Season of operatic bounty
The Fall 2018 opera season is underway in HK and its neighboring cities. Peter Gordon has the lowdown.
The Fall 2018 opera season (and yes, this year there really is a “season”) kicked off last weekend with the Opera Hong Kong production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at City Hall. These semi-staged summer productions are designed to showcase local singers. This year the soprano Etta Fung made a stunning Queen of the Night and showed herself as a singer to watch.
The must-see highlight of the season will surely be the company’s Turandot, running at Hong Kong Cultural Centre Grand Theatre from Oct 10 to 14. Puccini’s final opera is the tale of the eponymous Chinese ice princess melted by an implacable love. With no desire to marry, she sets suitors three unanswerable riddles to be solved on pain of death. Prince Calaf is nonetheless smitten and nothing will dissuade him from trying his hand. To everyone’s surprise and Turandot’s horror, he solves the riddles, but offers her a way out: If she can guess his name by dawn, she’s off the hook. Cue Nessun Dorma (No one must sleep), Puccini’s most famous tenor aria.
Veteran Italian conductor Paolo Olmi will be in the pit for this entirely new production from Opera Hong Kong and New York City Opera. The show stars Oksana Dyka, one of the world’s most renowned contemporary Turandots, joined by Alfred Kim, who sang Calaf at Covent Garden and Valeria Sepe who will be remembered from her poignant Desdemona in the company’s 2016 production of Otello.
Also featuring a worldclass cast is the curtain-raiser for the Macao International Music Festival at the end of September: Donizetti’s bestknown comedy, the bubbly L’Elisir d’Amore. The leads in this Zurich Opera House production are the internationally renowned Mexican tenor Arturo Chacón-Cruz and Italian soprano Laura Giordano, who sang the opera together earlier this year at Palermo’s Teatro Massimo. Filled with irrepressible music, The Elixir of Love tells of the country bumpkin Nemorino, hopelessly in love with the town’s “it” girl, Adina, who has just gotten herself engaged to a visiting sergeant. Nemorino procures the help of Dr Dulcamara, a less-than-honest purveyor of quack potions.
Puccini returns to wrap up the season of full-scale productions with Musica Viva’s Madama Butterfly from Dec 7 to 9 at City Hall. This everpopular and heart-rending story of a young Japanese girl wooed and dumped by a dashing American naval officer will feature several singers returning from previous Hong Kong productions, including Korean soprano Lee Sang-eun (Gilda in the 2013 Rigoletto), tenors Dominick Chenes (Rodolfo in last year’s La Bohème) and Jeffrey Hartman (who returns from both the 2012 and 2013 productions). This will also be a chance to appreciate performances by the leading local mezzo-soprano Carol Lin as well as the award-winning conductor Lio Kuokman.
Getting intimate
Interleaving these are a quartet of smaller productions. Musica Viva will be offering a local-cast production of Donizetti’s comic opera Don Pasquale on Sept 28 and 29, while the Macao festival is putting on what may well be the Chinese premiere of Gioachino Rossini’s one-act comedy Il Signor Bruschino performed by the Chamber Opera of Geneva at the iconic Dom Pedro V Theatre on Oct 12 and 13. Both are archetypal romantic farces about mixed identities from two of Italy’s leading bel canto composers.
Something entirely different comes in the form of Shanghai-born and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun’s modern English-language opera Angel’s Bone, which deals with the difficult subject of human trafficking. It forms part of the New Visions Arts Festival and will be performed on Nov 10 and 11. And for those who want another dose of Puccini, local vocal startup More than Musical is staging a “reduced” version of Puccini’s Tosca from Oct 30 to Nov 3, sung by Karen Ho Chia-ling, who appeared in Dream of the Red Chamber at the 2017 Hong Kong Arts Festival.
Several vocal concerts of note have been lined up as well. On Sept 29, Chinese prima donna and Hong Kong favorite He Hui is singing at the Shenzhen Concert Hall as part of her 20th-anniversary tour. For those who won’t mind traveling a bit to listen to their favorite soprano, she is reprising Aida at National Centre for Performing Arts in Beijing on Oct 23. On Nov 29 He is back in Hong Kong at the Youth Square Y Theatre to participate in the Italian Cultural Institute-hosted TriOpera — a trio of soprano, flute and piano — in a free Rossini concert to celebrate the composer’s 150th birth anniversary.
The year 2018 closes out in style with He performing in a New Year’s Eve concert at Macao Cultural Centre Grand Auditorium.