Ghosts at Versailles and in the Supreme Court

Corigliano, The Ghosts of Versailles, T. Stratas, H. Hagegård, R. Fleming, M. Horne, Metropolitan Opera (1992)

Charles T. Downey, Ghosts, Ginsburg Given Justice As Summer Delights
Classical Voice North America, July 22

WASHINGTON, D.C. – For opera to thrive, companies must be willing to commission new works and, just as important, to revive recent operas so they can be heard more than once. Two summer festivals near Washington did their part, premiering a new comedy and reviving one of the great operatic successes of the late 20th century.

Wolf Trap Opera, a young artist training program based in a national park in a far Virginia suburb of the District, aimed high with its first production of John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles, heard at its final performance on July 18. A “grand opera buffa” (Corigliano’s term) commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera for its centennial celebration, Ghosts was sized in every way to the cavernous proportions of the Met, where it received its premiere in 1991....

[Continue reading]

Corigliano, The Ghosts of Versailles
Wolf Trap Opera

Wang, Scalia/Ginsburg
Castleton Festival

SEE ALSO:
Robert R. Reilly, 'Ghosts of Versailles' at Wolf Trap (Ionarts, July 12)

Robert Battey, A return to grand style for Wolf Trap Opera with ‘Ghosts of Versailles’ (Washington Post, July 13)

Mark Swed, 'Scalia/Ginsburg' opera underscores how opposites can be in harmony (Los Angeles Times, July 13)

Philip Kennicott, ‘Scalia/Ginsburg’: An affectionate comic opera look at the high court (Washington Post, July 12)

Geoff Edgers, From ‘rage aria’ to ‘lovely duet,’ opera does justice to court, Ginsburg says (Washington Post, July 8)

Nina Totenberg, Judicial Differences Take Center Stage In 'Scalia V. Ginsburg' (NPR, July 10, 2013)

'Ghosts of Versailles' at Wolf Trap

Many thanks to Robert R. Reilly for this review from Wolf Trap.

After nearly a quarter-century delay, the Washington D.C. area has finally gotten the chance to see and hear John Corigliano’s opera The Ghosts of Versailles, composed for the Metropolitan Opera and premiered in 1991. It was worth the wait.

On Friday evening, July 10, 2015, Wolf Trap Opera opened its four-performance run (ending July 18) with an exhilarating performance. It was a coup de théâtre and a jeu d’esprit, performed with joie de vivre. I choose my French words advisedly as the opera is based on the works of Pierre-Austin Caron de Beaumarchais, the renowned French author of The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro, and The Guilty Mother; the first two works of which provided the librettos for Rossini’s and Mozart’s famous operas.

Corigliano, Phantasmagoria, Fantasia, et al., E.Klas/Tampere PO Ondine Guilty Pleasures, Moments for self-indulging and a little Corigliano exerpt, R.Fleming/Philharmonia/W.Cares Decca

William M. Hoffman provided the libretto for Corigliano, meanwhile, and he did a brilliant job of assimilating Beaumarchais’s characters and creating a fascinating, wholly original work that melds a world of ghosts from the eighteenth century, the theatrical world of opera, and the real, tragic world of the French Revolution. Here is how Corigliano describes it: “My opera The Ghosts of Versailles takes place on three different planes of reality: (1) the world of eternity, inhabited by the ghosts of Versailles, including the playwright Beaumarchais and Marie Antoinette; (2) the world of the stage, inhabited by eighteenth century characters of Beaumarchais (Figaro, Susanna, the Count and Countess, etc.); and (3) the world of historic reality, primarily the reality of the French Revolution itself, populated by the characters of (1) and (2). Thus The Ghosts of Versailles represents a journey from the most fantastic to the most realistic.” The action is driven by Beaumarchais’s love of Marie Antoinette and his desire to reach back into history to change it in order to save her.

My only acquaintance with Corigliano’s music for this opera is from Phantasmagoria—Suite from ‘The Ghosts of Versailles’ (Naxos). Musically, Corigliano captures the three worlds within the opera with idiomatic ease and he portrays their occasional disorienting intersections with an attractive eeriness and spectral glow. The occasional uneasiness during his excursions into aleatory music is dramatically apt and perfectly expressive of the disorientation that occurs when ghosts, theatrical figures, and real people confusedly intermix. So there’s no reason to be scared by this aspect of the work. For most of the almost three-hour work, Corigliano musically inhabits the imagined worlds into which the action travels. And it travels fast. By this I mean the madcap pace that propels the characters forwards (or backwards) depending on which world they are traveling to or from. We hear snatches of Mozart and Rossini, and music that is both a parody and an apotheosis of their styles.

What we witness in the first act—after the harrowing scene of Marie Antoinette recalling her execution—is certainly opera buffa, full of mayhem and hilarious pranks that reminded me strongly of a Marx Brothers production. From Figaro’s aria to the section at the ambassador’s residence with Turkish singer Samira—mezzo-soprano Jenni Bank in the comic performance of a lifetime—one scene after another was hilariously funny. Ms. Bank has a wonderfully supple voice and she is first-class comedienne. One of the “you-had-to-have-been-there” moments was a singer in

Read more »

National Orchestral Institute to Record for Naxos

J. Corigliano, Symphony No. 1 ("Of Rage and Remembrance"), National Symphony Orchestra, L. Slatkin (RCA Red Seal, 1996)

Charles T. Downey, National Festival Orchestra’s bright performance is a gift
Washington Post, June 15

The ambitions and hard work of the National Orchestral Institute, the training program for young musicians at the University of Maryland, continue to pay dividends. The concert of American music by this year’s National Festival Orchestra, heard Saturday night at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, was the first to be recorded in a new series for the Naxos label. Richard Freed, who writes the NOI program notes, made the suggestion to the leader of Naxos.

Guest conductor David Alan Miller, who has long championed the music of Michael Torke, opened with that composer’s “Bright Blue Music”... [Continue reading]

National Festival Orchestra
National Orchestral Institute
With David Alan Miller, conductor
Clarice Smith Center

NOI PREVIOUSLY:
2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011