Visit www.wfmt.com/santafe to listen to excerpts from Kerry Frumkin and Marc Neikrug’s conversation about this week’s program. There’s an interview excerpt in which Liang Wang describes the challenges and rewards of being a frequent participant in this Festival, and a video clip in which he casually discusses the importance of good posture. You’ll also see a video of Bella Hristova playing a Beriot Etude and find a link to Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt’s student recital at the Curtis Institute. That and more …

I hope you’ll visit the home of items rescued from the “cutting room floor” and other related tangents found along the way to creating these radio programs.

Thanks for stopping by,
Louise Frank
Series Producer

1. Instead of you, say thou or thee (and instead of y’all, say ye).
2. Rhymed couplets are all the rage.
3. Men are Sirrah, ladies are Mistress, and your friends are all called Cousin.
4. Instead of cursing, try calling your tormenters jackanapes or canker-blossoms or poisonous bunch-back’d toads.
5. Don’t waste time saying “it,” just use the letter “t” (’tis, t’will, I’ll do’t).
6. Verse for lovers, prose for ruffians, songs for clowns.
7. When in doubt, add the letters “eth” to the end of verbs (he runneth, he trippeth, he falleth).
8. To add weight to your opinions, try starting them with methinks, mayhaps, in sooth or wherefore.
9. When wooing ladies: try comparing her to a summer’s day. If that fails, say “Get thee to a nunnery!”
10. When wooing lads: try dressing up like a man. If that fails, throw him in the Tower, banish his friends and claim the throne.

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The following “reblogcast”
is a tribute to Shakespeare’s birthday
which we posted on WFMT’s “Off Mic” Production blog
last year on April 23rd, 2009.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Earlier this week, Mayor Richard M. Daley announced that April 23, Shakespeare’s 445th Birthday, will be Talk Like Shakespeare Day, an occasion for Chicagoans to bring the spoken words of Shakespeare into their daily lives. “On his 445th birthday, Shakespeare still speaks to the people of Chicago through timeless words and works,” said Mayor Daley in his formal city proclamation.” On April 23, I encourage citizens to celebrate Shakespeare by vocal acclamation, through his words.”

Chicago Shakespeare Theater will mark the occasion as well. “We’re asking our artists and audiences to find a moment to bring Shakespeare into their daily discourse-even if it’s just asking a coworker to pass ‘yonder stapler,’” said Artistic Director Barbara Gaines. “This is someone who literally, single-handedly, introduced at least 2,000 words to the English language that we still use today. We wish him a very happy birthday.”

Some of those 2,000 words include some pretty colorful bluster and insults, as documented in great and random detail

on this website, no doubt operated by someone with a surplus of time on their hands. For those of you looking for more of a Do-It-Yourself experience, leave it to the folks at MIT to have a Shakespeare Insult Kit.

There seem to be countless renditions of the Bard’s creative output out there. Here are just a few examples, from the mirthful and merry to the sublime. If you have some favorites not posted here, by all means, please let us know!

Be large in mirth; anon we’ll drink a measure the table round,
Louise

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Beatles present a version of “Pyramus and Thisbe” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream on this 1964 British television program.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” from the 2001 Broadway revival of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sesame Street: Soliloquy On B by Patrick Stewart

Click here to view the embedded video.

Judi Dench is the sleep-walking Lady Macbeth in the 1979 TV version of the Trevor Nunn production by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Denyse Alexander is the Gentlewoman and John Woodnutt is the Doctor.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And here Lady Macbeth is portrayed by Shirley Verrett in this scene from Act 4 of Verdi’s opera. This is from the Claudio Abbado and Giorgio Strehler la Scala production from the 1975/76 season.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Dance partners Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn portray Romeo and Juliet to Prokofiev’s classic score in this 1965 Royal Opera House presentation.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Visit www.wfmt.com/santafe to find many items rescued from the “cutting room floor” along with other related tangents found along the way to creating this radio series. For example, when Kerry and Marc discuss the Bartok, Marc explains, “As with every composer the search is always the same and it’s for your voice.”

Todd Levy, who is the principal clarinetist of both the Milwaukee Symphony and the Santa Fe Opera, details how he copes with playing the clarinet at altitude, and also shares his feelings about his love of chamber music. Back in March the Milwaukee Symphony presented the world premiere of Marc Neikrug’s Clarinet Quintet, a work the MSO commissioned for Todd to play. We’ve included some behind-the-scenes remarks about that process, as well as a review of the work.

That and more, updated each week. wfmt.com/santafe … I hope you’ll stop by.

Louise Frank
Series Producer

“What I really enjoyed about this project
is reviving these people’s words,
taking them off the dead, flat pages,
bringing them to life, bringing them to light.”
– Natalie Merchant -

Click here to view the embedded video.

Visit www.wfmt.com/santafe to hear excerpts from Marc Neikrug and Kerry Frumkin’s conversation about this week’s program and to find more about the artists and music featured in the broadcast.

What do a sword fight and a fidgety squirrel have to do with Janácek’s Concertino? Benny Kim tells tales of humor and high jinks from behind the scenes and Todd Levy describes the role of the e-flat clarinet in their performance of this work.

That and more, updated each week… I hope you’ll stop by.

Louise Frank
Series Producer

Were it not for University of Chicago musicologist Philip Gossett, a long-forgotten opera titled Stiffelio might have been lost forever.

Giuseppe Verdi wrote the tale of religion and sex in 1850, and immediately it prompted heavy censorship from Roman Catholic authorities who objected to its themes of adultery and divorce. In 1856, after a few tortured revivals, the infuriated Verdi withdrew the opera from circulation entirely. Never again, he said, would the piece be heard.

Yet more than a century after being purged from the Verdi canon, Stiffelio opened at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Staged for the first time using the composer’s original score, the October 1993 production starred tenor Plácido Domingo and intrigued reviewers with its innovative melodies and powerful dramatics. “It was clear,” wrote New York Times critic Edward Rothstein, “that the company had succeeded in introducing a significant work into its mainstream repertory.”

Gossett may have been off-stage, but his 40 years of Verdi scholarship had helped unearth Stiffelio and other opera masterpieces for modern audiences.

Spheres of Influence

“This is a major Verdi,” says Gossett, the Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor of Music, of the piece. “And it was totally unknown.”

Considered one of the world’s foremost scholars of 19th-century Italian opera, Gossett has spent his career enriching opera performances as only a scholar can, with exhaustive work that puts compositions in a new light. Even as his upcoming retirement this year brings his formal teaching career at UChicago to a close, Gossett is embarking on new critical editions and writing projects that will again put him in the detective role.

“If there were such a thing as a Nobel Prize for musicology — and there should be — he would add luster to the list of Nobel laureates from the University,” said Brian Dickie, director of the Chicago Opera Theater, at a Feb. 22 symposium that celebrated Gossett’s achievements.

Gossett’s critical editions of Verdi and Rossini set the gold standard for opera editions. The product of intense investigation, each volume features a detailed score and a complete history of the composition process. In 1998, the Italian government awarded Gossett for his scholarship with the country’s highest civilian honor, the Cavaliere di Gran Croce.

“You really can’t talk about Italian opera without hitting something he’s laid the groundwork for,” says Hilary Poriss, AM’93, PhD’00, who wrote her dissertation on 19th-century arias under Gossett’s guidance.

Now an assistant professor of music at Boston’s Northeastern University, Poriss remembers house-sitting for Gossett one summer and trying to work on her dissertation in his study. Scanning the bookshelves full of Italian opera, it hit her that Gossett had played some role in nearly every volume, either as author, co-author, or editor. “I got so overwhelmed that I actually left,” she says with a laugh. “I worked in the library for the rest of the summer.”

That voluminous body of work continues to grow. Gossett’s upcoming projects include supervising an edition of one of Rossini’s last operas, Le comte Ory, scheduled to be performed next February in Zürich, with Cecilia Bartoli as the Comtesse; working on a new Italian translation of Verdi’s Les vêpres siciliennes for a 2011 performance in Turin, Italy; and supervising an edition of Rossini’s Neopolitan opera, Maometto secondo, which will be performed in Sante Fe, N.M., in the summer of 2012. Gossett’s writing projects include a book about Rossini for Norton and The Very Short Introduction to Opera for Oxford University Press.

From Theory to Practice

Gossett’s award-winning 2006 book, Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera, has further revolutionized the performance of the 19th-century repertoire, helping famed Italian conductor Riccardo Muti, soprano Renée Fleming, and other opera superstars deliver richer, more historically informed performances. “He’s always terribly good with singers,” says Dickie, who is collaborating with Gossett on the Chicago Opera Theate’s April production of Rossini’s Moses in Egypt. “He’s very, very helpful in pointing them, and us, in the right direction to enable us to perform this repertory as well as possible.”

“When the public sees an opera,” says Gossett, “they just assume that it’s all straightforward, but it’s not.” Every singer makes countless decisions: “Should I sing just the notes that are written? Should I ornament this? Do I need a cadenza at this point?” Critical editions put all options on the table, allowing performers to make more informed choices about their roles.

“What we want to know is what Verdi did and why,” says Gossett, who is general editor of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi (University of Chicago Press and Ricordi-Universal Music of Milan), the only edition of the composer’s complete repertoire based exclusively on original sources. For Gossett, this means painstakingly piecing together snippets of autographed manuscripts acquired from the composer’s heirs, recording archives, and theaters where the opera was performed. “The critical edition,” he says, “makes everything available.”

Behind the Scenes

Discovering new music is perhaps the most exciting part of working on a critical edition. In researching Verdi’s La forza del destino, for example, Gossett realized the composer had added a soaring tenor aria to the end of Act III just before the opera’s 1862 debut, and then abruptly removed it in a subsequent version. Turns out, Verdi had inserted the part specifically for a male singer known for his high C note. When the performer left the role, the aria went with him. “Nobody else in the world can sing this,” said Verdi, before transposing the aria down a step and later revamping the entire act.

Without these discoveries made by Gossett, says Dickie, the “whole world of the Italian repertory would be just such an impoverished place.” And it would have happened if Gossett had listened to his graduate school advisers.

“My teachers at Princeton at that point thought I was crazy,” says the musicologist. “What is this Italian opera stuff?” they demanded, advising him to switch to something more “serious,” like Beethoven or Stravinsky. Gossett, who had fallen in love with opera watching performances from the Met’s standing-room-only section as a teenager, refused.

“I’ve never been sorry a day,” he says.

By Brooke O’Neill, AM’04

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This article was pilfered with gratitude from http://www.uchicago.edu/features/20100405_gossett.shtml