Every so often we regret having missed telling our readers about a barihunk appearance. Michael Weyandt's appearance as Fernando in Handel's Almira with operamission at the Gershwin Hotel was a prime example. New York Times classical music critic Anthony Tommaini wrote glowingly about the performance and wrote that the role of Fernando was "...movingly performed here by the virile, ardent baritone Michael Weyandt." You can read the entire review on the NY Times website.
We wanted to share a bit of the performance for those of you who missed this wonderful talent.
In the first part of the video you'll hear Weyandt sing "Edele Sinnen schaffen von hinnen" followed by the arioso "Was ist des Hofes Gunst? ein Dunst." The rough translations are:
"Noble thoughts soothe away whatever causes annoyance and harm. And on the contrary strive by all means to become on earth delighted in sweetest repose."
--and--
"What is the favor of the court? A mist, that swiftly disperses; a labyrinth of the times, that invariably takes us from crown and throne to prison."
We've featured numerous operamission concerts on our website and they are a must for anyone in the New York area. You can follow them on Facebook or Twitter at @operamission.
Last Sunday we posted about the wedding of barihunks Dan Kempson and Zachary Altman. Today's Sunday, New York Times featured an official wedding announcement and we've published the entire text below.
Alexander Mackay-Smith Kempson and Zachary Clayton Altman, both baritones, were married Saturday evening at the Tribeca Rooftop, an event space in New York. Dona D. Vaughn, a Universal Life minister who taught them in the opera program at the Manhattan School of Music, officiated.
The couple met in 2007 at the music school, from which Mr. Altman graduated and from which both received master’s degrees in voice.
Until May, Mr. Kempson (left), who is 26 and known professionally as Dan Kempson, was a resident artist with the Pittsburgh Opera, where last year he sang the role of Figaro in “The Barber of Seville.” He performed the role of the Baritone in “Hydrogen Jukebox,” by Philip Glass and Allen Ginsberg, with the Fort Worth Opera last May. He graduated from Johns Hopkins.
He is a son of Catharine Mackay-Smith Kempson and Kenneth E. Kempson of Wilton, Conn. Until June, his mother was the president of the League of Women Voters of Wilton. His father is a senior tax counsel for General Electric in Stamford, Conn. He is a trustee of the Wilton Library.
Mr. Altman, 27, is a private voice teacher in New York. Last year, he performed the role of Hermann Augustus in “Candide” with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He appeared in a Sarasota Opera production of “La Bohème” earlier this year.
He is the son of Nancy Crueger Altman and Brett H. Altman of Wyndmoor, Pa. His mother is on the board of Concert Operetta Theater in Philadelphia. His father is a partner in the Altman Group of Companies in Fort Washington, Pa., which operates a general contracting business, manages housing and is involved in real estate development. He is on the board of Federation Housing Inc. in Philadelphia, a nonprofit developer of housing for the elderly.
The couple began dating in 2008, a year after they met. The next year they appeared in a Manhattan School of Music production of “Die Fledermaus,” directed by Ms. Vaughn. Mr. Altman sang the part of Dr. Falke and Mr. Kempson Gabriel von Eisenstein (normally a tenor part). Both characters were vying for the affection of Rosalinde.
In real life, Mr. Altman recalled, “we were pretty entrenched in our relationship at that point.” He said that Ms. Vaughn lightheartedly reminded them, “You need to make gaga eyes at Rosalinde, and not each other.”
The baritone Mariusz Kwiecien performing in the rakish title role of Mozart's “Don Giovanni,” in a recently mounted production directed by Michael Grandage for the Metropolitan Opera. (Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera)
Read Anthony Tommasini's review in the New York Times of Mariusz Kwiecien's dramatic return to the Met's "Don Giovanni."
In yesterday's New York Times, Zachary Woolfe asked the question "What is charisma? A gift from the musical gods." He mentions many of the great sopranos of recent times, including Maria Callas, Renata Scotto, Natalie Dessay and Catherine Malfitano. The one barihunk who is mentioned is the indisputably charismatic Dmitri Hvorostovsky.
Read the article and post a comment letting us know who else in the world of opera you find charismatic.
Russian composer Igor Krutoy and Dmitri Hvorostovsky collaborated on the video "Toi et Moi":
Cornell MacNeil, one of the great postwar American baritones, best known for his roles in Verdi operas, died on Friday in Charlottesville, Va. He was 88.
His death was announced by his wife, Tania. Mr. MacNeil had been living in an assisted-living facility in Charlottesville.
A pure baritone with power from low to high notes, he was considered the equal of Leonard Warren and Robert Merrill, the other stellar American Verdi baritones during the second half of the 20th century.
From 1959 to 1987, he sang 26 roles in more than 600 appearances at the Metropolitan Opera alone. But he reached his peak in his Verdi performances.
“The larger and more complex the part, the better he was,” James Levine, the Met’s longtime conductor, said of Mr. MacNeil’s Verdi roles in a 2007 interview with Opera News. “Boccanegra, Rigoletto, Macbeth, Nabucco, Falstaff, Iago — a lot of these parts could be said to be the most challenging and varied.” Referring to characters in “Aida” and “Tosca,” Mr. Levine continued, “He sang lots of Amonasros and Scarpias marvelously well, but those more complex ones were where he was at his best.”
Though not known as a temperamental artist, Mr. MacNeil was remembered for a spectacular public outburst when he stormed off the Parma Opera stage in Italy on Dec. 26, 1964. It happened during “Un Ballo in Maschera,” when the Parma audience, notorious for rude displays of disapproval, hissed at the soprano Luisa Maragliano just as Mr. MacNeil was about to sing the aria “Eri tu.”
“I was getting more and more angry as the rumbling and noise got worse,” he told The New York Times the following day. “I couldn’t stand it any longer. ‘Basta, cretini!’ I shouted and walked off the stage.” (His words meant “That’s enough, you idiots!”)
The situation grew worse in his dressing room, where the stage director warned him to return to the performance because he had his family’s safety to consider. Refusing to go back onstage, Mr. MacNeil sent his wife and children to their hotel. But when he made his way to the back entrance, he was assaulted by theater employees. “During the scuffle, I got socked on the jaw,” Mr. MacNeil said, displaying a bruised chin during his Times interview. The following day the MacNeils fled Parma. Cornell MacNeil was born on Sept. 24, 1922, in Minneapolis, where his father was a dentist and his mother a singer who had studied with the celebrated contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink. Though interested in an operatic career from an early age, Mr. MacNeil suffered from asthma until he was 20. It was severe enough to get him rejected by the military draft during World War II. He took a wartime job as a lathe operator, and then, on his mother’s advice, studied with the retired baritone Friedrich Schorr at the Hartt School of Music in Hartford.
Before the war ended, Mr. MacNeil joined the Radio City Music Hall Glee Club and also did backstage announcements. It was his sonorous baritone that announced the news to Radio City audiences of both the German and Japanese surrenders.
Mr. MacNeil made his opera debut when, after a brief vocal audition, the composer and director Gian Carlo Menotti immediately decided to cast him as the male lead in “The Consul,” which opened on March 1, 1950, at the Shubert Theater in Philadelphia. “The Consul,” the first full-length opera composed by Menotti, won the Pulitzer Prize in music that year. Still a raw talent, Mr. MacNeil took voice lessons over the next two years while working nights at the Bulova Watch factory in Queens. In 1953 Mr. MacNeil made his New York City Opera debut, as Germont in “La Traviata.” Though acclaimed for his sumptuous singing in that performance, he also committed a memorable faux pas that began the occasional carping by critics about his acting abilities.
In a 2007 interview with Rudolph Rauch for Opera News, Mr. MacNeil recalled making hand gestures in the aria “Di Provenza” that didn’t agree with the music, and he acknowledged he had been unaware of the meaning of the words he was singing. “It seemed like the hand was out there for about half an hour, and it began to shake,” he said. “I finally got it back in, and I decided then I was not going to sing any more Italian operas until I really knew the language.”
His Italian improved, though his acting continued to draw sporadic barbs from critics. Commenting on his performance as the villain Scarpia, the villain in a 1985 performance of Puccini’s “Tosca” at the Metropolitan Opera, Donal Henahan of The Times wrote, “Cornell MacNeil, the Scarpia, sang mellifluously, but his wooden acting could fool nobody into believing him a sadistic tyrant.” In 1959 Mr. MacNeil moved to Rome with his first wife, Margaret Gavan, and their five children. That March 5 he made his debut at La Scala in Milan as Carlo in Verdi’s “Ernani.” “His rich, flexible baritone soared and swelled with enormous power,” Time magazine wrote. He impressed La Scala’s manager, Antonio Ghiringhelli, enough that he offered him a contract.
But Mr. MacNeil signed instead with the Met after making his debut there on March 21, 1959 — barely two weeks after his La Scala debut — as the lead in Verdi’s “Rigoletto.” He would go on to sing that role at the Met more than 100 times.
Mr. MacNeil scored numerous successes in other roles as well. Commenting on his first Met appearance as Renato in Verdi’s “Ballo in Maschera” on March 7, 1962, Alan Rich wrote in The Times, “This superb American baritone may very possibly have had his finest hour.”
He sang Scarpia more than 90 times at the Metropolitan following his debut in the role on Nov. 2, 1959. His final performance at the Met was in that role, on Dec. 5, 1987. He retired from the opera a year later after medical tests showed he had a possible blockage of the carotid artery.
Mr. MacNeil occasionally sang in Wagnerian operas, including the roles of the Dutchman in “Der Fliegende Holländer” and the Herald in “Lohengrin.” But the consensus was that his talents were best on display in Italian operas.
His marriage to Ms. Gavan ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, the former Tania Rudensky, and five children from his first marriage: Walter, of New York; Mary Ellen MacNeil of Greenwood, Va.; Dennis, of Sag Harbor, N.Y.; Susan Keuter of Florence, Ore.; and Katherine Mary Dariani of Eau Gallie, Fla.; as well as two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
A few years before leaving the stage, Mr. MacNeil gave a straightforward assessment of the opera world to his friend and Met colleague Jerome Hines, the well-known bass, who interviewed him for a 1982 book “Great Singers on Great Singing.”
“Opera is an excessive art form populated by excessive people,” Mr. MacNeil said. “We make it more excessive than necessary. Singing is really a very simple thing.”
Zachary Woolfe has written a review for the New York Times about "Two Boys," which we recently featured. It's nice to see a reviewer not write a "Broadway review" and actually talk about the music and not just the production values and direction. Woolfe's review is important, as the opera is slated to be performed at the Metropolitan Opera in the 2013-14 season. Here is a highlight:
Without using electronic instruments, Mr. Muhly has created a world immersed in technology; his sound palette is Britten, not “Tron.” There are softly chiming gongs and ethereal winds, lyrical and sinuous strings and sympathetic, Romantic orchestral surges. The second act starts with an eerie, suspended calm punctured by string flourishes that develop into something almost folksy. There are foreboding minor-key arpeggios throughout, but Mr. Muhly ventures far beyond stock Minimalism. He even creates a new setting for part of the Anglican service; the sound of church music, dense yet floating, permeates the opera.
Indeed, the choral writing is the work’s most successful element.
You can read Zachary Woolfe's entire review in the NY Times HERE.
