Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Dame Kiri Te Kanawa at 80 A Life in Song

The great New Zealand lyric soprano Dame Kiri Te Kanawa is 80 today.

Her talent and charisma carried her from humble origins to the world stage.

Her father was a Māori butcher and her mother the daughter of Irish immigrants. Inconveniently, her father happened to be married to someone else – the daughter of the community minister! Under the circumstance, her mother insisted on giving her up for adoption. Te Kanawa was raised by an indigenous couple and took their surname. Her birthname, from her mother, was Rawstron.

In her teens and early 20s, she started out as a pop singer and an entertainer at clubs. First prize in an opera competition, Mobil Song Quest, in 1965, brought her a grant to study in London. A contemporaneous recording of the “Nuns’ Chorus” from Johann Strauss II’s operetta “Casanova” became New Zealand’s first gold record. Almost as an afterthought, she won the Melbourne Sun Aria Contest in 1966.

That same year, she was accepted without audition into the London Opera Centre. It was remarked that while she lacked technique, she already possessed the ability to captivate an audience. Needless to say, she picked up and polished the technique.

In 1973, she received an OBE for her services to music. She was elevated to a Dame, for her services to opera, in 1982. By then, she was recognized all over the world for having sung Handel’s “Let the Bright Seraphim” at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana in 1981.

It seems almost anticlimactic that her recording of “The Marriage of Figaro,” with Sir Georg Solti conducting, would receive a Grammy Award in 1984. In all, Te Kanawa would be nominated six times. She also appeared on what has become known as the operatic “West Side Story,” singing Maria opposite José Carreras’ Tony, under composer Leonard Bernstein’s direction. That recording was recognized with a Grammy for Best Cast Show Album in 1985.

There followed decades of memorable performances, as Te Kanawa appeared on the stages of most of the world’s major opera houses. In 2009, she announced her retirement from opera, effective the next year. She gave her final recital in 2016.

By then, she had already started giving back, fostering young musicians in New Zealand through the Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation, which she established in 2004. She also gave masterclasses and sat as a judge in several singing competitions.

In 2013, she made a guest appearance on “Downton Abbey” as the historical Australian soprano Nellie Melba. In 2021, she moved back to her homeland permanently after having lived in the UK for 55 years. She returned briefly in 2022 as part of the New Zealand delegation at the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II.

Happy birthday, Dame Kiri, and many happy returns.

An early appearance in the 1966 New Zealand film “Don’t Let It Get You”

Singing Handel at the wedding of Charles and Diana

Decades before singing “O mio babbino caro” on “Downton Abbey,” Te Kanawa received wide exposure through an earlier recording of the aria used in the film “A Room with a View” (1985). Interestingly, both productions employed Maggie Smith as a prim sourpuss.

Kiri on “This Is Your Life”

As the Countess in “The Marriage of Figaro”

As the Marschallin in “Der Rosenkavalier”

As Desdemona

40 years of performances from the BBC archives

March 6, 2024
Sarah Caldwell Opera Pioneer at 100

While soprano Dame Kiri Te Kanawa rightly takes center stage today, as the musical world showers her with rose petals for her 80th birthday, spare a piece of cake for Sarah Caldwell.

Today marks the 100th anniversary of Caldwell’s birth. With her own hands, she molded the Opera Company of Boston, for 32 years an organization distinguished by its bold programming, insightful productions, and esteemed singers (including Beverly Sills, Joan Sutherland, Shirley Verrett, Marilyn Horne, Jon Vickers, and James McCracken).

Caldwell tackled works that struck fear in the hearts of major companies, operas such as Prokofiev’s “War and Peace,” Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aaron,” Roger Sessions’ “Montezuma,” Peter Maxwell Davies’ “Taverner,” and Rodion Shchedrin’s “Dead Souls.” She spearheaded the first complete American staging of Berlioz’s “Les Troyens.” She was also the first in the U.S. to employ Mussorgsky’s original orchestrations for “Boris Godunov.”

She had her detractors, to be sure. For many of her productions in Boston, she served not only as conductor, but as stage director. Some felt this diluted her powers, but there is no questioning her magnificent ambition. On a shoestring budget, she drove her team as hard as she pushed herself, which was very hard indeed. Often it led to its share of backstage drama and cost overruns.

Caldwell became the first woman to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera (in “La traviata” in 1976, with Sills). The same year, a production of “The Barber of Seville” (again with Sills) was televised over PBS. In 1978, she returned to the Met to conduct “L’elisir d’amore,” with José Carreras and Judith Blegen.

A non-operatic highlight, surely, was when she joined the New York Philharmonic for a program of women composers – in 1974! – as only the second woman ever to conduct the orchestra (Nadia Boulanger was the first, in 1939 and 1962), presenting works by Ruth Crawford Seeger, Lili Boulanger, and Thea Musgrave. Time Magazine dubbed her “Music’s Wonder Woman.”

She also conducted the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Caldwell founded the organization that became the Opera Company of Boston (originally known as the Opera Group) in 1958, with $5000.

She didn’t have the best head for money and she could be politically naïve. In Boston, a cultural exchange with the Soviet Union tanked at the box office. Later, she entered into an agreement with the Marcos regime to bring opera to the Philippines. To her credit, she pulled out of the deal, but it brought her some bad publicity.

In 1993, at 68, she became principal guest conductor of the Sverdlovsk Philharmonic Orchestra of Ekaterinburg, Russia.

Clearly, Caldwell was a force of nature.

She died in 2006 at the age of 82.

Caldwell conducts “The Barber of Seville” at the Met (with Sills, Alan Titus, Donald Gramm, Henry Price, and Samuel Ramey)

Hindemith, again with Sills, in Boston – oh my goodness, unless I’m very much mistaken, Aaron Copland provides the spoken addendum, at around 12:20!

“Otello” with Vickers and Verrett

“Norma” excerpts with Sills and John Alexander

A Musical Adventure in Siberia

Shostakovich Cello Concerto

Interviewed by Bruce Duffie

https://www.bruceduffie.com/caldwell.html

March 6, 2024
Heitor Villa-Lobos: Brazil’s Musical Genius

On the birthday of Heitor Villa-Lobos, here’s a documentary about Brazil’s most celebrated composer. Of course, most of it’s in Portuguese, but there are plenty of candid stills and footage and examples of his music, and Arthur Rubinstein speaks French.

A few bonuses:

Villa-Lobos plays Villa-Lobos

Andrés Segovia (at 93)

Julian Bream

Arthur Rubinstein

Nelson Freire

Leonard Bernstein talks Villa-Lobos

Conducting Villa-Lobos’ greatest hit, the Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5

Joan Baez gives it a whirl

The classic recording with Victoria de los Angeles and the composer conducting

Bernstein conducts “The Little Train of Caipira,” from Bachianas Brasileiras No. 2

The José Limón Dance Company performs “The Emperor Jones”

Folkloric rainforest piece, “Uirapuru,” named for a Brazilian bird

Feliz Aniversário, Heitor Villa-Lobos!

March 5, 2024
Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Electric Guitar East Coast Spring

The Western U.S. may be in the grip of the Winter Warlock, but on the East Coast, it might as well be spring. Cue Antonio Vivaldi on his birthday. Tired of “The Four Seasons?” Then you haven’t heard it played by electric guitar orchestra (the way Vivaldi intended)!

March 4, 2024
The Marx Brothers’ Lost Laughter?

Yesterday, a rainy day in Princeton, I finally got around to rewatching a Marx Brothers documentary I hadn’t seen in decades (“The Marx Brothers in a Nutshell,” 1982), kindly sent to me by a friend over Christmas. Naturally, among the clips were some from “A Night at the Opera,” which got me thinking about all the classical music used as grist for musical interludes and parody in the Marxes’ films – and soberingly, by extension, how far we’ve fallen as a culture that broader audiences today would likely not recognize some of these once indelible melodies.

Toward the end of the documentary, Dick Cavett remarks, prophetically, although perhaps not in the way he had hoped, “50 years from now, will the Marx Brothers be funny? Will the films live? I would have to say, I hope so, and I think so. Because if not, there’s something wrong with the people, not the films.”

At a time when so many are so easily offended at the first whiff of anything subversive (which, I would argue, is a substantial root of humor), and younger people such as my nephews claim never even to have heard of Groucho Marx, I’m not much encouraged to believe in the continued “life” of their films. It’s a source of amazement to me that the Marxes and the Universal monster movies of the 1930s still held such sway over all of us youngsters in the 1970s – 40 years later! I’d go further and say that Groucho Marx was one of my biggest, and perhaps least helpful, influences during my teens in the 1980s.

Hopefully, someday the pendulum will swing again – like Harpo through the painted backdrops of “Il trovatore” – but I can’t say that I think it is likely. How is it that, with everything seemingly spinning out of control, the world has become such an anodyne place? The Marxes were up against the Great Depression and World War II. Maybe a little inappropriate laughter, once in a while, would do us some good.

“I want my shirt” (“The Cocoanuts”)

“Il trovatore” (“A Night at the Opera”)

Earlier “Anvil Chorus” parody at 5:30 (“Animal Crackers”)

Rachmaninoff Prelude in C-sharp minor (“A Day at the Races”)

Harpo fantasy on Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 (“A Night in Casablanca”)

Medley of Chico Marx numbers, in which he references the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, the Pizzicato from Leo Delibes’ “Sylvia,” and more.

March 3, 2024

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