Alwyn mellor biography template

"Soprano Lori Phillips and mezzo-soprano Mary Phillips, twin sisters who have been critically acclaimed in opera houses and on concert stages both here and abroad, had performed together just once before until this concert, giving this recital an unusual distinction. From the first two songs, Mikhail Glinka’s “How Sweet It Is to Be with You” and “You Won’t Come Again,” their ease of production and harmonic convergence were evident. Both singers displayed a dramatic soprano’s range and a burnished tonal brilliance, while amiably anticipating each other’s cues and facilitating their entrances. Closing the first half of the program, Arensky’s “Violet” (op. 29, no. 3) offered the rare pleasure of hearing both singers sustain the same high note in unison, the sound gloriously ringing and rounded, followed by Aleksandr Gretchaninov’s “Day Dreams,” in which first Lori, then Mary hit a climactic top note with stunning clarity and thrilling richness. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Angel and Demon” (op. 52, no. 4), the two sopranos/spirits pulled it off with masterful persuasiveness, each of them equally determined to convince the listener of her own (character’s) superiority. To conclude the program, Lori and Mary Phillips (with Danchenko-Stern at the piano) offered three duets by Tchaikovsky. First came the soothing and poetic “Lisa and Polina Duet” (lyrics by Pushkin) from his opera Queen of Spades, which the three musicians gave a harmonious rendering.  The song “Tears” (op. 46, no. 3) was among the composer’s “favorite offspring.” The Phillips sister’s voices’ timbre, like that of two impeccably tuned instruments were seamlessly bowed, played one mood, that of impassioned sorrow. The fusion reached apotheosis with the final song, “Passion Has Fled,” the dramatic intensity heightening as each singer picked up the narrative from the other—“Everyt

Why, I ask myself, did the Opera North semi-staged performance of Götterdämmerung in the Leeds Town Hall make such an impact? To begin with, we in the audience were much closer to the singers than in a conventional theatre. More obviously, the positioning of the large orchestra on the stage, rather than in the pit, gave a sharper profile to that dimension of the performance. And since we had the good fortune to have Richard Farnes as conductor we could appreciate not only the broad sweep of the famous passages in the score but also impressive and intriguing attention to detail. For example, in the second half of the Prologue, as dawn breaks on the Rhine, we could sense in the music the lovers rubbing the sleep from their eyes as they awoke and in the Journey to Rhine, the ripples on the water could be heard as Siegfried churns his way through them. A big  thank you to members of the orchestra who, once again, showed that they were second  to none in music of this kind.

Unlike some of previous parts of this Ring cycle, concessions do not have to be made for the singing  which was truly of an international quality. Alwyn Mellor, for example, who has fully internalised  the range of emotions in Brünnhilde’s predicament, was much superior to the soprano who took the role in Walküre and Siegfried, maintaining the colour and intonation of the voice at full volume, even at the end of a long evening. And the heldentenor Mati Turi again convinced having both the steel  to ride the orchestral sound and the lyricism for his Act Three narration. The sonorous bass of Mats Almgren met the considerable demands of the role of Hagen, added to which his physical demeanour epitomised, but without exaggeration, evil. A word of praise too for Susan Bickley who as Waltraute made much of my favourite scene in this work.

And was the semi-staging effective?  Having learned from  the challenging experiences of the past three years

Wagner considered himself first a writer and poet, and secondarily a composer. So far as he was concerned, he only wrote music because his words made a stronger impression when sung. Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote all his librettos himself. Thanks to the curiously dual nature of his genius, his words and music, united, are much stronger than either by itself. When pontificating about his art (a favorite pastime), he loved to speak of a ‘marriage’ between words and music, sense and sound, with the masculine word planting a seed in feminine music, who then brings to bear glorious fruit.

Curiously, despite Wagner’s own bias towards words and ideas, some of the liveliest moments in his operas come when his characters stop singing words and start singing nonsense instead. In The Flying Dutchman, for example, the maritime setting and sea-shanty-soaked score calls for lots of “Yo Heave Ho” sailor/pirate jabber.

You’ll hear such cries (spelled “Ho-ho! Je holla ho!” in Wagner’s libretto) in the refrain of the sleepy Steersman’s song. Listen in particular at 1:00 in the track:

Wagner spells his sailor jargon differently at other moments in the opera. When you attend Seattle Opera's upcoming Flying Dutchman, keep your ears peeled for moments including:

Daland’s crew seek a safe haven: “Hojohe! Hallojo!”
Senta begins her ballad: “Johohohe! Johohe!”
Sailors make merry: “Ho! He! Je! Ha! Klipp’ und Sturm’, He! Sind vorbei, he! Hussahe! Hallohe!”

Why is The Flying Dutchman full of such glorious nonsense? Der Freischütz, the 1817 opera by Carl Maria von Weber, is the real source of all the lusty gibberish in The Flying Dutchman. Freischütz was Wagner’s favorite opera when he was a kid; he idolized Weber, a family friend, and, in his autobiogr