If you are wondering what mysterious something seems to be missing from your life this winter, it could be opera. While we wait for the Washington National Opera‘s spring season to start in late March, there are a few operas on the schedule to tide us over, presented by visiting companies like the Kirov Opera and the smaller Washington companies like Opera Lafayette and Virginia Opera. Still, opera addicts will not be satisfied until WNO finally kicks back into gear.
In a reportedly swell event (.PDF file) at the Library of Congress yesterday, Plácido Domingo officially announced the productions that will make up WNO’s 2007-2008 season. Just as the current season has offered a good mix of the daring and the staid, the company will give us a much-appreciated revival of William Bolcom’s A View from the Bridge and Strauss’s disturbing shocker Elektra (1909). The cast for the Bolcom production will include several of the singers who premiered the opera in Chicago in 1999, and Susan Bullock will sing the demanding title role of the infamous Strauss opera.
Apparently responding to my recent calls for Baroque opera, Handel’s Tamerlano will make an appearance, with Domingo himself singing with countertenor David Daniels. There is no word yet on whether the company will invite an instrumental ensemble specializing in historically informed performance into the pit. That model has proven successful in European opera houses over the past several years. William Lacey, whom I saw at the podium for Santa Fe’s Magic Flute this summer, will make his WNO conducting debut. He does have experience with Baroque opera, including Handel, and he tends to favor brisk, exciting tempi.
For some reason, WNO will delay its production of American Ring Cycle, moving back the third opera, Siegfried to the following season. Instead of this, we will have another Wagner opera, Der fliegende Holländer (not mounted by WNO in over a decade), with an excellent baritone, Alan Held, taking the title role for the first time. The season also includes some good chestnuts for the traditionalist. Puccini’s La Bohème is always popular, and the new staging by Mariusz Treliński will hopefully provide some interest. There will also be a new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (NB: with Domingo conducting), and the cast of Verdi’s Rigoletto will be headlined by Joseph Calleja as the Duke and Lyubov Petrova as Gilda. Tenor Salvatore Licitra and mezzo-soprano Dolora Zajick will sing in a semi-staged concert performance of Cavalleria Rusticana to end the season.
