Santa Fe Opera tries to do a world premiere or at least an American premiere every year. This year the closest that they got to that goal was Karol Szymanowski’s King Roger, which was written in 1918-1924, premiered in Warsaw in 1926, and not performed in the US until 1981 when the St. Louis Symphony gave it in a concert performance. Long Beach Opera did the first American staged performance in 1988.
Like Handel’s Semele, a concert performance is not unreasonable, as both works straddle the boundary between oratorio and opera. King Roger, in particular, is very much a “thinky” piece; not much happens. A shepherd brings a message of joy, pleasure, and lust to a 12th-century Byzantine kingdom in Sicily, a message contrary to the established customs. The Queen, the people, and ultimately King Roger himself are drawn to the shepherd’s way of thinking.
The staging was simple, but not much staging was needed. King Roger had a throne, set on a platform about four inches high, the platform bordered by a short (six-inch) metal fence. At the back of the stage, about ten feet above the stage, was a projection that changed for each act. In act 1 we saw a modern, subtly Picasso-like rendition of golden Byzantine art. Act 2 featured a “starry night” sort of backdrop. In act 3, I could only think of a photomicrograph of the surface of an aluminum skillet. The only other props were chairs for the chorus. As act 1 commenced, members of the chorus gradually drifted in and took their seats; I was pleased to note that our tenor from Opera San Jose, Michael Dailey, was seated front and center. The chorus members were dressed in costumes from many different times and places and walks of life.
Our cast:
Roxana: Erin Morley
Shepherd: William Burden
Edrisi: Dennis Petersen
King Roger: Mariusz Kwiecien
Archbishop: Raymond Aceto
Conductor: Evan Rogister
Director: Stephen Wadsworth
All of the first-rate cast performed superbly, giving their all to this operatic rarity and making a strong case for it. At the end, I still didn’t “get it,” but I did come away with the feeling that this could be important music, worth repeated hearing. I hope to get more out of repeated hearings than I did from four iterations of Nixon in China. Somewhat short of a beta.
Friday, August 31, 2012
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Tosca, Santa Fe Opera, August 8 2012
The third opera in our five-operas-in-five-days marathon in Santa Fe was Puccini’s “shabby little shocker,” Tosca. The production was, unfortunately, the least successful of the five. The theory was, presumably, that the Santa Fe Opera stage didn’t have the height required to include the dome of the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle, so instead when the audience looked at the stage, we were actually looking up at the dome: the dome was tilted way back, with its peak pointing toward the landscape behind the opera house. This meant that we were also looking up to the dome from a vantage point close to the bottom of the wall on which Cavaradossi was painting the portrait of Mary Magdalene. So the wall with the portrait was about 5° off of level, and those of us in the orchestra couldn’t see the portrait very well. But we could see it, and since the wall formed a major part of the stage, people walked on the portrait. Especially in the Te Deum that concludes the first act. The remainder of the set for the first act was conventional: the chapels to the sides of the nave were marked off by black iron bars with gold tips.
The second act, in the Palazzo Farnese, used only the front part of the stage. About 15 feet back from the edge of the stage was the wall of Scarpia’s office, dominated by a huge painting of what I was told was “The Rape of Persephone.” In front of the painting was Scarpia’s dinner table, and the door to the torture chamber was off to the right. In a bit of directorial license, Tosca did not place a crucifix on Scarpia’s body and place two candles by his head. Instead she dragged the body into the torture chamber and shut the door.
In the third act the wall of the first act church had become the top of the Castel Sant'Angelo, a structure so high that we looked down on the domes of the surrounding churches. On the left and right sides of the stage were simple brick walls. What would have been an arched window in a vertical wall served as the top of the stairway to the lower floors of the Castel. Continuing the theme of the end of the second act, in which Tosca dragged Scarpia’s body into the torture chamber, the shepherd boy who has the first words wandered into Scarpia’s office halfway through his song. He was now a janitor’s assistant, sweeping the floor. He found a drop of blood on the floor and followed the trail of blood to the torture chamber, where he found the body. He rushed off to tell an adult, and at that point the scene change to act 3 was effected by lowering the painting, again hinged at the bottom like a piano lid, to reveal the top of the Castel.
Our cast:
Floria Tosca: Amanda Echalaz
Mario Cavaradossi: Brian Jagde
Scarpia: Raymond Aceto
Spoletta: Dennis Petersen
A Sacristan: Dale Travis
Conductor: Frédéric Chaslin
Director: Stephen Barlow
Raymond Aceto’s Scarpia was the star of this show, with just about everything you could want in a Scarpia, though he lacked the concentration of pure evil so dramatically displayed in Lado Atanelli’s performance in San Francisco in 2009. His Spoletta, Dennis Petersen (our fabulous Mime in Seattle in 2009), was a bit part, but it was the finest Spoletta I’ve seen. Amanda Echalaz’s Tosca would be worth seeing again. Brian Jagde must have had an off night as Cavaradossi; a tweet from Leah Crocetto implied that he was in fine form a few days later. Not quite a beta.
The second act, in the Palazzo Farnese, used only the front part of the stage. About 15 feet back from the edge of the stage was the wall of Scarpia’s office, dominated by a huge painting of what I was told was “The Rape of Persephone.” In front of the painting was Scarpia’s dinner table, and the door to the torture chamber was off to the right. In a bit of directorial license, Tosca did not place a crucifix on Scarpia’s body and place two candles by his head. Instead she dragged the body into the torture chamber and shut the door.
In the third act the wall of the first act church had become the top of the Castel Sant'Angelo, a structure so high that we looked down on the domes of the surrounding churches. On the left and right sides of the stage were simple brick walls. What would have been an arched window in a vertical wall served as the top of the stairway to the lower floors of the Castel. Continuing the theme of the end of the second act, in which Tosca dragged Scarpia’s body into the torture chamber, the shepherd boy who has the first words wandered into Scarpia’s office halfway through his song. He was now a janitor’s assistant, sweeping the floor. He found a drop of blood on the floor and followed the trail of blood to the torture chamber, where he found the body. He rushed off to tell an adult, and at that point the scene change to act 3 was effected by lowering the painting, again hinged at the bottom like a piano lid, to reveal the top of the Castel.
Our cast:
Floria Tosca: Amanda Echalaz
Mario Cavaradossi: Brian Jagde
Scarpia: Raymond Aceto
Spoletta: Dennis Petersen
A Sacristan: Dale Travis
Conductor: Frédéric Chaslin
Director: Stephen Barlow
Raymond Aceto’s Scarpia was the star of this show, with just about everything you could want in a Scarpia, though he lacked the concentration of pure evil so dramatically displayed in Lado Atanelli’s performance in San Francisco in 2009. His Spoletta, Dennis Petersen (our fabulous Mime in Seattle in 2009), was a bit part, but it was the finest Spoletta I’ve seen. Amanda Echalaz’s Tosca would be worth seeing again. Brian Jagde must have had an off night as Cavaradossi; a tweet from Leah Crocetto implied that he was in fine form a few days later. Not quite a beta.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Maometto Secondo, Santa Fe Opera, August 6 2012
Maometto Secondo (Mahomet the Second) is one of Rossini’s mature operas, the 31st of the 39 that he wrote, although he was only 28 years old at the time of its composition. The plot has a vague similarity to that of Romeo and Juliet: the soprano (Anna) had earlier met a man in disguise and fallen in love with him; now she discovers that he (Maometto II) is actually the leader of the forces that are attacking her city. It’s the only opera that I know of in which a general advises surrender to the enemy. But another general’s fight-to-the-death aria is persuasive, and after an initial setback the defenders are victorious. Anna marries the fight-to-the-death general but almost immediately stabs herself before Maometto II and his few survivors can take vengeance upon her.
The set carried forward the theme of the previous evening’s Arabella: two curving walls, with their curves facing the audience, blocked all vision of the landscape behind the opera house. On the left-hand wall was an inscription in stone reading (in Latin) Venice: a unique refuge of liberty, justice, and peace—Petrarch. In the middle of the right-hand wall was a large piece of fabic, which was later pulled down to reveal a large portrait of Anna’s deceased mother. The two walls were offset (front-to-back) from each other, allowing characters and chorus to enter and leave via stairs to the basement. At the beginning of Act 2, part of the floor was raised like a piano lid to show a bright red triangle representing Maometto II’s tent. When the tent was lowered to become the floor again, the same two curving walls were there, but this time the floor was a set of wide, tilted steps curving around to the space between the two curving walls. When Maometto II attacked the city, the section of wall that had supported the Petrarch quotation in the first act was lowered like a drawbridge to reveal an elaborate sculpture of horses pulling a chariot.
Our cast:
Erisso: Bruce Sledge
Calbo: Patricia Bardon (yes, the Erda from the recent Metropolitan Opera Ring)
Anna: Leah Crocetto
Maometto II: Luca Pisaroni
Selimo: Michael Dailey
Conductor: Frédéric Chaslin
Director: David Alden
Leah Crocetto was the star of this show, with a pure, powerful voice, although Rossini wrote more interesting music for Calbo. Luca Pisaroni sang well but his acting was one-dimensional: pretty much nothing but rage. Our friend Michael Dailey had the smallest of bit parts, about half a dozen words, but it was nice to see him get his moment. The music and the plot failed to make much of an impression on me, so it’s somewhere between a gamma and a beta.
The set carried forward the theme of the previous evening’s Arabella: two curving walls, with their curves facing the audience, blocked all vision of the landscape behind the opera house. On the left-hand wall was an inscription in stone reading (in Latin) Venice: a unique refuge of liberty, justice, and peace—Petrarch. In the middle of the right-hand wall was a large piece of fabic, which was later pulled down to reveal a large portrait of Anna’s deceased mother. The two walls were offset (front-to-back) from each other, allowing characters and chorus to enter and leave via stairs to the basement. At the beginning of Act 2, part of the floor was raised like a piano lid to show a bright red triangle representing Maometto II’s tent. When the tent was lowered to become the floor again, the same two curving walls were there, but this time the floor was a set of wide, tilted steps curving around to the space between the two curving walls. When Maometto II attacked the city, the section of wall that had supported the Petrarch quotation in the first act was lowered like a drawbridge to reveal an elaborate sculpture of horses pulling a chariot.
Our cast:
Erisso: Bruce Sledge
Calbo: Patricia Bardon (yes, the Erda from the recent Metropolitan Opera Ring)
Anna: Leah Crocetto
Maometto II: Luca Pisaroni
Selimo: Michael Dailey
Conductor: Frédéric Chaslin
Director: David Alden
Leah Crocetto was the star of this show, with a pure, powerful voice, although Rossini wrote more interesting music for Calbo. Luca Pisaroni sang well but his acting was one-dimensional: pretty much nothing but rage. Our friend Michael Dailey had the smallest of bit parts, about half a dozen words, but it was nice to see him get his moment. The music and the plot failed to make much of an impression on me, so it’s somewhere between a gamma and a beta.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Arabella, Santa Fe Opera, August 6 2012
Off to Santa Fe for an “opera orgy”—five operas in five days, a more concentrated experience than even the Seattle Ring, which is four operas in six days. First on the list was Arabella by Richard Strauss. I’ve only seen one other performance in my career, but that performance (1998, in San Francisco, with Janice Watson in the title role) was so emotionally moving that I was looking forward to a repetition.
Santa Fe Opera performs in a theater that has a lot of “outside awareness”: patrons seated from the front of the orchestra to near the back have no walls to their right or left; if it’s raining and there’s a strong wind, patrons on the edge can get wet. Also, the back of the stage is open to the elements. It’s possible to watch a thunderstorm in the distance while the stage action is taking place. For Arabella, however, the sets covered this view. In Act 1, we saw a collection of curved grey walls representing the hotel room where the Waldner family is living. To the left there was a sofa on which Adelaide (Arabella’s mother) consulted with a fortune teller; to the right were a number of doors, one leading to the rest of the hotel, the others to the other rooms of the suite. For the second act, the wall on the left with the sofa was retained, while the wall on the right was turned around and the doors removed to form the location for the party. On the upstage side of this latter wall an out-of-sight staircase allowed characters to arrive and depart. In the third act, the walls were turned around again so that both left and right walls curved toward the audience. There were three doors on the left; on the right, a curving staircase led from stage left up to a door leading to the Waldner’s lodgings on the second floor. In the interior of this curved wall there was an upholstered bench. It was all very appropriate; there was no excess of directorial “concept.”
Our cast:
Count Waldner: Dale Travis
Adelaide von Waldner: Victoria Livengood
Arabella: Erin Wall
Zdenka: Heidi Stober
Matteo: Zach Borichevsky
Count Elemer: Brian Jagde
Mandryka: Mark Delavan
Conductor: Sir Andrew Davis
Director: Tim Albery
Of these, the standout performer was Mark Delavan as Mandryka. An uninformed patron might have thought that the opera was titled Mandryka, so powerful was his portrayal. Dale Travis made a fine Count Waldner; the remainder were up to their tasks without making a permanent impression in my memory. The finale did not carry the impact of my 1998 San Francisco performance. A friend who also saw that performance said “I was bawling,” and I was doing my best to hold it together. Sorry, that didn’t happen this time. A beta or a bit less, based on Mark Delavan’s Mandryka.
To our surprise and delight, an Opera San Jose resident artist, Michael Dailey, was among the chorus. He would have a named role in Maometto Secondo; perusal of the program revealed that he would be in all five operas. We figured out how to get backstage after the performance to say Hi. He had lots of praise for Sir Andrew, the conductor.
Santa Fe Opera performs in a theater that has a lot of “outside awareness”: patrons seated from the front of the orchestra to near the back have no walls to their right or left; if it’s raining and there’s a strong wind, patrons on the edge can get wet. Also, the back of the stage is open to the elements. It’s possible to watch a thunderstorm in the distance while the stage action is taking place. For Arabella, however, the sets covered this view. In Act 1, we saw a collection of curved grey walls representing the hotel room where the Waldner family is living. To the left there was a sofa on which Adelaide (Arabella’s mother) consulted with a fortune teller; to the right were a number of doors, one leading to the rest of the hotel, the others to the other rooms of the suite. For the second act, the wall on the left with the sofa was retained, while the wall on the right was turned around and the doors removed to form the location for the party. On the upstage side of this latter wall an out-of-sight staircase allowed characters to arrive and depart. In the third act, the walls were turned around again so that both left and right walls curved toward the audience. There were three doors on the left; on the right, a curving staircase led from stage left up to a door leading to the Waldner’s lodgings on the second floor. In the interior of this curved wall there was an upholstered bench. It was all very appropriate; there was no excess of directorial “concept.”
Our cast:
Count Waldner: Dale Travis
Adelaide von Waldner: Victoria Livengood
Arabella: Erin Wall
Zdenka: Heidi Stober
Matteo: Zach Borichevsky
Count Elemer: Brian Jagde
Mandryka: Mark Delavan
Conductor: Sir Andrew Davis
Director: Tim Albery
Of these, the standout performer was Mark Delavan as Mandryka. An uninformed patron might have thought that the opera was titled Mandryka, so powerful was his portrayal. Dale Travis made a fine Count Waldner; the remainder were up to their tasks without making a permanent impression in my memory. The finale did not carry the impact of my 1998 San Francisco performance. A friend who also saw that performance said “I was bawling,” and I was doing my best to hold it together. Sorry, that didn’t happen this time. A beta or a bit less, based on Mark Delavan’s Mandryka.
To our surprise and delight, an Opera San Jose resident artist, Michael Dailey, was among the chorus. He would have a named role in Maometto Secondo; perusal of the program revealed that he would be in all five operas. We figured out how to get backstage after the performance to say Hi. He had lots of praise for Sir Andrew, the conductor.
Saturday, August 4, 2012
La finta giardiniera, Merola Opera Program, August 2 2012
Premiered in Munich two weeks before his 19th birthday, Mozart’s La finta giaridniera (“The Pretend Gardener”) is a complicated story of seven people, most of whom love (or pretend to love) at least two of the other characters. As presented by the Merola Opera Program at Cowell Theater, Ft. Mason, it was an evening well spent.
The same set served all three acts. On a slightly tilted square platform a foot or two above stage level, we saw a large round oak single-pedestal oak table with five chairs arranged around it. To the left and right were suspended four (for a total of eight) 4-foot by 5-foot photos of formal English gardens—simple but effective, and a far cry from the “obscenely stupid” production of the same opera by the same organization (but different director) ten years ago.
Our cast:
Nardo: Gordon Bintner
Sandrina: Jennifer Cherest
Podesta: Casey Candebat
Belfiore: Theo Lebow
Ramiro: Sarah Mesko
Arminda: Jacqueline Piccolino
Serpetta: Rose Sawvel
Conductor: Gary Thor Wedow
Director: Nicholas Muni
The standout performer of the evening was Jacqueline Piccolino, whose rage aria immediately made me want to hear her as Elektra in Idomeneo. Also notable was Gordon Bintner as Nardo. I’ll be watching for those two at the upcoming Grand Finale. The castrato part of Ramiro was taken (adequately) by Sarah Mesko, whose short wig, goatee, and formal black suit were so convincing that I took the performer for a countertenor until I looked at the program. The orchestra was a bit sketchy at the beginning, but before long they had reached cruising speed. Overall, somewhat short of a beta.
The same set served all three acts. On a slightly tilted square platform a foot or two above stage level, we saw a large round oak single-pedestal oak table with five chairs arranged around it. To the left and right were suspended four (for a total of eight) 4-foot by 5-foot photos of formal English gardens—simple but effective, and a far cry from the “obscenely stupid” production of the same opera by the same organization (but different director) ten years ago.
Our cast:
Nardo: Gordon Bintner
Sandrina: Jennifer Cherest
Podesta: Casey Candebat
Belfiore: Theo Lebow
Ramiro: Sarah Mesko
Arminda: Jacqueline Piccolino
Serpetta: Rose Sawvel
Conductor: Gary Thor Wedow
Director: Nicholas Muni
The standout performer of the evening was Jacqueline Piccolino, whose rage aria immediately made me want to hear her as Elektra in Idomeneo. Also notable was Gordon Bintner as Nardo. I’ll be watching for those two at the upcoming Grand Finale. The castrato part of Ramiro was taken (adequately) by Sarah Mesko, whose short wig, goatee, and formal black suit were so convincing that I took the performer for a countertenor until I looked at the program. The orchestra was a bit sketchy at the beginning, but before long they had reached cruising speed. Overall, somewhat short of a beta.
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