Reviews – 2014
The program of the Bartók+ Opera Festival 2014 in Miskolc was finished with Erika Miklósa’s concert and the announcement of the results of the Opera Composition Competition.
In the first part of the Gala we could listen to an about 20-minute excerpt from each of the three finalist works of the Opera Composition Competition. The three operas were Eugenia Manolides’ La pisanella, Andrzej Karalow’s Kepler and Apor Szüts’ The chirurgeonin Halle. These were already performed in full version earlier, on the 17th of June, but only with a piano accompaniment (see our report about it in the Festival Journal, in an article of the 5th day).
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Review of Korngold's The dead city. Composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold was born in the city of Brno in 1897. Though his opera The dead city is usually regarded a masterpiece, it is rarely performed, and the name of the composer is mainly known to the wider audience by his activity in Hollywood, and not by his operas. Korngold’s name is usually referred to as the father of film music; he was the first composer to be awarded an Oscar for the music of a film (The adventures of Robin Hood) in 1938.
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Review of Verdi's Aida. It has been a tradition at the Miskolc Opera Festival for already three years to make one free opera performance ’in the street’. Two years ago it was Tosca, last year Traviata, and this year Verdi’s Aida. The ’choreography’ has been the same every year. There were three performances: two ’initiation performances’ with excerpts from the piece, and then a third one with the complete opera performed towards the end of the Festival. In the previous two years in the initiation performances we saw one act each time at different venues of Miskolc, and the complete performances were also open-air ones. This year it was somewhat different. In the first initiation performance (June 16th, Erzsébet square) we could listen to those singers performing later in the complete version, but they were singing arias and duets from different, popular operas, not Aida. However, in the second initiation performance we could already listen to a kind of a ’best of’ selection from Aida, still at the same venue. These two concerts were narrated amusingly by baritone András Hábetler, just like in the previous two years.
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On the 19th of June we saw two one-act operas at the Grand Theatre of Miskolc. László Dubrovay’s Váltságdíj (Ransom) and László Vidovszky’s Narcissus and Echo were advertised together and entitled ’Men in the crosshairs’, which joint motto may sound a bit artificial – we are talking about two very different works – but it is true, that both have ’men victims’. It was a guest performance of the Budapest Operetta Theatre, for the company of which it was not the first time to perform these two operas. The pieces have been on at the Studio Stage of the Operetta Theatre since April. The stage-director is Szilárd Somogyi.
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