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Opera Vivente turns in a strong and haunting 'Turn'
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By Tim Smith
Sun Music Critic
October 4, 2005
In transforming The Turn of the Screw into an opera, Benjamin Britten does
not provide answers to the questions posed in the chilling novel of that name by Henry James.
Are the ghosts real, or merely imagined by the repressed governess who
arrives at a country home to care for two orphaned children? What exactly
happened between the former governess, the valet and the children before
both adults died?
Britten only adds to the uncertainty, and the unease. His remarkably concise
opera puts us deep inside this gothic tale of innocence threatened, defiled
and lost, but we can never know for sure what dark secrets are at the heart
of the plot. That so much is left up to the imagination may be the scariest
thing of all.
This truly haunting quality is effectively exploited by the Opera Vivente
production that opened over the weekend at Emmanuel Episcopal Church, where
it will be presented twice more this week. It's one of the most accomplished
efforts I've seen from this adventuresome, modest-sized company.
Set and lighting designer Paul Christensen conjures up considerable
atmosphere with an economy of means. The scenes change seamlessly; ghostly
appearances are sufficiently spooky. Company founder John Bowen directs the
action with a sure hand, maintaining tension throughout. Norah Worthington's
evocative costumes fill out the picture.
Last Friday's performance was particularly notable for standout singing and
acting from Zachary Stains, as Quint, the valet calling from the grave. The
tenor's tonal warmth and superb diction enabled him to convey myriad nuances
in the dreadful, but irresistible, character. (In a different guise, he also
sang the narration in the Prologue compellingly.)
This Quint had a sturdy opponent in Kelli Harrington, as the Governess. Her
vibrant vocalism and keen theatrical instincts yielded a rich
interpretation.
Michelle Rice, as the housekeeper Mrs. Grose, was another strong presence.
Siobhan Kolker, as the spectral Miss Jessel, didn't always produce a
centered tone, but created a potent portrayal.
Britten demands much in the roles of the children who are caught in the
crossfire of normal and paranormal forces. Elisabeth Bull, as Flora, and
Nicholas Pazdalski, as Miles, didn't bring all the desired clarity, color or
firmness to their lines (I was a little worried that his voice was going to
change right before our ears), but both proved adept at capturing the
unsettled nature of the characters.
Conductor JoAnn Kulesza brought out much of the power in the score from a
mostly tight, accomplished ensemble.
And what a brilliant, endlessly fascinating score it is. Britten builds it
out of variations on a 12-note theme, an ingenious process that helps make
the orchestra as much a protagonist as anyone onstage. Amazing how menacing
a couple of bassoon notes can be.
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'Italian Girl' sung with enthusiasm
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By Tim Smith
Sun Music Critic
October 27, 2004
If the Marx Brothers had written an opera, instead of just famously wrecking one, it might well have turned out something like Rossini's L'italiana in Algeri.
With a pompous pasha, wronged and wily women, a lovesick gent or two, and even a bunch of eunuchs whirling through the plot, there's no chance of taking anything seriously. Thanks to the effervescent and brilliantly constructed score, however, there's no way to mistake this for an insubstantial work, either.
Opera Vivente opened its season last weekend with a diverting, if uneven, production of the piece, performed in a deft English translation by Robert David Macdonald as An Italian Girl in Algiers.
This chamber-sized company, which performs in an intimate hall of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Baltimore's Mount Vernon neighborhood, has often put together some remarkably cohesive casts from the regional talent pool, but the choices this time didn't quite add up to a satisfying unit.
The exception on Friday night was in the title role of Isabella, whose search for a long-lost love lands her in the clutches of an Algerian ruler tired of his own wife. Ann Marie Wilcox inhabited the part persuasively, revealing Isabella's take-charge streak as easily as her beguiling side. The mezzo-soprano's singing was secure and vibrant. She revealed a particular flair for inserting colorful nuances, some of them decidedly - and amusingly - non-operatic in style or technique.
As Lindoro, the object of Isabella's affections, tenor John Zuckerman offered some charming touches in phrasing and acting (he didn't know what to do with his hands, though). But he never seemed comfortably settled into the tricky music; he occasionally landed on top notes with a sturdy ping, more often with strain.
Jimi James was a burly-voiced Mustafa, the pasha with a penchant for Italians. Subtlety was not part of his vocal or theatrical approach, but the high energy had its rewards. Will Heim nicely captured the timorous nature of Isabella's pesky admirer, Taddeo. His singing was a little under-powered, but brimming with telling inflections.
Vikki Jones (Elvira), Andrea Arena (Zulma) and Brian Ming Chu (Haly) made more or less effective contributions. There weren't enough bodies to constitute a real chorus of eunuchs, and the singers on hand had trouble with articulation and projection (not to mention acting).
JoAnn Kulesza conducted the spotty, but scrappy, little orchestra in propulsive style, and, baton clutched between her teeth, smoothly switched to the harpsichord to play recitatives.
Thom Bumblauskas designed the set, Peter Jakubowski the lighting. Stage director John Bowen followed a mostly straightforward path that uncorked only part of the opera's humor. And he let the eunuchs hang around awkwardly onstage too many times, fiddling with their vests, waiting for their next cue - not a good look for such a manic opera.
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Copyright (c) 2004, The Baltimore Sun
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SCORE, VOICES SAVE 'CLARA'S' WEAK BOOK
By T.L. Ponick
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Famed 19th-century pianist Clara Schumann's tragic marriage to composer Robert Schumann, her battles with her tyrannical father, her seemingly platonic romance with Johannes Brahms, and the haunted lives of her damaged children all form the core of a new chamber opera, "Clara," that is receiving its world-premiere performances this week at the University of Maryland's Kay Theatre in College Park.
With a score by Robert Convery and a libretto by Kathleen Cahill, the opera unfolds in a single act of five vignettes in reverse chronological order as viewed by an older Clara on her deathbed. In our own musical age when atonal dissonance has been favored over comprehensible tonality, Mr. Convery's lush, somewhat impressionistic score filled with character-centered motifs is a welcome change of pace, more evidence that contemporary composers are shedding the yoke of serialism and attempting to connect with their audience.
Unlike the musical score of the film "The Piano," whose modernistic solo piano essays were jarringly at odds with its 19th-century subject matter, Mr. Convery's music bridges the gap between Clara Schumann's period and our own. Mr. Convery's music is all the more remarkable given the bare-bones book his librettist created for him. Miss Cahill's choppy, expository libretto lacks, for the most part, the kind of plummy poetry on which a composer can hang an impressive aria.
In addition, Miss Cahill's portrayal of Robert Schumann as a blithering idiot is senseless. Clara Schumann was an extraordinary artist by any standard. Her posthumous reputation doesn't need to be enhanced in a revisionist, post-feminist fashion by diminishing that of her husband, who was a formidable composer-critic in his own right before his gradual descent into madness. Too little of this Robert appears in "Clara," and one wonders why the pianist married him.
"Clara's" opening night was an enjoyable evening that was marred at times by the youth and relative inexperience of the cast. Diction was a problem for nearly everyone, and most singers seemed unable to project their voices much beyond the center of the auditorium. Consequently, even though the opera is in English, it was often difficult to hear the words. The work's reverse-chronological order made it even more challenging to comprehend what was happening.
Nonetheless, there was some lovely singing. The voices of mezzo-sopranos Michelle T. Rice and Lee Anne Myslewski as the older and younger Clara were expressive and clear, although Miss Myslewski occasionally was inaudible in louder passages. Soprano Stacy Mastrian (Julie) was lovely in the work's one true aria. Crusty bass-baritone Bobb Robinson was convincing in his role of Clara's father, old Weick, one of music history's great bad guys. Baritone Paul Hindemith was touching and expressive as the devoted Johannes Brahms.
Nino Sanikidze, as a non-singing Clara, performed the Robert Schumann piano interludes quite nicely even while she and her piano were in perpetual motion on a revolving turntable. Conductor JoAnn Kulesza did a fine job keeping the singers and instrumentalists tightly integrated although dropping the level of the percussion a bit might have helped the singers somewhat. Erhard Rom's simple sets were effective in focusing the action but the little drop-down pianos that appeared during the intervals soon became a silly distraction.
This article from The Washington Times
Copyright (c) 2004 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
Current events underscores works
Opera double bill warmly celebrates those who raise voices in protest
By Tim Smith
Sun Music Critic
January 27, 2003
The issue of political dissent never loses its timeliness. Just now, with voices of opposition to all sorts of governments around the world getting louder by the day, that issue is particularly pertinent. It provides an extra degree of power to Peabody Chamber Opera's exceptional double bill at the Theatre Project - Kurt Weill's Mahagonny Songspiel and Udo Zimmermann's White Rose.
Weill's short, biting piece of cabaret-style entertainment from 1927 took effective pot shots at the unsettled post-World War I scene in Germany and beyond, a time when "there is no peace in us, and no compassion, and there is nothing a man can depend upon." Illusion and delusion are everywhere.
The remarkable heroics of two siblings in Nazi Germany, Sophie and Hans Scholl, guillotined for passing out anti-Reich leaflets, inspired Zimmermann's 75-minute, stream-of-consciousness drama from 1985. The composer finds in their short-lived struggle the essence of the battle between morality and evil and presents it in an alternately bracing and achingly beautiful expressionistic style.
Roger Brunyate has designed and directed a provocative staging of these two works, with minimal props and maximum intensity.
On Friday night, Arsenia Soto (Sophie) and Joseph Cole Regan (Hans) thoroughly inhabited their roles; their acting had a disarming naturalness. They both negotiated the complex score with aplomb; Regan's voice had an especially warm, affecting tone. Conductor JoAnn Kulesza led a taut, assured account of the score and had the orchestra responding firmly.
The six-member cast of Mahogonny Songspiel caught the spicy flavor of the piece, vocally and theatrically. Mariatana Salerno and Beth Stewart delivered the intoxicating Alabama Song with considerable flair. Kulesza's conducting was again admirable; so was the instrumental contribution.
The double bill will be repeated Thursday, Friday and Sunday.
Copyright (c) 2003, The Baltimore Sun
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'Werther' strikes a sad, but good chord
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By Tim Smith
Sun Music Critic
November 12, 2003
Can hyper-romanticism still strike a chord in a post-modernist world? Sure, especially if that chord is from Jules Massenet's opera Werther. In 1892, the French composer transformed a literary landmark of German romanticism, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, into a work brimming with exquisite torment. His music shimmers, shudders and shouts in supremely lyrical fashion, making it possible to believe utterly in this sad tale of obsessive love.
For a long time, Massenet owed his fame almost exclusively to his earlier Manon, about another doomed romance, but in recent decades, Werther has enjoyed rightful popularity. In many places, at least. Locally, the Baltimore Opera Company, which has other Massenet pieces in its repertoire, has never offered Werther. But over the weekend, Opera Vivente gave it an ambitious staging that managed to convey much of the work's beauty and strength.
There were inevitable compromises. This is, after all, a chamber-sized company that performs in a hall at Emmanuel Episcopal Church not designed for operatic purposes. Werther, although a fundamentally intimate story, has plenty of grandness, especially in orchestration. That instrumental component could not be fully realized by the 15 or so instrumentalists crammed into a corner of the hall, playing a reduced arrangement of the original score. Still, conductor JoAnn Kulesza coaxed a good deal of sound (not all of it entirely accurate) from the players as she shaped Sunday afternoon's performance with a good ear for its expressive ebb and flow.
Werther offers colorful possibilities for staging, given a plot progression that moves from summer and light in the first act, through autumnal shades in the second and on to a dark Christmas Eve for the third and fourth. Paul Christensen's minimal set left much to the imagination, but provided effective atmosphere for the last two scenes. Norah Worthington's costume design, which placed the action more in Massenet's 19th century than in Goethe's 18th, filled in the visual side of things nicely.
What counts most, of course, is the singing, and here Opera Vivente was on generally solid ground with its cast of young professionals. In the title role, Kenneth Gayle sometimes suggested a work-in-progress - his bright, powerful tenor needed more technical refinement around the edges and more variety of dynamics; his acting tended to be stiff, relying too often on an upraised right arm for emphasis. But his was a remarkable performance nonetheless.
Gayle rode Massenet's most poignant melodic lines with passionate conviction, tapping into the character's soul-consuming despair. There was also something in the fierce concentration of his gaze that drove home just how far into the deep end of romantic illusion Werther had plunged.
In the first act, Fenlon Lamb's portrayal of Charlotte did not provide enough charm to explain why Werther would fall so hopelessly, insanely in love with the bailiff's daughter. But in the last two acts, when Charlotte tries to make sense of lingering feelings for Werther and her duties as the wife of bland, bourgeois Albert, Lamb did telling work, vocally and theatrically.
Christopher Austin, as the Bailiff, filled the hall with sturdy, ringing tones. Amy Bonn's fluttery, mostly on-target soprano fit the personality of Charlotte's younger sister Sophie nicely, but I wish more of her words had registered. (Most of the cast could have articulated the text, in Amanda Holden's workable English translation, more clearly.) James Rogers (Albert), Steven Goodman (Johann) and John Weber (Schmidt) did vibrant work. So did the sextet of children's voices.
John Bowen's straightforward direction kept the action flowing more or less smoothly. In Act 3, when the would-be lovers confront their emotions to devastating effect, Bowen provided a particularly deft touch. He also slipped into the church during the second act to play the off-stage organ part, a welcome bit of sonic luxury.
Copyright (c) 2003, The Baltimore Sun
