flute, the only such instrument manufactured (in 1869) by renowned artisan Louis Lot.  Rampal played this instrument exclusively until receiving a 14-karat gold flute from the Haynes Company, a U.S. concern that used a pattern of the original Lot piece to craft its own version in 1958.

In addition to his vast recording and performing career—Rampal’s discography includes more than 60 recordings on the CBS label alone—he also taught a number of students who have gone on to significant flute careers of their own, including James Galway and Robert Stallman.  The awards he received during his lifetime included being named a chevalier to the French Legion of Honor [1966], and grand prizes from multiple organizations on behalf of his many recordings.  Beginning in 1980, the Jean-Pierre Rampal Flute Competition began its tri-annual run in conjunction with the Concours Internationaux de la Ville de Paris.

Rampal performs the second movement of Francis Poulenc’s flute sonata, with the composer at the piano:

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Composer’s Corner—Francis Poulenc


2011
11.21

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Francis Poulenc [1899–1963] was one of the most prominent French composers of the twentieth century, whose individualistic musical style is oftentimes ascribed to the fact that he was mostly self-taught in areas of harmony and orchestration.  His membership in the loosely formed 1920s compositional group “Les Six”—Darius Milhaud and Arthur Honegger were, with Poulenc, the most prominent participants—helped raise public awareness of his early compositions.  These six composers, aligned with modernist French painters and writers of the era, collectively believed in creating French art, music and literature that was free of foreign influence.

Poulenc was greatly influenced by Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy, and many of his pieces are infused with elements of jazz, and even a touch of surrealism.  Harmonically, Poulenc enjoyed stretching the bounds of basic chord structure, challenging his listeners even though most of his music is quite melodious.  Throughout his life he wrote a great deal of music for solo piano, as well as chamber pieces with the piano as primary accompaniment.  These include a sextet for piano and wind instruments, and sonatas for flute and piano, clarinet and piano, and cello and piano.  In 1932 he wrote a concerto for two pianos and orchestra.

His Catholic faith was one factor that propelled him into consideration as one of the most acclaimed composers of church music during his era.  Among his choral pieces set to a religious text are Mass in G [1937], Exultate Deo and Salve regina [both 1941], Stabat mater [1950], and Ave verum corpus [1952].  His choral masterpiece, Gloria [1959], is best known for its widespread use of augmented harmonies and a very lively orchestration.  Poulenc also wrote several pieces for the organ, including an organ concerto that many music historians consider the finest of the century.

Francis Poulenc composed several works for the stage, including the ballet Les biches, commissioned in 1924by Serge Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes.  It is one of the few French ballets to also employ a chorus.  His three operas include the surrealistic two-act comic opera Les mamelles de Tirésias [1947], the single-act La voix humaine (“The Human Voice”) [1959], written for a single soprano, and the full-length tragic drama Dialogues of the Carmelites [1957], which relates the story of a group of nuns martyred at a monastery in Compiègne during the French Revolution.  The final scene is renown throughout opera for its musical depiction of the nuns’ executions.  The guillotine is heard repeatedly as, offstage, the voices of the nuns singing a hymn is reduced, one by one with each descent of the blade, until there is only silence.

University of Utah Singers (with Utah Philharmonic) perform the opening section to Poulenc’s Gloria [2007]:

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Opera Stars of Today—Anna Netrebko


2011
11.19

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Anna Netrebko [b. 1971] is a Russian-born soprano who has risen to become one of the most acclaimed singers in the opera world.  Her hometown is Krasnodar, a Cossack stronghold for centuries and situated about 90 miles northeast of the Black Sea.  She studied voice at a conservatory in St. Petersburg and worked as a part-time janitor at the Mariinsky Theatre, where she ultimately auditioned for conductor Valery Gergiev.  He arranged for her to make her operatic debut there in 1994 as Susanna in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro.

Over the following year or so, Netrebko appeared in a number of productions in Eastern Europe, notably as the Queen of the Night in another Mozart opera, Die Zauberflöte [Riga, Latvia], and as Rosina in Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Sevilla [Mikkeli, Finland].  Her American debut came with the San Francisco Opera in 1995, where she sang the female title role in Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila.  She continued to focus on Russian opera as her career progressed.  Some of the other Russian roles in her repertoire have included Xenia in Boris Godunov (Mussorgsky), Natasha in War and Peace and Ninetta in Love for Three Oranges (Prokofiev), and Marfa in The Tsar’s Bride (Rimsky-Korsakov).

Anna Netrebko first appeared with New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2002, reprising Natasha in War and Peace.  This marked the beginning of a long and mutually beneficial arrangement, particularly after Peter Gelb assumed the general manager’s position there in 2006.  He recognized Netrebko’s drawing power for her vocal skills as well as her stage presence, and she continues to be one of the most prominent singers for whom many new Met Opera productions have been commissioned.  When Gelb instituted “The Met in HD,” an ambitious project that involves satellite transmissions of Saturday afternoon performances to hundreds of movie theaters around the world, he clearly anticipated that Netrebko would play a key part in that strategy.

Having transitioned from Mozart-type operas to those of the bel canto era, Netrebko’s reputation as one of the most sought-after sopranos rose almost beyond measure.  Thanks to the remarkable exposure received as a participant in these “Met in HD” cinecasts—there have been from six to eleven per season since their onset in 2006—audiences have been treated to some of her most memorable performances.  These have included appearances as Elvira in Bellini’s I Puritani, Juliette in Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette, and as the title character in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.  The 2011–12 Met season opened its high-def cinecasts with her appearing as the doomed queen of Henry VIII in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, and she will sing the title role in Massenet’s Manon in April 2012.

In 2008, Netrebko was named Musician of the Year by the organization, Musical America.  She is also the first opera singer to appear on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people, an honor she achieved in 2007.  She married baritone Erwin Schrott in 2008.

Netrebko as Anna Bolena in the Act I finale of  Donizetti’s bel canto masterpiece of the same name (Metropolitan Opera, 2011) [with Ildar Abdrazakov as Enrico VIII]:

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