The force is strong with Domingo

Plácido Domingo has shunned the material wealth of the $1m Birgit Nilsson prize, which, we suspect, is why he was rewarded with a statue of a golden jedi during the ceremony Royal Swedish Opera on 13 October.
As the first winner of the competition, nominated by the late 'primadonna assoluta' herself, putting the prize money towards his own Operalia competition has set a strong precedent of philanthropy which will be hard to shake off. As Sondheim and Lenny said, 'you just have to pass it along'...

Separated at birth

Mussorgsky



Runnicles



Our Donald is just one vodka-soaked bender from being completely indistinguishable from the infamously-tortured Russian hellraiser.

The food of love

Long live the great Lanza. It is 50 years (yesterday) since Mario Lanza died and, in commemoration, and in preference to writing something new, this is a diamond-polished opportunity to drag out the Barlines top five opera related foods. We like this game. Here goes:

Presumably ever since people recreationally stretched their leftovers over the bits of wood they were eating off there has been a link between music and food. One discerning clergyman during the enlightenment said that heaven was the sound of 'eating paté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets'. Not the sound of moaning virgins, vanquished infidels or the cadences of the spoken mass, mind, but actual brass instruments.

Many great singers have had a weakness for the pies, and we have heard singing teachers with our own ears endorsing fat as a backdoor route to a natural support and superior sounding vocal chords. Some said that the slimline Maria Callas lost something after she shed the pounds. Deborah Voigt, having lost 100 of them following gastric bypass surgery, said that her singing is no longer 'as effortless'. Some have been cruelly consumed by their appetites, like Mario Lanza, mayherestinpeace, who drank champagne like water. On the other side of the pros arch, we won't go as far as to say that English audiences are dead until they get a few fingers inside them, but anyone who has been to Garsington or Glyndebourne or, indeed, taken a hip flask to a cinecast, can attest to a certain alco-dramatic synergy. Anyway here are the Barlines top five opera-related foods.

1. Tournedos Rossini. No contest, Barlines' all-time number one greatest musical gourmand happens to be our second-favourite bel canto composer. Place a seared fillet steak on a fried crouton, then drown it with foie gras, truffles, demi-glace sauce and madeira. Apparently the recipe was the composer's own, and it was he who gave it to Adolphe Dugléré, chef at the Café Anglais in Paris, a man Rossini later dubbed Le Mozart de la cuisine. In Larousse Gastronomique, you will find entries for omelette Rossini, scrambled eggs Rossini, soft-boiled eggs Rossini and roast chicken Rossini, all of which involve smothering the principal ingredient with foie gras, truffles and demi-glace. The encyclopaedia also credits the composer with inventing a way of stuffing macaroni with foie gras by means of a silver syringe. The story goes that Rossini once said that he only cried three times in his life: when his first opera was booed, when he first heard Paganini play the violin, and when he dropped a truffled turkey in a lake whist picnicking.
2. Georges-Auguste Escoffier's creations in the Savoy kitchens in honour of Dame Nellie Melba are well known – serve your peaches on a bed of vanilla ice cream and add raspberry purée (although originally spun sugar was used instead) and you have Peach Melba. Make your toast thin, dry and crispy and ditto. The three-octave diva once had a serious food-related sense of humour failure when Enrico Caruso, clasping her tiny hand under the table, during a performance of Bohème, in order to pronounce it frozen, pressed a hot sausage into it. The offending piece of meat was hurled across the stage in disgust.
3. Bizet's Omelette. A brilliant spoof of stilted bel canto ensemble writing, the Omelette quartet is from the composer's early opera Dr Miracle. Written when he was 19, for a competition organised by Offenbach, it has long outlived the other 70-odd contenders.
4. Spaghetti alla Caruso. A great commercial ambassador for Neapolitan food to New York, the tenor had a particular fondness of chicken livers. Recipes for the sauce vary, but you can't go far wrong if you fry some mushrooms in butter with some onions and garlic, deglaze the pan with a glass of wine, turn the livers in some seasoned flour and sautee separately while the wine reduces, then add around a tin of tomatoes with some tomato puree before adding the livers. Season and garnish with parsley.
5. JD Wetherspoons' Chicken Korma. Most of the standard venues for small touring opera companies have a J D Wetherspoon round the corner. Forget the idea of not eating before a show, from our own experience most of the band and singers will be in there about an hour and a half before curtain-up.

Hieronymus who?

Deane Root has been appointed editor in chief of the Grove Music programme at Oxford University Press. Professor of music and director of the center [sic] for American music at the University of Pittsburgh, he will, no doubt, bring to the post an impressive judgment, gleaned from his multi-roped, gleaming career as a professor, scholar and librarian. More importantly, it gives us the opportunity to trot out the Barlines top five questionable entries in Grove list again. It first appeared in the 19 July 2008 edition of Classical Music after we found some wildly inconsistent comment on standard subjects in the Oxford Music Online database. We felt a bit mean back then, and we still do, because, as Guglielmo Baldini would say, alla fine del giorno, Grove is our life blood – a constant fixture on the Barlines Firefox bookmarks toolbar, when blogs, cartoon strips, and Anime review podcasts come and go.

1. Esrum-Hellerup, Dag Henrik, composer for flute who was named after several small Danish Villages. Probably the most well-known spoof, we had assumed that it was a nihilartikel – a deliberate false entry inserted to reveal copyright infractions, but we have it on good intelligence that editor Stanley Sadie was not amused.
2. Baldini, Guglielmo. As above, from the 1980 New Grove – a long-running spoof before it was picked up by Grove, but some nice touches were added. The author’s name – Di Gennaro – for example, is the vulgar Italian version of the two-faced Roman God, Janus (thank-you Viola d’Odio). It is also said that the entry ‘Verdi, Lasagne’ was nearly sent to print in this volume.
   
3. Scott, John (i). Hearsay. Don’t take our word for it, but this early English organist may remind some who work in ecclesiastical circles of a more recent one.
4. Mango, Hieronymus. Likewise not confirmed as a spoof. It is in fact unlikely that a mischievous sub-editor would choose such a silly name, but all the other references to the 18th-century Italian composer we have found have, like 70% of the undergraduate music history essays in the UK, the unmistakable whiff of Grove about them. All of his operatic subjects (the complete mango) are duplicated elsewhere among his contemporaries.
5. Kathleen McMorrow, who reviewed the New Grove Second Edition for the Canadian Association of Music Libraries, insists that Burgas, a Bulgarian town the size of Warrington which sports one 800-seat theatre, has no place in the dictionary as, she says, ‘the closest accommodations are in Varna, 90km further north up the Black Sea Coast’. Finally, Barlines would like to spare a thought here for French academician Louis Bollioud-Mermet who lost out on being immortalised on the second spine from the left so that the legend on that volume would read ‘Back to Bolivia’. Also, tribute must be paid here to Mr David Fallows, author of Grove’s own article on spoof entries, for managing to begin each paragraph of his article on Gilles de Bins Dit Binchois with successive letters of the Franco-Flemish composer’s name.

The problem with you is it's all Mimi...

Operagnostic your correspondent may be, and certainly allergic to Puccini, but duty calls and so a break in sunny Provence is briefly interrupted by an evening in front of la télé.

As you probably know, the vast majority of French telly is a complete disaster, a consumer of the souls of men. The one exception is Arte, the Franco-German cultural channel with the unashamed mission of intelligent cultural broadcasting. And on Tuesday 29 September, all the talk was of its multi-platform transmission of 'La Bohème en Banlieue' ('La Bohème in the Suburbs'), a live performance of the opera staged in and around a block of flats in Bern, Switzerland.

Featuring actual residents as extras, real-life locations (including a real-life artist's studio which was used for the appropriate scenes) and an audience of local people able to move around and follow the action from mere metres away, the production demonstrated a truly committed attempt at live action opera.

The only real quibble was in the handling of the necessarily long scene changes (you were occasionally aware of a protagonist or two legging it to the next location) in which singers, fresh from their arias, would be collared by a presenter and given dull Match of the Day style questions to answer. And was there a touch of self-satisfaction in the explanations of how the technical challenges involved in the production were overcome?

But the singers (Maya Boog and Saimir Pirgu as Mimi and Rodolfo, Eve Liebau and Robin Adams as Musetta and Marcello, Gerardo Garciacano as Schaunard) all took to their unfamiliar circumstances with dedication, even deploying that rarely used operatic weapon - acting. And who could fail to be moved, if not amused, that she dies on a bendy bus heading for... the 'Endstation'?

You should find it here, until 6 October.