Autumn / Winter Performances

"Help for Africa" Celebrity Gala in aid of the Alfred Biolek Foundation

Köln / Cologne, Germany

With Harald Schmidt, Sarah Wiener, Thomas Quasthoff, Hildegard and Lotti Krekel, Max Lorenz, and Marianne Rogée

La Rondine / Magda

Finnish National Opera

Summer Performances

June 8, June 9, June 10, June 11:
Andechs Festspiele, soprano soloist in Carl Orff's Carmina Burana (new production)

July 15:
Ciechocinek Festival, Ciechocinek, Poland
VIIth Gala of Polish Tenors and friends of Polish star Tenor Dariusz Stachura

Spring Performances

February 19 (Live concert):
La Vera Constanza / Baronessa Irene,  WDR Funkhaus Wallrafplatz, Köln

February 21, March 4, March 7, March 15:
Die Blume von Hawaii / Prinzessin Laya, Vienna Volksoper

February 27, March 23, March 27, May 28:
Manon, title role / debut, Theater St. Gallen (new production)

Massenet's Manon: The Case of the Vanishing Opera

Massenet’s Manon is one of those operas that in the last few decades seemed to have fallen through the cracks, in terms of performance and recording. Probably there are a number of reasons for this – no single factor that made operagoers, or opera stagers, fall out of love with it for a while.

It may have suffered from confusion with the other famous work,  Manon Lescaut. It may have been so peculiarly a work of its time – sort of nineteenth-century “mixed media” -- that companies considering its staging found themselves unsure of quite how to handle it. What do you do with the ballet sequences, for example? Why spend dancers’ wages and rehearsal time on something that doesn’t particularly seem to drive the plot?  There may also have been an issue surrounding the grueling demands the opera makes on its voice talent – demands sometimes likened to “singing a marathon”.  Why try to stage a work that you can’t find anyone willing to sing?

And it probably doesn’t help that the opera itself is a touch subversive -- full of what at first glance seem like well-worn operatic tropes that in the hands of the gifted Massenet turn into something completely different. For example, right at the outset the operagoer  is shown one of the great traditional operatic scenarios, the Innocent Young Girl Swept Off Her Feet By The Older Man or Rake. Normally the Innocent Young Girl is completely out of her depth in these situations, entirely fixated on the new lover. But Massenet, sly and unpredictable storyteller that he was, immediately starts sending you messages that not everything in this story is going to go the usual way. As Manon – mere hours earlier on her way to the convent – falls for the first of her two beaux, and they sing together of how they’ll go to Paris and be together, just the two of them, it’s not precisely the togetherness that Manon lingers over. “Paris…”  she sings longingly. “In Paris…”

Perhaps this is the biggest of Manon’s problems: the famously conservative audience of opera tends to shy away from something that doesn’t follow the long-laid-down “rules”. Despite being sung by great names such as Illeana Cotrubas, Beverly Sills and Edita Gruberova, despite its ravishing music and thought-provoking plot, Manon gradually fell a little out of favor in recent times.

But as many trends eventually do, this one seems to be reversing, as houses looking for something fresh to perform rediscover works that just by virtue of being out of the public eye for a while are better placed to display their virtues. In 2007, soprano Anna Netrebko and tenor Roberto Alagna starred in a well-reviewed revival of the piece at the Vienna Staatsoper, and Netrebko then repeated the success in Berlin's Staatstheater unter den Linden with Rolando Villazón, under Daniel Barenboim's baton (in a debut for the conductor). After that followed a flurry of other performances, with Nathalie Dessay singing opposite Villazon, and Netrebko singing the title role again opposite Vittorio Grigolo at Covent Garden.

So Manon would appear to be firmly on the operatic map again, the most recent demostration of this being the new production of Manon being staged at Theatre St. Gallen from February to May of 2011. Siphiwe McKenzie Edelmann makes her debut in the title role of this freshly realized production, under the direction of the notable television and film director and music scholar Jan Schmidt-Garre, auteur of films such as Opera Fanatic, who brings a cutting-edge vision and decades of media and musical expertise to bear on a work that richly deserves to be in the spotlight again. Conducting is David Stern, head conductor and music director of the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv, and son of the renowned violinist Isaac Stern.

Siphiwe’s next performance dates in Manon are: February 27, March 23, March 27 and May 28.

Die Blume von Hawaii

Take a few cups of romance, a soupçon of intrigue, and several big dashes of nineteenth-century geopolitics: add a plot strewn with secret identities, misread motivations, and difficult choices; stir in a farrago of music in which the exotic meets the traditional, the foxtrot meets the waltz, and the steel guitar meets the saxophone; and garnish with a storyline that leaps gracefully from Hawaii to Monte Carlo. Mix them all together, shake well, and the resultant tropical cocktail is Die Blume von Hawaii -- both a lush and unusual flowering of the musical theater tradition, and a brilliant reaction against the creeping fossilization that from the end of the nineteenth century had been steering the operetta format toward extinction.

It would be difficult to find an modern operetta with a more eventful developmental and performance history than Blume. Created in the slowly darkening cultural shadow of 1930s Germany by a composer forced to flee Europe ahead of the pre-World War II German crackdown on the arts, Paul Abraham’s Die Blume von Hawaii brings together characters wearing a new and slightly edgier realism with the nostalgic and melodic qualities that have always distinguished the best in operetta. Before escaping to the New World with its gifted composer, the work suffered the ennobling indignity of being banned by the second World War regime as “decadent art”, and its score was thought to have been destroyed. Fortunately for modern listeners this was not the case; the lively musical and dramatic creativity of Die Blume von Hawaii stands out among the light operatic work of its time -- so much so that it has been filmed three times.

While Blume contains long-established musical tropes such as the march and waltz, it also features such unexpected felicities as the foxtrot and Charleston, and the rhythms of swing and jazz, expressed in a mélange of languages. And though the subject material may feature in common with older operettas such familiar themes as wandering bluebloodery and arranged (or expected) marriages gone wrong, these concepts have been subverted or turned on their heads for the younger and more discriminating audiences of a new century. The title character Prinzessin Laya distances herself from her relationship with her people and her island not out of mere wanderlust, but from a desire to keep clear of her homeland’s painful entanglements with its new colonial masters. Over the course of Die Blume von Hawaii Laya discovers that such ties – political or personal -- are impossible to cut cleanly, and she finally rises willingly to the challenge posed by them, drawing her fellow protagonists along with her to a happy ending. This potentially weighty (or just plain heavy) material is made not just palatable but delightful by Abrahams’ light touch and the cheerful eclecticism of his instrumental and vocal scoring.

Siphiwe McKenzie Edelmann brings her own unique multicultural outlook to the title role in this new Vienna Volksoper production of Die Blume von Hawaii. The production will be directed by artistic polymath Helmut Baumann, whose Volksoper production of Orpheus in the Underworld was such a huge success, and conducted by rising star and contemporary music theatre expert Joseph Olefirowicz, highly acclaimed for his conducting at the Volksoper in last season's new production of Guys and Dolls. Come spend a hibiscus-scented evening swinging between demimonde Europe and the island-paradise Hawaii of a century ago, with the sounds of the Age of Jazz setting the beat!

Dates for Siphiwe's performances are:

February 7, 9, 12, 15 | March 29 | April 10, 12