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Glimmerglass Opera
Two Super Sopranos Ruled
Reviewed by Ed Cloos
In its first season with a famous and high-powered artistic director, five works including the world premiere of one completed in rehearsal there, full houses and extra media attention were the happy result. The presence of Deborah Voigt, one of the great divas of our day didn’t hurt either.
All that was overshadowed by two such dazzling performances by young sopranos that one is at a loss for words to describe them. Of course, I’ll try. I saw all five productions Aug. 5-7.
First for me was Ginger Costa-Jackson, a 24-year-old Italian mezzo who took her own command of Carmen, the role that has been filled by some of the world’s greatest sopranos in its 136 years of performance. Surely it was the one performance that would stand out over all this season. Then along came Canadian soprano Alexandra Deshorties as Medea, one of the best known and least understood characters in Greek mythology. She invested her demigod character with such profoundly human anguish and emotion that the audience leapt to its feet at the curtain call, and went home emotionally drained. So I’ll begin with that.
Medea: Luigi Cherubin was Italian but much of his working life was in France so the opera was in French when completed in 1797, but a revised libretto by Carlo Zangarini five years later was in Italian and that's the one that continues to be performed. The Medea legend has many versions. The opera is based on that told by Euripides in a drama presented in 431 BCE. The story is set sometime more than 1,000 years earlier in the Bronze Age and involves many of the sites visited in the Iliad and the Odyssey, including passing by Troy, presumably before it was destroyed.
The character of Medea is known in popular culture as the woman who killed her children out of anger over rejection by her husband Jason. There’s much more to the story than that, of course, and it made for some sublimely beautiful music. Medea has supernatural powers, but director Michael Barker-Caven chose to present her entirely in mortal human terms as a spurned wife and dishonored mother. Alexandra Deshorties carried it off brilliantly. The humanity of Medea made the transcendent beauty of Cherubini’s music even more moving.
Micaëla, the young woman from Don Jose’s home village whom he has promised to marry, is the other important singing role. Anya Matanovic gave lovely singing support and believable courage to her character.
More important to the plot than the music is Escamillo, the toreador who steals Carmen’s affections from Don Jose. Baritone Michael Todd Simpson’s Escamillo was an imposing figure. He carried off his few memorable singing phrases securely.
Costa-Jackson was more than a singer through it all: she was a driven force of nature.
A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck was created for its world premiere and to some extent completed at Glimmerglass. Composer Jeanine Tesori and librettist Tony Kushner were on site for rehearsals and Tesori conducted the orchestra in performance.
The libretto tells the story of a battle between a sick Eugene O’Neill and his borderline psychotic wife Carlotta in their seaside cottage one 1951 winter evening in Marblehead, Massachusetts. He wanted the thermostat set low because they were broke, and she was freezing. The incident actually happened, but of course the details in the cottage had to be imagined.
I must confess at this point that the plays of O’Neill meant so much to my theater-loving late wife and myself that I was absorbed in the play and can’t give a good account of the music. It’s hard to make a beautiful aria, in any case, out of the long string of anti-Irish epithets that Carlotta hurls at “Gene.” Critical failure of The Iceman Comethwhen it opened on Broadway in 1946 is another part of her ammunition.
College juniors with a baby son when the play was revived at off-Broadway Circle in the Square in 1956, under the direction of Jose Quintero and starring then little-known Jason Robards Jr., we were as broke as Gene and Carlotta, but we made it to New York City to see it. Later the same year (seniors now), we got to Long Day’s Journey Into Night, this time on Broadway but directed and acted by the same team.
In the opera, Carlotta’s harping onIceman’s critical failure is reinforced by three of the critics passing by, presumably as delusions. The argument leads to O’Neill making good on his threat to go outside in a raging snowstorm. One of the critics, Mary McCarthy (Stephanie Foley Davis, a young artist), returns and visits Carlotta, encouraging her to go after her husband. Music can’t be more than background to all this action.
In the end, Officer Christopher Snow (Jeffrey Gwaltney again) types up his report telling us that the “old guy” was found in a snow bank and was sent to the hospital where he was found to have a broken leg. The “old lady” found wandering around in the snow also was hospitalized. When they were found their prominent identities weren’t known.
The opera is a concentrated 30 minutes, entirely unlike O’Neill’s major plays which are comparable to parts of the Wagner Ring Cycle in length.
Later the Same Evening, music by John Musto and libretto by Mark Campbell, was the other half of the twin bill. It gives life to the subjects in five Edward Hopper paintings. They were reproduced on large panels that served as most of the set. The artist gave the paintings titles, but offered no further information.
The opera changes all that, giving personalities to the characters and bringing them together at a performance of the popular new showCall Me Tomorrow, and two of them end up for coffee in the Automat in which one woman sits alone in the painting. The opera isn’t brand new, but Glimmerglass gave it its first professional production.
It truly is an opera in which conversations are sung, and the music fits the Jazz Age time reflected in the paintings though it wasn’t itself jazz.
The Hopper paintings peek in—often through windows—on people in private situations, even when they are in public places. The opera takes the next step and reveals their lives and their thoughts to us. It manages to make trivial situations and conversations interesting and important to us. What more can we ask?
Along with the opera, Fenimore Art Museum, a few miles down the road on the outskirts of Cooperstown, offered a display of Hopper paintings, including the ones in the opera, and summaries of the opera interpretation. It all made for a wonderful day.
Annie Get Your Gun is classic Irving Berlin, but perhaps more suited to summer stock (of 50 years ago) than a “real” opera house. It continued the practice of offering one musical theater production each season, and Glimmerglass Festival plans to carry on with it. It starred perhaps the most famous opera star ever to appear there, Deborah Voigt.
She was wonderful as Brünnhilde inDie Walküre at the Met in the season just past, but she’d made up her mind a year ago to do something entirely different, and here she was on the shores of Otsego Lake playing in a traveling Wild West Show.
Annie didn’t need an operatic voice (it was sung in its original key), but she needed charm, energy and certainly a sense of humor, and Voigt provided plenty of each. Earlier in her career she’d done musical theater and even in recent years has sung and recorded in styles other than opera.
She played opposite Rod Gilfrey whom she’d known since college days but hadn’t appeared with since. His booming baritone is perfect for the Frank Butler character he played. Butler is the full-of-himself rival to Annie as a marksman as well as her love interest.
As is often the case with Irving Berlin songs, we know them as part of our popular culture—songs like There’s No Business Like Show Business—but we’ve forgotten when they came from. It was good to be reminded.
The 2012 Season (July 7-Aug. 25)
Francesca Zambello’s second season promises to display additional aspects of her creative stamp, offers two co-productions with other companies, and continues the new artist-in-residence program.
Lost in the Stars will be the first production of a Kurt Weill (with Maxwell Anderson) work. It is a joint production with Cape Town Opera of South Africa. It is based on Cry, theBeloved Country, the Alan Paton novel that has become a classic. Eric Owens, the 2012 artist in residence, will star. Owens is an acclaimed American bass-baritone who, like this year’s Deborah Voigt, has extensive Wagnerian roles behind him. He’ll offer several solo performances, including, according to his agency’s website, a jazz concert. Weill figures prominently in Zambello’s background, but she’s chosen to direct Giuseppe Verdi’sAida.
Aida will open and close the season. Owens will take the role of Amonasro, the Ethiopian king who is Aida's father but whose identity isn’t known to their Egyptian captors. Zambello promises a more intimate interpretation than the spectacle (with elephants and such) of many productions.
The Music Man, by Meredith Willson. Hard to believe that it was more than 50 years ago (1957) that this beloved show opened. It has been identified since it opened, and especially after the 1962 movie, with Robert Preston who originated the role of “Profesor” Harold Hill, the con man whose scheme went awry in a good way. Preston was trained in music, but he wasn’t in any sense a singer. Cooperstown native Dwayne Croft, who will take on the role, is an opera star through and through so it surely will be a different experience. I can’t wait. Marcia Milgrom Dodge, whose Broadway production of Ragtime won several Tony awards, will direct.
Armide, by Jean-Baptiste Lully, is a joint production with Opera Atelier of Toronto. The company is known for lavish productions with period ballet. Lully is known for including dance interludes that have little to do with advancing the plot but much to do with pleasing the audience. Armide continues the tradition of presenting operas of historical interest, but it will be the first from the French Baroque period (its premiere was in 1686).
Croft started with Glimmerglass while still in high school in Cooperstown. He started as a supernumerary and graduated to singing roles in many productions over 15 years, but none in the past 22. He left the company in 1989 to join the Metropolitan Opera Young Artist Development program, and develop he did. He’s sung nearly 30 major roles at the Met. He’s appeared with most major American opera companies and many symphony orchestras (including St. Louis Symphony in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem in 2006).
Croft’s brother, David, is an acclaimed tenor but they aren’t rivals as Croft is a baritone.
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Summer 2010:
Glimmerglass Opera is the highlight of my summer, and this year was no exception, although it had to share top billing with the Santiago de Compostela Camino. That’s a story for another time. This season, the production I most looked forward to was Tolomeo, one of the many Italian operas composed in England by the German George Frideric Handel in the early 1700s, before he went on to compose the great oratorios so popular today.
Glimmerglass, near Cooperstown in rural upstate New York, is within a day’s drive of probably 100 million people, yet it is in an isolated world best known for the National Museum of Baseball. I saw all four of its productions Aug. 13 through 15.
Tolomeo: This was the professionally-staged American premiere of the work which seems like an early draft of Handel’s masterpiece Giulio Cesare in Egitto, done by the company in 2008. It actually was produced four years later and is an entirely different take on the fictional stories of the son of Cleopatra III. Nicola Francesco Haym was librettist for both.
In this version, Tolomeo, deprived of his right to be co-ruler of Egypt by his mother and his brother, Alessandro, is in exile, living secretly in disguise in Cyprus. Pretty soon just about the whole family, except for Mom, turns up but no one seems to recognize anybody as romance blooms between the “wrong” parties.
The tangled web provides opportunity for a steady stream of beautiful arias, many of them sung by Anthony Roth Costanzo, the young countertenor who impressed last year as the Sorceress in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Handel wrote many leading roles for the great castrato Senesino, so there are great opportunities for modern counter-tenors. Costanzo made the most of this one.
The arias, as the program explains, are in the da capo form in which the first statement is followed by a contrasting section and then a return to the first. Emotional development is shown by musical embellishment. Handel, however, didn’t specify what that embellishment should be. Nor did he leave behind music to accompany the recitatives between the arias. Conductor Christian Curnyn, with assistance from David Moody, did himself and the fine orchestra proud.
As for embellishment, the surprise for me was Julie Boulianne, the French-Canadian mezzo-soprano who played the lead last year in Rossini’s La Cenerentola. Her singing then was lovely, but it lacked the coloratura so often associated with the role. This time she offered coloratura in spades. Perhaps the red wig her character wore inspired the difference.
Tosca: My three-day tour of the repertory began with Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca. The suffering and death of a beautiful woman, and the sublimely beautiful music she gets to sing along the way characterize the greatest of Puccini’s operas. Though the title character is an opera diva, she has just one major aria and mostly has to act out her jealous nature. Lise Lindstrom fully met that challenge.
Although Tosca is the reigning diva of the Rome opera stage, she is also a kind of “bird in a gilded cage,’ who must do the bidding of the ruling powers. Those powers are personalized in the character of Baron Scarpia who, as chief of the security police, is the operative power. He’s determined to seduce Tosca with as little force as possible. The best interpretations of the role lead Tosca to feel some attraction to him even as he is threatening to execute artist lover, Mario Calvaradossi. Despite fine singing, Lester Lynch’s Scarpia didn’t reach that level.
Where Handel left a lot to the musicians to improvise, Puccini specified fine detail, especially for the bells that play important roles in expressing emotional and dramatic moments in several scenes. Joel Morain, audio/visual coordinator, adapted recordings of bells and chime sounds specified by Puccini so a percussionist could play them on a drum pad and output through 14 speakers. He did this to great success.
It should be noted that the singers are never miked, and are heard without speakers between them and the audience.
The Marriage of Figaro is a Mozart masterpiece, and one of the most frequently produced of all operas today. So, alas, it doesn’t lend itself to new and original interpretation. Glimmerglass, thankfully, didn’t try. At least that’s how I saw it.
The action centers—swirls is more like it—around Count Almaviva who has designs on the naïve Susanna, serving maid to the countess and bride-to-be of Figaro, the count’s valet. The happy couple, and, indeed, his whole household and village conspire to thwart, deceive and humiliate the count. But he is frustrated most of all by his innate decency.
“I know all that,” you are probably thinking: “cut to the chase.” You want to know how the countess handled Dove Sono, one of the great arias in opera. I’m happy to report Caitlin Lynch was wonderful. I get goose bumps writing about it now, several weeks later. The countess gets two arias while Susanna (Lyubov Petrova) just one, but Susanna is the center of the action and gets lots of singing in ensembles. Petrova, a young Russian who was a magnificent Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare, was a fine Susanna. But dramatic roles show off her talent better than broad comedy.
Patrick Carfizzi was an excellent Figaro, both in voice and comedy. The force of romantic obsession that knits the action together—or shreds it, depending on your point of view—is Cherubino. He’s the Puck-like character who is page to the count and would-be lover to just about every woman, but primarily the countess (incidentally, his godmother). Aurhelia Varak played the role to perfection, making the character almost believable even though it is just a 13-year-old boy being played by a woman. It’s a singing role, but only the acting made an impression on me.
The Tender Land: More than 50 years after its world premiere, Aaron Copland’s slender work is having something of a renewal, especially among regional theater. This was the third production of the little-known work that I’ve seen. As Copland intended, it was cast entirely with young singers, in this case all members of the Glimmerglass Young American Artists program.
The opera is fine, typical Copland music and a not-very-strong play by the famous dancer Erik Johns with whom Copland lived at the time. Johns used the pen name Horace Everett, for some reason. On a superficial level it is a story of the farmer’s daughter and the traveler. In this case it is about Laurie Moss who is about to become her family’s first high school graduate.
Loved, but suffocated, in the household headed by her grandfather, she is anxious to break away. The chance comes along in the persons of two wandering young men who happen by looking for work, and the farm has that to offer with the spring harvest coming in. One thing leads to another and Grandpa Moss catches Laurie and Martin, one of the travelers, in a tender moment that is no more than a kiss. The young men are ordered to leave before daybreak and do that, leaving Laurie, who was to join them, behind with suitcase in hand.
With an aria that is the vocal highpoint of the opera, which otherwise offers few, Laurie decides to leave anyway. Laurie is a difficult role, and Lindsay Russell carried it off with convincing style. Young Artists play many roles at Glimmerglass, including those of characters much older than themselves. Always they look the part; a credit to Anne Ford-Coates, responsible for hair and makeup in all productions.
Glimmerglass performances almost always end with the audience (increased this year over last) on its feet and applauding with enthusiasm. The Tender Land audience stayed seated, but I think that is more because the opera doesn’t end with grand and dramatic music rather than any dissatisfaction with the performance.
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A Preview of the Glimmerglass 2011 Season
You can count on fresh performances by talented young artists at Glimmerglass, but one doesn’t expect to hear a world-famous diva. Until now.
Next season, Deborah Voigt has signed on as the first Artist in Residence, and will sing the lead in Annie Get Your Gun. Who would have expected that! She’ll make other appearances outside of the main productions as well as mentoring. I can’t wait.
A new general and artistic director takes over from Michael MacLeod, Francesca Zambello, who comes from San Francisco Opera. She’s an American, grew up in Europe, has vast international credits yet has a local connection in that she is a graduate of Colgate University, about 45 minutes west of the theater.
She says it will be Glimmerglass Festival rather than merely opera, although each season has been called “festival season” right along and features a Festival Weekend as well as a Seminar Weekend. “My goal is to have a variety of offerings so you can come to a concert or reading in the afternoon, have a picnic, go to the opera, and stay afterward for a cabaret,” she says in a statement released by the theater.
In any case the new season, in addition to the musical with Ms. Voigt, is: Bizet’s Carmen, Cherubini’s Medea, and a double-bill about American artists. A Blizzard at Marblehead Neck, a Glimmerglass-commissioned work, by composer Jeanine Tesori, who usually writes for the musical stage, and librettist playwright Tony Kushner, will be a world premiere. The other half of the bill will be the professional premiere of Later the Same Evening, based on five paintings by Edward Hopper, by John Musto and Mark Campbell.
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Shakespeare in Spirit if Not in Word
by Ed Cloos
In its 34th season, Glimmerglass Opera at Cooperstown in upstate New York applied its trademark youth-powered ensemble skills to the world of Shakespeare. The result was joy upon joy. The Shakespeare theme was emphasized in John Conklin’s set, a representation of his Globe Theater, that was used in all productions. Conklin, who includes Opera Theater St. Louis in his credits, retires from Glimmerglass after 18 seasons.
I was able to experience the entire season over three days, an opportunity that will be even more available next season when the season is condensed, beginning two weeks later (July 18) but still including 39 productions compared with 41 this year. It will conclude Aug. 25.
It would be impossible to single out one as the best, but I’ll do it. Every performance was rewarded with extremely enthusiastic audience response, but Vincenzo Bellini’s I Capuletti e I Montecchi brought the audience to its feet, shouting and cheering. Me too. It is the familiar story of Romeo and Juliet, but based on the sources Shakespeare used rather than the classic play itself.
The production was on the murky side. Costumes were of no particular period, lighting was dark, weapons used by the warring factions were symbolic in form: gray sticks rather than swords. Against this back-ground, the luminous doomed couple glowed in their music and in their persons: Giulietta, played by Sarah Coburn, and a career-boosting per-formance by cover Emily Righter, a member of the Young American Artists program. Her Romeo captured the physical aspects (he’s the warrior-leader of the Montecchi) and the warm sensuality of her singing stirred the audience. She was rewarded with a rave in The New York Times, and I second the view. She did about half of the performances in place of Sandra Piques Eddy who was indisposed. I didn’t hear Miss Eddy, but the favorable New Yorker review called her Romeo "ferocious."
The rich beauty of Miss Coburn (herself once one of the Young Artists) was stunning in voice and person as she sang her lovely first-act aria reclining on a bench and even lying on her back, filling the Alice Busch Theater where all voices are free of amplification.
Her following duet with Romeo, ending in a kiss, matched glowing beauty with warm and sensitive strength. The act ended with Romeo, who had come to meet the Capuletti in the guise of his own emissary, proposing peace to be sealed by the marriage of Romeo and Giuletta. In a complex and beautiful quintet, backed by the chorus, Romeo and Giulietta state their case, while the principal players on the Capuletti side express their implacable objection.
It’s more or less based on Measure for Measure, the Bard’s tale of justice restored. He set it in Vienna, but Wagner put it back in Sicily where the original story first appeared. There it contrasts the stern temperament of the German deputy to the absent King of Sicily, with the easy-going warmth of the natives. There’s a connection with the Bellini opera in that Wagner had conducted it while working on his own. Bellini, 12 years older, was an accomplished composer at the time while Wagner was showing just intimations of his mature greatness. We don’t know what Bellini might have done when truly mature because he died in 1835 before his 34th birthday.
Such a singer is Laura Vlasak Nolen. She carried off the role of Julius Caesar with easy strength and her lovely mezzo-soprano tone. Caesar was invulnerable to all enemies, but not to affairs of the heart. Russian soprano Lyubov Petrova displayed such beauty of voice and person that it was easy to believe her Cleopatra could lead so mighty a man almost to his doom and then share his eventual triumph.
You’ll remember that the Cole Porter musical is about a travelling theater company that is producing Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. It’s mostly about "off-stage" goings on but contains the only actual Shakespeare lines of the "Shakespeare" season. As staged, the troupe has arrived in Cooperstown and local references are added.
Brad Little was a handsome and commanding Fred Graham, the overbearing director, and Petruchio, the suitor of Kate in the play. Lisa Vroman was perfect as Lilli Vanessi, the prima donna who plays Kate. To me she resembles a young Julie Andrews only with a stronger, more operatic voice. Their characters have been divorced a year.
On the surface, it is hard to accept that the way to a woman’s heart is through repeated and rather brutal spanking, but the deeper story is the love that is revealed as the show progresses.
We know all the songs, but haven’t heard them much lately. It was a great chance to "Brush Up on Your Shakespeare" even when "It’s Too Darn Hot." And it’s "Wunderbar" to be "So In Love" even if the object of your affection may be "Always True to You in My Fashion." And so forth.
Important and entertaining supporting roles were contributed by Courtney Romano as Lois Lane/Bianca, and Michael Mott and Bradley Nact as gangsters, sent to collect a gambling debt, who practically stole the show with their "Brush Up on Your Shakespeare" which threatened never to leave the stage.
On the weekend I was there, Little and Miss Vroman, who are experienced Equity actors, returned to the stage on Sunday morning to read the appropriate Shakespeare text for Mendelssohn’s Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This gem of a concert got the orchestra out of the pit and onto the stage. In addition to the spoken parts, there were lovely solos by soprano Caitlin Lynch and mezzo soprano Angela Brower, both members of the Young American Artists program which also supplied a fine chorus.
The orchestra is a solid and respected collection of professional union musicians that performed equally well with four different conductors.
Glimmerglass Opera, (607) 547-2255, glimmerglass.org.
Washington National Opera
May 2010
Le Nozze di Figaro: The Voice is the Thing
Reviewed by Ronald G. Precup
There are so many facets to opera that it is easy to overlook what matters most: great singing. How fortunate for us that the Washington National Opera did not overlook it in mounting a memorable, lively production of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro that never let down, from the opening notes of the overture through the concluding ensemble. Brisk tempi and a single intermission for this four-act opera resulted in a three-hour, six-minute evening that seemed even shorter.
Though none of the singers is – at least yet – a marquee name, one would be hard put to cast better voices, more attractive actors, or a better fit among principals than in this sparkling production.
As
with most grand operas, an instrumental overture preceded the singing, and it
was the first clue that this was anything but humdrum. Conductor Patrick
Fournillier, mak-ing his company debut, set an uncommonly swift, exciting, but
entirely controlled pace. The WNO orchestra never missed a beat.
The
tempo proved less than ideal for the opening duet between Russian bass Ildar
Abdrazakov’s Figaro and Argentinian soprano Veronica Cangemi’s Susanna, leaving
them working too hard to produce a lyrical sound. After that “warm up,” though,
the pair hit their stride and provided nothing but the most pleasing, idiomatic
singing.
Abdrazakov,
a spry, engaging Figaro, held forth with just the right balance of wit,
cunning, and slapstick to command the center of attention without going
overboard. Cangemi seemed the very embodiment of Susanna, flirtatious,
strong-willed, tender, inhabiting the set with easy grace, all the while
singing impeccably.
New
Zealand baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes was ideally suited to the role of Count Almaviva.
Standing tall, feet apart, arms akimbo, with shoulder-length hair and a
sometimes open shirt, he portrayed the most Don Giovanni-like Almaviva
imagin-able. His bold, resonant voice perfectly matched his swashbuckling
manner, and his hold on the women in the audience seemed as powerful as his
hold on the Countess, Barbarina, and even Susanna on stage.
Argentinian
soprano Virginia Tola brought a youthful, yet noble and dignified mien to the
Countess. Though the tempo for her aria “Porgi amor,” unlike the pacing of the
rest of the opera, was too slow to carry the musical line, “Dove sono” floated
poignantly and beautifully through the opera house, holding the audience in
thrall. Tola and Cangemi together struck the ideal balance of mistress and
chambermaid, fully realizing the complexity of their relationship, equal in
intelligence and character, if disparate in station.
Mezzo
soprano Michèle Losier as Cherubino sang well, with a straight-forward reading
of the sometimes exaggerated role. Like the opening duet, her “Non so più” was
rushed to the detriment of its lyricism, but that must fall to the conductor,
not Losier.
Victoria
Livengood simply sang and acted the spots off the role of Marcellina, her huge
voice filling the hall and her comedic sense adding immeasurably to the success
of the production. Bass Valeriano Lanchas was an uninspired Bartolo, not quite
up to the excellence of the rest of the cast. Tenor Robert Baker’s Basilio was
the quirky, silly characterization Baker does so well, and soprano Emily
Albrink delighted as a sweet, endearing Barbarina.
Harry
Silverstein’s stage direction was classic, never imposing out-of-time or
out-of-place idiosyncrasies for their own sake, but laying out the Mozart
masterpiece with the greatest respect for its art. As a result, the inherent
humor and the brilliant and beautiful music shone through in the best of
operatic tradition.
November 2009
Falstaff: Verdi’s Last Opera No Laughing Matter
by Ronald G. Precup
An
excellent supporting cast barely managed to survive baritone Alan Opie’s
lackluster title character in the Washington National Opera’s dis-appointing
production of Giuseppe Verdi’s final and perhaps greatest masterpiece, Falstaff.
The operatic comedy, fashioned from parts of Shakespeare’s Henry plays and The
Merry Wives of Windsor, is a delightful panoply of musical forms and parodies,
but it demands a larger-than-life Falstaff, and Opie did not provide it.
Vocally,
Opie was certainly adequate for the role, earning high passing marks for tone
quality, pitch, and precision. His acting, though, was far too restrained to
convey the breadth – physically and dramatically – of his complex character.
Better suited to the introspective aria “Va, vecchio John,” Opie’s
characterization was reserved when it needed to be expansive, straitened when
it needed to be broad, constrained when it needed to be free. That simply left
too much for the rest of the cast to do.
The
opera’s inherent brilliance got little help from the play-within-a-play conceit
director Christian Räth imposed on a work that didn’t need it. The conceit did
nothing to deepen the audience’s understanding of the characters, the plot, or
the music. It seemed to be little more than a difference for difference’s sake,
seldom a good reason to “improve” a proven work of art.
Other
directorial failings robbed the opera of some of its funniest moments. In the
final scene, with the townspeople, costumed like various spirits of the forest
to taunt and frighten Falstaff down from his throne of self-importance, singing
“pizzica, stuzzica” (“poke him, stick him”), there was no poking or sticking.
That left flat and meaning-less Verdi’s hilarious musical parody that Falstaff
sings on the Latin hymn “Salva me, Domine” (“Save me, Lord”): “Ma salvagli
addomine” (“But save my belly”).
The
stalwart supporting cast did much to salvage the production. Tenor Robert
Leggate, fondly remembered for his sensitive portrayal of Starry Vere in WNO’s Billy
Budd of 2004, sang a subtler, deeper Dr. Caius than is usually heard. Chinese
tenor Yingxi Zhang used his youthful, lovely voice to project a lithe and
handsome Fenton, perfectly matched by the sweet soprano voice of the comely
German-born Micaela Oeste.
Baritone
Timothy Mix sang and acted a multifaceted Ford, strongly into the plot and
interacting fully with the other characters. Aided by a powerful stage
presence, he proved more a personage than the title character. Mezzo-soprano
Nancy Maultsby pleased as Mistress Quickly. Her clear voice, agile bear-ing, and
wonderful sense of the comic contributed to a memorable performance. Elizabeth
Bishop’s Mrs. Page, Tamara Wilson’s Alice Ford, David Cangelosi’s Bardolfo, and
Grigory Soloviov’s Pistola were all well-cast and helped salvage what was
otherwise a humdrum pro-duction.
Hayden
Griffin’s sets did a lot with little, and the giant oak that forms the backdrop
for the final scene was particularly well done. Sebastian Lang-Lessing’s
conducting was tradi-tional, exacting competent but uninspired sounds from the
company’s orchestra.
The
large chorus, superbly prepared by chorus master Steven Gathman, was unerring
in its diction, timing, precision, and stage movement. Like the supporting
cast, it did a lot to save the production from mediocrity.
Falstaff
is a large work requiring a dramatically large title character and a large
directorial vision to be successful. Both elements were lacking here, and the
result was sadly predictable.
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Although perhaps not Puccini’s most popular opera, Turandot, incomplete at the composer’s death, is generally recognized as his best. Beginning with an exotic fable from a faraway land, Puccini weaves some of his most haunting, potent, compelling music to portray the melting of the ice princess of ancient China.
This review takes in the final performance, the only one conducted by WNO general director Placido Domingo. Unfortunately, the second cast sang, and the combination was not a happy one.
Any assessment of a Turandot production must start with the title character, a role so powerful that it took Wagnerian sopranos like Inge Borkh and Birgit Nilsson to do it justice. No Mimis need apply. Based on her earlier fine performances a Salome and Tosca, French soprano Sylvie Valerie has a strong and lovely voice and more than a little acting ability. As Turandot, she sang her notes on time and on pitch, but with little else. Nothing in her singing or acting brought any magic to the stage. The audience never had a chance to experience the high drama and tension of the signature aria, “In questa reggia,” because Valerie never provided it.
Tenor Franco Farina fared far worse, though, as Calaf, Turandot’s success-ful suitor. He barked and strained his way through the opera with a most unpleasant voice, doing almost no acting and seeming careless of the role he was paid to sing. His rendition of the overwhelmingly popular “Nessun dorma” lacked fire, intensity, and any other quality that might have raised it above the purely mundane.
Domingo’s conducting suffered from what appeared to be a lack of rehearsal time, and the tempos, dynamics, and entrances the cast had gotten used to under the baton of Keri-Lynn Wilson, who led the other seven performances, were different enough under Domingo to lead to a raggedness and lack of precision that were all too amateurish for this city and company. Never did Domingo seem to have a clear idea of where the work was going.
Latvian soprano Maija Kovalevska was as infected with ennui as the rest of the cast as Liu, especially in the first act’s “Signore, ascolta”. By the time of her torture and death scene in Act Three, the intensity of her acting and the warmth of her voice had markedly improved.
Ping, Pang, and Pong, ably and delightfully sung by baritone Nathan Herfindahl, tenor Norman Shankle, and tenor Yingxi Zhang, easily proved to be the high point of the production. They were lively, en-gaged, enthusiastic and most enter-taining. More importantly, they performed so superbly in ensemble that they might have been perform-ing their roles together for years.
Bass Morris Robinson gave an affecting, tender performance as Calaf’s blind, deposed father. Tenor Robert Baker was his usual, accomp-lished self as the Emperor Altuom. Ukranian baritone Oleksandr Pushniak did not measure up, delivering the stentorian announce-ment of the Mandarin with poor Italian pronunciation and a lackluster voice.
The chorus, except for the conducting problems already men-tioned that were not the singers’ fault, was a massive, focused mount-ain of sound, filling the important role with force and decisiveness.
The production, that of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, is now 25 years old. Its one-time inno-vations are no longer new, and they add little to either the story or the staging’s entertainment value. The chorus was sometimes used as an audience to the unfolding events and sometimes as a participant. The conceit seemed superfluous at best.
The first cast, conductor included, provided an acceptable level of performance to this great opera. Washington audiences deserve much more than the poor facsimile of this second cast.
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