Verdi

Editor's note: A young python doesn't want to grow up and become slow and boring like the older snakes in the tropical jungle where he lives.On a small tropical island, the sun rose high above the steamy jungle. A mother python was sending her hatchlings out into the forest the way all mother pythons do. "Grow up big and green -- as green as the trees' leaves," she called to her little yellow babies as they happily scattered among the trees.But Verdi dawdled. Why the hurry to grow up big and green?

Lyric Opera Baltimore is wrapping up its comfort-food season with Verdi's stirring drama of love, nastiness and misplaced loyalties, “Rigoletto.” The staging looked a little square and economical Friday night at the Modell Performing Arts Center, but it often sounded splendid; Sunday's matinee ought to be even better. In the two short years since it emerged from the ruins of the longtime Baltimore Opera Company, which folded its tent in 2009, Lyric Opera Baltimore has taken a purposely conservative path, offering standard works in mostly traditional productions.

Since his death at 87 in 1901, Giuseppe Verdi has been portrayed as a kind of Abraham Lincoln of music: a wise, gruff yet humane man of humble origins who cared deeply about four things: music, people, farming and his beloved country.In countless biographies, Verdi venerators have described the Italian composer as a peasant from Busseto, a small town near Parma, who rivaled Wagner as the king of 19th-century opera and who rallied his countrymen in uniting Italy.He wrote 30 operas, including masterworks such as "La Traviata," "Rigoletto" and "Aida."

The opera world has been giving a little extra attention to a couple of giants born in 1813, Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner. Locally, that bicentennial salute has included memorable concerts by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra featuring excerpts from Wagner's mountainous operas. And this week, Lyric Opera Baltimore offers a production of one of Verdi's earliest masterworks for the stage, "Rigoletto. " The "Rigoletto" staging brings tenor Bryan Hymel back to town after his Lyric debut last season, when he made a formidable impression in Gounod's "Faust.

MILAN, Italy -- Carefully and gently, as though his life woul crumble away in his hands, Eraldo Coda unfolds the yellowing papers and points with pride."

IT CALLS ITSELF the Handel Choir but yesterday it was the Verdi Choir. It sang the Manzoni Requiem passionately in only the second time since the group began here in 1934 (the first Requiem was in 1971). It was 95 uninterrupted minutes of polished Verdian contrasts in the requiem that speaks of death but feels of life.Giuseppe Verdi revered text almost as much as music. So the soft descending cellos led effectively into the opening words "Grant them rest eternal, Lord." The crashing tumult of the four G minor chords of "Day of anger, day of trouble" unfolded.

With Rigoletto, a tale of depravity, deformity, delusion, decency and devotion, Verdi reached a new peak. For all the quality at work in his previous 15 operas, it was Rigoletto that first reflected the full power of the composer's genius. Not even the brilliant works he wrote afterward overshadowed its musical and theatrical virtues. Many of those virtues could be appreciated Saturday night in the Baltimore Opera Company's production at the Lyric; fewer came through on Sunday afternoon with a different set of principal singers.

In another of those rare and fortuitous alignments of local musical forces, the two greatest choral works of the 19th century will be performed in the space of two days this week - Beethoven's Missa Solemnis by the Baltimore Choral Arts Society and Verdi's Requiem by the Handel Choir of Baltimore. Some people who adore Beethoven's symphonies, concertos, etc., pass over his sacred music. Likewise, you can find devoted Verdi opera fans who don't get as enthused about his setting of the ancient Latin Mass for the Dead.

You've heard that those who can, do; and those who can't, teach. Well, sometimes, those who can, do - and teach, too. Victor Danchenko, for example. The Russian-born pedagogue, a veteran faculty member at two leading conservatories, Curtis and Peabody, gave an instructive recital Tuesday night at An die Musik LIVE. He demonstrated not just the calm authority you would expect from a professor and a competition-winning Moscow Conservatory graduate, but an unabashedly old-fashioned, romantic style.

Censorship and complaints about it are constants -- although their intensity has varied throughout history and not necessarily in proportion to each other. Recently, we have come through a particularly intense period in regard to censorship -- or at least to complaints about it -- but one need only look to mid-19th century Italy to see a time when censorship genuinely affected art.This all comes to mind because the Baltimore Opera Company will present Guiseppe Verdi's "A Masked Ball" this week and next at the Lyric Opera House.

The 2013-2014 opera season at the Modell Performing Arts Center at The Lyric will have a lot in common with the 2012-2013 season -- staged works by Verdi and Puccini produced by Lyric Opera Baltimore, with a concert in between. There is something substantially more adventurous in terms of repertoire for next season, courtesy of the Peabody Opera Theatre, which will present Poulenc's "Dialogues of the Carmelites. " That masterpiece was last performed at the Lyric in 1984 by the old Baltimore Opera Company.

Annapolis Opera opened its 40th season with Giuseppe Verdi's 26th opera, "Aida," a performance that emphasized the music of this grand opera in an intimate setting that made a full staging impossible. Marking his 30th season as artistic director, Ronald J. Gretz chose to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Verdi's birth with the composer's monumental work in concert form. In contrast to the dazzling spectacle of a fully staged "Aida," we enjoyed the glorious music in the smaller Maryland Hall setting.

Annapolis Opera is on fire with excitement about its 40th-anniversary season. That much is evident from its season brochure — the company's best ever — on which a flaming "V" proclaims a celebration of the bicentennial of Giuseppe Verdi's birth. Italy's pre-eminent composer will be honored at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts in Annapolis Opera's productions of two masterworks — a concert version of "Aida" and a fully staged "Rigoletto. " This season also celebrates the 25th annual Vocal Competition, which introduces outstanding young singers from the Mid-Atlantic region who compete for more than $10,000 in total prizes.

Annapolis became a major cultural metropolis this month, thanks to the presentation of two musical masterworks — one by a major 19th-century symphony composer, the other by a major 19th-century opera composer. Both works, which premiered within 20 years of each other, focus on the meaning of life and death. At the U.S. Naval Academy's Alumni Hall on April 19, the Distinguished Artists Series closed with the 39th annual Spring Oratorio. The presentation of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 featured Aaron Smith conducting the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Naval Academy men's and women's glee clubs, the Goucher College Chorus, and soloists.

Verdi's "A Masked Ball" makes an appropriately grand choice for Washington National Opera's season opener. It's a big-gesture work with terrific sweep, yet one with many a subtle musical and dramatic detail. The composer was forced by government censors to turn the opera's plot about the assassination of Sweden's King Gustavus III into an unlikely scenario set in Colonial Boston. But like some other companies these days, WNO restores the original Swedish setting. Although Salvatore Licitra doesn't always use his sizable tenor gracefully, his singing as Gustavus has a certain visceral appeal.

Annapolis Opera opened its 37th season last weekend at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts with an all-Verdi concert. Starting his 26th year with the opera, artistic director Ronald J. Gretz created an exciting and comprehensive program of arias illustrating the astonishing breadth of 19th-century composer Guiseppe Verdi, who wrote 28 operas between 1839 and 1893. Gretz created a program that included arias from Verdi's three major career periods, introducing the audience to some rarely heard works, along with masterworks too grand to be fully staged at Maryland Hall.

Verdi's "A Masked Ball" makes an appropriately grand choice for Washington National Opera's season opener. It's a big-gesture work with terrific sweep, yet one with many a subtle musical and dramatic detail. The composer was forced by government censors to turn the opera's plot about the assassination of Sweden's King Gustavus III into an unlikely scenario set in Colonial Boston. But like some other companies these days, WNO restores the original Swedish setting. Although Salvatore Licitra doesn't always use his sizable tenor gracefully, his singing as Gustavus has a certain visceral appeal.

To opera singer James Morris, there's "no feeling in the world like singing Wagner."But the 44-year-old Baltimore native -- whose commanding portrayal of Wotan, ruler of the gods, in Wagner's four-part epic "The Ring of the Nibelung" has made him arguably the foremost Wagnerian of his day -- also knows there can be too much of a good thing."

Verdi's Aida, perhaps the most iconic of grand operas, doesn't demand too much. Only half a dozen or so amply gifted singers with an unusual capacity for technical and interpretive depth, a big-league chorus and orchestra, scenery that can live up to the visual expectations of a work set in ancient Egypt, and an all-encompassing sense of style. No wonder the piece doesn't come around every day. And when it does, chances for disappointment invariably run high. The Baltimore Opera Company's new production faces those odds head on and, for the most part, succeeds handsomely.

In his last years, Verdi drew extraordinary inspiration from Shakespeare, producing two equally compelling swan songs - Otello and Falstaff, each with its own remarkable combination of musical sophistication and theatrical sureness. This being the age of directorial license, both works are candidates for rethinking. If you go Verdi's Otello will be performed at 3 p.m. tomorrow at the John. F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Virginia and New Hampshire avenues Northwest, Washington.