CLAUDE-BÉNIGNE BALBASTRE (1724 – 1799), JACQUES DUPHLY (1715 – 1789), JEAN-BAPTISTE FORQUERAY (1699 – 1782), JOSEPH-NICOLAS ROYER (circa 1705 – 1755): Le clavecin français: Pièces de clavecin— Adam Pearl, harpsichord [Plectra MusicPL21803; 1 CD, 74:22; Available from Plectra Music and major music retailers]

Cultural, political, and societal perceptions of the concepts of nationality and nationalism have undergone countless transformations, humanity having collectively and divisively redefined the essence of the impact of individuals’ tangible origins upon their psychological perspectives and existential identities. What to one person is little more than a geographical distinction is to another person something that can be weaponized in the pursuit of ideological alienation and superiority. As the politics of nationality and nationhood have evolved, the most basic notions of identity have been challenged, requiring individuals and societies to seek answers for difficult questions about the extent to which lives are shaped by the nations in which they are lived.

Whilst several of today’s most powerful nations remained disarticulated assortments of self-governed regions, influential nationalistic trends emerged, often forged by groups of people who shared common origins or languages. Thus, unique German and Italian cultures were identifiable long before Germany and Italy assumed their modern forms. Though no less affected than her neighbors by regionalism and conflicts arising from dynastic ambitions, the dominion of the Franks emerged from Roman Gaul as an entity that closely resembled today’s France. By the time of Hugh Capet’s ascension to the Frankish throne in 987, the boundaries of the eventual French republic were etched upon the Continent. As many Europeans looked to the flags flying above their local fortresses to determine by which factions they were dominated, the French cultivated the still-discernible traits that yielded artists ranging from Molière and Rousseau to Monet and Rodin.

Alongside literature, the visual arts, and cuisine, music became an indelible component of the French national identity. Whether the troubadours’ ballads of the Middle Ages, the operas of Charles Gounod, or the chansons of Édith Piaf, music has for a millennium been an integral part of the French experience, and this was especially true in the Eighteenth Century, when musical forms developed in France were emulated by composers throughout Europe. The French musical diaspora encompassed Bach, Händel, Telemann, and virtually every composer of consequence active in the first half of the Eighteenth Century, but it was in the work of her native musicians that France’s national school flourished most fruitfully.

Playing a bright-timbred instrument by Dutch-born maker Joannes Goermans, dated to 1768 and expertly restored in 2014 by California-based harpsichord builder John Phillips, prize-winning harpsichordist Adam Pearl makes this volume in Plectra Music’s Le clavecin français series an astonishingly vivid portrait of a period in which the French school of composition taught some of its most representative lessons from the keyboard. Working in Paris from the time of his arrival in the city, circa 1730, until his death in 1777, Goermans witnessed the advancement of writing for the harpsichord surveyed on this disc, lending the choice of instrument particular relevance.

Placing the harpsichord in an acoustic space reminiscent of an intimate but vibrant salon, the immediacy of the recording is astounding: there is a compelling sense of experiencing a performance rather than hearing a recording of it. Both a scholar and a practitioner [his doctoral thesis dealt with French Baroque harpsichord music], Pearl plays all of the selections on this disc with the kind of virtuosity that encourages the listener to concentrate on the wonders of the music rather than those of the musician’s technique. These are not performances that conjure ghosts of the past: Pearl reveals that this music lives as viscerally today as it did two-and-a-half centuries ago.

A protégé of Pierre Février and friend of Armand-Louis Couperin who enjoyed the advocacy of Jean-Philippe Rameau, Claude-Bénigne Balbastre was so admired as an organist that civil and clerical authorities sometimes forbade his participation in regular services because the crowds his playing attracted were unmanageable. His compositions for the harpsichord were sufficiently appreciated to have been included in the pieces that Thomas Jefferson brought back to Virginia after a sojourn in Paris. The three works played by Pearl on this disc were published in the first book of Balbastre’s Pièces de Clavecin, issued in 1759, the year in which Georg Friedrich Händel died in London. The difficulties of ‘La de Caze’ are conquered by Pearl with an exhibition of impeccably period-appropriate phrasing. Crisp realization of ornamentation is a consistent trait of the harpsichordist’s playing, but still more impressive is the lyricism that he finds among the formidable challenges of a piece like ‘La d’Héricourt,’ here executed with thrilling theatricality. It is not unreasonable to expect accuracy in a performance recorded in studio, but Pearl’s performance of Balbastre’s ‘La Lugeac’ is accurate but never studio-bound, his playing conveying engaging spontaneity.

There is an element of chronological irony in the fact that Jacques Duphly’s Troisième Livre de Pièces de Clavecin was published in 1756, the year in which Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg. That the birth of the musical innovator who would play a pivotal rôle in setting the seal on the harpsichord’s obsolescence was figuratively accompanied by the pieces from Duphly’s collection played by Pearl on this disc enhances the contextual provenance of the music. The young Mozart was exposed to the musical life of Parisian society during the Continental tours arranged by his father, and he may well have heard music like Duphly’s whilst in the French capital. As Pearl performs it on this disc, ‘Les Grâces’ is true to its title, imparting a level of sophistication that would surely have piqued Mozart’s interest. The infanticidal mania of the mythological wife of Jason permeates ‘Médée’ and Pearl’s playing of it, the musician’s temperament proving wholly equal to that of the music. ‘La Forqueray’ is Duphly’s homage to the Forquerays, père and fils, and the fiery rondeau is ignited by Pearl’s powerful artistry. His approach to the Chaconne is both gratifyingly cosmopolitan and refreshingly straightforward. No anachronisms are imposed upon the music, but this view of of Duphly’s work offers aural glimpses of the future.

It is indicative of the volatility of the relationship between Jean-Baptiste Forqueray and his father Antoine, a viola da gamba virtuoso attached to La chambre du Roy from an early age, that the younger musician was both imprisoned and exiled at his father’s instigation. History affords the son a sort of poetic justice in the form of the father’s music being wholly lost except for a selection of pieces preserved by Jean-Baptiste. The caliber of the son’s talent is apparent in the 1747 first book of Pièces de Clavecin fron which three pieces were drawn for this recording. Pearl revels in the ambiguity of ‘La Angrave,’ divulging a suggestion of a Jekyll-and-Hyde dichotomy in the transition from minor to major tonalities. The relative simplicity of ‘La du Vaucel’ gives Pearl an opportunity to further display the sensitivity of his musicality. The ingenuity of the composer’s variations in ‘La Morangis ou la Plissay’ is accentuated by the imagination with which Pearl plays them.

Born in Torino but residing in Paris for the final three decades of his life, Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer enriched French musical life in the first half Eighteenth Century with operas and well-crafted music for the harpsichord, of which instrument he was a widely-renowned master. Welcomed in the most exalted social strata owing to his co-directorship with Jean-Joseph de Mondonville of the elite Concert Spirituel series and service in several capacities to the musical interests of France’s ruling house, Royer exerted a profound influence on his own and future generations of composers. His operas are still being rediscovered, but his music for harpsichord has won the espousal of a number of gifted keyboardists, among whom Pearl is one of the most capable interpreters.

The first book of Royer’s Pièces de Clavecin was published in 1746, during the time in which he was also writing his sole tragédie en musique, Prométhée et Pandore. The rhythmic structure of Royer’s Allemande may owe something to Teutonic models, but, as the elegance of Pearl’s playing affirms, its prevailing spirit is quintessentially French. The pensiveness of ‘La Sensible’ suits Pearl’s tasteful manner, and he emphasizes the feeling of reverie that lurks within the music. ‘La Marche des Scythes’ is the final piece in Royer’s 1746 collection and is rightly regarded as one of the most demanding works in the harpsichord repertoire. Pearl’s galvanizing performance persuasively evokes the bellicosity of the nomadic Scythians, but their warmongering is unfailingly and uncommonly musical.

In bygone days of steadfast financial solvency in the Classical recording industry, artists’ discographies were often mined to produce ‘portrait of the artist’ compendia, offering listeners quick-reference introductions to musicians’ work. A single disc could never provide a comprehensive acquaintance with the vast output of the French school of composition for the harpsichord, but this recording engenders the kind of connection between listener and musician to which all similar endeavors should aspire. The link to this disc could hardly be more tenuous, but there is something strangely apposite in Three Dog Night’s singing of ‘I’ve never been to Spain, but I kinda like the music.’ Adam Pearl was not born in France, but his playing on this disc rouses keen affection for that country’s music for the harpsichord.

Le prince du plectre: harpsichordist Adam Pearl
[Photograph © by the artist]

Gioachino Rossini was two weeks from his thirtieth birthday when his opera Zelmira premièred in Naples on 16 February 1822—and, though he would live for another forty-six years, only seven years from retiring from the composition of opera. From the first performance of the one-act farce La cambiale di matrimonio in 1810 until the 1829 première of Guillaume Tell, Rossini’s music dominated opera, not least in Naples. Beginning with Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra in 1815, ten of Rossini’s operas débuted in Naples, all of them serious operas rather than the comedies that have sustained Rossini’s popularity unto the Twenty-First Century. Did Neapolitan audiences lack a sense of humor, or did they perceive in Rossini’s music qualities more profound than the affable hilarity that endeared the son of Pesaro to all of Europe?

Rossini’s operas are rarely praised for the literary integrity of their libretti, but the composer often found inspiration in the work of eminent writers: Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais in Il barbiere di Siviglia, Jean Racine in Ermione, Sir Walter Scott in La donna del lago, and Friedrich von Schiller in Guillaume Tell, for instance. The texts of Ermione and La donna del lago were written by the appointed poet of the royally-supported Neapolitan opera houses, Andrea Leone Tottola, who turned to a 1762 play by Pierre-Laurent Buirette de Belloy for the source of Zelmira’s plot. [Tottola later adapted de Belloy’s 1777 drama Gabrielle de Vergy for an operatic setting by Gaetano Donizetti. De Belloy’s 1765 patriotic epic Le siège de Calais was also a source for Salvadore Cammarano’s libretto for Donizetti’s L’assedio di Calais.] Though not as familiar to Twenty-First-Century readers as Racine’s Andromaque and Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, de Belloy’s Zelmire provided Rossini with a tale of political intrigue, false accusations, and tested loyalties that he recounted with music that both embodies and in some scenes defies the genial tunefulness for which his operas are renowned.

Two months after its Neapolitan première, Zelmira was staged in Vienna, where the score provoked heated debate about the Teutonic elements perceived by some listeners, likening it to music by Gluck and Mozart. Thereafter, the opera was performed throughout Italy; in London, where Rossini conducted the inaugural British performance; in Paris and Lisbon; and in opera-loving New Orleans. Zelmira’s good fortune waned as the Nineteenth Century drew to its close, joining Rossini’s serious operas in being eclipsed by their comic siblings and the operas of Giuseppe Verdi. Zelmira returned to Naples in 1965 in a production that featured Romanian soprano Virginia Zeani in the title rôle, but reappraisal of the opera’s considerable merits has been slow. A 1988 concert performance in Venice gave rise to a studio recording and a staged production in Rome, all with Cecilia Gasdia as Zelmira. Mariella Devia sang the eponymous heroine in Pesaro, Lyon, and Paris, and the opera was performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 2003 and reprised at Pesaro in 2009. Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Zelmira on 5 April 2019, likely the first performance of the opera in America since its New Orleans début in the 1830s, offers a rare opportunity to hear this music sung by a cast capable of recreating the vocal flair that enchanted Naples 197 years ago.

From Naples, with love: the title page of the autograph manuscript of Gioachino Rossini’s Zelmira, being performed by Washington Concert Opera on 5 April 2019

Australian conductor Antony Walker has been a tireless champion of underappreciated repertoire in his capacity as Washington Concert Opera’s Artistic Director, and his trademark enthusiasm pervades his contemplation of resurrecting Zelmira. Above all, Walker is exhilarated by the idiosyncrasies that enliven this score. ‘Zelmira has a few unique touches that really spring out dramatically,’ the Maestro mused. ‘One such surprise is at the very beginning of the opera, where Rossini chooses to dispense with the traditional overture and launch straight into a chorus scene where we discover that Prince Azor has been murdered.’ The convoluted conceits of Tottola’s libretto have received much criticism, but Walker trusts Rossini’s dramatic instincts to make Zelmira viable for today’s listeners. ‘The opera starts with shuddering strings and menacing wind/brass diminished chords that plunge the audience into a world of uncertainty and chaos. Antenore then enters and feigns horror and outrage at this murder—he basically engineered it, with the help of Leucippo. Rossini provides firstly flowery, ironic music, then a mock-heroic cabaletta underscoring the insincerity of the usurper.’

Luring the audience into the opera’s conspiratory atmosphere, Rossini heightens the impact of the characters’ conflicts with chameleonic music, one moment’s delicate tenderness giving way to another’s rousing bravura display. ‘A surprise of a very different quality is the exquisite duettino for Zelmira and Emma, depicting Zelmira’s sorrow in having to hand over her small son to Emma’s protection for the foreseeable future, as she knows that Antenore and Leucippo are closing in on her and will soon probably deprive her of her liberty,’ Walker asserted. ‘This duettino is perfectly and breathtakingly scored for only a quartet: the two singers, English horn, and harp, and [it] is a delicate, poignant, and moving jewel of chamber music, beautifully positioned just before the aggressive and frenetic finale to Act One.’ This musical variety is Zelmira’s foremost strength, Walker feels, but it also begets some of the score’s greatest challenges.

Creating and maintaining dramatic momentum are hallmarks of Walker’s conducting, and he is acutely aware of the conductor’s integral rôle in the success of a performance of Zelmira. His method of pacing Washington Concert Opera’s Zelmira will be guided by five principals. ‘The biggest issues in keeping a work of such length riveting in performance are: (1) to equally take care of the large dramatic arcs in each act, as well as the small details on each page of the score; (2) [to] make sure that individual characters are very specifically drawn and presented; (3) [to] always remember to keep the recitatives dramatically engaging and full of emotional and dramatic contrast; (4) [to] ensure that the orchestra is always adding specifically to the drama, encouraging the players [to] feel like characters and helping them express the underlying emotions of each scene; and (5) [to] make sure [to make the most of] each special and unique moment in the score,’ he explained. These are lofty goals, but Walker has devoted his career to meeting the musical and dramatic needs of pieces that other conductors ignore.

Performing Zelmira in concert allows the artists and the audience to wholly surrender themselves to the music, but Walker realizes that the ultimate impression made by the performance relies upon satisfying musical storytelling. ‘For a work like Zelmira, which is not well known and which most of the principals are singing for the first time, I like [to] at first sit together and discuss the characters; how they feel about their characters and how I see their characters in the whole scheme of the drama,’ he said. ‘It is especially important in concert for singers to understand the characters of their colleagues, as we don’t have staging rehearsals to take us through this important step of understanding, exploration, and discovery.’

Coloratura champion: American tenor Lawrence Brownlee, who will sing Ilo in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Gioachino Rossini’s Zelmira on 5 April 2019, as Rinaldo in Armida at The Metropolitan Opera in 2010
[Photograph by Ken Howard, © by The Metropolitan Opera]

To date, Ohio-born tenor Lawrence Brownlee’s Rossini portrayals at New York’s Metropolitan Opera include Conte d’Almaviva in Il barbiere di Siviglia, Don Ramiro in La Cenerentola, Rinaldo in Armida, and Giacomo in La donna del lago. One of the most acclaimed modern exponents of music written by Rossini for Giovanni David, who created the rôle of the Trojan prince Ilo in Zelmira, Brownlee returns to Washington Concert Opera for his rôle début as Ilo, bringing to the performance a battle-tested strategy for conquering Rossini’s daunting vocal salvos. ‘Ilo’s entrance aria “Terra amica” calls for a virtuosic voice to sing it in order to be done well,’ the tenor stated. ‘It sits very high and is very demanding, but it's also very gratifying if you can equip yourself to do it well.’ Equipping oneself to sing the aria well is a Herculean task, he admitted. ‘Just getting through it is an accomplishment!’ Brownlee confided with characteristic wit. Though Ilo is new to his repertory, he is well acquainted with ‘Terra amica,’ which was included on his Delos recording of Rossini virtuoso arias. ‘I always aim to not only get through the demanding virtuosity of it, but to focus on the beauty of the writing and sing it musically and with intention,’ Brownlee reflected. ‘That is the thing that sets [the aria] apart and makes it a moment in the opera that’s not to be missed. I hope the Washington audience will enjoy it!’

Voz de Valencia: Spanish mezzo-soprano Silvia Tro Santafé, who will sing the title rôle in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Gioachino Rossini’s Zelmira on 5 April 2019, as Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia at San Diego Opera in 2012
[Photograph by Ken Howard, © by San Diego Opera]

The title rôle in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Zelmira will be sung by Spanish mezzo-soprano Silvia Tro Santafé, an uncommonly versatile singer whose American début as Cherubino in a Santa Fe—an apt setting!—production of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro has been followed by too few appearances in the USA. Zelmira was originated in 1822 by Isabella Colbran, the singer for whom Rossini wrote some of his most iconic heroines and who became his wife a month after Zelmira’s première. The national origin that she shares with the rôle’s creator is an obvious aspect of Zelmira’s allure for Santafé. ‘Of course, as a Spanish singer I have a special interest in rôles created for Isabel Colbran!’ she declared. Not surprisingly, especially considering her superb bravura technique, Santafé also feels particular affection for Rossini’s music. ‘I have always felt [that] Rossini is the center of my singing. From the serious rôles—Arsace [in Semiramide], for example—and all the comic rôles I sing, which are not actually all that comic if you really think about the characters, I find these roots in all the music I sing.’ These roots, she intimated, provide the technical security that has enabled her to comfortably explore other repertory.

Earlier this year, Santafé sang her first Laura in Amilcare Ponchielli’s La Gioconda at Théâtre Royale de La Monnaie, an achievement that she credits to the technical foundation built upon her experience in Rossini rôles. ‘Laura is my first step into early verismo and has very direct demands from the very beginning of the rôle,’ the mezzo-soprano remarked. ‘La Gioconda is a drama packed with fast-moving dramatic situations, and the rôle reflects that.’ This is a trait that Laura and Zelmira have in common, she suggested. She continued, ‘Zelmira is also a quickly-unfolding drama, and the character of the singing and Rossini’s masterful writing take [Zelmira] through multiple situations. Sometimes, [the drama is] extremely intimate, as in a truly beautiful Duetto in Act One or Zelmira’s prison aria in the second act. Then, [in] the incredibly grand ensembles, the drive of Rossini’s rhythm and tempo creates overwhelming vocal excitement.’

A consummate mistress of opera’s grand passions, Santafé is ever cognizant that vocal control must govern even the most unbridled operatic emotions. ‘The discipline of Rossini’s coloratura helps me prepare for [the performances as] Principessa Eboli that I will sing in Madrid this year,’ she said. It is not merely Rossini’s translation of psychological drama into fiorature requiring specific technical mastery that makes the composer’s music a grounding force for Santafé, however. She summarized her process of learning Zelmira’s music with a statement that reveals much about the importance of Rossini repertory to her artistic identity. ‘Rossini’s beautiful long phrases became amplified later in Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, and Ponchielli, which means [that] as a singer my approach to the drama and the vocal demands will always be influenced by my Rossini musical roots. No matter how distant [I roam], I always return.’

The company’s Zelmira’s credo might also be cited in an assessment of Washington Concert Opera. Repertory in WCO’s recent seasons has roamed as widely as Richard Strauss’s Guntram, Massenet’s Hérodiade, and Gounod’s Sapho, but performing Zelmira is a return to the bel canto roots that have resiliently anchored Washington Concert Opera in the nation’s notoriously unstable operatic humus for the past three decades.

In addition to Silvia Tro Santafé and Lawrence Brownlee, the cast for Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Rossini’s Zelmira includes mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux as Emma, tenor Julius Ahn as Antenore, bass-baritone Patrick Carfizzi as Polidoro, and bass-baritone Matthew Scollin as Leucippo.

The performance will take place in Lisner Auditorium on the campus of The George Washington University at 7:00 PM (EDT) on Friday, 5 April 2019.

For more information and to purchase tickets for the performance, please visit Washington Concert Opera’s website.

SIR ARTHUR SEYMOUR SULLIVAN (1842 – 1900) and SIR WILLIAM SCHWENCK GILBERT (1836 – 1911): The Mikado; or, The Town of Titipu— Michael Rowe (The Mikado), Brady DelVecchio (Nanki-Poo), Greg Toft (Ko-Ko), Jim Burnette (Pooh-Bah), Stuart Albert (Pish-Tush), Farren Hilliard (Yum-Yum), Lauren Hussey (Pitti-Sing), Mary Elisabeth Hirsh (Peep-Bo), Alana Sealy (Katisha); The Durham Savoy Opera Stage and Royal Choruses, The Durham Savoy Opera Orchestra; Jackson Cooper, conductor [Janell Lovelace, Producer; Derrick Ivey, Artistic Director and Choreographer; James Vollers, Set Designer; Matt Artigues, Lighting Designer; Karen Guidry, Costume Designer; Pam Guidry-Vollers, Hair and Makeup Designer; The Durham Savoyards Ltd., Carolina Theatre, Durham, North Carolina, USA; Friday, 29 March 2019]

London in 1885 must have seemed a curious place. Though she had returned to public life, Queen Victoria remained in mourning, for both her newly-dead favorite John Brown and her consort, Prince Albert, then dead for nearly a quarter-century. Irish combatants attacked the Palace of Westminster with dynamite. Two days later, Major-General Gordon was slain in Khartoum. William Gladstone was forced by the hostile defeat of a proposed budget to resign from the Prime Ministership but was reinstalled at 10 Downing Street before the year’s end. Parliamentary action legalized professional-league football. The first sanctioned cremation in the UK was performed. The Nineteenth-Century’s emblematic teeming metropolis, it was a place that often needed laughter to lighten the gloom.

Amidst the incessant turmoil of this collision of history, industry, and everyday existence, the ninth of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s and Sir William Gilbert’s theatrical collaborations was premièred at the Savoy Theatre in the Strand on 14 March 1885. The 672 performances of its inaugural production revealed that The Mikado was precisely the diversion that Londoners needed. The opera’s success was instantaneous, prolonged, and transoceanic: the longest-running of Gilbert’s and Sullivan’s Savoy operas, The Mikado reached stages throughout England and in both America and Australia by the end of 1885.

The Mikado’s path to triumph traversed uncertain terrain. Plagued by health concerns and professional disappointments, Sullivan sought solace in the composition of ‘serious’ music. Keen to recapture the acclaim of H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance, Gilbert intended to overcome the relative failure of 1884’s Princess Ida with a new opera based upon the premise of amorous intrigue engendered by enchantment. Unconvinced of the viability of the scenario, Sullivan declared that his partnership with Gilbert had reached its end. Gilbert was crestfallen but not defeated and by the end of May 1884 had rekindled the composer’s interest with the first draft of The Mikado.

Freed by the plot’s pseudo-exotic Japanese setting from the bane of accusations of near-defamatory satire, Gilbert sharpened the barbs of his lampooning of British society to an even greater degree in The Mikado than in any of his previous Savoy operas. Oft-repeated stories about Gilbert’s imagination having been stimulated by a Japanese sword falling from a wall and an exhibition in Knightsbridge of tableaux from Japanese culture are now known to be hyperbole, but he was unquestionably fascinated by the fanciful Japan that he conjured in his libretto. His enthusiasm for the subject ultimately seized Sullivan, inspiring the composer to create a score in which the vitality of the words is amplified by music that delights from the first note of the Overture to the final chord of the finale.

Now in their fifty-seventh season of bringing D’Oyly Carte-worthy performances of Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire to North Carolina’s Triangle region, The Durham Savoyards confirmed that observers do not need to be scholars of Victorian politics or Imperial Japan in order to savor The Mikado. Without employing over-extensive rewriting of the text as many companies do, Durham Savoyards neither blunted the cutting wit of Gilbert’s words nor disrespected the audience by ‘dumbing down’ the show’s cosmopolitan comedy.

The Mikado has been unjustly but unsurprisingly condemned for perpetuating unfortunate ethnic stereotypes, and Durham Savoyards’ production ingeniously addressed concerns about the opera’s cultural insensitivity without altering its essence by placing the action in a fashion show teetering on the brink of career-ending catastrophe. Perhaps the denizens of haute couture would not be amused, but, like Londoners in 1885, theirs is a stressful environment that would benefit greatly from an infusion of fun of the kind provided by this Mikado.

The production team assembled for The Durham Savoyards’ staging of The Mikado united an array of talented individuals whose shared vision yielded a show that earned its laughs. Too many productions of the Savoy operas sink under the dead weight of misguided attempts to make them funny. They are funny, no less so now than when they were written, and a listener who fails to react to the humor of Gilbert’s words is unlikely to be significantly more stimulated by bowdlerizations thereof. Approaching the Savoy operas as works to be performed, not rehabilitated, is a hallmark of the Durham Savoyards’ endeavors, and this Mikado’s producer, Janell Lovelace, ensured that this aesthetic permeated the show.

James Vollers’s set designs established the physical parameters of the production’s concept with clever details and clear sight lines. The prevalence of poorly-lit productions divulges that theatrical lighting is an art that is not easily mastered, but Matt Artigues devised lighting designs that artfully illuminated not just the sets and the singers occupying them but also the opera’s narrative. Likewise, Karen Guidry’s costumes and Pam Guidry-Vollers hair and makeup, integral components of any turn on the catwalk, markedly enhanced this Mikado’s visual allure. The choreography developed by Artistic Director Derrick Ivey kept both the story and its participants moving uproariously.

Under the baton of Jackson Cooper, a musical polyglot who speaks the languages of performance, administration, and criticism with equal fluency, the instrumentalists of the Durham Savoy Opera Orchestra strove mightily to fulfill the expectations raised by the ensemble’s reputation for playing Sullivan’s scores with panache more typical of London’s West End than of America’s east coast. It was a rough evening for them, faltering intonation and intermittent imprecision imperiling the performance’s overall musicality, but their dedication outweighed the defects. Cooper’s conducting of the spirited Overture was invigorating, his handling of the Allegro con brio section catapulting the spectators into the opera’s zany hubbub. In both of the opera’s acts, Cooper’s tempi were consistently ideal, allowing singers and audience to fully savor the joys of Gilbert’s words and Sullivan’s melodies. The challenges to conductors posed by the Savoy operas are in no way inferior to those of opere buffe by Rossini and Donizetti, and Cooper’s conducting of this performance of The Mikado was as satisfyingly savvy as Vittorio Gui’s much-loved Rossini interpretations.

The writing for chorus in The Mikado is a comedic nod to Britain’s centuries-long choral tradition, a tradition to which Sullivan contributed with works like The Prodigal Son, The Golden Legend, and the posthumously-premièred Boer War Te Deum. Scrutiny of the score discloses that, though obviously lighter in mood, the choral music in The Mikado lacks none of the sophistication of Sullivan’s liturgical pieces, and the efforts of the Durham Savoyards choristers displayed none of the inadequately-rehearsed, haphazard caterwauling that is sometimes substituted for proper singing.

The gentlemen of the chorus voiced ‘If you want to know who we are, we are gentlemen of Japan’ in Act One with joie de vivre that was complemented by the ladies’ mellifluous delivery of ‘Comes a train of little ladies.’ These Savoyards sang ‘Behold the Lord High Executioner!’ and their lines in the manic Act One finale as though sole responsibility for the destiny of the Land of the Rising Sun rested on their shoulders. The choristers’ every utterance in Act Two was tunefully entertaining, including the occasionally-cringe-inducing ‘Mi-ya sa-ma’ that accompanies the grand entrance of Katisha and the Mikado. The ranks of Durham Savoyards’ chorus being drawn from the community facilitates the choristers’ credible depictions of communities in the company’s productions. They made this production’s incarnation of Gilbert’s town of Titipu a divertingly distinct locale.

There are instances in which the term ‘ensemble cast’ is used with a pejorative connotation, suggesting that the artists involved in a performance exhibited a uniform level of mediocrity above which none of the players managed to rise. The travesties to which many audiences are subjected notwithstanding, there is not a part in The Mikado that can wholly overcome bad singing: in this Mikado, there was case neither for singers to hide within the ensemble nor for any deficiencies to be vanquished.

Among the ladies, Lauren Hussey was a Pitti-Sing who sang as engagingly as she acted, voicing her parts in both the trio with Ko-Ko and Pooh-Bah and the subsequent madrigal with sweet-natured incisiveness. Mary Elisabeth Hirsh’s Peep-Bo was also a vivid presence, her lines in the famous ‘Three little maids from school are we’ sung with firm, focused tone and comedic alertness.

Most of the Savoy operas have a pivotal contralto rôle, often a feisty lady of a certain age who does not shrink from telling her comrades what’s what. In The Mikado, the low-voiced lady with first love and then vengeance on her mind is Katisha, brought to life in Durham Savoyards’s Mikado by Alana Sealy. She declaimed Katisha’s futile plea of ‘Your revels cease, assist me, all of you!’ in the Act One finale with exasperation, and her entrance with the Mikado in Act Two lent credence to her being described as ‘something appalling.’ There was nothing appalling about her vocalism in the Andante moderato song ‘Hearts do not break,’ however, and she duetted ebulliently with Ko-Ko in ‘There is beauty in the bellow of the blast.’ Formidable when her maneuvering was thwarted but touchingly vulnerable when lamenting her amorous miadventures, Sealy’s Katisha was a potent feminine force, not a caricatured crone.

Stuart Albert and Jim Burnette matched their colleagues’ work with riotously funny portrayals of Pish-Tush and Pooh-Bah. In the former rôle, Albert phrased his Act One song with chorus, ‘Our great Mikado, virtuous man,’ with apt pomposity, and his singing of ‘I heard one day a gentleman say’ in the trio with Ko-Ko and Pooh-Bah was musically and dramatically pleasing. Burnette’s Pooh-Bah was a rippingly persuasive Lord High Everything Else despite the weakness of the singer’s ascents above the stave. His account of the minuet song ‘Young man, despair’ was appropriately disheartening, and he articulated the line ‘I think you ought to recollect’ with perfect hubris. In the trio with Ko-Ko and Pish-Tush and throughout the performance, Burnette’s strong singing was enjoyably droll.

The title rôle in this Mikado was taken by Michael Rowe, who arrived in Act Two with a majestic traversal of ‘From ev’ry kind of man obedience I expect’ that disclosed at once that his opinion of himself was as exalted as his position. Rowe’s demeanor was delectably imperious but undeniably charismatic: he was the sort of Mikado whose authority was surely a product of seniority rather than superiority. Rowe’s extensive experience as a Savoyard was especially apparent in his performance of the brilliant song with chorus ‘A more humane Mikado never did in Japan exist,’ initially cut by Gilbert and Sullivan during rehearsals for the opera’s first performance but thankfully reinstated at the eleventh hour. Rowe’s robust singing reflected the Mikado’s social stature, completing a peevishly charismatic portrait of the character.

Lyric tenor Brady DelVecchio embodied the youthful verve and idealism that Nanki-Poo should possess. From the start of his recitative ‘Gentlemen, I pray you tell me’ in Act One, DelVecchio sang with dulcet tone and total dramatic involvement. The character’s beguiling song with chorus ‘A wand’ring minstrel I’ received from the tenor a performance of unforced merriment, legitimizing Katisha’s infatuation with him. In the duet with Yum-Yum, he suffused ‘Were you not to Ko-Ko plighted’ with a young lover’s disillusionment. ‘The flowers that bloom in the spring,’ was winsomely sung, DelVecchio’s voice blossoming at the top of the stave. Much of Nanki-Poo’s music inhabits the tenor’s passaggio, increasing the rôle’s difficulties, particularly for young singers. DelVecchio braved the music’s demands with skill and poise to spare, his Nanki-Poo emerging as a bona fide romantic lead.

The Mikado’s heroine Yum-Yum has typically been sung by light-voiced sopranos like Clara Dow and Valerie Masterson. As written, Yum-Yum’s music is not high by conventional operatic standards, but it was a novelty to hear the part sung by a fuller voice. Lyric soprano Farren Hilliard brought a refreshing ‘girl next door’ aura to the part, giving the much-parodied ‘Three little maids from school are we’ a hint of mischief. The soprano’s diction lacked clarity in ensembles, and she sporadically lacked her colleagues’s assurance in dialogue. She was impetuous passion personified in her exchanges with Nanki-Poo, though, and her singing in the Act One finale imparted the same smiling confidence that shone on her face.

Hilliard was most in her element in the lovely Andante commodo song in Act Two, ‘The sun, whose rays are all ablaze,’ and the madrigal, both of which she phrased with consummate grace. As she, DelVecchio, and Toft sang it, the kinship of the trio ‘Here’s a how-de-do!’ with a similar number for Marie, Tonio, and Sulpice in Act Two of Donizetti’s La fille du régiment was evident. The adolescent awkwardness of Hilliard’s portrayal intensified the contrast between Yum-Yum and Katiska, giving them profiles as opposite as Dvořák’s Rusalka and Cizí kněžna. There is little dramatic depth to Yum-Yum, but Hilliard made the character atypically wily and independent.

Greg Toft made Titipu’s Lord High Executioner Ko-Ko a complex, maddening, and curiously magnetic figure whose foibles were all the more amusing for being recognizably universal. The demands of the Act One Allegro marziale song with chorus ‘Taken from the county jail by a set of curious chances’ were exuberantly met, the voice pealing through the difficult writing with exultant ease. Textually, Ko-Ko’s song with chorus ‘As someday it may happen that a victim must be found’ is one of the most problematic pieces in the score, its words troubling to Twenty-First-Century audiences, but Toft and Durham Savoyards cunningly circumnavigated the song’s pitfalls. In the trio with Pish-Tush and Pooh-Bah, Toft voiced his lines with unmistakable ego.

The Act Two trio with Pitti-Sing and Pooh-Bah was one of the performance’s highlights, Toft’s singing of ‘The criminal cried as he dropp’d him down’ galvanizing the ensemble. The Andante espressivo song ‘On a tree by a river a little tom tit sang’ is arguably the best-known number in The Mikado, and the duet with Katisha that follows is perhaps the finest of Sullivan’s music in the score. The jocularity of the scene was not overlooked, but, responding to the quality of the music, Toft rightly concentrated on producing gratifying sounds. He succeeded, and the Lord High Executioner’s impact was all the more cutting for it.

Gilbert’s and Sullivan’s Savoy operas are frequently presented as farces, especially in America, where they fall victim to directors who deem their humor ‘too British’ for Yankee audiences. Letting Gilbert and Sullivan have their say without ‘translation’ (and—praise them!—without feigned British accents), Durham Savoyards’ production of The Mikado affirmed that comedy is most effective when the artists bringing it to life take it seriously. This was a Mikado that was unafraid of frivolity, but its greatest virtue was its exploration of the inherent comedy in extraordinary things happening to thoroughly ordinary people.

CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI (1567 – 1643): L’incoronazione di Poppea, SV 308— Amanda Crider (Poppea), Karim Sulayman (Nerone), Katherine Pracht (Ottavia, La Virtù), Nicholas Tamagna (Ottone), Matthew Treviño (Seneca), Melissa Harvey (Drusilla, Amore), Marc Molomot (Arnalta), Nicole Heinen (Valletto, La Fortuna, Famiglieri), Nathaniel Hill (Liberto, Tribuno, Soldato pretoriano, Famiglieri), Nicholas Huff (Lucano, Famiglieri, Littone, Soldato pretoriano, Console); Florentine Opera Baroque Ensemble; Jory Vinikour, harpsichord and conductor [Robin Guarino, Director; Melissa Benson, Costume Designer; Noele Stollmack, Set Designer; Mary Ellen Stebbins, Lighting Designer; Erica Cartledge, Wig and Makeup Designer; Debra Loewen, Choreographer; Florentine Opera Company, The Wilson Theater at Vogel Hall, Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA; 30 and 31 March 2019]

Whether an expedition’s breadth is measured in miles, days, or feelings, it cannot be disputed that, literally or figuratively, the greatest journey begins with a single step. That step is not always steady, does not invariably advance the journey in the intended direction, and cannot unfailingly be perceived by uninvolved observers, but its significance is often immeasurable. Opera existed prior to the première of Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo in 1607, but it was Monteverdi’s work that propelled the art form from its emergence in works like Jacopo Peri’s Dafne and his earlier L’Orfeo, the score of which is lost, to the entity that continues to evolve and thrive in the Twenty-First Century. Regrettably, only three of Monteverdi’s operas—L’Orfeo, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, and L’incoronazione di Poppea—survive in substantially complete form, each of them an important step in opera‘s advancement. Presented in the beautiful and aptly-sized Wilson Theater at Vogel Hall in Milwaukee’s Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, Florentine Opera Company’s production of L’incoronazione di Poppea provided an enlightening and marvelously entertaining opportunity to take this momentous step in opera’s history anew.

First staged in Venice’s Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo, L’incoronazione di Poppea was Monteverdi’s final opera, its première during Carnavale 1643 coming only a few months before the composer’s death. Giovanni Francesco Busenello’s libretto for the opera assimilates material taken from sources including Dio Cassius, Tacitus, and Gaeus Suetonius Tranquillus, conjuring a daringly theatrical but sometimes historically dubious glimpse into the Roman emperor Nero’s reign. There continues to be debate about the origins of the opera’s music, some of which, including much of the writing for Ottone and the widely-known final duet for Poppea and Nerone, is attributed with varying degrees of plausibility to composers including Francesco Sacrati, Benedetto Ferrari, and Francesco Cavalli. Whether Monteverdi himself assembled the disparate parts or supervised a collaborative process is unknown, but Florentine Opera’s Poppea was remarkably cohesive, musically and dramatically.

Master of Monteverdi: harpsichordist and conductor Jory Vinikour (foreground), with violist ​Marika Fischer Hoyt (left) and violinist ​Kangwon Lee Kim (right), in Florentine Opera's March 2019 production of Claudio Monteverdi's L’incoronazione di Poppea
[Photograph by Kathy Wittman, © by Ball Square Films]

In practical terms, the success of this show owed much to the edition of the score specially prepared for this production by harpsichordist and conductor Jory Vinikour. Incorporating Tarquinio Merula’s ​C-major ​Ciaconna​ (Opus 12, No. 20)​ to open the second of the two parts into which this production was divided and judiciously adapting the version of the score devised for the 2015 Boston Early Music Festival by conductor and musicologist Stephen Stubbs, Vinikour circumvented the piece’s potential longueurs to produce a fast-paced drama that faithfully preserved the essence of Monteverdi’s and Busenello’s convoluted but absorbing narrative. Poppea poses many problems, extant Seventeenth-Century manuscripts dating from productions staged after the composer’s death, but those problems were persuasively solved in this production. Honoring both Monteverdi and the customs of his time, Vinikour’s performing edition achieved ideal equilibrium between humor and hostility.

Several landmark productions of L’incoronazione di Poppea utilized lavish evocations of the hedonistic splendor of Nero’s Rome as backdrops for the opera’s intimate drama, sometimes distracting audiences’ attention away from crucial interactions among characters. For Florentine Opera’s staging, director Robin Guarino took a minimalist approach, scaling the action to match the dimensions of the story and the space in which it was being told. Guarino’s realization of Poppea examined the ways in which the lives and destinies of all of the characters are upended by a river of blood that runs through the opera’s metaphysical terrain like a fault line; or, in this production, like the ball of scarlet yarn that was gradually unwound to symbolically bind the characters and their actions in a single linear progression.

The conditions that in Monteverdi’s time might have been viewed as inflammations of the blood—lust, ambition, betrayal, rage—were explored in imagery like that of the chair occupied by Seneca bathed in red light during Poppea’s garden scene, intimating that the sage’s spilled blood stained the future empress’s hands. Mary Ellen Stebbins’s intuitive lighting and Noele Stollmack’s utilitarian set designs visually manifested Guarino’s concept, and Melissa Benson’s costumes and Erica Cartledge’s wigs and makeup insightfully reflected the moral and sexual ambiguities of the characters and their relationships, dichotomies further advanced by Debra Loewen’s choreography. History indicates that, despite his imperial pedigree, Nero was no stranger to flamboyant depravity. In Florentine Opera’s visit to Nero​​’s Rome, his milieu was colorfully ribald but never overtly vulgar.

Conducting from the harpsichord, Vinikour presided over an ensemble of musicians who brought to this production of L’incoronazione di Poppea a degree of period-appropriate authenticity now commonplace in Europe but still quite rare in American theaters. Violinists Allison Nyquist and Kangwon Lee Kim, violist Marika Fischer Hoyt, and cellist Jennifer Morsches played with historically-informed articulation that combined crisply-executed ornamentation with gratifying tonal warmth and body. The incisiveness of Morsches’s phrasing was extraordinary, her instrument an integral voice in the opera’s discourses. The continuo was completed by Deborah Fox and David Walker, whose playing of theorbo and Baroque guitar provided a firm, flexible pulse. The placement of the harpsichord, a bright-toned double-manual instrument built by and loaned to Florentine Opera by Bryan Gore, in the theater’s small orchestra pit introduced the challenge of stage-right action occurring beyond Vinikour’s range of sight, but the coordination between stage and pit was impeccable. Cuing singers and instrumentalists with instinctual timing whilst playing the harpsichord with the technical acumen for which he is renowned, Vinikour guided performances that demonstrated mesmerizing musical and emotional continuity.

Spirited soldiers: baritone Nathaniel Hill (left) and tenor Nicholas Huff (right) as the Soldati pretoriani in Florentine Opera’s March 2019 production of Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea
[Photograph by Kathy Wittman, © by Ball Square Films]

Each portraying multiple rôles, three of Florentine Opera’s 2018 - 2019 Baumgartner Studio Artists contributed sonorously to the consistent excellence of the production’s vocalism. Baritone Nathaniel Hill sang and acted skillfully and attractively in all of the rôles assigned to him, but it was as Liberto, the captain of the Praetorian guard ordered by Nerone to relay to Seneca the grim news of the imperial prerogative demanding the stoic’s death, that he was most impressive. Aided by the ​voice​’s handsome timbre, the sincerity of his expression of regret at finding Seneca though doing so was his mission, a moment often depicted lightheartedly, was unexpectedly affecting. Tenor Nicholas Huff was also fully convincing in all of his guises but was most memorable as the poet Lucano (the historical Marcus Annæus Lucanus), who joins Nerone in a bravura duet celebrating the death of Seneca. Staged in this production as a cruel game of drunken seduction that culminated in Nerone slashing Lucano’s face in an outburst of petulant, jealous neurosis, the scene was electrified by Huff’s vocal and dramatic fearlessness. First heard as the golden-voiced Fortuna in the opera’s brief Prologue, soprano Nicole Heinen later faithfully served Ottavia as the opinionated Valletto. She delivered ‘Madama, con tua pace, io vo’ sfogar la stizza’ with exasperation that unmistakably limned the character’s disapprobation for Seneca and threatened to perpetrate arson on the philosopher’s property and person with an incendiary statement of ‘Che vo’ accenderti il foco, e nella toga, e nella libreria.’ All three of these gifted young artists displayed voices and stagecraft that qualify them for prominent careers.

Loyalty under fire: soprano Melissa Harvey as Drusilla in Florentine Opera’s March 2019 production of Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea
[Photograph by Kathy Wittman, © by Ball Square Films]

Both in the Prologue and in her appearances elsewhere in the opera, soprano Melissa Harvey sang the music for Amore with wonderful brio, the exuberance of her personification of the goddess’s confidence making the triumph of her agenda seem inevitable. Though the prowess with which she distinguished one character from the other was particularly commendable, the playfulness with which she brought Amore to life also animated her portrayal of Drusilla. In this production, Drusilla was an oasis of earnestness in an expanse of duplicity, her affection for Ottone charmingly flirtatious and ultimately fatefully profound. Declaring Drusilla’s love for Ottone, Harvey used the music as a blueprint for constructing a multi-dimensional characterization of the optimistic, fiercely determined young woman. Joyously surrendering her cloak to disguise Ottone for his attempt on Poppea’s life, her devotion to claiming a new life with the man she loved was sweetly touching. Harvey’s singing was unfailingly lovely and stylistically right, but the scene in which she falsely confessed to attacking Poppea in order to save Ottone’s life impelled operatic emoting of the highest order. Immense but deeply personal tenderness flooded Harvey’s voicing of ‘Adorato mio bene, amami anche sepolta,’ but, as ever, the integrity of the musical line was maintained.​ Consequentially, Nerone’s sole act of mercy in the opera is inspired by Drusilla, and it was impossible to imagine even the most stony-hearted emperor condemning Harvey’s endearing, sparklingly-sung Drusilla.

Lady of the house: tenor Marc Molomot as Arnalta in Florentine Opera’s March 2019 production of Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea
[Photograph by Kathy Wittman, © by Ball Square Films]

Casting tenor Marc Molomot as Poppea’s nurse and confidante Arnalta was as inspired in its way as partnering Kirsten Flagstad’s Brünnhilde with Lauritz Melchior’s Siegfried. Bringing extensive experience with Early Music to this production, Molomot was an Arnalta who upheld Seventeenth-Century conventions but set a standard of his own in the rôle. Warning Poppea of the dangers of her liaison with Nerone and of men’s general fickleness, this Arnalta was genuinely funny but also discernibly genuine. Assigning the high line in the madrigal in which Seneca’s followers lament his fate to Arnalta, who spied on the scene of the philosopher’s demise, was ingenious, closing the gap between the public and private worlds that shape the opera’s cataclysmic confrontations and lending the music an arresting immediacy. Arnalta’s lullaby for Poppea, ‘Oblivion soave,’ is one of the most exquisite pieces in Seventeenth-Century opera, and Molomot sang it with piercing expressivity that so entranced the audience that merely breathing seemed to disturb the scene’s serenity. Awakened by Amore at the moment of Ottone’s approach, Arnalta exulted in rescuing her mistress from the murderous blade with a stirring traversal of ‘Ho difesa Poppea,’ sung in existing Venetian and Neapolitan libretti by Amore but fruitfully given to Arnalta in this production.

Contemplating the vastly different circumstances that awaited Arnalta upon Poppea’s ascent to the throne, Molomot sang ‘Oggi sarà Poppea di Roma imperatrice’ with an aura of vindication. The tenor’s affinity for Monteverdi’s musical language was always perceptible, but the true glory of his performance was the emotional complexity of his portrayal. Molomot’s Arnalta unquestionably cherished the prospect of upward social mobility, but she also loved and feared for Poppea: the passage in which she asked Poppea to remember her after becoming empress, a moment that typically goes for nothing, was here very moving. An act as seemingly superfluous as chasing after the banished Ottone with the bag that he carried throughout the opera but left behind when sent into exile was made meaningful by Molomot’s artistry. In this Poppea, the eponymous lady received the crown, but her humble servant won the laurels.

The mortality of morality: bass Matthew Treviño as Seneca (center), with (from left to right) tenor Nicholas Huff, baritone Nathaniel Hill, and soprano Nicole Heinen as Seneca’s followers, in Florentine Opera’s March 2019 production of Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea
[Photograph by Kathy Wittman, © by Ball Square Films]

Few rôles in works of any era of operatic history are as difficult to cast as that of the august philosopher Seneca in L’incoronazione di Poppea. Ideally, the character should possess the vocal dexterity of Samuel Ramey, the dramatic presence of Martti Talvela, and the histrionic impact of Boris Christoff. This amalgamation of qualities is as impractical as Richard Strauss‘s desire to have for the title rôle in his Salome an adolescent singer with an Isolde voice, but bass Matthew Treviño depicted the man of knowledge with technical assurance, dignity, and imposing vocal resonance. Futilely striving to comfort the wronged Ottavia with platitudes about attaining virtue through suffering, the bass sang ‘Ecco la sconsolata’ commandingly, evincing Seneca’s belief in the precepts that he advocated. There was a palpable sense of solace in Treviño’s voicing of ‘Solitudine amata,’ and this contrasted tellingly with the philosopher’s fraught exchange with Nerone, whose resolution to repudiate Ottavia he denounced as an ethical affront to Rome.

Receiving from Liberto formal communication of the emperor’s lethal pronouncement, an eventuality foretold by his own reasoning, Treviño’s Seneca prepared for death with the tranquility that governed his life. The solemnity with which he intoned ‘Amici, è giunta l’ora’ elicited empathy for the man beneath the philosophical persona, a response heightened by this Seneca’s affectionate farewell to his friends, who seemed not merely to follow his teachings but to care for him. Treviño sang ‘Itene tutti, a prepararmi il bagno’ nobly, relinquishing Seneca’s life to imperial prerogative with a majestic low D. Like all of the characters in L’incoronazione di Poppea, Seneca is not altogether above reproach, but Treviño portrayed him as an honorable man whose principles are not compatible with the treacherous world in which he lives.

Pensive patrician: countertenor Nicholas Tamagna as Ottone in Florentine Opera’s March 2019 production of Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea
[Photograph by Kathy Wittman, © by Ball Square Films]

That countertenor Nicholas Tamagna’s beautifully-vocalized and grippingly heartfelt portrayal of Ottone—not the Holy Roman emperor who would later become the hero of Händel’s Ottone, incidentally—often received laughter from the audience is evidence of the perils of projected supertitles. Though undeniably beneficial, not least in minimizing the language barrier as justification for avoiding opera, supertitles often render period-specific conceits in translations that are correct but complicated by modern connotations markedly differ from what librettists sought to convey. From the urgent utterance of ‘E pur io torno qui’ with which he made his entrance to the final note of the part, Tamagna was an Ottone whose inner turmoil was revealed in singing of boundless energy and musicality. The pain of Ottone’s awareness of Poppea’s affair with Nerone coursed through the countertenor’s voicing of ‘Ad altri tocca in sorte,’ and his subsequent colloquies with Poppea imparted the agony of unrequited love.

The anxiety and self-doubt with which Tamagna sang ‘Otton, torna in te stesso’ offered a portal into the character’s soul. The torment of forsaking the past and embracing new realities reverberated in his vocalism and surged through his body language. One of the emotional climaxes of the production was Ottone’s assertion of ‘Drusilla ho in bocca, e ho Poppea nel core,’ enunciated by the singer with radiant tone that accentuated the anguish of Ottone’s predicament. The character found no relief in the scene in which Ottavia ordered him to slay Poppea. Unnerved by the task, this Ottone declaimed ‘Eccomi transformato’ with desperation and self-loathing, feelings that were compounded by guilt when Drusilla was apprehended and accused of his crime. Tamagna gave a subtle performance of Ottone’s confession, his pride broken by misfortune. Monteverdi and Busenello left no hints about whether Ottone can ever be truly happy with Drusilla, but Tamagna’s portrayal inspired the hope that Ottone finds peace.

A woman scorned: mezzo-soprano Katherine Pracht as Ottavia in Florentine Opera’s March 2019 production of Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea
[Photograph by Kathy Wittman, © by Ball Square Films]

The tragic irony of L’incoronazione di Poppea is that the lady who holds the greatest power is least able to use it to her own advantage. It is the empress Ottavia’s sad lot to be the wife of Nerone, an inconstant lover who respects neither laws nor customs. Already cognizant of her husband’s trysting with Poppea, Ottavia roared into the drama with a galvanizing exclamation of ‘Disprezzata regina,’ wielded by mezzo-soprano Katherine Pracht, whose singing as Virtù in the Prologue was equally adroit, like a thunderbolt with which she meant to wound her errant husband and his paramour. This Ottavia’s renunciation of Seneca’s praise for her resilience was not unkind, but there was no doubt that she was a woman who expected to be obeyed. There was haughtiness in her demand that Ottone carry out her order to murder Poppea at once, especially in her voicing of ‘Tu che degli avi miei avesti le grandezze,’ but the character’s momentary viciousness was depicted by Pracht as an outward show of internalized humiliation.

In Pracht’s performance, Ottavia’s impassioned farewell to Rome and her rightful position, ‘Addio, Roma,‘ was heartbreaking, her voice cascading through the stumbling, wrenching music with regal poise. The ritualistic eloquence with which she discarded the physical trappings of her status breathed the air of Greek tragedy, Pracht giving her Ottavia an aura of living martyrdom. She inhabited the rôle with the dramatic force of Cathy Berberian and the vocal magnitude of Frances Bible, but her Ottavia was a meticulously-wrought character study enlivened by unstinting vocal beauty. No Fricka taking refuge amongst theorbos, Pracht’s Ottavia was a woman enduring indignity on her own terms, defeated but not destroyed.

Lover without limits: tenor Karim Sulayman as Nerone, with mezzo-soprano Amanda Crider as Poppea, in Florentine Opera’s March 2019 production of Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea
[Photograph by Kathy Wittman, © by Ball Square Films]

Recipient of the 2019 GRAMMY® for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album for his Avie disc Songs of Orpheus, tenor Karim Sulayman is a noted exponent of music by Monteverdi and his contemporaries. The rôle of Nerone in L’incoronazione di Poppea was written in soprano range and first sung by a castrato, but aligning the character’s gender identity with modern sensibilities by allocating the part to tenors remains typical. The register change was far more successful here than in many productions, but Sulayman’s singing intermittently lost impact where it was most needed, primarily at the ends of phrases at the lower extremity of his range. The sensuality of his portrayal was often entrancing, however, and his voice exuded eroticism in his first scene with Poppea. Savagely suave, his Nerone pursued his amorous quarries with the stealth of an inveterate predator. Declaring ‘Son risoluto insomma’ with unapologetic arrogance, the fury that Sulayman’s Nerone expended in dismissing Seneca’s moral arguments was startling.

Manipulated by Poppea’s insinuations that his political power was undermined by his boyhood tutor, Nerone impetuously ordered Seneca’s death, but Sulayman’s depiction of the emperor was enriched by fleeting signs of remorse. The sheer virility of the tenor’s singing of ‘Or che Seneca è morto, cantiam, cantiam Lucano, amorose canzoni’ was exhilarating, his utter immersion in the drama making a scene that might have been crude bizarrely fascinating. His cruelty in punishing first Drusilla and then Ottone for the attempted assassination of Poppea was a product of gnawing uncertainty. Sulayman voiced ‘Ascendi, o mia diletta’ dulcetly, but, here and in the final duet, he was never entirely at ease with Poppea. Something was held back, some element of his psyche that could not be conquered even by a siren as hypnotic as Poppea. Nerone is sometimes portrayed as an amoral sociopath, but Sulayman’s Nerone was more self-indulgent than evil. The dusky patina of his tones added to his dark allure: it was possible to both see and hear why so many moths perished in his flame.

En route to the throne: mezzo-soprano Amanda Crider in the title rôle of Florentine Opera’s March 2019 production of Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea
[Photograph by Kathy Wittman, © by Ball Square Films]

Perhaps surprisingly, the title character in L’incoronazione di Poppea is arguably one of the most modern women in opera. Inviolably independent, she weaponizes her femininity in her quest for power and molds men according to her purposes. Nerone is volatile, but Poppea is calculating: her strategizing easily dominates his rashness. Florentine Opera’s Poppea, mezzo-soprano Amanda Crider, wielded beauty and charisma with scheming acumen. In her opening scene with Nerone, the efficacy of every syllable of her ‘Signor, deh non partire’ was carefully considered. Her affection for the emperor may well have been unfeigned, but it was employed as a means to her end. Crider sang ‘Speranza, tu mi vai il genio lusingando’ bewitchingly, her daring increasing as Nerone’s infatuation with her grew more insurmountable. Repeating ‘No, non temo, no, di noia alcuna’ like a mantra, Crider’s Poppea blissfully defied Arnalta’s warnings about the changeability of the emperor’s heart.

Crider tightened Poppea’s grip on Nerone with a tantalizing voicing of ‘Come dolci, signor, come soavi,’ her words targeting his ego as accurately as his libido. In her interview with Ottone, though, there was a glimmer of the woman Poppea was before obsession with winning the imperial crown honed her ruthlessness. The mezzo-soprano sang ‘Chi nasce sfortunato’ with annoyance, but there were passages in which pity for Ottone softened her demeanor. Rejoicing in accomplishing her goal to be empress, this Poppea’s elation shone as resplendently as the gold with which she was adorned. The pulchritude of Crider’s vocalism in the concluding duet with Nerone, ‘Pur ti miro, pur ti godo,’ was spellbinding. One of the production’s most effective contrivances was bringing all of the characters affected by Poppea’s intrigues back onto the stage to witness her coronation, and Poppea’s final encounter with Ottone as he gravitated to her but was supplanted by Nerone just before making contact was emotionally devastating. Crider’s Poppea was deceitful and unscrupulous, but this imaginative artist also disclosed the vulnerability and humanity that make Poppea one of opera’s most engrossing protagonists.

Productions of Seventeenth-Century opera remain infrequent in America. The alternating ariosi and stylized recitatives of Italian operas of this period intimidate some listeners whose principal operatic acquaintance is with later repertory. It is often said that opera without easily-excerpted set-piece arias and large-scaled ensembles is dull and interminable, deserving the quip made about enduring an hour’s worth of music in a Wagner opera and discovering that only a quarter-hour has passed. Time was irrelevant in Florentine Opera’s production of L’incoronazione di Poppea: every character’s drama played out at an organic pace, intersecting in a ruminative but diverting meditation on loyalty, love, and loss. Whether in First-Century Rome, Seventeenth-Century Italy, or Twenty-First-Century Milwaukee, these themes are cornerstones of the human experience. Florentine Opera’s L’incoronazione di Poppea indisputably attested that it is only modern perceptions of Monteverdi’s music that are antiquated.

GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813 – 1901): Falstaff— Richard Zeller (Sir John Falstaff), Christian J. Blackburn (Ford), Victoria Erickson (Alice Ford), Leanna Crenshaw (Nannetta), Ian DeSmit (Fenton), Tamara Beliy (Meg Page), Kayla Brotherton (Mistress Quickly), Michael Friedrich (Dottore Cajus), Lorenze Sparks (Bardolfo), Reginald Powell (Pistola); UNCG Opera Theatre Chorus and Orchestra; Peter Perret, conductor [David Holley, Producer and Stage Director; Jonathan Emmons, Chorus Master; James Austin Porzenski, Assistant Chorus Master; Randall McMullen, Scene Designer; Caleb Taylor, Lighting Designer; Deborah Bell, Costume Designer; UNCG Opera Theatre, UNCG Auditorium, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA; Thursday, 4 April 2019]

Be they the work of one man, one woman, or some unidentified consortium, the plays attributed to William Shakespeare have individually and collectively exerted influence on Western art to an extent rivaled by no other body of work. Writers have emulated, adapted, and expanded them, painters and sculptors have added visual dimensions to their characters and situations, and musicians have given melodies to their cadences. What might be described as the Shakespearean diaspora is perhaps more extensive in opera than in any other art form. Just as the plays have been translated into more languages than Shakespeare could ever have imagined, operas have rendered stories drawn from or inspired by Shakespeare in a broad array of musical styles. From the English Baroque of Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen to the Twentieth-Century modernism of Aribert Reimann’s Lear, Shakespeare’s uncanny mastery of dissecting, analyzing, and magnifying the most intimate mechanics of humanity has begotten similarly astute creations for the operatic stage, not least in scores by Giuseppe Verdi. He also planned a setting of King Lear that sadly never came to fruition, but with his early Macbeth and his valedictory serious and comic operas, Otello and Falstaff, Verdi produced a triumvirate of thrilling pieces in which the Bard’s timeless stories are retold with rousing Italian morbidezza.

Premièred at one of Verdi’s artistic homes, Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, on 9 February 1893, Falstaff was the composer’s final opera and only his second comedy. His first effort at comic opera, Un giorno di regno, was composed during a time of personal tragedy, and the poor reception the opera’s inaugural production received in 1840 not only convinced Verdi that his affinity was for serious opera but nearly prompted him to stop composing operas altogether. Forty years later, it was with great reluctance that Verdi agreed to end his decade-long hiatus from composing new scores by setting Arrigo Boito’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello. The tremendous success of that enterprise paved the way for Falstaff, the libretto for which Boito masterfully assembled from The Merry Wives of Windsor and Parts One and Two of Henry IV. Doubting his instincts for viable comedy, Verdi toiled for three years over the composition of Falstaff, completing the score as his eightieth birthday neared. The hope for a repeat of Otello’s success proved to be well founded. Extolled as one of Italian opera’s greatest comic masterpieces, Falstaff crowned Verdi’s career with a score that continues to entertain and invigorate.

Sung in an amusing if none-too-Shakespearean English translation by Walter Ducloux [for the benefit of readers who are not acquainted with the English translation, textual references in this review adhere to Boito’s Italian], David Holley’s production of Falstaff for UNCG Opera Theatre ingeniously permitted a cast of undergraduate and graduate students to benefit from sharing the stage with world-renowned baritone Richard Zeller’s portrayal of the opera’s title rôle. Relocating the opera’s action from its original setting in the first quarter of the Fifteenth Century to the Victorian era was visually credible but occasionally at odds with the text. Neither lutes nor daughters trained to play them are likely to have been found in even the most affluent Victorian households, and, following the death of Prince Albert on 14 December 1861, Windsor was one of the principal seats of Queen Victoria’s prolonged grief for her consort. Moreover, the first tree claimed to be Herne’s Oak having fallen in 1796 and a second tree espoused by Victoria as the genuine oak following it to the arboreal graveyard in 1863, UNCG Opera Theatre’s merry wives might have encountered difficulties with selecting the locale for their recreation of the legendary huntsman’s fate.

Unsurprisingly, however, Holley’s direction sought and found the spirit of Falstaff in Verdi’s score, preferring the lighter hues of the music to its darker undertones but accentuating the ridiculous without overdoing the ridicule. Flawed and infuriating as he is, Shakespeare’s Falstaff is peculiarly endearing. In the supportive environment provided by Holley’s direction, Zeller’s characterization of Verdi’s Falstaff wielded genuine Shakespearean mystique.

Though mostly appealing, especially in the second part of Act Three, Deborah Bell’s costume designs and Caleb Taylor’s lighting did little to differentiate among singers of similar ages portraying characters of varying years and social stations. Alice Ford must not be frumpy, for instance, but costumes and coiffures can more effectively facilitate distinguishing that she and Nannetta are mother and daughter. In this production, that task was left to the young singers, who were already charged with singing some of the most difficult music in Italian opera. Randall McMullen’s set designs combined creative use of space with attractive utilitarianism: a frugally-minded director might also successfully stage the second acts of Lucia di Lammermoor and Der Rosenkavalier in McMullen’s rendering of Ford’s house in this Falstaff. Visually, the impression made by the production was more Dickensian than Shakespearean, but the staging validated W.H. Auden’s assessment in The Dyer’s Hand that Falstaff is ‘a character whose true home is the world of music.’

Stag on the prowl: baritone Richard Zeller in the title rôle of UNCG Opera Theatre’s April 2019 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff
[Photograph by Tamara Beliy and Amber Rose Romero, © by UNCG Opera Theatre]

It is difficult for the most extraordinary production of Falstaff to thrive with an ordinary Falstaff. Despite countless audiences having endured badly-sung performances, the unfortunate misconception that, in opera, comedy equates with music that is easy to sing persists. Richard Zeller’s portrayal of Falstaff for UNCG Opera Theatre offered a lesson in the art of embodying operatic hilarity without sacrificing musical integrity. Vitally, the baritone’s English diction was consistently clear.

In Act One, Zeller sang ‘Ecco la mia riposta’ with an apt insinuation of bourgeois ennui, and he rose to the top F in ‘L’arte sta in questa massima’ with ringing virility that suited the text. The conversational brusqueness of his parlando passages was complemented by the elegant legato of his voicing of ‘So che se andiam la notte.’ The slightly decrepit lecher’s carnal appetite was delightfully apparent in Zeller’s reading of ‘M’arde a l’estro amatorio nel cor,’ the voice mellifluously conveying libidinous passion. Vexed by Bardolfo’s and Pistola’s protestations against the dishonor of delivering amorous messages to Alice Ford and Meg Page [that duty was fulfilled by the old knight’s page Robin, charmingly acted by Dean Hennessee], this Falstaff’s ‘Può l’onore riempirvi la pancia?’ was an expression of indignation of cyclonic force. The top Gs were not wholly comfortable, but a voice with effortless top Gs is unlikely to be a suitable instrument for Falstaff’s music.

The ebullient personality that Zeller crafted in Act One was meticulously maintained in the two subsequent acts. It was only in the sense of the character’s more advanced age that Zeller was obviously a veteran performer amongst a cast of twenty-somethings: he brought a buoyant impishness to Falstaff’s antics. In the first scene of Act Two, he voiced the brilliant soliloquy ‘Va, vecchio John’ with the rich tone and dramatic finesse that it deserves. Duped by the Ford ladies and their cohorts, Zeller’s Falstaff suffered accompanying the laundry into the Thames with the dread of an accomplished trickster getting a taste of his own medicine. The first scene of Act Three can differentiate an eminent Falstaff from a merely proficient one, and the vulnerability that mingled with the self-pity in Zeller’s depiction of the crestfallen man’s emergence from his riparian comeuppance identified him as a Falstaff of superlative intellectual perspicacity.

The singer’s balletic entrance into Windsor Park in the opera’s final scene emphasized Falstaff’s relish of his own cunning, but his trepidation when he realized that he was the prey rather than the predator was touching. The bitterness of Falstaff’s declaration of ‘Ogni sorta di gente dozzinale’ was convincingly followed by the self-deprecating good humor of ‘Tutto nel mondo è burla,’ both sung sonorously by Zeller. In the Verdi canon, Falstaff is a rôle in which many fine exponents of Macbeth, Rigoletto, and Iago have failed. Giuseppe Taddei, a standard-setting interpreter of ‘vecchio John,’ understood that, musically and dramatically, Falstaff is a brother not of his fellow Verdi characters but of Donizetti’s Dulcamara and Don Pasquale. In this performance, Zeller exhibited complete cognizance of this distinction. As the cliché goes, this Falstaff’s bark was more perilous than his bite, but Zeller barked considerably less than many Falstaffs.

Bosom[-loving] buddies: (from left to right) tenor Lorenze Sparks as Bardolfo, baritone Richard Zeller as Falstaff, and bass Reginald Powell as Pistola in UNCG Opera Theatre’s April 2019 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff
[Photograph by Amy Holroyd, © by UNCG Opera Theatre]

An asset to the performance as great as Zeller’s interpretation of Falstaff was the presence of Peter Perret on the podium. The longtime Music Director of the Winston-Salem Symphony, Perret has regrettably been an infrequent presence in performances of vocal music in North Carolina’s Triad region in recent seasons. A stirring performance of Sir Edward Elgar’s Sea Pictures—a piece that was first performed only six years after Falstaff’s première—with the Winston-Salem Symphony and mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves some years ago revealed the conductor’s affinity for marshaling vocal and orchestral resources, and his pacing of Falstaff confirmed that his leadership remains strikingly lucid and eloquent.

Aided by Jonathan Emmons’s expert training of the chorus, Perret supervised the edification of a musical foundation that unassailably supported the score’s abundant marvels. Again, this is not easy music, the mercurial ensembles and intricate contrapuntal writing bringing many performers to grief. There were moments of uncertain coordination between stage and pit in this performance, but Perret navigated a sagacious course through the opera’s challenges without losing anyone along the way. Orchestral playing adhered to a commendably high standard, though here, too, there were occasional missteps. Woodwinds were especially, inexplicably, and sometimes distractingly prominent, a condition observed in other performances in this venue but perhaps not discernible from the pit. Experience demonstrates that Perret is too sensitive a collaborator to permit any section of the orchestra to dominate the soundscape. Even with the English text, which can cause Italian opere buffe to sound disconcertingly like Savoy operas, Perret ensured that Verdi’s voice was always audible.

Engaging a singer of Richard Zeller’s reputation to interpret the title rôle in this production of Falstaff is evidence of the respect that David Holley commands in the opera community, but the greater accomplishment—and the one that is the truest measure of his importance to opera, both in and beyond Greensboro—is the quality of the ensemble of young artists he assembled to learn from Zeller’s Falstaff. Though his responsibilities as the proprietor of the Garter Inn required no singing, Liston Kidd was committed as innkeeper, chorister, and prankster on stilts. Michael Friedrich’s implacable Dottore Cajus complained of being swindled and schemed to claim Nannetta’s hand in matrimony with equal enthusiasm and tonal solidity. Tenor Lorenze Sparks and bass Reginald Powell sang Bardolfo’s and Pistola’s music with vocal assurance and sure-footed comedic timing, not least when decrying the disgrace of Falstaff instructing them to dispatch his billets-doux to the objects of his romantic infatuation.

Sylvan songstress: soprano Leanna Crenshaw as Nannetta (center) in UNCG Opera Theatre’s April 2019 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff
[Photograph by Tamara Beliy and Amber Rose Romero, © by UNCG Opera Theatre]

Verdi composed the rôle of Mistress Quickly in Falstaff for Giuseppina Pasqua, who had sung Eboli in the 1884 première of the revised version of his Don Carlo at La Scala and was acclaimed in both Naples and Milan for her portrayals of Preziosilla in La forza del destino and Amneris in Aida. The tessitura of Quickly’s music separates her from her Verdian sisters, but Kayla Brotherton’s singing in Greensboro affirmed the character’s musical pedigree. Epitomized by her emblematic utterances of ‘Reverenza,’ Quickly’s low compass necessitated tonal placement that deprived Brotherton’s lovely voice of opportunities to be heard to optimal advantage. Nevertheless, the panache with which she sang ‘Quell’uom è un cannone’ in Act One and Quickly’s lines in her exchange with Falstaff in the first scene of Act Two disclosed her carefully-honed artistic prowess. In the final scene, Brotherton intoned ‘Cavaliero, voi credeste due donne così grulle’ lustrously, her feisty vocalism animating the character’s part in the woodland escapade. Vocally, Mistress Quickly is not a congenial part for young singers, but Brotherton’s performance was that of a seasoned professional.

Tenor Ian DeSmit brought to the lovesick Fenton precisely what Verdi wanted but so seldom receives: a dulcet, youthful timbre and a gratifyingly straightforward depiction of an impressionable but ardent man in love. In Act One, DeSmit sang ‘È un ribaldo, un furbo, un ladro’ handsomely before joining with Nannetta in an account of ‘Labbra di fiore!’ that exuded innocent rapture, his bright top B♭ punctuating their playful banter. This Fenton voiced his aria that begins Act Three, ‘Dal labbro il canto estasiato vola,’ with smooth tone and suave phrasing, convincingly limning the character’s fervor without distorting the delicate melodic line. That he laudably delivered his impassioned words of love to Nannetta rather than bawling them to the audience meant that DeSmit’s voice did not always project strongly into the house, and he was the foremost victim of the acoustical imbalance between stage and pit. He was too shrewd to force his voice in pursuit of volume, instead relying upon his dynamic acting. DeSmit’s performance highlighted Fenton’s sincerity, his awareness of the stakes in the game of chance orchestrated by the ladies making the swain far more than the pretty-voiced cipher that he is in many productions.

DeSmit’s Fenton was ably partnered by the effervescently mischievous Nannetta of soprano Leanna Crenshaw. In both her conspiratorial discourse with her mother, Meg, and Quickly and her flirtatious interactions with Fenton, this Nannetta was sweetly girlish but also very much her own woman. She voiced ‘Labbra di foco!’ with understated bliss, her floated top A♭s suggesting subtle teasing of her eager lover. In consort with Alice and the ladies, the gleam of her top Bs imparted a very different attitude, one of determination to avenge Falstaff’s affront to womanhood. Crenshaw’s voice soared in ensembles and in Nannetta’s Act Three song with the pantomime fairies, ‘Sul fil d’un soffio etesio.’ Often entrusted to diminutive voices, Nannetta’s music benefits tremendously from a fuller sound such as Crenshaw’s, and the soprano’s unaffected thespianism fostered a captivating portrayal of the Fords’ plucky daughter.

Men about town: baritones Richard Zeller as Falstaff (left) and Christian Blackburn as Ford (right) in UNCG Opera Theatre’s April 2019 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff
[Photograph by Martin Kane, © by UNCG Opera Theatre]

With the respective dramas of the elder and junior branches of the House of Ford dominating the opera, Meg Page is marginalized in some productions of Falstaff. Soprano Tamara Beliy’s Meg in UNCG Opera Theatre’s Falstaff could not be overlooked, her vocal confidence paralleled by her vivid characterization. In her reading of Falstaff’s letter to Alice, Beliy declaimed ‘Fulgida Alice! amor t’offro’ with genuinely amusing fury. Her Meg seemed more gobsmacked by the stupidity of Falstaff’s sending of identically-worded letters to herself and Alice than by the indiscretion of his intentions. Whether strategizing or exacting vengeance, Beliy sang incisively. Like Brotherton, the music assigned to her in this Falstaff did not enable Beliy to display the best of her vocal artistry, but her portrayal of Meg was one of the best aspects of this Falstaff.

A quick-thinking champion of women’s independence who masterminds triumphs over both a bumbling seducer and a jealous husband, Alice Ford is a worthy sister of opera’s greatest feminist protagonists. In UNCG Opera Theatre’s Falstaff, Alice waged her wars against male domination with pointed wit and sparkling tone, wielded with comedic potency by soprano Victoria Erickson. Upon her arrival in the second scene of Act One, her Alice took charge of the drama like a military commander, singing ‘Facciamo il pario in un amor ridente’ and ‘Falstaff m’ha canzonata’ like calls to arms. Her resolute top Bs and earnest attempts at the trills were testaments to her technique and preparation, especially as every note of her music was sung with the appearance of spontaneity.

Erickson’s talents as a comedienne were invaluable in the hubbub of Act Two: even as Falstaff trumpeted his objections from the laundry basket, Alice remained the center of attention, her elation as Ford, expecting to surprise his wife with her paramour, discovered Nannetta and Fenton behind the screen galvanizing the ensemble. As Alice’s plans came to fruition in Act Three, Erickson’s vocalism became still bolder, the character’s ascendancy crowned by the singer’s rousing top C. Most consequentially, Erickson led her fellow ladies in avoiding confusing The Merry Wives of Windsor with The Taming of the Shrew. Though clearly pleased with the outcome of her quest for retribution, Erickson’s Alice stopped short of gloating, enjoying her supremacy without unpleasantness.

Though Falstaff is the title character and the focal point of the comedy, Ford is the opera’s ‘Verdi baritone’ rôle in the tradition of Rigoletto, Rodrigo di Posa, and Iago. This is not always perceptible in performances of Falstaff, but baritone Christian Blackburn furnished UNCG Opera Theatre’s production with a Ford who comprehended and respected the rôle’s significance in the lineage of Verdi’s writing for the baritone voice. Dramatically, Blackburn lent Ford the natural authority that he should wield even when, whilst impersonating Fontana in order to gain Falstaff’s trust without being suspected of being Alice’s husband, subjected to a silly disguise, but it was his singing that served Verdi most honorably. In Act One’s second scene, he voiced both ‘Sorveglierò la moglie’ and ‘A lui m’annuncierete’ powerfully, deepening his interpretation of the rôle beyond the possessiveness that defines some Fords. The intelligence and expressivity with which Blackburn sang ‘È sogno o realtà’ in the first scene of Act Two introduced the ambivalence of Ford’s sentiments at once being deadly serious and amusingly pompous in the opera’s broader context.

Merely as vocalism on a suitably Verdian scale, Blackburn’s account of ‘Io già disposi la rete mia’ in Act Two was admirable, and his theatrical savvy heightened his connection with the text. There was a bemused smugness in the baritone’s pronouncement of ‘Già s’avanza il corteggio nuziale’ in Act Three, his Ford having figuratively counted his chickens before they hatched, and this was followed by an unmistakably bitter articulation of ‘Chi schivare non può la propria noia.’ Rather than lingering over his wounded pride, this Ford rejoiced in having a wife such as Alice, whose machinations were a credit to the family’s standing in their community. Throughout the performance, his comfort with the full range of the music, his nuanced phrasing, and the maturity of his portrayal of the insecure but devoted husband and father belied Blackburn’s youth, further marking him as a singer whose wondrous promise is already being realized.

An integral component of the lasting comic effectiveness of Verdi’s final opera is the fact that at some point in life almost everyone meets a Falstaff. Perhaps he is not portly, of a certain age, philandering, or even male, but he is undeniably a kinsman of Shakespeare’s iconic denizen of the Garter. The splendor of UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Falstaff was the open-hearted happiness with which it renewed acquaintance with this old friend. Above all, this production was a reminder that, his superb music notwithstanding, Verdi’s greatest accomplishment in Falstaff is perhaps encouraging people of different ages, faiths, and lifestyles to sit shoulder to shoulder in a darkened theater, laughing together in a world that thrives on the pain of division.

GIACOMO PUCCINI (1858 – 1924): Tosca— Alexandra LoBianco (Floria Tosca), Scott Quinn (Mario Cavaradossi), Malcolm MacKenzie (Il barone Scarpia), Sabri Karabudak (Cesare Angelotti), Donald Hartmann (Il sagrestano), Jacob Kato (Spoletta), Ted Federle (Sciarrone), Rachel Stenbuck (Un pastore), Thomas Keefe (Un carceriere); North Carolina Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Joseph Rescigno, conductor [David Paul, Director; Scott MacLeod, Chorus Master; Nick Malinowski, Children’s Chorus Director; Tláloc López-Watermann, Lighting Director; North Carolina Opera, Memorial Auditorium, Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA; Sunday, 7 April 2019]

An opera lover who cited Gounod’s Faust as his favorite work, Abraham Lincoln is often quoted as stating that ‘you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.’ The attribution resulting from a labyrinthine series of mistaken assumptions that is itself worthy of opera, it is unlikely that Lincoln actually penned those words, but the aphorism is consistent with his rustic wit. Were he a Twenty-First-Century musicologist, Lincoln might have used the sentiment credited to him to assess the enduring popularity of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, dismissed as a ‘shabby little shocker’ by noted critic Joseph Kerman six decades ago but still performed frequently throughout the world. When pondering the reasons for an opera’s prevalence in the international repertory, American presidential politics yields another nugget of wisdom: ‘the economy, stupid.’ Opera companies stage Tosca because audiences buy tickets to hear it. Productions of Tosca can indeed be shabby, little, or shocking, but the merits of a work that lures listeners who do not know Cavaradossi from Caravaggio to the opera should not be spurned.

Critics of his work who allege that he wrote saccharine melodramas with little musical distinction tend to neglect Puccini’s artistic ancestry. His great-grandfather was an organist, member of Bologna’s exclusive Accademia Filarmonica, and composer whose sacred music was admired by the celebrated Padre Martini. By the time of the younger Puccini’s birth in 1858, the family name was widely respected in his native Lucca, where the composer’s forebears had been maestri di cappella at the city’s Cattedrale di San Martino for more than a century. In addition to his exposure to his family’s musical legacy, Puccini’s education included studies with Amilcare Ponchielli, the composer of La Gioconda, at Milan’s Conservatorio. Composing for the church having been in his blood, Puccini’s preference for the opera house likely incited disapproval among his fellow Tuscans, but the extraordinary success of his career surely vindicated the wisdom of his decision. Distinguished by musical values worthy of the world’s greatest stages, North Carolina Opera’s production of Tosca substantiated that, though liturgical music may have coursed through his veins, Puccini’s soul was fed by writing for the stage.

When Tosca premièred at Rome’s Teatro Costanzi on 14 January 1900, Puccini’s career as a composer of opera had been legitimized by the tremendous successes of Manon Lescaut and La bohème. The notion of adapting Victorien Sardou’s 1887 drama La Tosca occupied Puccini even before the composition of Manon Lescaut, the musical potential of the rôle of the eponymous prima donna made famous by Sarah Bernhardt having engaged his creativity from his first encounter with the play. From the inception of Puccini’s interest in the project in 1889 until he began composition of Tosca six years later, legal and artistic maneuvering had the rights for utilizing Sardou’s play first in Puccini’s hands and then in those of his contemporary Alberto Franchetti. The task of writing Tosca’s libretto assigned to Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, who contributed to the libretto of Manon Lescaut and refashioned Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème into the text of La bohème, Puccini became Tosca’s musical champion.

Illica’s and Giacosa’s influence notwithstanding, the dramatic atmosphere of Tosca more closely resembles that of his early opera Edgar, unsuccessfully premièred at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala in 1889, than the prevailing moods of Manon Lescaut and La bohème. Without surrendering to the temptation to over-emphasize the semblances between Tosca’s and today’s political climates, North Carolina Opera’s production placed the opera within logical contexts, both in Puccini’s compositional development and in the history of Rome in the Napoleonic era. Like Edgar, Tosca inhabits a dangerous, hostile world: inflicted physically and psychologically, violence was the most prominent resident of Raleigh’s Rome.

Pit, no pendulum: Maestro Joseph Rescigno and the North Carolina Opera Orchestra rehearsing for North Carolina Opera’s April 2019 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca
[Photograph by Eric Waters, © by North Carolina Opera]

Director David Paul organized a staging of Tosca that filled the Memorial Auditorium stage with sights and situations that recreated Puccini’s and Sardou’s vision of turn-of-the-Nineteenth-Century Rome with commendable fidelity. Tosca is an opera of grand gestures, which can engender the sort of overwrought stage business that provides critics of opera’s dramatic verisimilitude with fodder for their arguments. Though the production was essentially traditional, Paul’s direction reflected a conscious effort to avoid the kind of conventional stand-and-sing inertia that undermines the theatricality of some performances of Tosca. The cumulative momentum of the opera’s narrative was refreshed without being injuriously rethought.

Paul’s endeavors were aided by Glenn Avery Breed’s costumes and Martha Ruskai’s makeup and wigs, all of which contributed to each character having a unique visual profile but also looking as audiences expect the people in Tosca to look. Designed for New Orleans Opera Association, David Gano’s sets sometimes imperiled dramatic clarity with sharply-angled sight lines, and, arrayed as it was in this production, the Attavanti chapel was as much a prison as the cell in Castel Sant’Angelo that Angelotti occupied. Not least in the representation at the beginning of Act Three of dawn gradually spreading its light over the rooftops of Rome, the sets were also splendidly evocative. An oddity in Tláloc López-Watermann’s otherwise sensible lighting designs—or an unfortunate malfunction thereof—marred the final scene of Act One: Scarpia’s blasphemously lecherous musing was rightly the principal focal point, but it was a disservice to the choristers to leave them in shadows as they sang the celebratory ‘Te Deum.’

Conductor Joseph Rescigno’s musical lineage rivals Puccini’s. His uncle, Nicola Rescigno, was a co-founder of Lyric Opera of Chicago, under the auspices of which he conducted the company première of Tosca with Eleanor Steber in the title rôle, as well as conducting Maria Callas in Bellini’s Norma and I puritani, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Verdi’s La traviata and Il trovatore, and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in LOC’s first two seasons. The younger Rescigno’s link to Callas, who is still widely recognized as one of the greatest interpreters of Tosca, is tenuous, but his pacing of North Carolina Opera’s Tosca exhibited the indefatigable musicality for which his uncle’s and the soprano’s performances were admired. Tempi were unwaveringly right for the music and the singers, and a remarkable degree of transparency was maintained in passages of densest orchestration. Rescigno engineered thrilling climaxes without rushing or overwhelming the cast. With its engrossing synthesis of intimacy and grandeur, Rescigno’s Tosca was sometimes shocking but never shabby.

Under Rescigno’s leadership, the playing of North Carolina Opera’s orchestra was fantastic, the woodwinds and brasses acquitting themselves with particular excellence. The sound of the organ that accompanied the ‘Te Deum’ was excessively loud, more redolent of the Mormon Tabernacle than of Sant’Andrea della Valle, but the tolling of bells was very capably handled. Harpist Jacquelyn Bartlett played elegantly whenever Puccini called upon her instrument, and the doleful clarinet obbligato in Cavaradossi’s ‘E lucevan le stelle’ received a profoundly expressive performance from David Ochler. Heard in the ‘Te Deum’ that ends Act One and the offstage cantata in Act Two, the choristers had fewer opportunities to impress, but, the adults trained by Scott MacLeod and the children by Nick Malinowski, they resoundingly seized those opportunities, singing powerfully and accurately.

Roman triumvirate: (from left to right) tenor Jacob Kato as Spoletta, baritone Malcolm MacKenzie as Scarpia, and baritone Ted Federle as Sciarrone in North Carolina Opera’s April 2019 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca
[Photograph by Eric Waters, © by North Carolina Opera]

The unseen Pastore’s brief song at the start of Act Three was attractively sung by mezzo-soprano Rachel Stenbuck, a Cary native whose voice from offstage was both lovely and plausibly boyish. The Carceriere who guards Cavaradossi in the final moments before his execution was given an unusually notable presence by bass-baritone Thomas Keefe, a longtime member of NC Opera’s chorus. Baritone Ted Federle was a wily, dangerous Sciarrone who sounded like a lighter-voiced Scarpia in training, musically and dramatically. He advanced the amoral baron’s ruthless agenda with perverse joy evinced by firm, vibrant vocalism. Transitioning from baritone to tenor in this production, Jacob Kato depicted Spoletta as a hesitant henchman, his obedience prompted as much by fear of Scarpia as by loyalty. The quality of Kato’s instrument was apparent despite the rôle’s brevity, but the music’s tonal center of gravity did not yet sound wholly congenial for the voice.

Man on the run: tenor Scott Quinn as Cavaradossi (left) and bass-baritone Sabri Karabudak as Angelotti (right) in North Carolina Opera’s April 2019 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca
[Photograph by Eric Waters, © by North Carolina Opera]

Aside from disclosing that he was by some means in communication with his sister, Marchesa Attavanti, Puccini and his librettists provided no specific information about precisely how the political prisoner Cesare Angelotti escaped from his bondage within the walls of Castel Sant’Angelo. In the person of bass-baritone Sabri Karabudak, he might well have blasted through the fortress wall with a well-aimed vocal bombardment. Fully convincing as a man running for his life, Karabudak sang as though he might evade his pursuers by hiding behind a wall of sound. The singer’s intonation was occasionally compromised by the intensity of his declamation, particularly at the ends of phrases, but his Angelotti was uncommonly empathetic, heightening the effect of the news in Act Two that, when discovered in the well at Cavaradossi’s villa, he took his own life rather than allowing himself to be recaptured by Scarpia. In many performances, Angelotti is little more than a personification of a plot device, but Karabudak made him a man of flesh and blood whose fate mattered.

Man of God, more or less: bass-baritone Donald Hartmann as Il sagrestano (center), with tenor Scott Quinn as Cavaradossi, in North Carolina Opera’s April 2019 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca
[Photograph by Eric Waters, © by North Carolina Opera]

There is perhaps no more experienced interpreter of the rôle of Il sagrestano, the sacristan who oversees the daily operations of Basilica di Sant’Andrea della Valle, in America today than Greensboro-born bass-baritone Donald Hartmann, who has donned the cleric’s cassock—it is prescribed by canonical law that the sacristans of basilicas in communion with Rome should be ordained—in productions by an array of companies including Michigan Opera Theatre, Central City Opera, and Piedmont Opera. In North Carolina Opera’s Tosca, Hartmann was a Sagrestano whose only loyalty was to his charge, the church under his care, and he devoted every modicum of his courage and cunning to defending it first from Cavaradossi’s revolutionary proclivities and then from Scarpia’s violation of its sanctity.

A stage animal whose attention to detail can make moments of great significance of a production’s seemingly unimportant intricacies, he approached the character’s first scene as a duet with the Madonna, who rudely never responded. His refilling of the holy water font with a watering can was somehow transformed into a bizarrely sincere act of piety, and his exasperated exchanges with Cavaradossi echoed an intractable but endearing resistance to change. His reaction to Scarpia’s interrogation conveyed fear, suspicion, and loathing in equal measures. Endeavoring, mostly unsuccessfully, to corral the young choristers for the singing of the ‘Te Deum,’ Hartmann was the rare Sagrestano who did not seem like a pedophile. Hearing desiccated, wobbling tones in the Sagrestano’s music is commonplace, making the sonorous solidity of Hartmann’s singing all the more enjoyable. It could be argued that the talents of such an immersive, impactful-voiced artist are wasted on a part like Il sagrestano, but Hartmann’s performance suggested that this part is often wasted on singers who lack the imagination needed to completely inhabit the rôle.

Fanning the flames: baritone Malcolm MacKenzie as Scarpia in North Carolina Opera’s April 2019 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca
[Photograph by Eric Waters, © by North Carolina Opera]

Some interpreters of Tosca’s antagonist, the sadistic superintendent of Rome’s Stasi-esque police, Barone Scarpia, inspire hatred solely by delivering the part’s music with Sprechstimme more appropriate for Berg’s Wozzeck than for a Puccini rôle. The villainy of baritone Malcolm MacKenzie’s Scarpia was all the more startling for being enlivened by appealing, impeccably-controlled vocalism. Not once in his commanding portrayal of the loathsome reprobate did he resort to shouting or snarling. At his first entrance, his declamation of ‘Un tal baccano in chiesa!’ instantaneously heightening the tension of the scene, it was apparent that faith was little more than a weapon in this Scarpia’s arsenal, one that he used to his advantage in manipulating the pious Tosca’s jealousy. MacKenzie’s Scarpia was unquestionably a bully but a treacherously seductive one, voicing ‘Tosca gentile la mano mia la vostra aspetta’ with chilling sultriness. In the final scene of Act One, the brash arrogance of MacKenzie’s portrayal indicated that Scarpia’s boldness before the Madonna was born not of a supplicant’s trust in intercession and absolution but of a misogynist’s sense of superiority.

The self-satisfaction with which MacKenzie sang ‘Tosca è un buon falco!’ at the start of Act Two made Scarpia’s stratagem sickeningly lucid. It was again the superb caliber of his singing that ignited the baritone’s characterization. The duplicity of the baron’s civility in questioning Cavaradossi was exemplified by MacKenzie’s mellow enunciation of ‘Ed or fra noi da buoni amici,’ his ability to adapt vocal colorations to nuances of text allied with unassailable technical assurance. There was a maddening insouciance in his pronouncement of ‘Nel pozzo del giardino - Va, Spoletta,’ his show of indifference calculated to insinuate that Tosca’s betrayal of Angelotti’s location was similarly nonchalant.

MacKenzie’s portrayal assumed a dimension of Shakespearean equivocation in the fateful scene with Tosca, the artifice of his chivalrous courtship accentuating his sardonic lust. Although protracted death struggles are not incompatible with the innate cowardice that escalates Scarpia’s cruelty, the lack of histrionics with which MacKenzie’s Scarpia expired was considerably more effective. [Admittedly, the melodrama of Scarpia’s death was commandeered in this performance by Tosca, whose repeated stabbing of Scarpia was disconcertingly cathartic, even receiving enthusiastic applause from the audience.] Eschewing excess, MacKenzie out-sang a number of the Tosca discography’s most acclaimed interpreters of Scarpia, bringing to the Raleigh stage a magnificently-sung performance of the rôle that made compelling virtues of the baron’s voice-battering vices.

Addio, Roma: tenor Scott Quinn as Cavaradossi in North Carolina Opera’s April 2019 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca
[Photograph by Eric Waters, © by North Carolina Opera]

Débuting in the rôle of the reactionary artist Mario Cavaradossi in this production, tenor Scott Quinn brought to the part a bright-timbred, focused sound that could be beautiful and piercing at once. On the whole, the success of his performance was achieved more by intelligent projection and engaging acting than by vocal amplitude. There were moments in which his lyric instrument lacked heft, but the earnestness of his singing provided the necessary dramatic muscle. The annoyance that permeated Quinn’s singing in his opening scene with Il sagrestano was an apt depiction of an artist’s reluctance to have his process observed by an outsider. With poetic phrasing and a ringing top B♭, he gave a lovely account of ‘Recondita armonia.’ Interrupted first by the disheveled figure whom he ultimately recognized as Angelotti and then by Tosca, Quinn’s Cavaradossi channeled his irritation into his vocalism. The tenor’s lines in the duet with Tosca were vividly sung, and Quinn denounced Scarpia’s brutality with an exhilarating exclamation of ‘La vita mi costasse, vi salverò!’

Few moments in opera are more beloved by tenors than Cavaradossi’s cries of ‘Vittoria!’ in Act Two of Tosca. Having suffered torture without divulging Angelotti’s whereabouts to Scarpia’s adjutants, Cavaradossi extols the unexpected news of Napoleon’s victory at the Battle of Marengo with long-held top As, fervently sustained by Quinn. Exultation quickly gave way to anger as Cavaradossi grasped that Tosca’s will was broken by hearing his groans of pain, but Quinn’s singing limned disappointment more discernibly than ire, lending his expression of despair at being separated from Tosca in Act Three added credence.

Quinn voiced that surge of sorrow, the well-known aria ‘E lucevan le stelle,’ entrancingly, neither crooning nor spoiling its expansive melodic arcs by over-singing. The aria was a deeply private reverie, and the almost childlike surprise with which Quinn reacted to her sudden appearance emphasized the link between Tosca’s arrivals in the first and third acts. His Cavaradossi seemed genuinely moved by the lengths to which Tosca went to save his life, and the tenor’s singing in their final duet was particularly impassioned. Quinn clearly approached his first portrayal of Cavaradossi with thorough preparation, and he conquered the demands of the music without overextending his vocal resources.

Living for art, living for love: soprano Alexandra LoBianco in the title rôle of North Carolina Opera’s April 2019 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca
[Photograph by Eric Waters, © by North Carolina Opera]

In the 119 years since Tosca’s première, the title rôle has been sung by a broad spectrum of voices. The first Tosca, Hariclea Darclée, created the name parts in Mascagni’s Iris and Catalani’s La Wally, but she also sang Gilda in Verdi’s Rigoletto and the heroine in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. Historically, the most memorable Toscas can be said to have been those who, like Darclée, were stylistically versatile—artists including Callas, Magda Olivero, and Marisa Galvany. Soprano Alexandra LoBianco’s portrayal of Tosca for North Carolina Opera fleetingly recalled qualities familiar from the performances of famous Toscas of the past—Maria Caniglia’s and Zinka Milanov’s hauteur, Renata Tebaldi’s and Dorothy Kirsten’s sincerity, Sena Jurinac’s and Gilda Cruz-Romo’s femininity, Carol Neblett’s and Ghena Dimitrova’s abandon—but was also her own singular creation, crafted to capitalize on her considerable visual, dramatic, and vocal assets. [Paying homage to fellow Toscas who sang also Wagner heroines, notably Birgit Nilsson and Dame Gwyneth Jones, LoBianco will return to Raleigh in November 2019 to sing Brünnhilde in North Carolina Opera’s concert performance of Act Three of Siegfried.]

Calling to Cavaradossi from offstage, LoBianco’s repetitions of ‘Mario’ were the utterances of a woman who expected to be answered, and, unlike singers who simply enter, this Tosca emphatically made an entrance. In the subsequent duet with Cavaradossi, LoBianco alternated playfulness with bursts of pique and romantic ardor, drawing a kaleidoscopic portrait of a complex woman. Ensnared by ruthless exploitation of her vulnerability, there were tears when Scarpia produced fabricated proof of a liaison between Cavaradossi and Marchesa Attavanti, but LoBianco did not indulge in the embarrassing sniveling and exaggerated sobbing employed by some Toscas. All of Tosca’s music in Act One was capably, captivatingly sung.

Aside from its exciting top C, the cantata on which Scarpia eavesdrops in Act Two is not of great interest, musically, but LoBianco’s radiant singing uplifted the ensemble. Subjected to the torment of listening as Cavaradossi was tortured, her Tosca’s agitation reached a point of no return at which, not unlike Minnie in the poker game with Rance in Act Two of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, she played the only ace in her hand by trading Angelotti’s life for Cavaradossi’s. In LoBianco’s portrayal, this was the first glimpse of Tosca’s descent into the cycle of violence that consumed the world around her. The soprano’s performance of ‘Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore’ was an oasis of beauty and tranquility in this desert of depravity and desperation. Her top B♭ gleamed, and she managed a ravishing diminuendo without sputtering on the final ‘così.’ Plunging the knife into Scarpia’s back with frightening ferocity, she sang ‘Questo è il bacio di Tosca!’ with astonishing subtlety. Forgoing the libretto’s instruction that Tosca should place a crucifix on Scarpia’s corpse, the aftermath of the stabbing was here a silent contest between Tosca and a small statue of the Madonna, fostering an analogy with the diva’s devotion to the Holy Mother in Act One.

LoBianco sprang onto the stage in Act Three with the euphoric sense of purpose of a youthful Brünnhilde determined to rescue Siegmund from Hunding’s vendetta. She voiced ‘Il tuo sangue o il mio amore volea’ with conflicting emotions, unashamed of her defense of her own and her lover’s lives but unnerved by the horror of taking a life. As LoBianco sang it, ‘Amor che seppe a te vita serbare’ was as meaningful a portal into Tosca’s psyche as the aria in Act Two. A measure of the character’s delicate vivacity returned in her final sequence with Cavaradossi, making her discovery that his execution was unfeigned wrenching. The blazing top B♭ with which LoBianco resolved ‘O Scarpia, avanti a Dio!’ echoed the aura of spiritual liberation that her Tosca gained in death. Symbolically paralleling her dorsal assault on Scarpia, this Tosca hurled herself into the Tiber with feline athleticism, unhesitatingly plunging backwards from the parapet. LoBianco’s Tosca died as she lived, following no one’s rules but her own. Musically, though, few Toscas other than Callas have served Puccini as faithfully as LoBianco did throughout the performance. This, North Carolina Opera demonstrated, is what is truly required to justify Tosca’s undiminished marketability.

GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685 – 1759): Total Eclipse: Music for Handel’s Tenor— Aaron Sheehan, tenor; Pacific Music Works Orchestra; Stephen Stubbs, lute, guitar, and conductor [Recorded in St. Thomas Chapel, Kenmore, Washington, USA, 21 – 24 February 2017; Naxos 8.573914; 1 CD, 68:00; Available from Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), fnac (France), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

It is impossible to discern precisely when the cult of celebrity in the modern sense first welcomed singers into the coven of social sorcery. Both the mythological Orpheus and the biblical David can be said to be early examples of musicians whose abilities to utilize their prodigious gifts to literally and symbolically influence others’ actions and perceptions spurred analysis, emulation, and adulation. Whether societal lionization of legendary musicians originated in antiquity with figures like Orpheus and David or is a more recent phenomenon, history documents that, by the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, some of the most widely-acclaimed figures in Western culture were musical artists. Aside from military leaders, monarchs, and saints, few people were as universally idolized in previous eras as the castrati Carlo Broschi and Francesco Bernardi, familiar throughout Europe as Farinelli and Senesino, were in the first half of the Eighteenth Century. Their notoriety among their contemporaries was perhaps rivaled only by appreciation of Voltaire, Goethe, and George Washington. Neither Johann Sebastian Bach nor Georg Friedrich Händel was as famous in his lifetime as Farinelli and Senesino were in theirs, and not even the extraordinary Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, now virtually worshiped, enjoyed the respect and adoration that Farinelli and Senesino commanded.

In a broad sense, opera was more of an entertainment for the wealthy and privileged in the Eighteenth Century than it is in today’s pay-to-play society. Public theaters were uncommon, and aristocratic patronage was a critical component of the success of any musical endeavor. In London, the rival opera companies operated by Händel and his detractors respectively relied upon the financial backing of the royal family and a consortium of noblemen whose efforts were governed at least as much by politics as by art. It was battle between factions that brought Senesino and Farinelli to London, the former initially committed to Händel’s Royal Academy of Music and the latter seeking to bolster his former tutor Nicola Porpora’s leadership of the Opera of the Nobility. During the course of Händel’s half-century career in London, he endured more betrayals and shifting alliances than there are in the plots of his operas. He recognized, respected, and rewarded loyalty, however, and few singers have been more loyal to a composer and his work than English tenor John Beard was to Händel. Though not as known beyond Britain as his higher-voiced counterparts, Beard served Händel with devotion that inspired some of the composer’s finest music.

The infamously cantankerous Händel would perhaps have rejected the notion of Beard being a muse for him, but their artistic partnership was a prototype for the beneficial relationships between Rossini and Adolphe Nourrit, Bellini and Giovanni Battista Rubini, and Britten and Sir Peter Pears. Variously reported as having been born in 1716 or 1717, Beard first worked with Händel in the winter of 1734, when, still an adolescent, he appeared alongside another of the Eighteenth Century’s star castrati, Carestini, and the widely-fêted dancer Marie Sallé in the second revival of Il pastor fido. This launched a collaboration that continued until Händel’s death in 1759, encompassing Beard’s creation of rôles in several of the composer’s operas, including Lurcanio in Ariodante, Oronte in Alcina, and Vitaliano in Giustino.

In 1735, Beard interpreted the part of Mathan in the first London performance of Händel’s 1733 oratorio Athalia. This provided Händel with a new channel for his creativity: challenging the convention of assigning heroic male rôles to castrati, he devised the heroes in several of his English oratorios as tenor parts. In the next two decades, Beard originated the title rôles in Samson, Belshazzar, Jephtha, and Judas Maccabaeus, as well as Jonathan in Saul, Simeon and Judah in Joseph and his Brethren, the tenor solos in Israel in Egypt, and Jupiter in Semele. As this wonderful homage from tenor Aaron Sheehan, Pacific Music Works, conductor Stephen Stubbs, and Naxos proclaims, Beard was indeed ‘Händel’s tenor.’ Senesino’s musical legacy has been extensively explored on recordings: this disc reveals that Beard’s artistry is no less deserving of commemoration.

Seattle has long been rightly celebrated as America’s Bayreuth, Seattle Opera’s enterprising Pacific Northwest Wagner Festival having nurtured an association between metropolitan Seattle and the operas of Richard Wagner that continues today. The initiatives of Pacific Music Works are now giving the Emerald City a presence in the global historically-informed Early Music community that rivals its Wagnerian prominence. Under the direction of Stubbs, an eminent scholar and advocate of period-appropriate performance practices, Pacific Music Works’ musicians display technical and stylistic prowess worthy of comparison with the work of the most proficient period-instrument ensembles. Stubbs’s wonderfully alert, communicative playing of lute and guitar provides the pulse of each piece, creating a compelling dialogue with keyboard virtuoso Adam Pearl, whose mastery of the art of inventive but unobtrusive realization of the continuo is apparent in every moment of his performance. Stubbs’s pacing of each of the pieces performed on this disc is guided by palpable understanding of and affection for the music, his fluency in Händel’s musical language disclosing how modern authenticity can sound.

The superlative caliber of the orchestra’s collective musicianship is demonstrated in performances of two of Händel’s Concerti grossi, both of them in B♭ major. The contrasts of forms, tempi, and dynamics among the movements of the concerti are exceptionally evident in these performances, but thematic links are also elucidated. The Vivace that introduces the HWV 313 Concerto is played with a level of energy that risks sloppiness, but tidiness of ensemble is an aspect of the orchestra’s virtuosity. The subsequent Largo is a tranquil sigh before the frenzy of the Allegro. The Minuet and Gavotte are here recognizably dances, their rhythms taut but elastic. HWV 325 opens with a Largo, played with gravitas befitting a performance of a Bach prelude, and the Allegro that follows is exciting but controlled. HWV 325’s Largo e piano movement is another temporary shelter from Händel’s musical tempest, and the Pacific Music Works instrumentalists perform it serenely. Stubbs reminds the listener that Andante in the Eighteenth Century was not the plodding speed that it became in the next century, and the Hornpipe’s rustic charm is enhanced by the spirit with which it is played.

John Beard’s voice was characterized by contemporary observers including the much-quoted Charles Burney as being more powerful than pretty—a description that cannot be employed in an assessment of Aaron Sheehan’s voice. As he has affirmed on previous recordings, a gem among which is his account with Stubbs of Händel’s Acis and Galatea [reviewed here], the younger tenor’s voice is a superbly-trained instrument in which tonal beauty and flexibility are supported by reserves of strength powered by projection rather than volume. This blend of finesse and fortitude lends Sheehan’s singing of music from Part Two of Alexander’s Feast (HWV 75) the sort of dramatic vitality that Händel likely received from Beard. Sheehan’s traversals of the recitative ‘Give the vengeance due’ and aria ‘The princes applaud with a furious joy,’ the former presented as an integral extension of the latter, are never overwrought, however: he identifies the moods of the music and text and makes them audible on an appropriate scale. The poetic integrity of the tenor’s handling of words gives his accounts of Moses’s song from Part Three of Israel in Egypt (HWV 54), ‘The enemy said, I will pursue,’ and the aria ‘Sharp violins proclaim their jealous pangs’ from Händel’s setting of John Dryden’s Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day (HWV 76) unusual psychological depth. Meeting the demands of Händel’s vocal writing typically consumes singers’ resources, but the abundance of this singer’s technical wherewithal enables him to explore textual subtleties without jeopardizing musical adroitness.

Sheehan recently sang Jonathan in Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra’s San Francisco-area performances of Händel’s Saul (HWV 53), and he samples that rôle on this disc with some of the character’s most poignant music. The accompagnato ‘O filial piety!’ and air ‘No, cruel father, no!’ in Act One constitute one of Händel’s most emotionally powerful scenes, and Sheehan delivers the music with expressive expertise worthy of but wholly different from opera. Moving into the oratorio’s second act, he phrases the recitative ‘Ah, dearest friend’ with both tenacity and tenderness, and the eloquence with which he voices the air ‘But sooner Jordan’s stream’ creates a moving vignette of Jonathan’s fateful nobility. In some performances of Händel’s oratorios, it seems that the musical idiom—or, rather, fear of it—is an obstacle that separates singers from the emotions of the characters whom they are portraying or describing. Wholly comfortable with Eighteenth-Century modes of expression, Sheehan affirms that this is music to be felt, not merely sung.

Messiah (HWV 56) requires neither introduction nor espousal by accomplished singers, but singing of the quality brought by Sheehan to his performance of the tenor soloist’s sequence from Part Two of the oratorio is invaluable in any context. There is no artifice in his articulations of the recitative ‘Thy rebuke hath broken his heart’ or the affecting arioso ‘Behold and see if there be any sorrow.’ Händel famously wrote that, with Messiah, he aimed not solely to entertain listeners but also to enlighten and improve them. Performances of Messiah are so frequent that its emotional potency is easily neglected, especially by singers whose acceptance of invitations to sing the piece is motivated solely by the prospect of collecting a fee. As Sheehan’s readings of the very different but equally effective arias ‘But thou didst not leave his soul in hell’ and ‘Thou shalt break them’ intimates, the words of Messiah are Christian, but its themes of redemption through suffering, faith, and righteousness are universal. Musically, these selections from Messiah are sung marvelously. Ever tasteful, Sheehan’s ornaments are derived not from the singer’s ego but from the temperament of the music. As an English-speaking singer with special affinity for Händel’s music, Sheehan has perhaps participated in too many performances of Messiah to number, but he sings the excerpts on this disc with the immediacy of new discovery.

On 3 and 4 May 2019, Sheehan will sing the title rôle in Pacific Music Works’ performances of Händel’s Samson, and his performances of music from that score on Total Eclipse offer a gratifying preview of his portrayal of one of the most iconic biblical heroes. His singing of three airs from the oratorio’s first act establishes Samson as a charismatic man whose physical brawn masks spiritual vulnerability. The skill with which the tenor evokes turmoil without abusing the vocal line in the air ‘Torments, alas, are not confin’d’ is indicative of the essence of his artistry: not even the most ravishing sounds are acceptable if they do not echo the sentiments of the words that they enunciate. It is from the air ‘Total eclipse!’ that the title for this disc was taken, and it proves to be a wise choice. The piece is voiced with carefully-managed intensity that demonstrates how Beard eclipsed other tenors with whom Händel worked and how few modern interpreters of this music are capable of emerging from Sheehan’s shadow. The recitative ‘My griefs for this’ and air ‘Why does the God of Israel sleep?’ are delivered with sincerity and expressivity that overwhelm the listener but not the music. On records, at least, with a voice that was far larger, Jon Vickers was a Samson who sounded markedly smaller of emotional stature than the flawed but fervent man brought to life by Sheehan.

In the performance on this disc, the Act Two air ‘Your charms to ruin led the way’ is intriguingly introspective, Samson’s recriminations for his surrender to temptation addressed to his own weakness. An atmosphere of heightened self-cognizance also permeates the recitative ‘Let but that spirit’ and air ‘Thus when the sun from’s wat’ry bed’ from the oratorio’s third act, Sheehan’s vocalism touchingly imparting the character’s conflicting weariness and renewed hope. As assured in descents below the stave as in passages at the top of the range, Sheehan sings this music with confidence that does not beget complacency. There are occasional moments of toil in bravura passages, in which the tenor’s breath control unfailingly impresses, but the performances on this disc suggest that, in this repertory, effortlessness pales in comparison with earnestness.

The concept of opportunism is now marred by a pervasive pejorative connotation, but Händel indisputably made a virtue of seizing opportunities. With the music that he composed for John Beard, Händel capitalized on the opportunity of having at his disposal an artist whose musical and theatrical sensibilities paralleled his own. In the Twenty-First Century, the precarious state of funding for Arts projects leaves many opportunities unrealized. That Pacific Music Works’ goal of recording Aaron Sheehan’s performances of music that he was born to sing came to fruition is a triumph of planning that would have delighted Händel. Opportunism may be semantically unsavory, but, onTotal Eclipse, it sounds spectacular.

JEAN SIBELIUS (1865 – 1957): Symphony No. 1 in E minor, Opus 39— Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal; Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor [Recorded in Maison symphonique de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada, in October 2018; ATMA ClassiqueACD2 2452; 1 CD, 41:06; Available from ATMA Classique, Naxos Direct, Amazon (Canada), Amazon (USA), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

It is unlikely that any serious musician pursuing a career in North America has escaped being regaled with the adage that stipulates that the path to New York City’s Carnegie Hall, revered as a sort of Mecca for concert artists, is peregrinated with practice, practice, practice. The peril of conventional wisdom is that it is often more conventional than wise, but few musicians with genuine affection for their work would contradict the assertion that, even for artists with extraordinary natural talent, the only true means of achieving greatness is a continuous process of honing, refining, and renewing one’s craft.

Assessing artists’ significance is an inherently subjective undertaking, but there are finite criteria that determine an instrumentalist’s qualification for consideration. Any piece of music presents its own unique challenges, and a musician’s technical proficiency either is or is not equal to the music’s demands. There are also appraisable aspects of a conductor’s artistry, among which baton technique is perhaps the most visible, but evaluation of a conductor’s importance is affected to an even greater extent than analysis of an instrumentalist’s noteworthiness by intrepretive acuity.

A professional orchestra deserving of that designation can maintain musical integrity without the guidance of a conductor, but the reputation of the personage on the podium is founded upon subtleties that are perceived and esteemed differently by each listener. The physical dimension of conducting notwithstanding, a conductor’s success is innately ephemeral. Colloquially, it might be said that the proof of a conductor’s merit is in the hearing. Hearing this ATMA Classique recording of Jean Sibelius’s First Symphony, expertly engineered to faithfully reproduce the rich acoustic of Montréal’s Maison symphonique, is a gratifyingly visceral experience. The performance exudes a vitality that is achieved in the recording studio only by a conductor who respects the music and commands the respect of his musical collaborators. Are those not two crucial measures of a conductor’s artistic value?

At an age at which some of the most admired conductors of previous generations essentially remained apprentices, Québécois conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin has built a career that has already encompassed leadership positions with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, The Philadelphia Orchestra, and The Metropolitan Opera, with the last of which institutions he is completing his first season as Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer Music Director with performances of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. It is in his capacity as Music and Artistic Director of his native city’s Orchestre Métropolitain that he leads this performance of Sibelius’s Opus 39 Symphony No. 1 in E minor.

Nézet-Séguin has been fortunate to inherit from his predecessors resilient orchestras, and his effective, nurturing direction has bolstered the standards of excellence achieved by Orchestre Métropolitain. The performance on this disc conveys an engrossing sense of occasion, orchestral balances meticulously matched to the music and the space in which it was recorded. The understated rhythmic precision that has become a hallmark of Nézet-Séguin’s conducting is particularly apparent in this performance: at the core of even the most rhapsodic passages is a robust beat that intensifies the continuity of the conductor’s handling of this score.

Born in the Finnish city of Hämeenlinna in 1865, the ethnically Swedish Sibelius would ultimately become the globally-recognized ambassador for Finnish music and the Finnish people’s quest for absolute cultural and political autonomy from czarist Russia. Like many Scandinavian musicians, Sibelius received a musical education that was strongly influenced by the Teutonic tradition of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann—a tradition in which the symphony was the principal mode of large-scaled orchestral expression.

Completed when the composer was thirty-three years old, the first of Sibelius’s seven symphonies was premièred by the Helsinki Philharmonic in 1899. Exhibiting the stark judgment of his own work later epitomized by his relative avoidance of composition during the final three decades of his life, Sibelius substantially revised the score after the first performance and may have destroyed the original manuscript, which has never resurfaced. His six subsequent works in the form would further develop Sibelius’s singular voice as a symphonist, but his inaugural effort established him as a peer of Bruckner and Brahms.

With a duration of 12:25, Nézet-Séguin’s traversal of the symphony’s opening movement is unusually expansive, but his pacing facilitates both exceptional clarity in the realizations of Sibelius’s orchestral textures and striking contrasts among the majestic fanfares for brass and percussion, the gossamer figurations for the strings and harp, the latter beautifully played by Danièle Habel, and the playful, almost rustic writing for the woodwinds. The plaintively meandering clarinet solo that introduces the Andante, ma non troppo passage is thoughtfully phrased by Orchestre Métropolitain’s principal clarinetist, Simon Aldrich, and his colleagues in all sections of the orchestra deliver their solos with unfluctuating musicality. The transition to the movement’s Allegro energico section is intelligently navigated by the conductor and zestfully executed by the orchestra.

An atmosphere of impending misfortune permeates the start of the Andante, ma non troppo lento movement, but, sensitive to the momentum generated by Sibelius’s thematic metamorphoses, Nézet-Séguin does not surrender to tragedy. Rather, he conjures a tonal environment in which moments of mystery are resolved by bursts of melody. His is a notably optimistic reading of the piece: whilst wholly respecting the fundamental structure of the movement, he emphasizes the expressive significance of the brightness that penetrates the music’s gloom, finding more excitement than angst in the agitation that propels the movement to its tranquil conclusion, which in this performance suggests a cathartic moment of relief after a grave emotional struggle.

In comparison with similar movements in the symphonies of other consequential contributors to the genre, Sibelius’s Allegro Scherzo is especially unconventional. This Scherzo is anything but the expected jocular episode: the disquiet of the preceding movement returns, only temporarily abated, infusing the music with an oppressive uncertainty. The orchestra’s opulent but astonishingly transparent sound potently imparts the distress that haunts the music, but here, too, Nézet-Séguin pursues a course that circumvents unequivocal desolation. His approach to this music is uncommonly attentive to the fact that, as surely in music as in nature, shadows cannot exist without light. The Orchestre Métropolitain’s playing echoes this conviction, lending the ambiguous stretto an undertone of hesitant contentment.

Marked ‘quasi una fantasia’ by Sibelius, the symphony’s Finale undulates from an initial Andante through a progression of tempi and temperaments that recapitulates the dramatic journey of the previous movements with ambivalence reminiscent of the final movements of Mahler’s symphonies. Nézet-Séguin’s management of the lyrical effusions spotlights the kinship between Sibelius’s and Tchaikovsky’s orchestral writing. In this performance, the brief but meaningful silences that punctuate the symphony’s last pages are staggeringly jarring. The conductor employs these abrupt interruptions in the narrative’s dénouement as opportunities for aural palate-cleansing, preparing the listener for the movement’s terminal trajectory. Even with the portentous din of the percussion, the symphony seems not to truly end but merely to stop. Instead of imposing a speculatory resolution upon the music, Nézet-Séguin leaves the impression of the symphony’s final movement being a flow of thought that exhausts and then pauses to replenish its musical resources.

Since Robert Kajanus, who conducted the first performance of Sibelius’s revision of the First Symphony in 1900, recorded the work with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1930, this score has presented listeners with difficult choices. This is a piece that affirms that the notion of any interpreter or performance being the ‘greatest of all time’ is as stupid in music as in sports. The composer having appreciated the young conductor’s earliest recordings of his music, Herbert von Karajan’s Deutsche Grammophon account of the First Symphony with the Berliner Philharmoniker has long enjoyed exalted status, but dozens of challengers have widened and complicated the symphony’s discography. It is fatuous to argue that this or any recording of Sibelius’s First Symphony is definitive, but this performance and its conductor wield greatness very persuasively.

GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1848) and GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813 – 1901): Verdi ● Donizetti— Michael Fabiano, tenor; London Voices; London Philharmonic Orchestra; Enrique Mazzola, conductor [Recorded in St. Jude-on-the-Hill, London, UK, August and September 2018; PentatonePTC 5186 750; 1 CD, 57:03; Available from Pentatone, Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), fnac (France), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Assessing the technical and artistic merits of voices is a divisive endeavor in any context, but in the realm of aficionados by whom voices and music written for them are revered it can be dangerous. This assertion seems ridiculous, but it should be remembered that as earnest a proponent of important voices as Schuyler Chapin, General Manager of The Metropolitan Opera for four tumultuous seasons in the 1970s and one of opera’s true gentlemen, received death threats from New York’s organized crime families for suggesting to the aging Renata Tebaldi that she might consider singing a few carefully-selected mezzo-soprano rôles. His dual aims were prolonging the career and preserving the legacy of one of opera’s greatest singers, but the reaction to what some of the soprano’s admirers perceived as an unforgivable affront is indicative of the fervor with which aficionados debate the virtues and vices of voices and the singers who brandish them.

It is unlikely that any singer in the history of opera has garnered universal acclaim or condemnation. Wagnerians who recognize no idols other than Kirsten Flagstad allege that Birgit Nilsson’s singing was cold and mechanical: Nilsson’s champions assert that Flagstad’s characterizations were inert and matronly. Perceptions of artistry are as subjective as those of natural wonders: there are always observers who regard the Grand Canyon as an over-hyped hole in the ground. Like the river that carved the Grand Canyon, voices can sometimes seem like ungovernable forces of nature, functioning independently of their owners’ artistic impulses, but the finest voices are managed with meticulous control that requires intellectual engagement matching the caliber of the natural instrument. That tenor Michael Fabiano has a voice with a rare ability to enthrall is unmistakable, but his singing’s power to inspire what in opera can be regarded as universal appreciation is evidence of artistic acuity of the sort for which listeners yearn.

Since being selected as the 2014 recipient of the prestigious prize awarded by the Richard Tucker Music Foundation, Fabiano has assumed a prominent rôle in the generation of young American tenors whose work furthers Tucker’s initiatives to cultivate, celebrate, and encourage artistry of the highest order among America’s singers. During his three-decade MET career, Tucker excelled in a varied repertoire that encompassed Ferrando and Tamino in Mozart’s Così fan tutte and Die Zauberflöte, Don José in Bizet’s Carmen, Lensky in Tchaikovsky’s Yevgeny Onegin, and many of Verdi’s and Puccini’s leading rôles for tenor.

In the trajectory of his career to date, Fabiano has exhibited artistic kinship with Tucker, having enjoyed success in rôles that formed the foundation of his forebear’s career. With his début recording for Pentatone, expertly engineered to place the voice in a vibrant but remarkably clean acoustical space, Fabiano examines the artistic kinship that linked Gaetano Donizetti and Giuseppe Verdi via the work of the tenors who sang their music. Through his performances with Arturo Toscanini, Tucker had a direct connection to Verdi: though he was born after Tucker’s untimely death, Fabiano honors his memory ​by continuing the legacy of advancing respect both for opera in America and for American singers in the opera community by singing with musicality and artistic integrity that pay homage to Tucker, Toscanini, and the heritage they sustained.

The study of history relies upon chronologies, but the evolution of music has rarely been straightforwardly linear. That bel canto existed long before it was refined by Donizetti is apparent in the almost Bellinian vocal line of a piece like Oronte’s aria ‘Un momento di contento’ in Händel’s Alcina: proof of bel canto’s survival far beyond the careers of Donizetti and Verdi can be found in the music of Philip Glass—though repetitive, the writing for Gandhi in Satyagraha embodies a bel canto aesthetic—and Jake Heggie. It is not difficult to erroneously glean from musicological analysis of Italian opera in the Nineteenth Century that, with his post-Nabucco operas, Verdi wrote the obituary for true bel canto, but this disc guides the listener to the discovery of a vastly different reality.

Though it can be argued that in propelling operatic expressivity towards verismo Verdi obliterated the formulaic tenets of bel canto, it cannot be denied that a piece like Rodolfo’s oft-excerpted aria from Verdi’s Luisa Miller is a paragon of bel canto grace. One of Fabiano’s most notable triumphs in Verdi repertory was his unapologetically romantic portrayal of Rodolfo in San Francisco Opera’s 2015 production of Luisa Miller, and he revisits the character’s music by opening this disc with deftly-delivered accounts of the recitative ‘Oh! fede negar potessi’ and aria ‘Quando le sere al placido.’ Liberated from the necessity of projecting a column of sound into the vast expanse of a space like that of San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House, the tenor’s singing of the aria is here more nuanced than it was in San Francisco. Shifts in dynamics and vocal coloring are more pronounced, and the immediacy of his verbal articulation is undiminished. Fabiano approaches the aria not as a showpiece but as a moment of reflection in Rodolfo’s dramatic development, accentuating the manner in which Verdi integrated the subtle hues of bel canto into the bolder tones of his musical palette.

The Duca di Mantova in Verdi’s Rigoletto is another rôle in which Fabiano has won praise from both critics and audiences, not least in Claus Guth’s 2016 Opéra de Paris production. On stage, Fabiano is a Duca whose actions disclose inner conflict: credible as a dangerously seductive cad, his interpretation of the part also conveys a redeeming vulnerability, intimating that the Duca’s debauchery is driven as much by desperation born of the loneliness of his position as by libido. In this recorded performance of the Duca’s most famous music, ‘La donna è mobile,’ the focus is primarily on the aria’s musical impact, but the tenor’s singing imparts compelling dramatic impetus. Sounding alluringly youthful but wearied by the demands of his rank, this Duca’s commentary on the fickleness of women and their affections seems empirical rather than cynical. Vocally, Fabiano brings a bronzed, virile timbre to the music, lending even the flippant cadenza uncommon gravitas.

Following his Festival début as Alfredo in La traviata in 2014, the title rôle in Donizetti’s tale of Christian piety, conjugal love, and martyrdom in Imperial Rome, Poliuto, endeared Fabiano to Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s discerning patrons anew in 2015. Glyndebourne’s Poliuto was conducted by Enrique Mazzola, whose marshaling of the stylishly sonorous vocal and instrumental forces of London Voices and the London Philharmonic Orchestra contributes indelibly to the success of this release. With the conductor’s support, the tenor offers a performance of ‘Veleno è l’aura ch’io respiro’ that is genuinely communicative, his diction heightening the aural impact of the words. The momentum with which he advances the melodic line in ‘Fu macchiato l’onor mio’ confirms the potency of the composer’s theatrical savvy. Fabiano sings the cabaletta ‘Sfolgorò divino raggio’ with ardent swagger that elucidates the skill with which Donizetti adapted the principles of bel canto to his own unique dramatic sensibilities. The tenor is in easy, exhilarating voice in all of the selections on this disc, but his singing of this music from Poliuto is a valuable document of his mastery of bel canto.

From the lean lyricism of Ferruccio Tagliavini to the Wagnerian heft of Jon Vickers, a surprising array of voices have effectively sung Verdi’s music for Gustavo—or his American alter ego Riccardo—in Un ballo in maschera. The blend of light-hearted jocundity, amorous zeal, and inviolable commitment to duty that makes Gustavo difficult to portray convincingly suits Fabiano’s stage persona, by which the joyous facets of even the most tragic figures are illuminated. In his singing of ‘Forse la soglia attinse’ and ‘Ma se m’è forza perderti’ on this disc, the relationship between Fabiano and Richard Tucker is especially meaningful. An integral component of Tucker’s memorable interpretation of Riccardo was his capacity for plausibly shouldering the weight of the affairs of state that trouble the man without overshadowing the ebullience that is the core of his charisma. Fabiano achieves this, too, the duality of Gustavo’s constitution manifested in his candid, unreserved vocalism. His dedication to fully realizing the dramatic potential of every rôle that he depicts can occasionally lead Fabiano to sing too strenuously, but his earnestness in this miniature portrait of Gustavo never overwhelms his innate musicality.

Edgardo in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor is a part that Fabiano sang with the gusto that has become a hallmark of his artistry even when he was a student at Philadelphia’s Academy of Vocal Arts, and his returns to the character in the Spring 2018 revival of the MET’s Mary Zimmerman production and in Opera Australia’s July 2018 staging disclosing the thoughtfulness with which he continues to hone his interpretation of the rôle. In the performance on this disc, a deluge of anguish surges in his voicing of ‘Tombe degli avi miei,’ the despair of a young man reeling from his beloved’s betrayal evoked in the singer’s febrile phrasing. The poise of his singing of ‘Fra poco a me ricovero’ contrasts tellingly with the angst of the preceding recitative, reflecting the solemnity that Edgardo feels amidst the tombs of his ancestors. The inviolable security of the tenor’s intonation throughout the range gives his Edgardo greater strength than some interpreters of the music can muster, again revealing the narrowness of the musical divide between Donizetti and Verdi.

At this juncture in his career, the younger tenor’s voice does not possess the pulse-quickening thrust at the very top that his illustrious predecessor’s voice wielded, but, in the performance of the recitative ‘Qual sangue sparsi’ and aria ‘S’affronti la morte’ from the 1862 St. Petersburg version of Verdi’s La forza del destino that is one of this disc’s musical zeniths, Fabiano’s timbre is often arrestingly reminiscent of Franco Corelli’s. Fabiano’s forays into heavier Verdi repertory have thus far been confined to the title rôle in Don Carlo, but this performance of Alvaro’s death scene, excised when Verdi revised La forza del destino for its 1869 La Scala première, provides a tantalizing preview of future endeavors. Though La forza del destino is unquestionably a more coherent work in the 1869 guise that is typically preferred in modern stagings, the beauty and brawn of Fabiano’s traversal of ‘S’affronti la morte’ grant credence to the efficacy of Verdi’s first thoughts on the opera’s ending. Fabiano’s vigorous but appropriately-scaled singing also reminds Twenty-First-Century listeners that, two decades before the première of La forza del destino, the first Alvaro, the Roman tenor Enrico Tamberlik, made his operatic début as Gennaro in Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgina, another rôle that Fabiano has sung with great success.

First performed at Vienna’s Kärntnertortheater in 1843, Maria di Rohan is deemed by some musicologists to be Donizetti’s finest score despite the neglect from which it is only beginning to emerge. A compact, fast-moving drama, the opera is indisputably distinguished by some of its composer’s most thrilling and emotionally affecting music. The brilliance of Fabiano’s performance of Chalais’s brief aria ‘Alma soave e cara’ is wholly worthy of the music: the voice intertwining with a lovely flute obbligato, the sentiments of the text are entrancingly limned with bel canto sensitivity.

Aside from Nabucco, which has clung to popularity with audiences, Verdi’s early operas sadly have not sustained the attention that they received in conjunction with 2013’s celebrations of the Verdi bicentennial. Charges that the scores that came before the transformative triumvirate of La traviata, Rigoletto, and Il trovatore—pieces that are now frequently denigrated, as well—are musically inferior to the composer’s later masterworks are not unfounded, but there are abundant pleasures to be found in the early operas, foremost among which is a profusion of unforgettable Italianate melodies that no other composer’s efforts have surpassed.

Unlike its fellow products of Verdi’s ‘galley years,’ Ernani continues to be performed with relative regularity, including at the MET, where, in 101 performances between 1903 and 2015, the title rôle has been sung by an impressive progression of lauded tenors including Giovanni Martinelli, Mario del Monaco, Franco Corelli, Carlo Bergonzi, Plácido Domingo, and Luciano Pavarotti. Proving himself to be a splendidly-qualified prospective Ernani [rôle débuts as both Ernani and Gustavo in Un ballo in maschera are planned for future seasons], Fabiano sings ‘Odi il voto’ with a bona fide Verdian line, and his reading of the cabaletta ‘Sprezzo la vita’ resounds with heroic fortitude. Here and in all of the performances on this disc, ascents above the stave are always evocations of the character’s predicament rather than demonstrations of the singer’s ego.

Jacopo Foscari, the younger half of the eponymous Byronic protagonists of Verdi’s I due Foscari, is a rôle for which Fabiano’s emotive immediacy is ideal, and he sings both ‘Notte, perpetua notte’ and ‘Non maledirmi’ with attention to detail that uncannily adheres to the requisite bel canto idiom whilst also emphasizing the ingenuity with which the young Verdi transcended conventionality. Verdi’s first opera, Oberto, conte di San Bonifacio, premièred at La Scala in 1839, and, though its first production was lukewarmly received, the promise apparent in the score was sufficient to prompt La Scala’s management to commission Verdi to compose two additional operas for the theater. On disc, Fabiano’s best-known rival in Riccardo’s music is Carlo Bergonzi. In these performances of ‘Ciel, che feci!’ and ‘Ciel pietoso,’ he does not yet equal Bergonzi’s finesse, but the voice, very different from Bergonzi’s, withstands comparison with the most exalted standards of Verdi singing.

Fabiano is one of the few living tenors of international renown who can boast of singing Corrado in a complete performance of Verdi’s Il corsaro [the 2014 Washington Concert Opera performance in which he portrayed Corrado is reviewed here]. He is unlikely to have plentiful opportunities to return to Corrado’s music, making the inclusion of a scene from Il corsaro on this disc all the more welcome. Fabiano voices both ‘Ah sì, ben dite’ and ‘Tutto parea sorridere’ handsomely, his burnished tones engendering an impression of maturity atypical for a singer who has only recently celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday. The cabaletta ‘Pronti siate a seguitarmi’ is a prototype for Manrico’s ‘Di quella pira’ in Il trovatore, and Fabiano sings it with the swashbuckling masculinity of an important Manrico in the making. He has captivated audiences with his portrayals of rôles including Gounod’s Faust, Don José in Bizet’s Carmen, Jean in Massenet’s Hérodiade, Lensky in Tchaikovsky’s Yevgeny Onegin, and Rodolfo in Puccini’s La bohème, but his singing on this disc establishes the operas of Donizetti and Verdi as this stage animal’s musical natural habitat.

Activist, indefatigable advocate for Arts education, aviation enthusiast, avid sports fan, and debonair man about town, Michael Fabiano revives the jet-setting glamour of opera’s storied past in an era in which not even the greatest artists escape the scrutiny of naysayers armed with internet access and social media accounts. Glamour is a vital aspect of the operatic experience, perhaps more so in today’s age of high-definition cinecasts than ever before, but the most basic ingredient in an operatic feast is the same now as it was when Donizetti and Verdi were testing their musical recipes: the voice. The sounds made by Fabiano on this disc are those of a major voice that is already extraordinary but not yet in its prime. That is to say that, building upon the accomplishment of this fantastic recording, the best is yet to come for this artist who, like Donizetti and Verdi, is redefining opera.

Verified Verdian: tenor Michael Fabiano in the title rôle of San Francisco Opera’s 2016 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlo
[Photograph by Cory Weaver, © by San Francisco Opera]

RICHARD WAGNER (1813 – 1883) and RICHARD STRAUSS (1864 – 1949): Lise Davidsen sings Wagner and Strauss— Lise Davidsen, soprano; Philharmonia Orchestra; Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor [Recorded in Henry Wood Hall, London, UK, 28 – 29 September and 6 – 7 October 2018; Decca483 4883; 1 CD, 63:55; Available from Amazon (USA), fnac (France), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

It can be argued—even, in this instance, by a member of their ranks—that a significant measure of the most mesmerizing magic of opera eludes Twenty-First-Century listeners. Ears that have heard the great voices of the past solely as digitalized streams of sound emanating from speakers or coursing through headphones can have only an imperfect understanding of the boundless energy of Lauritz Melchior’s Siegfried, the engrossing intimacy of Maria Callas’s Tosca, the visceral impact of Birgit Nilsson’s Turandot, and the crestfallen charm of Carlo Bergonzi’s Nemorino. Conscientious study and careful listening can deepen an acquaintance with opera’s past, but observation never equals experience. Just as some natural phenomena cannot be adequately described to those who have not seen them, there are musical marvels that can be fully appreciated only by those who heard them in the flesh. As it might be colloquially put, grasping the momentous importance of certain events in operatic history requires that you had to be there.

As the decades continue to separate listeners from the performers and performances that they cite as definitive, today’s singers are increasingly compared, often unfavorably, to artists whom neither they nor their analysts have ever heard except via recordings. There is always value in assessing the merits of an artist’s work in the context of similar achievements by acclaimed artists of prior generations, but is there any true validity in dismissing a singer’s interpretation of a piece or a rôle because it is judged to be inferior to a performance by a long-dead artist whose preeminence is now affirmed exclusively by recordings? Does the artistry of an aspiring Siegfried meaningfully benefit from the singer being said to be no Melchior by someone who never heard Melchior? Without neglecting the models of history, must it not be more nurturing to artists and advantageous to the continued vitality of opera to principally base assessments of singers upon their own efforts? Genuinely great artists rarely publicly disparage the work of their colleagues and successors: a component of their greatness is perhaps the realization that success should be determined by how accurately and appropriately a singer performs a piece of music, not by how closely that performance emulates another artist’s interpretation.

As vocal longevity is a crucial gauge of the efficacy of a singer’s technical foundation, it is premature to proclaim Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen the heir apparent to the legacies of her legendary predecessors in the repertoire sampled on this captivating Decca release, the music of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. As a Scandinavian singer with an affinity for works by Wagner and Strauss, it is inevitable that Davidsen will endure comparisons with other Nordic artists who similarly excelled, singers including fellow Norwegians Kirsten Flagstad and Ingrid Bjoner, Swedes Birgit Nilsson, Berit Lindholm, and Siv Wennberg, and the Finn Anita Välkki. The collective influence of these artistic ancestors is unavoidable (and should not be avoided), but Davidsen has proved in her career to date to be a singer who approaches music without preconceptions. The extensive performance histories of the works on this disc are too consequential to be ignored, but Davidsen’s singing is that of an artist who is destined to create her own history.

It is indicative of Davidsen’s potential that, for her first recital disc, she was given the gift of collaborating with the Philharmonia Orchesta and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. The prominence of music by Wagner and Strauss in her repertoire notwithstanding, Davidsen is a versatile artist: she demonstrated impressive mastery of late Classicism in her singing of the title rôle in the 2017 Wexford Festival production of Cherubini’s Medea, for example, and her Metropolitan Opera début, scheduled for 29 November 2019, will be as Lisa in Tchaikovsky’s Pikovaya dama. Not least in his capacity as the Philharmonia’s principal conductor, Salonen’s work manifests a kindred artistic inquisitiveness, and he shares with Benjamin Britten and Leonard Bernstein the boon of bringing a composer’s sensibilities to the podium.

In the performances on this disc, the same concentration on setting tempi that aid both composer and singer and supporting the voice by identifying its proper place within orchestral textures that characterize his conducting of a work like György Ligeti’s Le grand macabre also permeate his pacing of these pieces by Wagner and Strauss. The virtuosic panache with which the Philharmonia musicians respond to Salonen’s leadership is not surprising, but playing of this caliber on a recording of this nature is uncommon. Many fine recital discs have been recorded with merely competent orchestras and conductors. Nonetheless, a Monet canvas looks out of place in a mass-produced frame, and Salonen and the Philharmonia offer Davidsen’s musical portraiture the opulent presentation it deserves.

On 25 July 2019, Davidsen will expand her Wagnerian credentials when she débuts at the Bayreuther Festspiele as Elisabeth in a new production of Tannhäuser. Anticipating that milestone, she launches this disc with a radiant account of the music with which Elisabeth makes her entrance at the start of Act Two, ‘Dich, teure Halle, grüß ich wieder.’ The immediacy of her singing fosters a rush of theatrical energy, plausibly imparting to the listener the irrepressible excitement of an earnest young woman greeting the space in which her future is to be determined. The soprano’s voice retains its rich patina and certain intonation from the bottom of the range to her sonorous top B.

Some Elisabeths are comfortable either in ‘Dich, teure Halle’ or in the exquisite prayer to the Madonna in Act Three, ‘Allmächt’ge Jungfrau! Hör mein Flehen.’ Davidsen sings the latter as beguilingly as she sings the former, the expressivity of her vocalism enhanced by the eloquence of her phrasing. Every listener who believes that the essence of Wagner’s aesthetic is bombast without beauty should hear ‘Allmächt’ge Jungfrau.’ Listeners who believe that singing Wagner’s music requires power at the expense of pulchritude should hear Davidsen’s singing of Elisabeth’s music.

One of the most-discussed opera productions of 2018 was Katie Mitchell’s evocatively modern staging of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, the musical nucleus of which was Davidsen’s beautifully-sung, movingly unaffected portrayal of the Prologue’s Prima donna and the mythological heroine into whom she metamorphoses in the Opera. The dramatic profile of Davidsen’s interpretation of her rôles in the Aix-en-Provence Ariadne auf Naxos transitioned from the aloof but slyly endearing singer of the Prologue to the despondent but dignified woman scarred by betrayal.

It is a woman of genuine psychological depth rather than a one-dimensional archetype who emerges in the soprano’s account of Ariadne’s monologue ‘Es gibt ein Reich’ on this disc. She displays an invaluable talent for using vocal effects to complement the emotional subtexts of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s words, but it is the confident ecstasy of her handling of Strauss’s music that bewitches. Singing forcefully when the composer so dictates, she never forces the voice. Ariadne has been sung credibly by voices as diverse as those of Maria Reining, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Christa Ludwig, Leontyne Price, and Montserrat Caballé. Davidsen’s performance of ‘Es gibt ein Reich’ amalgamates the best traits of Ariadnes of the past with her own distinct artistry.

Composed and first published in 1894, the four Lieder that constitute Strauss’s Opus 27 were initially devised with piano accompaniment and later orchestrated by the composer. These are four of Strauss’s most familiar songs, but Davidsen does not rely upon tradition to supply interpretive nuances. Rather, she is guided by the texts, finding within the words of each Lied its musical and sentimental cadences. She voices ‘Ruhe, meine Seele!’ with ethereal grace, her tones unerringly placed and seemingly effortless. Strauss orchestrated ‘Ruhe, meine Seele!’ in 1948, contemporaneously with his composition of his Vier letzte Lieder, and the kinship between the works is here made poignantly conspicuous. In their performance of ‘Cäcilie,’ Davidsen and Salonen faithfully observe Strauss’s ‘Sehr lebhaft und drängend’ marking, producing an account of the song that rivals long-praised recordings of the piece.

Robert Heger’s orchestration of ‘Heimliche Aufforderung’ receives a reading that feels both profoundly personal and aptly timeless, soprano and conductor fostering an environment of musical symbiosis in which their trust of one another—and of the music—yields unfiltered emotional directness. At least two recordings of Strauss conducting his orchestral arrangement of ‘Morgen!’ survive, and the performance on this disc has much in common with the earlier of Strauss’s recordings, a 1941 traversal with tenor Julius Patzak. Zsolt-Tihamér Visontay’s artful playing of the violin solo echoes the subtleties of Davidsen’s navigation of the song’s melodic line. Like Patzak, Davidsen lends the song an understated urgency, voicing the words ‘und auf uns sinkt des Glückes stummes Schweigen’ with compelling probity.

‘Wiegenlied,’ the first of the five Lieder of Opus 41, was completed in 1899, the year in which Strauss’s much-admired tone poem Ein Heldenleben was first performed. The atmosphere of the song could hardly be more different from that of the tone poem, but Davidsen finds in the lullaby a vain of slumbering heroism that her unwavering intonation awakens. A setting of a text by Swiss writer Betty Wehrli-Knobel, the song ‘Malven,’ composed in November 1948, was the last piece that Strauss completed. Instead of submitting the piece for publication, the composer presented the manuscript to Maria Jeritza, the Moravian soprano who created the title rôle in Ariadne auf Naxos and Die Kaiserin in Die Frau ohne Schatten. Unknown until after Jeritza’s death in 1982, ‘Malven’ was given its public première by Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Martin Katz in 1985. Wolfgang Rihm’s orchestration is employed for Davidsen’s performance of the song, which glows with the ‘himmlischen Licht’ evoked by the text.

The culmination of the composer’s career-long passion for the soprano voice, Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder were completed in 1948, when their creator was eighty-four years old, and first performed on 22 May 1950, eight months after Strauss’s death. To view the Vier letzte Lieder from the perspective of Strauss’s most enduringly popular opera, Der Rosenkavalier, the songs have been sung in the seven decades since their première by Marschallins, Octavians, and Sophies, but the task of introducing the songs to the public was entrusted in fulfillment of one of Strauss’s final wishes to Kirsten Flagstad.

Despite the recommendation of the doyen of German repertory at The Metropolitan Opera, Artur Bodanzky, that the Marschallin be among the rôles that she should prepare before offering her services in New York, Leonore in Beethoven’s Fidelio was the only part in an opera not by Wagner that Flagstad ultimately sang at the MET. Strauss greatly admired Flagstad but had not heard her voice since conducting a 1933 Bayreuth performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in which she was the soprano soloist. In the subsequent fifteen years, Flagstad’s instrument had lost some of its youthful flexibility. When Flagstad sang the first performance of the Vier letzte Lieder in 1950, hers was the voice of a late-career Brünnhilde and Isolde, heavier than a voice like that of the composer’s wife Pauline for which the Lieder were likely conceived, but the beauty and earnestness of her singing, qualities that overcome the poor sound of the recording of the occasion, revealed the wistful glories of the penultimate fruit of Strauss’s musical storytelling.

Flagstad’s colleagues in the world première of Vier letzte Lieder were the Philharmonia and celebrated conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. Under Salonen’s direction, today’s Philharmonia musicians play Strauss’s score with a synthesis of Romanticism and modernity. Salonen does not overlook the fact that, though they are resolutely tonal and accessibly tuneful, the Lieder are mid-Twentieth-Century works, written in the year that Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw were first performed.

The Lieder are here performed in the sequence that has become customary rather than the order in which Flagstad sang them, beginning with ‘Frühling.’ Though its companions remained in her repertoire, Flagstad did not return to ‘Frühling’ and substituted the G two tones lower for its top B in the première. As in ‘Dich, teure Halle,’ Davidsen soars to the B exultantly. The vernal lightness that challenges the prevailing melancholy of the Lieder is only partially realized, but the freshness of the soprano’s singing appealingly brightens the soundscape. Horn soloist Nigel Black contributes hauntingly to a sublime reading of ‘September’ in which Davidsen’s vocal depiction of the warmth of Indian summer is gradually muted by the words’ crepuscular sobriety.

Visontay’s violin is a source of comforting beauty in ‘Beim Schlafengehen.’ The expressive acuity of Davidsen’s performance here reaches its apex, the voice engaging in a duet of such tender discourse that the ears almost attribute words to the horn’s replies. Few composers have evinced the resigned relief of a wanderer at a journey’s end more serenely than Strauss did in ‘Im Abendrot.’ Salonen and Davidsen dedicate themselves to serving the text without surrendering to the temptation to impose metaphysical complexities on Strauss’s musical treatment. At its core, this is simple music, its meandering harmonies progressing inexorably to the fading trills with which it gives way to silence. Rather than battling the orchestra as some singers do, Davidsen listens to the instruments’ voices and adds her sound to the theirs like a bird joining a flock migrating towards an inviting sunset. This is not easy music, however, and Davidsen deftly and intrepidly meets its demands; an accomplishment of which only an excellent voice bolstered by a superlative technique is capable.

Nordic voices are often said to possess a timbral coolness that recalls the frigid climates that nourished them, but Scandinavia is also the land of the Northern Lights. It is this blazing wonder of nature that the singing on this disc mirrors. Virtually every listener has personal favorite interpreters of the music on this awe-inspiring disc, and the intention of this release undoubtedly is not to mimic or supplant them. This is a recording that should be appraised on its own terms, not as a competitor but as a peer of the great recordings of the past. With these dazzling performances of music by Wagner and Strauss, Lise Davidsen exclaims to the world, ‘Hier bin ich!’

Strauss songstress: soprano Lise Davidsen in the title rôle of Festival d’Aix-en-Provence’s 2018 production of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos
[Photograph by Pascal Victor / artcompress, © by Festival d’Aix-en-Provence]

WALTER LEIGH (1905 – 1945), NED ROREM (born 1923), VIKTOR KALABIS (1923 – 2006), and MICHAEL NYMAN (born 1944): 20th Century Harpsichord Concertos— Jory Vinikour, harpsichord; Chicago Philharmonic; Scott Speck, conductor [Recorded in Wentz Hall, Naperville, Illinois, USA, on 3 November 2016 (Nyman), Feinberg Theater at Spertus Institute, Chicago, Illinois, USA, on 5 March 2018 (Leigh and Kalabis), and Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA, on 8 May 2018 (Rorem); Cedille RecordsCDR 90000 188; 1 CD, 75:42; Available from Cedille Records and major music retailers]

Whether his musical curiosity encompasses five centuries or five months of artistic innovation, each listener develops unique sensibilities that are influenced by performances that inspire, intrigue, and educate. The jazz lover is unlikely to forget his first hearing of Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five.’ For the rock ’n roll enthusiast, an introduction to the pioneering recordings of Sister Rosetta Tharpe can have the impact of a spiritual awakening. Buddy Holly, Bill Monroe, Mahalia Jackson, Chuck Berry, and the Beatles all changed the ways in which music is created and heard, cutting records that altered their own and other genres. The recorded efforts of these and countless other trailblazers, some widely acclaimed and others barely remembered, form an artistic legacy that parallels and in some cases propels the evolution of human societies.

Even if only Western cultures are considered, the diversity of the vast spectrum of genres and forms that collectively constitute what has somewhat cavalierly been designated as Classical Music is astounding, and every genre, form, and individual work has performance and recording histories that shape listeners’ perceptions of the music. Recordings like Artur Schnabel’s cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas, Pau Casals’s early account of Bach’s cello suites, Bruno Walter’s 1938 performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, and Maria Callas’s first Tosca created standards by which the merits of other performances of these and similar works are measured.

Determining which performances shoulder the responsibility of primacy is anything but a perfect science, what is definitive to one pair of ears sounding disastrous to another, but there are recordings that demand that listeners discard their assumptions and prejudices. Cedille Records’s ambitious new recording of Twentieth-Century works for harpsichord and orchestra lures listeners out of Eighteenth-Century salons and transports them to an aural world in which Igor Stravinsky is closer at hand than Domenico Scarlatti. With one notable exception, the pieces on this disc are not new to recordings, but these electrifying performances inaugurate a new chapter in the harpsichord’s still-developing narrative.

There are perhaps fewer milestones in the history of recording music for the harpsichord than in other instruments’ discographies. From Wanda Landowska’s pioneering performances of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations to George Malcolm’s recording of Poulenc’s Concert champêtre with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, the first half-century of the harpsichord’s tenure before recording microphones produced many performances in which obvious good intentions were ultimately mitigated by increased awareness of stylistic anachronisms. For some listeners, the very notion of Twentieth-Century music for harpsichord might seem inherently oxymoronic, a misconception that this disc seeks to remedy. Significantly, the music on this does not approach the harpsichord as an antiquated instrument that must be adapted to modern idioms. This music exploits the modernity of which the harpsichord has been capable since its emergence in its most familiar form in the Sixteenth Century.

It is not merely by right of monopoly that Chicagoland-born harpsichordist and conductor Jory Vinikour’s survey of Twentieth-Century music for harpsichord and orchestra assumes a place of great prominence in the harpsichord’s discography. His mastery of the instrument’s typical Baroque repertoire has been manifested in performances in a plethora of critically-acclaimed performances and recordings, but Vinikour is no less committed to championing the work of contemporary composers who write for the harpsichord. With this disc, he advances the initiative exemplified by his GRAMMY®-nominated recording Toccatas [reviewed here]. The harpsichord’s basic mechanism of tonal production is unchanging, whether the music being played is by a composer born in 1650 or in 1950, but Vinikour’s immersion in the divergent styles of the music on this disc yields spellbinding performances. To some listeners, these pieces may seem like curiosities. Vinikour reveals them to be cornerstones of Twentieth-Century writing for the harpsichord.

Expertly led in these performances by conductor Scott Speck, the musicians of the Chicago Philharmonic prove to be nimbly adaptable exponents of the disparate styles of the works on this disc. Chicago is home to another, more known large-scaled instrumental ensemble, but, as the Philharmonic’s playing affirms, notoriety does not always equate with superiority. Conductor and musicians devise consistently logical solutions to the music’s problems, one of the most important of which is that of maintaining proper balances between the harpsichord and a modern orchestra. Excessive or ill-managed electronic manipulation of the harpsichord’s timbre can result in harsh, unnatural sounds, but this disc’s engineering achieves a near-ideal acoustical balance between harpsichord and orchestra, a particularly commendable accomplishment considering that the recording sessions utilized three different venues.

Speck conducts each piece with perceptible comprehension of its musical infrastructure, his commands of stylistic shifts and thematic development facilitating the Philharmonic musicians’ crisp executions of difficult ensemble passages. The works on this disc are more overtly symphonic in basic construction than earlier music for harpsichord and orchestra, requiring particularly sympathetic collaboration between harpsichordist and conductor. The efforts of Vinikour, the Chicago Philharmonic, and Speck here impart an inviolable unity of purpose, their shared dedication to elucidating the many felicities of this music manifested in performances enriched and emboldened by each musician’s contributions.

Completed in 1934, eight years before World War II claimed the thirty-six-year-old composer’s life, Walter Leigh’s Concertino for harpsichord and strings is an attractive, accessible piece with bucolic charms that never linger beyond their capacities to entice. This is not to suggest that the Concertino lacks sophistication, however. Its musical language assimilates accents from a number of influences into an identifiably individual dialect, both discernibly cosmopolitan and unmistakably English. Vinikour and his colleagues perform the Concertino’s opening Allegro movement with consummate skill, the clarity of their ensemble playing aided by Speck’s sensible, supportive pacing. The movement’s elaborate cadenza, not unlike that in the first movement of the fifth of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti, provides Vinikour with an opportunity to display his virtuosic prowess, which he wields with restraint appropriate for this unpretentious score.

Leigh’s central Andante begins with an extended unaccompanied passage for the harpsichord that is reminiscent of the sarabandes found in the music of Georg Friedrich Händel and Jean-Philippe Rameau. His expertise in playing Baroque music is especially evident here, but the fluidity of his phrasing demonstrates commensurate comprehension of the essential tenets of bel canto. Hints of Antonio Vivaldi’s concerti echo in the concluding Allegro vivace movement, enlivening the music with a rustic exuberance.​ This performance of Leigh’s Concertino concludes with a surge of controlled spontaneity, harpsichord and orchestra conversing with the familiarity of beloved friends.

Here made commercially available on disc for the first time, Ned Rorem’s Concertino da Camera dates from 1946, when the composer was only twenty-three years old. The tunefulness of the piece contrasts with a metaphysical profundity that reminds listeners that the horrors of World War II remained open wounds as the ink dried on Rorem’s score. His introductory Allegro non troppo movement is characterized by writing for the instrumental ensemble that is both energetic and subtly elegiac, the melodic momentum of the music escalated by the scintillating figurations for cornet and flute. The Chicago Philharmonic musicians play their parts with passion and precision, the transitions among instruments navigated by both composer and conductor with the organic eloquence of similar effects in Mozart’s Divertimenti and Serenades.

The long melodic lines of the Molto moderato that momentarily still the dramatic tumult of Rorem’s Concertino da Camera like an operatic intermezzo receive intelligent handling in this performance. It can be argued that the harpsichord’s manner of tonal production is not conducive to lyricism, but an integral component of Vinikour’s artistry is an unusual ability to effectuate expressive legato playing despite the limitations of an instrument’s tonal prolongation. Vinikour plays poetically, evincing genuine emotion in the dialogue between harpsichord and orchestra. In the Presto, too, the music’s quest for resolution is driven by Rorem’s vivid writing for the cornet, which is delivered with galvanizing aplomb. The Concertino da Camera is a youthful work but in no way an immature one, and the performance of it on this disc spotlights the prodigality of invention that has distinguished Nyman’s music throughout his career.

In the final years of his life, Czech composer Viktor Kalabis and his wife, celebrated harpsichordist Zuzana Růžičková (1927 - 2017), formed a friendship with Vinikour, and, thirteen years after Kalabis’s death, the mutual respect of that relationship continues to permeate the harpsichordist’s performances of the composer’s music. Kalabis’s Harpsichord Concerto might have been written to showcase Vinikour’s singular blend of technique and heart. In the Allegro Leggiero that begins the Concerto, the rhythmic exactitude of Vinikour’s trills allies with the crystalline brilliance of his playing of bravura passages to beget stark, sometimes abrasive aural tableaux. The movement ends with a Wagnerian halo of high strings, recalling the gossamer sounds of the Vorspiel to Act One of Lohengrin. Speck’s intuitive conducting discloses the wealth of beauty in the music without dulling its jagged edges.

Launched by a mournful phrase for solo violin that grows more agitated when it recurs, the slow movement of Kalabis’s Concerto, marked Andante, is disquietingly ambiguous. Morose and menacing at once, the music is intriguingly intimate even at its most extroverted., The brusque chords with which the harpsichord makes its entrance are played with unstinting attack. Vinikour’s performance transcends the technical demands of the music, finding in its outbursts of fury and frustration a captivating emotional chronicle. There are moments in the Concerto’s Allegro vivo movement that bring the music of Samuel Barber to mind, but Kalabis’s work clings to originality, not least in the ferocious writing for the harpsichord. In the first of the movement’s oasis-like interludes, the exchanges among the strings’ pizzicati with the harpsichord’s isolated chords is given conversational immediacy: Vinikour and the Chicago Philharmonic musicians wage battle with passion and civility, ending the Concerto with an affectingly straightforward rendering of Kalabis’s ambivalent synthesis of conflict and accord.

Michael Nyman is justly esteemed as one of Britain’s most gifted contemporary composers. Like his colleagues whose music is featured on this disc, Nyman has written successful works in many genres, his ingenuity exhibited in vocal and instrumental music. The writing for the solo instrument in his through-composed Concerto for amplified harpsichord and strings occasionally suggests a vocal line, and Vinikour plays Nyman’s music with aptly ‘singing’ tone. The Concerto’s first sequence (crotchet = 120 - 144) has the complexity of a Bach toccata, and harpsichordist, orchestra, and conductor unleash a torrent of sound in the piece’s cacophonous, almost bellicose segments.

The allure of Vinikour’s lyrical phrasing lends the broad melody of the più mosso section unexpected tenderness, and the reminiscences of the keyboard works of Claude-Bénigne Balbastre in the lilting meno mosso episode of Nyman’s Concerto benefit from this harpsichordist’s acquaintance with the Baroque master’s music. Representative of Speck’s insightful negotiations of Nyman’s changes of tempo is his seamless shift into the music marked crotchet = circa 100. Ostinati emerge as the pulse of the music during the Concerto’s final minutes, and this performance triumphs as few traversals of similar music manage to do at exploring the psychological subtexts of inevitability and temporal claustrophobia that repetitive devices can convey. In Vinikour’s performance, the three-minute cadenza is a both personal examination of the Concerto’s emotional currents and a recapitulation of the musical questions for which the post-cadenza finale proposes answers.

The most consequential question asked by the music on this disc is whether, in this age of large orchestras and performance venues designed to physically and acoustically accommodate them, the harpsichord remains a viable, relevant conduit for composers’ creative impulses. With the performances on this disc, Jory Vinikour establishes that the harpsichord is not a period instrument. Rather, it is a semicolon instrument, one that, after decades of pause, rightly inspires new clauses of composition.

POUL RUDERS (born 1949): The Thirteenth Child— Sarah Shafer (Lyra, Princess of Frohagord), Tamara Mumford (Gertrude, Queen of Frohagord; Ghost of Gertrude), Ashraf Sewailam (Drokan, Regent of Hauven), Alasdair Kent (Frederic, Prince of Hauven; Toke, Prince of Frohagord), David Portillo (Benjamin, Prince of Frohagord), Matt Boehler (Hjarne, King of Frohagord), Alex Rosen (Corbin, Prince of Frohagord), Amber Evans (choral soloist); Bridge Academy Singers, Odense Symfoniorkester; David Starobin and Benjamin Shwartz, conductors [Recorded in Carl Nielsen Hall, Odense, Denmark, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City, USA, and New Rochelle Studios, New Rochelle, New York, USA, during September 2016 and December 2018; Bridge RecordsBRIDGE 9527; 1 CD, 77:50; Available from Bridge Records and major music retailers]

When his opera L’Orfeo premièred in Mantua in 1607, within mere days of the landing of the first party of successful English settlers in what would become the colony of Virginia, can Claudio Monteverdi have imagined that, 412 years later, not only would opera remain a thriving art form but that tomes would have been written about how L’Orfeo and his other surviving operas should be performed in the Twenty-First Century? Scholars debate whether short-lived composers including Mozart and Bellini expected their operas to be studied and appreciated by future generations, and there are many lamentable examples, among whom Rossini is one of the most familiar, of composers witnessing the waning of interest in their music. Wagner surely intended to be discussed by future listeners and musicologists, but perhaps he did not envision the virtues and vices of his operas being debated no less vehemently—likely more so, in fact—in 2019 as at the time of his death in 1883. If the important composers of the past considered the notion of opera’s future, how might they have dreamed that opera would sound in 2019?

It is likely that opera can survive on a diet of familiar works, but the genre’s appetite for new music must be fed in order to ensure that opera will thrive throughout and beyond the Twenty-First Century. It cannot be denied that innovation is not always welcomed, however. A maddening paradox of opera in the new millennium is that, in many instances, those listeners who dismiss current trends in staging standard-repertory works as unacceptable also reject new works. Professing to advocate for the perpetual vitality of opera, some connoisseurs argue both that long-admired scores should be shelved until singers and conductors capable of equaling acclaimed performances of past generations can be found and that most new works are not worthy of sharing stages with beloved classics.

All listeners, novices and aficionados, have likes and dislikes and the right to defend them, but opera quickly stagnates without new voices and new music. Since the label’s inception, Bridge Records releases have given listeners opportunities to discover new works in an array of genres, introducing or deepening acquaintances with accomplished composers, musicians, librettists, and lyricists. The present release, The Thirteenth Child, is a masterfully-recorded continuation of the label’s initiatives, but it is not merely the product of a concerted effort to affirm the merits of contemporary music. This project is the apotheosis of a personal crusade to create an opera not as an academic exercise in joining words with music but as a rejuvenation of the theatrical aesthetics that characterize the works that shaped the first four centuries of opera’s history.

Adapted from Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm’s story ‘Die zwölf Brüder,’ Danish composer Poul Ruder’s two-act opera The Thirteenth Child is a setting of an atmospheric, wonderfully singable libretto by Becky and David Starobin, the founders of Bridge Records. Under their guidance, this world-première recording, the release of which coincides with the opening of the opera’s inaugural production at Santa Fe Opera on 27 July 2019, gives the opera a truly memorable début.

The vocal music conducted by David Starobin and the superlative playing of the Odense Symfoniorkester, by which ensemble The Thirteenth Child was commissioned in partnership with Santa Fe Opera, led in Act One by Starobin and in Act Two by Benjamin Shwartz, there is not one passage of the score that seems haphazardly paced. The opera advances with cinematic celerity that incites both Starobin and Shwartz to conducting of gripping urgency. Throughout the performance, maintaining the intelligibility of the text is paramount. The result of this concentration on the impact of the words is a drama that ensnares the listener’s heart.

The operatic tapestry woven by the Starobins from the threads of the Grimms’ story unfurls in music that is by turns mesmerizing, wrenching, moving, and, in the opera’s final scene, uplifting. Born on the bustling island of Zealand in the Baltic Sea, Ruders turned to composition after studying the organ. From that start, a trajectory that is often audible in this score, he has forged a career that, with The Thirteenth Child, has engendered five operas. With each of these works, Ruders has exhibited an exceptional faculty for recounting profoundly human experiences in music that heightens their universality.

As its Grimmsian provenance suggests, The Thirteenth Child is fantastical, but the score is always rooted in a plausible emotional reality that is reinforced by transitional Interludes. Ruders eschews obvious, coy allusions and effects: the metamorphosis of the princes of Frohagord into ravens exerts a temptation to indulge in Wagnerian pastiche that many composers would find irresistible, but Ruders devises his own musical language for this and all of the opera’s dramatic exploits. That language, closely allied with the Starobins’ words, evokes an enigmatic, ritualistic realm in which discordant hostility ultimately cannot vanquish melody.

It is not surprising that considerable care was employed in casting this recorded performance of The Thirteenth Child, but engaging artists with uniformly exemplary qualifications for their rôles is rare in any repertoire. Soprano Amber Evans impresses as both chorus master of the Bridge Academy Singers and soloist, and her example clearly influenced the elegant, ideally-balanced singing of the choristers. Bass Alex Rosen’s voicing of Corbin, one of the ill-fated Princes of Frohagord, is handsomely forthright, his unaffected approach to the part conveying the frustration of a strong youth prostrated by ungovernable circumstances.

Few singers embody the musical and temperamental meanings of tenore di grazia as fully as tenor David Portillo. Acclaimed as an interpreter of Baroque, Classical, bel canto, and modern music, he possesses an appealing, flexible voice, the technical acumen required to use it properly, and an unfeigned charisma that endears his characterizations to audiences. As Benjamin, the youngest Prince of Frohagord, in The Thirteenth Child, Portillo provides a beam of light that brightens the decaying, Cimmerian environment engendered by Hjarne’s suspicions and uncertainty. United in Act Two with Lyra, the sister whose existence was hidden from the Princes, Benjamin realizes that the girl will fall victim to her brothers’ longing for vengeance. Singing ‘I must hide you’ with a torrent of fraternal affection, the tenor traverses the range of the music effortlessly, his upper register shimmering.

Portillo delivers Benjamin’s riddle with boyish playfulness, slyly shepherding his brothers to the discovery of Lyra. Transformed into a raven, Benjamin receives a mortal wound whilst freeing Lyra from flames that threaten to consume her. Portillo voices Benjamin’s dying words, ‘I hardly knew my parents’ love, yet felt complete in brotherhood,’ with touching sincerity. The Grimm story indicates that Benjamin was named for the biblical son of Jacob whose honesty and loyalty restored his brethren to the good graces of their wronged brother Joseph. In The Thirteenth Child, Benjamin’s sacrifice precipitates the opera’s lieto fine, and Portillo’s portrayal makes the young man’s modest but pivotal valor poignantly credible.

First heard in the music accompanying Hjarne’s funeral in the second scene of Act One, the voice of tenor Alasdair Kent is extraordinarily beautiful. In both the music for Frederic, Prince of Hauven, and the few words sung by Toke, Prince of Frohagord, Kent sings gloriously, his golden tones drawing their patina from his sparkling diction. When Frederic returns in the third scene of Act Two, the tenor persuasively expresses the prince’s yearning in his account of ‘For seven years I searched in vain.’ Later​, ​entreating the duplicitous Drokan to watch over the mute Lyra, Kent’s Frederic sings ‘Keep my beloved safe’ with tenderness and integrity that only the basest villain could betray. The brief, soaring phrases with the liberated Lyra in the opera’s final scene are projected with fearlessness and intonational accuracy. In longevity, Kent’s parts in The Thirteenth Child are not extensive, but his ringing, regal vocalism gives this performance its romantic hero.

Bass Matt Boehler copes courageously and securely but not always comfortably with the sepulchral tessitura of Ruder’s music for Hjarne, King of Frohagord. Manipulated by Drokan’s duplicitous warnings about his sons’ plots to usurp his throne, Hjarne is goaded into a state of Lear-like delirium in the throes of which he trusts no one, and Boehler utters the king’s raving ‘I gave them life’ with sputtering ire. This contrasts tellingly with the haunting loveliness with which he voices ‘The night air groans.’ Like many historical kings, Hjarne’s most powerful enemy is his own weakness, but in Boehler’s performance there is dignity even in the king’s most manic moments.

Drokan, Regent of Hauven, is the sort of irredeemable schemer who in a silent film might affix helpless maidens to railroad tracks. In fact, he resorts as his final misdeed in The Thirteenth Child to binding Lyra to a bonfire. The character’s one-dimensional pursuit of power notwithstanding, bass-baritone Ashraf Sewailam portrays Drokan as a man of Machiavellian cunning. Preying upon ​Hjarne​’s insecurity with insinuation, this Drokan is a model of false concern.

Sewailam’s voice echoes the perilous duality of the character’s words: frighteningly thunderous in anger, his singing can also be cajolingly soft. The jealous malevolence that erupts in his voicing of ‘Their house endures with each new child’ unmasks Drokan’s perfidy. The listener knows the calculating regent’s intentions before they become apparent to those he seeks to harm, of course, and he is in Sewailam’s performance unsettlingly chameleonic, alternately suave and sinister. The bass-baritone’s voice is perfect for the part, his granitic timbre and emphatic delivery filling Drokan’s veins with coldly fiendish blood.

Mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford is one of today’s most versatile singers. Unlike versatile singers who personify the cliché of being jacks of all trades and masters of none, Mumford excels in many musical styles. To their company she adds Ruders’s music for Gertrude, whom she will also portray in the Santa Fe Opera production of The Thirteenth Child. Enacting the confusion and horror of the queen’s response to ​Hjarne​’s bizarre ranting and unprovoked repudiation of their children, Mumford sings first ‘Lilies, red with blood, their beauty ever flowers’ and then ‘What is this madness?’ with musical and verbal immediacy, disclosing a queen’s poise, a wife’s alarm, and a mother’s anxiety.

Mumford’s phrasing of ‘O’, your sweetness dulled his rage’ in Gertrude’s death scene recalls the cadences of John Dowland’s doleful lute songs. Aided by suitably spectral electronic reverberation, she eerily intones the pronouncements of Gertrude’s ghost, dismay suffusing her singing of ‘My child, what have you done?’ when Lyra guilelessly destroys the lilies that are the Hofmannsthal-esque symbols of the princes’ existence. Alive and dead, Gertrude is the voice of reason in an increasingly unhinged domain. Mumford’s vocal prowess and theatrical savvy magnify this matriarch’s domination of a patriarchal world.

The thirteenth child of the opera’s title, Princess Lyra unwittingly jeopardizes the lives of the brothers she has never known and atones for her mistake by submitting to seven years of silence. Soprano Sarah Shafer interprets the rôle without artifice, evincing the princess’s innocence with singing of gossamer purity. Learning from her dying mother of the wrongs endured by the brothers she has never met, Lyra resolves to find and help the twelve princes. A guitar emerges from the instrumental ensemble to animate the accompaniment to ‘Oh, mother, your hand still warm, guide me,’ lending this music the communicative spirit of a troubadour’s ballad, and Shafer’s performance focuses on the text.

The soprano’s demeanor in the scene in which Gertrude’s ghost appears to Lyra is convincingly unnerved, but the voice remains glowingly resilient. Mourning the death of Benjamin, who gives his life in order to save Lyra from Drokan’s machinations, Shafer’s voice throbs with emotion as she sings ‘Benjamin! Do not go!’ The catharsis of the restoration of the princes’ birthright and Lyra’s joyous reunion with Frederic is all the sweeter for its brevity. Shafer’s voice rockets above the stave with the brilliance of a fireworks display, but Ruders does not prolong the celebration. There is a sense of reclaimed equilibrium: Lyra is eager to carry on, living rather than extolling normalcy. If the quality of Shafer’s singing in The Thirteenth Child were normal in performances of contemporary operas, their paths to acceptance might be far less arduous.

In some ways, it is now more difficult than ever before to bring a new opera to the stage, not least in terms of securing financial support. Perhaps contributing to a lasting work of art is no longer viewed as being as meaningful a return on an investment as it once was, or perhaps it is more gratifying to back projects that are more visible than operas are in the Twenty-First Century. From its earliest birth pangs in the Sixteenth Century, though, operatic innovation has relied not upon the espousal of the masses but upon the vision and daring of a small community of artists and their advocates. There are many variables in the equation that determines an opera’s success, yet, as The Thirteenth Child demonstrates, the computation is simple. The common denominator among memorable operas old and new is an engaging story told with words and music to which performers and audiences respond. Performed with the enthusiasm that this recording exudes, The Thirteenth Child is a score in which progress raises its voice like a lily lifting its head to welcome a new day.

GIOACHINO ROSSINI (1792 – 1868): Giovin fiamma— Levy Sekgapane, tenor; Münchner Rundfunkorchester; Giacomo Sagripanti, conductor [Recorded in Bayerischer Rundfunk Studio 1, Munich, Germany, 26 February – 3 March 2018; Prima Classic PRIMA002; 1 CD, 63:54; Available from Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

If one’s objective is to ignite impassioned debates amongst opera lovers, there is no spark more certain of starting confrontational conflagrations than the assessment of Fächer. Since the premature decline of the celebrated Cornélie Falcon’s vocal prowess precipitated the search for fellow exponents of the Fach that now bears her name, the business of categorizing voices according to subjective parameters has been a contentious endeavor. Though some species are critically endangered, nature’s falcons remain considerably more plentiful than opera’s Falcons, yet suggesting that Maria Callas was perhaps a Falcon provokes volleys of indignant dismissal from advocates of spinto, drammatico d’agilità, and other Fächer. A marvel of the human voice is that a physiological apparatus of unchanging basic construction produces such a remarkable array of voice types. Extraordinary, too, is the capacity of ears to hear identical sounds so differently.

Encompassing nearly a century of musical invention, ranging from rôles like Oronte in Georg Friedrich Händel’s Alcina and Mozart’s operatic protagonists to parts in Giuseppe Verdi’s early operas, bel canto writing for the tenor voice engendered a variety of Fächer, some of which are now erroneously cited interchangeably to describe singers whose voices likely little resemble those of their Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century counterparts. Terms such as tenore di grazia, tenorino, and tenore contraltino are used to characterize voices that are produced with resonance that differs markedly from that described by contemporaries of the tenors who worked with Händel, Gluck, Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. With too many singers and their admirers now confusing volume with vocal amplitude, connoisseurs’ discussions of a singer’s Fach are complicated by misinformation, misconceptions, and ever-decreasing familiarity with the storied traditions of past generations of singers. A young singer cognizant of his own Fach and confident in his place in the lineage of the masters of the music he sings is uniquely equipped to set the opera world ablaze, renewing opera’s cauldron with a young flame.

Making his solo recording début with Giovin fiamma, the second release from Prima Classic, South African tenor Levy Sekgapane upholds the standard of excellence established by the label’s first disc, Marina Rebeka’s splendid Spirito [reviewed here]. The admirably clear, focused, natural aural perspective that so faithfully conveyed the beauty of Rebeka’s voice on Spirito here enables the listener to experience the tenor’s voice not as it sounds on his previous recordings, an enjoyable but flawed performance of Donizetti’s Enrico di Borgogna and contributions to Amor fatale, Marina Rebeka’s disc of Rossini scenes, but as it blossoms in a hall with a good acoustic. [Sekgapane is also featured as Erster Priester and Erster Geharnischter on Deutsche Grammophon’s new recording of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.]

It is apparent that Giovin fiamma is not a disc that has been made to sound good by artful engineering: rather, a pleasing ambiance was organically achieved and then recorded with tremendous fidelity. Sekgapane thus provides the listener with a recital of some of Gioachino Rossini’s most daunting music for the tenor voice in which emphasis is placed on every aspect of the singer’s artistry. This is music that requires and, in the performances on this disc, receives showmanship, but Sekgapane sings with a palpable exuberance that distinguishes Giovin fiamma as a young singer’s invitation for the listener to join him on his artistic journey.

The repertory explored on Giovin fiamma makes comparisons with celebrated Rossini exponents including Ugo Benelli, Rockwell Blake, Juan Diego Flórez, Lawrence Brownlee, and Javier Camarena inevitable, but the voices that Sekgapane’s singing on this disc most meaningfully recalls are those of his countryman Colin Lee, the abrupt cessation of whose career is one of the most regrettable misfortunes in opera’s recent history, and the fantastic American tenor Kenneth Tarver. As heard here, the young tenor’s vocalism exhibits qualities akin to the innate nobility and poetic phrasing of Tarver’s singing, as well as the crystalline clarity of Lee’s articulations of bravura passages. The trait that marks Giovin fiamma as the work not merely of an exceptionally gifted singer but also of a discerning, disciplined artist is likewise one of the disc’s principal sources of pleasure for the listener: a pervasive sense of a singer with a thorough understanding of his vocal abilities.

Perception of this connection between singer and music is intensified by the support that Sekgapane receives from conductor Giacomo Sagripanti. Perpetuating the aesthetic fostered by the conducting of Alberto Zedda and Jesús López-Cobos, Sagripanti maintains fidelity to both the letter and the spirit of Rossini’s music without jeopardizing Sekgapane’s artistic individuality. Benefiting from the unerring musicality demonstrated by the Münchner Rundfunkorchester, here enlivening Rossini’s orchestrations as effervescently as any Italian orchestra might do, Sagripanti paces the pieces on this disc with insightful—and unquestionably well-rehearsed—comprehension of their hazards for singer and instrumentalists. Nonetheless, it is Sekgapane’s visage on Giovin fiamma cover, and the young tenor earns that pride of place. Devoting this first solo outing to a thoughtfully-conceived tribute to Rossini and three of the tenors whose voices inspired the composer, Sekgapane creates for himself a worthy presence in their company.

Few singers have influenced opera’s evolution as tangibly and enduringly as did Spanish tenor Manuel García (1775 - 1832), first with his own performances and later via his rôle in shaping the careers of his progeny, celebrated daughters Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot and son Manuel, whose voice was declared inferior to his father’s but whose much-read tome on the art of singing continues to be regarded as an invaluable resource for students of bel canto. During his own career as a singer, the elder Señor García created several rôles for Rossini, foremost in familiarity to Twenty-First-Century audiences among which is Conte d’Almaviva in Il barbiere di Siviglia.

Sekgapane logically begins his survey with Conte Almaviva’s bravura tour de force from Act Two of Barbiere, ‘Cessa di più resistere,’ a piece so demanding—and, undoubtedly to the chagrin of many interpreters of Rosina and Figaro, so exhilarating when sung well—that it was routinely omitted from performances of Barbiere by the early 1820s. Ever a savvy judge of the potential effectiveness of his own music, Rossini devised new homes for music from ‘Cessa più resistere’ in Adelaide di Borgogna, first performed in December 1817, and, most famously, as ‘Non più mesta,’ the heroine’s rondò finale in La Cenerentola. Propelled by a conspicuous evocation of the young aristocrat’s amorous ardor, Sekgapane’s rousing performance of ‘Cessa più resistere’ both validates the unmusical justifications for cutting the aria and, when sung with this sort of virtuosic panache, makes its customary excision seem little short of criminal.

The rôle of Lindoro in L’italiana in Algeri was created in the opera’s 1813 Venetian première by Serafino Gentili, but García’s interpretation of the part in Lisbon in 1819 ensured that Lindoro and his music became forever associated with the Spanish tenor. Even without aural evidence of the particular virtues that García brought to his performances of the rôle, Sekgapane’s singing of Lindoro’s ‘Languir per una bella’ on this disc challenges his artistic ancestor’s dominance. This is also true of the sample of the younger tenor’s portrayal of Don Ramiro, the prince in search of a suitable bride in La Cenerentola. Like Lindoro, Don Ramiro was first sung not by García but by a lesser-known tenor, Giacomo Guglielmi. García’s first Ramiro was likely heard in London two years after Cenerentola’s première in Rome, in a production supervised and conducted by Rossini.

Don Ramiro’s scene in Act Two of Cenerentola exemplifies a style of assertive writing for the tenor voice that Rossini would employ with sensational impact in Arnold’s ‘Asile héréditaire’ in Act Four of Guillaume Tell. The scale of Don Ramiro’s ‘Sì, ritrovarla io giuro’ is less heroic than that of Arnold’s music, but Sekgapane’s voicing of the music from Cenerentola is aptly electrifying. Don Ramiro shares with Verdi’s Manrico a resolve to find the woman he loves at any cost, but Sekgapane resists the temptation to sing—or, more accurately, over-sing—‘Sì, ritrovarla io giuro’ as a bel canto‘Di quella pira.’ Sekgapane conveys Don Ramiro’s determination with sparklingly precise fiorature, perfectly-placed top notes, and dramatic impetus drawn from the music.

The voice of Scottish tenor John Sinclair, the first interpreter of the rôle of Idreno in Semiramide, was characterized by Nineteenth-Century chroniclers in terms not unlike those employed to recount the singular qualities of French haute-contre singers. Upon his return to England after a brief period of study with Rossini and the première of Semiramide at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice, Sinclair was praised for his smooth delivery of passagework and expert management of an upper register that extended without strain to F₅. His singing was also criticized for being excessively effeminate. Diverging from Sinclair’s example in that regard, Sekgapane’s singing of Idreno’s ‘Ah, dov’è, dov’è il cimento?’ imparts stirring bravado, lending the character greater machismo than he often wields. It is improbable that the capabilities of singers as prodigiously gifted as John Sinclair and Manuel García were not taxed by ‘Ah, dov’è, dov’è il cimento,’ but neither the aria’s tessitura nor its coloratura overwhelms Sekgapane’s technical adroitness.

Contemporary appraisals of his performances indicate that Giovanni David (1790 - 1864) could not equal the stage deportments and theatricality of the most talented of his rivals, but his harshest critics acknowledged that few if any other singers of his time matched the brilliance of his vocalism. Perhaps this dichotomy accounts, at least in part, for Rossini allocating the rôle of Rodrigo rather than the name part in his setting of Otello to David. Veritably offering a seminar on the art of acting with the voice, Sekgapane prefaces the recitative that precedes Rodrigo’s ‘Ah, come mai non senti’ with declamatory authority, but it is his handling of the aria that verifies his mastery of Rossini’s writing for David. In this performance, the words are used not merely as sources for the vowels needed to produce a pleasing stream of sound but also as a catapult that hurls the character’s motivations into the dramatic fray. Sekgapane is more comfortable above the stave than below, but his lowest notes are fully, genuinely sung and integrated into the vocal line.

Contrasting markedly with the primal atmosphere of Otello, Act Two of Rossini’s La donna del lago begins with ‘Oh fiamma soave,’ a sublime aria sung by Giacomo, the Scottish king who masquerades—not implausibly, history relays—throughout much of the opera as Uberto di Snowdon. The man’s regal bearing is apparent in Sekgapane’s account of the piece. Capitalizing on Sagripanti’s apposite tempo, the tenor projects each note and phrases each roulade with purpose, limning the sentiments of the text with engrossing specificity.

The profusion of top Ds that makes Ilo’s ‘Terra amica, ove respira’ from Act One of Zelmira hard going for many singers poses no great hardship for this tenor. Sekgapane craftily trades the final written top D for an interpolated ascending passage cresting on a sustained top C, sung with the indefatigable brio heard in all of the performances on Giovin fiamma. Vitally, Sekgapane’s singing discloses an aptitude for capturing and maintaining the listener’s interest by expressing the feelings that provoke the dizzying divisions. The first rôle that David created for Rossini was Narciso in Il turco in Italia, and Sekgapane commemorates the inauguration of that momentous partnership with a resplendent voicing of Narciso’s ‘Tu seconda il mio disegno.’ Listeners who are inclined to question the psychological perspicacity of Rossini’s musical portraiture should scrutinize the immediacy with which Sekgapane animates the lovelorn Narciso’s music: this is irrefutably the work of an intuitive interpretive artist, but the materials with which he draws a compelling sketch of Narciso were provided by Rossini.

The final selection on Giovin fiamma, the Duke of Norfolk’s scene from Act Two of Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, is presented in homage to Andrea Nozzari (1776 - 1832), who sang the rôle of the Earl of Leicester in the opera’s first performance. Information in Nineteenth-Century annals concerning Nozzari having later portrayed Norfolk, who was created in Elisabetta’s 1815 première by Manuel García, is ambiguous, but it is wholly plausible that he accepted the advancement in rank from earl to duke in the sixteen years between the opera’s première and his retirement from the stage. [Incidentally, Juan Diego Flórez included the scene on a disc of arias sung by Giovanni Battista Rubini, whose portrayals of Norfolk are extensively documented.] From the first bars of his golden-toned enunciation of ‘Deh! troncate i ceppi suoi,’ the legitimacy of Sekgapane’s association with this music is affirmed, however. Always adhering to standards of period-appropriate tastefulness, the intensity of his voicing of Norfolk’s ‘Vendicar saprò l’offesa’ transforms his performance from a demonstration of a young singer’s vocal health into a pulse-quickening depiction of an ambitious nobleman’s chicanery. Nevertheless, the purest essence of Rossini’s art was in Nozzari’s time and is still the fluidity of the vocal writing, and the caliber of Sekgapane’s singing on this disc warrants the distinction of being described as bel canto.

For the star tenors celebrated on Giovin fiamma, there was no heavier repertoire with which to contend. Only after the advents of Verdi, Wagner, and verismo, after revisiting the music of the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century with perceptions influenced by larger orchestras and larger theatres, was it determined that tenors who sing Rossini’s Conte Almaviva, Don Ramiro, and Idreno should not also sing Florestan in Beethoven’s Fidelio and Max in Weber’s Der Freischütz. It is ironic that singers whose careers were limited by swaths of today’s standard repertory having not yet been written were also less inhibited by strict definitions of Fächer and their boundaries. [Josef August Röckel, Beethoven’s first Florestan in the 1806 revision of Fidelio, sang several Rossini rôles in Vienna, including Lindoro in L’italiana in Algeri, and his son later worked as Rossini’s assistant in Paris.] As Manuel García, Giovanni David, and Andrea Nozzari would surely have attested, the health and longevity of a voice rely upon its owner first cultivating a reliable technical foundation and then building a repertoire that the technique can support. The carcasses of ruined voices that litter the paths to the world’s great opera houses confirm that too many young singers are not being taught or allowed to listen to their own voices. Giovin fiamma is therefore a ray of hope. With these performances of some of Rossini’s most difficult music, Levy Sekgapane professes that he is a singer who both literally and figuratively knows and respects his own voice.

MASON BATES (born 1977): Mass Transmission– Choral Works by Mason Bates— Cappella SF; Ragnar Bohlin, Artistic Director [Recorded at St. Ignatius Church and Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, California, USA, in January and March 2018; DelosDE 3573; 1 CD, 54:24; Available from Delos, Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Whether the music being performed is a marvel of polyphony by a Renaissance master, a Bach Passion, a Händel oratorio, a crowd scene from an opera by Verdi or Wagner, or a Mahler symphony, choral singing wields a communicative power that no other mode of musical expression can duplicate. To hear a good performance of a motet by Josquin des Prez, the prisoners’ chorus in Act One of Beethoven’s Fidelio, or Hindemith’s When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d is to participate, even when listening to a recording, in a communal celebration of music’s capacity to transform sounds into emotional conduits that transcend ordinary modes of interpersonal connection.

Were their texts wordless, the choral works by American composer Mason Bates on the captivating Delos release Mass Transmission would impart engagingly provocative messages, but, like choral music itself, this tunesmith’s music divulges a notable gift for crafting music that not only conveys, complements, and heightens the meanings of words but also facilitates the listener’s comprehension of subtleties that read and spoken words can at best only partially disclose. So spiritually resonant are the pieces on Mass Transmission—and so eloquent are these performances of them—that it almost seems as though this is not music at all. Rather, Bates has made the essence of humanity audible.

Planning, polishing, and performing works in an array of genres have taken Bates from his native Richmond, Virginia, to many of the world’s most prestigious concert venues, where he has collaborated with celebrated artists and ensembles. His relationship with the Chicago Symphony has proved to be particularly fruitful, not least on disc, and the recording of the Santa Fe production his opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs—the most successful production of a new work in Santa Fe Opera’s history—garnered the 2019 GRAMMY® award for Best Opera Recording.

Also much in demand on the nightclub circuit as DJ Masonic, Bates has cultivated a rare and eclectic expertise in the mixing of sonic timbres and textures. This talent for creating musical mosaics that depict the magnificent simplicity of the complexities of life, represented by disparate aural components, permeates the works on Mass Transmission, as well as his Children of Adam, commissioned by the Richmond Symphony in celebration of the orchestra’s sixtieth anniversary and forthcoming on compact disc via a Reference Recordings release. The most daunting task faced by an insightful composer is surely that of giving life to relevant narratives with sounds that are at once original, challenging, and convincing. In the music on Mass Transmission, Bates accomplishes that task with grit and grace.

Completed in 2009, Sirens is performed here in the composer’s version for twelve-part a cappella chorus. A tremendously demanding meditation on the physical, psychological, and philosophical consequences of resistance and surrender to internal and external seductions, the piece is performed by Cappella SF with the kind of hypnotic immediacy that a choir merely singing for studio microphones cannot project. Artistic Director Ragnar Bohlin brings clear-sighted pragmatism to his conducting of this music, and the choir’s singing of the intertwining parts echoes the lucidity of his approach. It is unlikely that the San Francisco-based choristers have native speakers’ familiarity with the Greek text from Homer’s Odyssey that shapes the first segment of Sirens, but, guided by the cadences of the music, they enunciate the words as though their second home is an Athenian amphitheater.

One of the best-known literary incarnations of a cornerstone motif of German Romanticism, Heinrich Heine’s ‘Die Lorelei,’ becomes in Bates’s treatment an unsettlingly personal interlude, and the singing lures the listener into the mesmerizing intricacies of the vocal writing. The words of Pietro Arentino’s ‘Stelle, vostra mercè l’eccelse sfere’ drew from Bates’s imagination music of absorbing individuality, the inventiveness of which is appealingly accentuated by Bohlin and the singers. The text of ‘Sirinu nuqa rikunia’ is a beautiful passage in the indigenous language of the Quechua peoples of South America, a wrenchingly timely allusion in this season during which swaths of the Amazonian rain forest are burning. Quechua civilizations largely inhabited mountainous regions of their continent, but their words, evocatively set by Bates and exquisitely sung by Cappella SF, are an apt ambassador for South America’s environmental and cultural crises. ‘Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee’ from the biblical Book of Matthew is similarly current, the evangelist’s imagery receiving from the composer’s music increased, sometimes astonishing modernity. The return of words from Homer’s Odyssey in the last of Sirens’ songs precipitates a cathartic surge of emotional growth and self-awareness. Hearing this music is not a passive undertaking: this is a performance that an attentive listener will feel.

The disc’s eponymous work, Mass Transmission, was commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony as a headlining work for the 2012 Mavericks Festival. Fascinatingly, its poignant texts were taken from sources as unlikely as a document published by the government of the Netherlands and the diary of a Dutch citizen residing in Indonesia. In its sequence of movements, Mass Transmission examines the ramifications of separation from the perspective of a mother and her daughter, the former in Holland and the latter a continent away on the island of Java. With his music, Bates elucidates every unexpected expressive nuance of the impersonal bureaucratic language in ‘The Dutch Telegraph Office.’ The tone of the writer’s words in ‘Java’ is sporadically reminiscent of the fragile but fiercely unflappable spirit that emerges from Anne Frank’s diary. ‘Wireless Connections’ is a modern motet of the sort that Claudio Monteverdi might have written were he living in an age of interminable profusions of words without substance or significance. Bates’s music is ever on the cusp of cacophony. In Mass Transmission, he takes sounds and words to the precipice of atonality, not as a means of forging a dull alloy of musical modernity but as a way of renewing the timeless oracle of choral music.

Vocally and interpretively, soprano Cara Gabrielson and mezzo-soprano Silvie Jensen partner their Cappella SF colleagues excellently, their artistry lending the words the honesty of genuine conversation. Though the musical idioms are very different, the playing of organist Isabelle Demers recalls Marie-Claire Alain’s performances of the music of her brother Jehan, who perished in the Second World War. Her commitment to the music is no less than the composer’s, who here provides the music’s electronica elements. Soloists, choristers, organist, composer, and conductor devote themselves to serving the words and the stories that they tell. These artists are no pantomime players: they are sensitive, sonorous surrogates in whose performances the sentiments that they express become their own.

The emotional potency of Mass Transmission is a testament to Bates’s genius in composing pieces that meaningfully realize the ‘e pluribus unum’ potential of choral music, uniting many individual voices in a single stream of sound, sometimes a deafening deluge and sometimes barely a trickle, that overcomes obstacles of difference and division. A critically important voice in the chorus of artists whose contributions fostered the success of Mass Transmission is that of recording engineer David v.R. Bowles.

A skilled engineer’s goal is to manufacture an aural atmosphere in which his work is imperceptible, eliminating the tangible and intangible distances that isolate listeners from performers. True to his reputation, Bowles achieves this spectacularly on Mass Transmission, but his work on this disc is not merely the science of turning dials and manipulating channels. His is the artistry of a creator, in addition to that of a craftsman, akin to the efforts of a master translator whose translations have their own literary merit. On this disc, Bowles’s expertise yields a recorded ambiance in which Bates’s music seems as organic a part of existence as birdsong, roaring thunder, and whispered words of love and comfort.

The ‘bonus’ inclusion of a wonderful performance of the three-and-a-half-minute jewel ‘Rag of Ragnar’ to conclude Mass Transmission begets a parable about this disc and the composer whose music it showcases. Drinking from the spring that nourished the great creators of choral music of the past, a composer might understandably hoard the refreshment gathered from those waters. He might collect and closely guard ideas with justifiable concern for the advancement of his career. There is no question that a composer’s reputation benefits from a recording of the quality of Mass Transmission, but this is not a disc that ostentatiously seeks to impress. Rather, Mass Transmission earnestly seeks to inspire. Mason Bates does not drink his fill from the fountain of inspiration and then turn away. With his music, he fills a chalice and invites every listener to savor the undiluted elixir of choral song.

Lady of the hour: soprano Othalie Graham, Lady Macbeth in Opera Carolina’s November 2019 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth
[Photograph © by the artist]

Io vorrei in Lady una voce aspa, soffocata, cupa...la voce di Lady vorrei che avesse del diabolico. | I want for the Lady a harsh, throttled, somber voice...I want Lady’s voice to embody the diabolical.

It was with these words, written in a letter to librettist Salvadore Cammarano on 23 November 1848, that Giuseppe Verdi described the qualities that he wanted the voice of the eponymous thane’s consort in his ambitious operatic treatment of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth to embody. Rarely in the history of opera can a composer be found to have complained of a singer’s voice being too beautiful and angelic to sing a rôle effectively, but this was the foundation of Verdi’s dissatisfaction with Eugenia Tadolini, the soprano who earned Gaetano Donizetti’s admiration with her creations and, in the cases of first Giovanna Seymour and later the title rôle in Anna Bolena, recreations of leading ladies in his operas and was engaged by Teatro San Carlo to sing Lady Macbeth in the Neapolitan première of Verdi’s Macbeth.

When Macbeth was introduced to the public at Florence’s Teatro della Pergola on 14 March 1847, Lady Macbeth was sung by Florentine soprano Marianna Barbieri-Nini, a renowned exponent of dramatic bel canto who had already created the part of Lucrezia Contarini in I due Foscari for Verdi in 1844 and would later be the first Gulnara in Il corsaro. Eighteen years after the opera’s Italian première, Verdi substantially revised Macbeth for a Paris production. His second incarnation of Lady Macbeth was first sung by Amélie Rey-Balla, a soprano whose career is sparsely documented aside from accounts of her acclaimed portrayal of Sélika in Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine. Prodigiously documented are the formidable demands of Lady Macbeth’s music, before and after the composer’s revisions: rivaling the ferocity of the vocal writing for Abigaille in Nabucco, Verdi’s musical portrait of Lady Macbeth is one of opera’s most intimidating sings.

Indicative of the work’s many difficulties is the fact that, though Il trovatore, Rigoletto, and La traviata were performed in the company’s inaugural 1883 – 1884 Season, Macbeth was not staged by New York’s Metropolitan Opera until the 1958 – 1959 Season, when a production by Carl Ebert served as the vehicle for the house début of soprano Leonie Rysanek. Already celebrated for her portrayals of Wagner and Strauss heroines (and, at the time of her MET début, already heard in New York as Lady Macbeth, courtesy of a 1958 Carnegie Hall concert performance by The Little Orchestra Society), Rysanek shouldered the unenviable task of singing the rôle originally intended for Maria Callas, whose supremacy as Lady Macbeth was established by five performances at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala in December 1952—her only performances of the part. In subsequent seasons, Macbeth has been performed slightly more than one hundred times at the MET, whereas La traviata has amassed more than a thousand MET performances since 1883.

Veritable armies of singers have performed rôles like Bizet’s Carmen and Mimì in Puccini’s La bohème at the MET, but the company’s roster of Ladies Macbeth is considerably shorter, its relatively meager ranks including Americans Irene Dalis (the first mezzo-soprano to essay the rôle under the MET’s auspices), Elinor Ross, and Olivia Stapp [regrettably, the exhilarating Lady Macbeth of another American soprano, Marisa Galvany, never graced the MET stage]; the Swede Birgit Nilsson; the Ukrainian Maria Guleghina; and Russia’s Anna Netrebko, who is scheduled to reprise the rôle in the MET’s 2019 – 2020 Season. Also significant is the fact that the MET’s sole Italian Lady Macbeth to date is the inimitable Renata Scotto.

Following a much-anticipated début in the rôle with Toledo Opera in October 2019, Ontario-born soprano Othalie Graham returns to Charlotte for three further performances as Lady Macbeth with Opera Carolina. Previously heard in Charlotte as Verdi’s Aida and Puccini’s Turandot [reviewed here], Graham is an uncommon singer with a voice that is at once attractive, powerful, and flexible. Her depiction of Turandot, potentially one of opera’s most unidimensional characters, in Opera Carolina’s 2015 production confirmed that she is also a shrewdly intelligent actress who instinctively discerns the touchstones of a characterization in the rôle’s music. She is a performer whose sincerity forms the nucleus of her approach to any rôle. In an instance of felicitous casting, Graham will be partnered in Opera Carolina’s new production of Macbeth by another distinguished singing actor and bona fide Verdian, baritone Mark Rucker. It should not be unusual in 2019 for the leading couple in a Verdi opera to be portrayed by artists of color, but opera companies’ rosters still do not reliably mirror the increasing diversity of opera’s audiences.

La luce langue: mezzo-soprano Grace Bumbry as Lady Macbeth in Los Angeles Music Center Opera’s 1987 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth
[Photograph © by Los Angeles Music Center Opera; image from the Detroit Public Library collection]

Racial bias in the casting of rôles in Verdi’s operas has been prevalent since the works’ first performances, especially in the name parts in Aida and Otello. Russell Thomas’s 2017 début in the rôle in concert performances with the Atlanta Symphony welcomed an exceptionally rare Otello of color, but, regardless of the suitability of their individual voices for the character’s music, Black sopranos from Leonora Lafayette and Gloria Davy to Jessye Norman and Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez have been encouraged to sing Aida. It is narrow-minded to suggest that casting singers of color as Aida has often been based primarily upon race, but scrutiny of performance annals discloses a worrying—and continuing—pattern. Alzira has been performed too infrequently to engender casting trends, but how often have singers whose appearances reflected the character’s Andean heritage been engaged to sing Alvaro in La forza del destino? Unlike most of her sisters in the Verdi canon, however, Lady Macbeth, unquestionably a Caucasian character, has benefited extensively from the dramatic prowess of singers of color.

Defying prejudice with a triumphant depiction of Lady Macbeth opposite Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s Macbeth at the 1964 Salzburger Festspiele, St. Louis-born mezzo-soprano Grace Bumbry became the first artist of color to don the Lady’s crown for the Metropolitan Opera when she sang the rôle in a concert performance by MET forces in Newport, Rhode Island, on 17 August 1967. Ultimately, six of Bumbry’s seven MET Ladies were sung in tour performances: only her final MET performance of the rôle, on 4 June 1973, was sung at Lincoln Center. Praised in The Saturday Review for ‘the manner in which she conceives the character’s [in the context of Irving Kolodin’s review, Eboli in Verdi’s Don Carlo] place in the drama,’ Bumbry exhibited dramatic sensibilities with much in common with Othalie Graham’s artistry.

Also assuming Lady Macbeth’s mantle at the MET in 1973 was one of America’s most gifted Verdians, native New Yorker Martina Arroyo. The vitriolic psychology of the power-hungry Lady could hardly be more different from the good-humored soprano’s natural temperament, but her mastery of the music imparted the necessary duplicity. In nearly three decades with the MET, Arroyo built a repertoire that encompassed parts as diverse as Donna Anna in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, virtually all of the Verdi heroines then before the public, rôles in Wagner’s Lohengrin and Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Puccini’s Cio-Cio San, bringing to her interpretations welcome emotional directness. Possessing a voice capable both of delivering florid music credibly and of voicing dramatic rôles like Turandot with the requisite aural impact, Graham perpetuates Arroyo’s legacy.

Remarkably, the Lady Macbeth of Shirley Verrett (1931 - 2010), justifiably cited by many aficionados as one of the preeminent operatic portrayals of the Twentieth Century and documented on disc and film, was heard only once at the MET (15 February 1988). Like Bumbry, Verrett was a mezzo-soprano who possessed vocal range and dramatic versatility that enabled her to diversify her repertoire by singing soprano rôles. Though her MET tenure as Lady Macbeth was unfortunately limited to a single performance, her depiction still casts a long, intimidating shadow. A critic’s description of Verrett’s Leonora in a MET traversal of Donizetti’s La favorita as ‘stupendous in vocalism and amazingly believable in action’ also accurately recounts the essence of her Lady Macbeth.

Fatal mia donna: mezzo-soprano Shirley Verrett as Lady Macbeth (left) and baritone Ryan Edwards as Macbeth (right) in Boston Opera Company’s 1976 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth
[Photograph © by Boston Opera Company]

In the context of her depiction of Lady Macbeth garnering appreciation in her homeland, soprano Margaret Tynes, who was educated in and has many ties to North Carolina, was even less fortunate than Verrett. Tynes’s MET tenure consists of only three performances, all of them of the title rôle in Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa in 1974, in which her Laca and Kostelnička were Jon Vickers and Astrid Varnay, who was also an accomplished Lady Macbeth. A pirated recording of a 1972 performance of Macbeth from the Teatro Petruzzelli in Bari affirms that Tynes was an imposing, atypically sympathetic Lady Macbeth. Like Verrett, Tynes was an adventurous singer whose solid technical footing enabled her to impress in parts as different as Amaltea in Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto and Strauss’s Salome. Again, the parallel with Othalie Graham is unmistakable.

Latina artists have also excelled as Lady Macbeth, both in and beyond North America. Though none of them enjoyed opportunities to sing the part at the MET, sopranos Nora López, Gilda Cruz-Romo, and Áurea Gomes (1942 - 2018) wielded unique traits in their performances of the rôle. Now primarily familiar only to aficionados, the Chilean López sang Lady Macbeth in a memorable 1961 Rai Torino broadcast performance, sparring excitingly with the Macbeth of Mario Sereni. In nearly fifteen years on the MET roster, her Mexican colleague Cruz-Romo refined her Verdian credentials with interpretations of Violetta in La traviata, Leonora in Il trovatore and La forza del destino, Amelia in Un ballo in maschera, Elisabetta in Don Carlo, Aida, and Desdemona in Otello, in addition to a stunning turn as Odabella in Attila with Lyric Opera of Chicago. As Lady Macbeth, Cruz-Romo was simultaneously vituperative and vulnerable. Rightly lauded with fervor in her native Brazil, Gomes was an impassioned Lady Macbeth, one whose tale was indeed ‘full of sound and fury.’

It is maddening that in 2019, when the indignities endured by people of color on every continent are more visible—and more rectifiable—than ever before, occasional productions of Porgy and Bess are still fêted as increased diversity in opera. Porgy and Bess deserves a place in the standard operatic repertory, but George and Ira Gershwin would surely have agreed that staging their work more frequently should be but a small component of the initiative to make opera more demographically inclusive. As artistic representatives of a wonderfully diverse city, Opera Carolina productions have often featured artists of color in prominent rôles, including the cast of Richard Danielpour’s and Toni Morrison’s Margaret Garner (2006); Lisa Daltirus as Leonora and Denyce Graves as Azucena in Il trovatore (2011); Gordon Hawkins in the title rôle of Nabucco (2014); and Kevin Thompson as Zemfira’s father in Rachmaninov’s Aleko (2016). Casting Mark Rucker and Othalie Graham as the sinister spouses in Macbeth perpetuates the company’s commitment to obliterating prejudices and stereotypes in the Performing Arts. Moreover, Graham’s rôle début as Lady Macbeth—a milestone for the artist, Opera Carolina, and Macbeth—honors a storied past in which ladies of several ethnicities have proclaimed that the only colors that are important in opera are those projected by the voice.

Graham and Rucker are joined in Opera Carolina’s production of Macbeth by Zaikuan Song as Banco, Valentino Buzza as Macduff, and Jonathan Kaufman as Malcolm. Opera Carolina’s Artistic Director James Meena will conduct.

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Click here to read a Voix des Arts profile of Othalie Graham.

For more information about Othalie Graham’s career and future engagements, please click here to visit her official website.

Opera Carolina’s production of Verdi’s Macbeth opens in Belk Theater at Charlotte’s Blumenthal Performing Arts Center on Thursday, 7 November 2019. Additional performances are scheduled for 9 and 10 November. Click here to learn more about and to purchase tickets for the production.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770 – 1827): A Beethoven Odyssey, Volume Six– Piano Sonatas Nos. 4 in E♭ major (Opus 7), 11 in B♭ major (Opus 22), and 12 in A♭ major (Opus 26) — James Brawn, piano [Recorded in Potton Hall, Suffolk, UK, 16 – 18 December 2018; MSR ClassicsMS 1470; 1 CD, 73:43; Available from MSR Classics and major music retailers]

The world has changed immeasurably in the 192 years since Ludwig van Beethoven died on 26 March 1827. Were he walking along the streets of Vienna today, he would encounter familiar landmarks, some of them scarred by war, but the spaces and societies that have evolved beyond their façades would little resemble the imperial city that he knew. Only in the Wienerwald, where, like many residents of the Hapsburg capital, he sought refuge from the city’s tumult and found inspiration in unspoiled nature, would Beethoven now rediscover the sights and sounds that so indelibly impacted his work. The vistas of the musical metropolis from Kahlenberg’s summit are much different in 2019 from when Beethoven last viewed them, but, having persevered through nearly two centuries of alternating decadence and deprivation, Vienna retains much of the inimitable essence celebrated by artists as diverse as the city itself.

A similar phenomenon of familiar unfamiliarity can be observed in studying, performing, and recording Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas. Their genesis spanning nearly three decades, writing his thirty-two Piano Sonatas occupied Beethoven during a substantial portion of his compositional career, engendering a broad stylistic progress from Classicism learned from Haydn, Salieri, and Mozart to Romanticism prefiguring Schumann and Brahms. Attentive pianists and listeners can perceive in the early Sonatas fundamental modes of expression that Beethoven reworked and refined in his last efforts in the genre, in which a lifetime of challenging boundaries of form and technique begat formidable virtuosity. The stylistic innovations wrought by the composer in the Sonatas, more celebrated in the late scores but sometimes more conspicuous in earlier works, rival the most momentous advancements in Western culture, but, as pianist James Brawn’s Beethoven Odyssey on MSR Classics avers, recognition of the marvels of the individual Sonatas is enhanced when they are assessed cumulatively, via the work of a musician who fully comprehends and conveys each Sonata’s rightful place among its brethren.

In the Twenty-First Century, when commercial considerations rightly or wrongly seem more prominent than artistic merit in many deliberations concerning the recording of Classical Music, it is exceptionally rare for a pianist to have an opportunity to record a complete traversal of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas—and still rarer for a pianist to genuinely deserve such an opportunity. Laments for the demise of the Classical recording industry having thankfully proved to have been premature, the new millennium has yielded a profusion of recordings, an unfortunate portion of which document performances that in years past would likely have been deemed unworthy of preservation. It is not without justification that some listeners whose acquaintances with Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas were fostered by revered recordings by pianists like Artur Schnabel and Wilhelm Kempff complain of a dearth of more recent performances that offer original, legitimate interpretive insights to supplement those exhibited by pianists of the past.

The Beethoven discography suffers from no shortage of idiosyncratic performances of the Piano Sonatas, but, like Schnabel, Kempff, and especially Emil Gilels, whose untimely death regrettably prevented completion of his masterful Beethoven cycle for Deutsche Grammophon, Brawn plays Beethoven Sonatas with imagination and individuality that never diminish the composer’s singular presence in the music. His previous recordings of Beethoven Sonatas evinced the efficacy of Brawn’s unmistakably intimate but commendably unaffected relationship with the music. Like Brawn’s playing of each Sonata, the present disc is both an extraordinary achievement in its own right and an aptly evocative, searching continuation of the pianist’s Beethoven Odyssey.

The sixth volume of A Beethoven Odyssey begins with a performance of Sonata No. 4 in E♭ major (Opus 7) in which both the exuberant youthfulness and the contrasting maturity of the music are intelligently accentuated. Written in November 1796 during a visit to Keglevičov palács in Bratislava, where he taught the dedicatee of Piano Sonata No. 7 and the contemporaneous Piano Concerto No. 1, Ana Luiza Barbara Keglević, the Opus 7 Sonata shares its key with some of Beethoven’s most overtly grandiose music, notably the Third Symphony and the Fifth Piano Concerto.

The composer himself christened Opus 7 as the ‘Grande Sonate’ upon its first publication in October 1797, and the expansive, unapologetically symphonic scale of the the opening Allegro molto e con brio movement here receives deft handling that fully meets the bravura and expressive demands of the music. Nevertheless, not even the most opulent passages draw from Brawn playing that overwhelms the music. In his performances of the three Sonatas on this disc, he never joins the ranks of pianists who succumb to the temptation to over-Romanticize these pieces. Instead, he demonstrates that, though Weber and Wagner are close on the horizon, not only Haydn and Mozart but also Bach and Händel meaningfully influenced the young Beethoven.

Unfailingly faithful to the composer’s instructions, Brawn responds to the ‘con gran espressione’ character of Opus 7’s Largo movement with poignant eloquence. His sapient phrasing, engagingly rhapsodic but allied with rhythmic tautness of almost mathematical precision, facilitates an organic focus on melody that lends his performance an engaging bel canto sensibility. The energetic Allegro is played with galvanizing momentum that transitions coherently to the Poco allegretto e grazioso pace of the closing Rondo. There is a suggestion in the Sonata’s final pages of the ambivalent playfulness found in Mahler’s music. Simultaneously conjuring the spirits of Prospero and Puck, Brawn effectuates an ideal balance between sun and shade—and, vitally, between past and future.

Dedicated to Fürst Lichnowsky, Kammerherr to the imperial court of Franz II, Sonata No. 12 in A♭ major (Opus 26) dates from the turn of the Nineteenth Century, when Beethoven was also completing his First Symphony. Stylistically ambitious, not least in each of the four movements being centered in the home key of A♭ major, the Opus 26 Sonata follows the example of Mozart’s K. 331 Sonata by abandoning an introduction in a fast tempo in favor of a slower movement with variations. In the performance on this disc, Brawn navigates each transformation of the principal subject in Beethoven’s ingeniously-crafted Andante con variazioni with cognizance of the way in which it propels the music’s emotional narrative.

The Sonata’s Allegro molto Scherzo and Trio are played with an appealing lightness, the difficulties of the writing conquered with palpable joy. Beethoven gave Opus 26’s third movement the title ‘Marcia funebre sulla morte d’un Eroe’ and created music that communicates feelings of tragic loss that are at once resoundingly universal and devastatingly personal. By allowing the listener to experience details of Beethoven’s writing rather than a pianist’s egotistical executions thereof, the restraint of Brawn’s performance heightens appreciation of the composer’s true intentions. In the Allegro, too, Brawn serves no master other than Beethoven. His delivery of fleet passagework is brilliant, but accurate playing of notes at a brisk speed is only a small part of his artistry. It may seem nonsensical to state that Brawn plays music, not notes, but listeners who have endured pedestrian performances by score-bound pianists can discern the difference.

When preparing his four-movement ‘Grand’ Sonatas for initial publication and when later contemplating his artistic legacy, Beethoven cited Sonata No. 11 in B♭ major (Opus 22) as his favorite among the early Sonatas. Hearing Brawn’s performance of the Sonata would likely have solidified his opinion. The unflinching boldness of the pianist’s approach to the daunting Allegro con brio emphasizes the depths of Beethoven’s exegesis of sonata form. The composer’s inquisitive dismantling, experimenting, and reassembling the sonata according to his own design pervades the movement’s exposition, and Brawn ensures that every bar of the music inhabits its proper place.

Bach, Händel, Mozart, Brahms, and Mahler wielded affinities for writing music that seems to halt the passage of time and dissect the beating hearts of human emotions, but Beethoven possessed a singular ability to imbue strikingly simple, sometimes banal melodies with tremendous expressive potency. That skill was deployed sublimely in the composition of Opus 22’s Adagio con molto espressione movement. A sibling of the slow movements in the Violin Concerto, the Fifth Piano Concerto, and the Ninth Symphony and the ‘Agnus Dei’ in the Missa solemnis, this music beguiles even in an indifferent performance. Brawn’s performance of it is a peer of Maria Callas’s singing of Amina’s ‘Ah! non credea mirarti’ in Bellini’s La sonnambula.

The ethos of the Minuetto and Minore of Opus 22 is nearer to that of a Mahler symphonic scherzo than to the formal minuets found in Haydn’s symphonies and chamber music, but, like his Bohemian contemporary Jan Václav Dusík, Beethoven integrated precepts gleaned from the work of his predecessors into his own ideas, producing music that anticipates the Nineteenth Century and recalls the Eighteenth but is unmistakably Beethoven’s work. The Sonata’s Allegretto Rondo also exemplifies the composer’s uncanny faculty for adapting the musical language of the past into his own unique dialect. Brawn’s fluency in the idiom affords uncommon clarity, his playing infusing rejuvenating transparency into music that is often muddled in overzealous performances. Fashioning his performance as a dialogue among the voices of the music’s subjects and countersubjects, Brawn presents Opus 22 not as an esoteric treatise but as a thriving musical organism.

In the first nineteen years of the Twenty-First Century, some musicians, musicologists, and music lovers have posited that the quality and importance of Beethoven’s music have been exaggerated. Admittedly, there have been performances of Beethoven’s music that support this assertion. In the course of James Brawn’s Beethoven Odyssey to date, the pianist’s astounding technical acumen has accomplished many wonders, one of the most exciting of which is the spontaneity that he imparts in impeccably-rehearsed performances. This is the crucial attribute that too many performances of Beethoven’s music lack. It is possible that the significance of Beethoven’s work has been unnecessarily aggrandized, but the value of A Beethoven Odyssey cannot be overstated. This sixth volume reminds the listener that, 192 years after Beethoven’s death, his music still surprises, stimulates, and satisfies, particularly when played as it is on this disc.

Ecco la regina: Soprano Jodi Burns, interpreter of the title rôle in Piedmont Opera’s October 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda
[Photograph © by Jodi Burns]

From biblical heroines to Ancient Egypt’s God’s Wives of Amun, Boudicca to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, history has been shaped by powerful women. As mothers, they have nurtured all of mankind, but the notion of woman’s rôles in humanity’s collective story being confined to serving as mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters of influential men is as risible as it is insulting. Since its beginnings in Sixteenth-Century Italy, opera has also been populated with remarkable women whose stories have mirrored and in some instances transcended gender politics. Monteverdi‘s Penelope, Poppea, and Ottavia, Händel’s Alcina, Cleopatra, and Rodelinda, and Mozart’s Elettra, Donna Elvira, and Fiordiligi advanced woman’s operatic presence from its start with the victimized Dafne and Euridice to the take-no-prisoners bel canto protagonists of Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini.

So momentous are the depictions of a pair of history-making women in Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda that the singers portraying them in rehearsals for the opera’s inaugural production became so immersed in the drama that their rendering of the fateful meeting of Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor in Act Two—an encounter that originated in Friedrich von Schiller’s 1800 play Maria Stuart, upon which the seventeen-year-old Giuseppe Barbari’s libretto for Maria Stuarda was based, rather than in history—resulted in a physical altercation. The scandal fomented by this incident and objection to Donizetti’s portrayals of the Scottish and English queens by the King of Naples, whose consort had ancestral ties to the Stuart dynasty, subjected Maria Stuarda to censorial meddling. It was therefore the story of a hastily-substituted character borrowed from Dante, not that of Mary Stuart, that was told in the unsuccessful Neapolitan première of the piece on 18 October 1834, for which occasion the opera was rechristened as Buondelmonte. It was not until the opera reached the stage of Milan’s Teatro alla Scala fourteen months later that the maligned Queen of Scots regained her crown.

Born at Linlithgow Palace on 8 December 1542, Mary Stuart was the literal and figurative nexus of empires. The death of her father, James V, when she was only five days old elevated her to the Scottish throne and subjected Scotland to the regency of her mother, Marie de Guise, a scion of a powerful French aristocratic family who, after being widowed at the age of twenty-one, received a proposal of marriage from Henry VIII. Betrothed at the age of five and married before her sixteenth birthday, Mary became queen consort of France in 1559, supplanting her mother-in-law, the domineering Catherine de’ Medici. In the twenty-eight years between her ascension to the French throne and her execution at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire on 8 February 1587, Mary was subjected to intrigue and imprisonment, grave affronts to the honor of a woman of her station. Vilified by the Protestant English but revered on the Continent as a paragon of Catholic resistance to heretical barbarism, Mary remains a divisive figure. In other words, she is a near-perfect operatic subject, a condition treated by Donizetti with generous doses of exhilaratingly affecting music.

The singer who approaches a rôle in which Leyla Gencer, Montserrat Caballé, Beverly Sills, Dame Joan Sutherland, and Mariella Devia excelled without a sense of awe is unlikely to prove worthy of the legacy of her esteemed predecessors. Her poised but playful Adina in Piedmont Opera’s March 2019 production of Donizetti’sL’elisir d’amore [reviewed here] established soprano Jodi Burns as an insightful interpreter of Donizetti’s music whose singing exudes engaging imagination and commendable cognizance of tradition. Returning to Winston-Salem’s Stevens Center to portray the doomed Queen of Scots in Piedmont Opera’s staging of Maria Stuarda, this gifted singer adds to her repertoire a portrait of a proud woman whose vitality increases her vulnerability. More than four hundred years separate today’s listeners from the life of the historical Mary Stuart, but Burns is confident that Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda will be stirringly familiar to Piedmont Opera’s audience.

Musically and dramatically, Adina and Maria are very different ladies, but they are both intelligent, intuitive women who wield authority in male-dominated societies—and they of course share the bounties of Donizetti’s theatrical savvy. A shrewd artist whose approach to rôles is guided by study of the characters’ musical and historical contexts, Burns exhibits refreshing candor when describing her transition from L’elisir d’amore to Maria Stuarda. ‘Many [singers] portray Adina as a flippant, capricious little thing, but that’s never seemed right to me. She’s a land-owning businesswoman, for God’s sake!’ Burns shared. ‘She’s quite smart and conscientious. And a noblewoman. So I can see some similarities [with Maria].’

Further contemplating the similarities between Adina and Maria, Burns added, ‘They also share a certain joie de vivre.’ Burns quickly conceded that Adina’s and Maria’s life experiences yield very different characters, however. ‘Mary’s life has a great deal of heaviness upon it,’ she said. ‘When we meet her in this opera, she has been imprisoned for about eighteen years. But she did enjoy the idyllic upbringing of a queen. She enjoys nature and beauty and laughter but has also ruled and seen a tumult of heart-shattering losses.’ This heaviness permeates Donizetti’s score, Burns asserted. ‘Mary feels a great deal weightier than Adina, but I’m quite sure that, if they met at a party, they’d have a great time together!’

Nevertheless, acquaintance with Mary’s Donizettian incarnation has not distorted Burns’s perception of the woman who emerges from the pages of history. ‘I don’t think Donizetti’s view changes my interpretation of who the real historical Mary was,’ the soprano confided, ‘but he certainly has given me the opportunity to study her in depth.’ Understanding of attitudes towards Mary in Schiller’s and Donizetti’s cultural milieux is critical, Burns believes. ‘Donizetti depicts quite a sympathetic view of Mary. This is likely due to the political leanings of the Roman Catholic Church and the fact that Schiller’s play may have been the only historical interpretation available to him,’ she offered.

Burns perceives Donizetti’s empathy for Mary in the rôle’s musical evolution. ‘In her first entrance, she bursts onto the stage with youthful energy as the vibrant and beautiful Mary, singing her lilting aria with a wistful but burdened spirit. [Donizetti] allows her here to be a young beautiful woman rather than a rueful, betrayed, dark-eyed queen, winding down her days in the dreary, cool rooms of house arrest.’ Gradually, as Maria becomes ever more mired in political maneuvering, Donizetti’s musical portraiture takes on darker hues. ‘We see some fire from her in the cabaletta, when she hears hunters announce that “La Regina,” the queen, is near,’ Burns observed, ‘but this is no more fire than any passionate queen would exhibit upon finding that her rival has planned a surprise visit.’

Like many opera lovers, Burns identifies the pivotal scene in which England’s Virgin Queen visits her confined counterpart at Fotheringhay as the point of no return in Mary’s journey from misfortune to tragedy. ‘When she is coerced into meeting with Queen Elizabeth I in the famous confrontation scene, it is Elizabeth’s taunting that pushes her to the mad words of rage that seem at first to escape her lips,’ Piedmont Opera’s Maria mused. ‘Here, she is a tortured victim as Elizabeth slings brutal insults and burns her with images of her most desperate moments until she can no longer hold her tongue.’ Had the two queens met in life as in opera, the outcome of their exchange might have been very different, Burns theorizes. ‘As we know, this confrontation never happened: had it, the conversation would have been a great deal more complex, with no clear heroes or villains.’

Though an invention adapted from Schiller, the confrontation scene in Maria Stuarda is, in Burns’s estimation, a pinnacle not only of Donizetti’s work but of operatic writing in general. ‘This scene is pure opera magic,’ she said. ‘Deafening silences, mad screams: it’s an incredible moment.’ Asked whether there are other battles of ego that might prove equally suitable for the operatic stage, she paused for a moment before exclaiming, ‘The stage of a political debate would make a great opera! Or a town hall meeting! Interruptions, rise and fall of pitches in voice, hand gestures, commercial breaks...It writes itself!’

The interview between Maria and Elisabetta is not the sole historical inaccuracy to markedly alter the dramatic narrative of Maria Stuarda. Burns intimated that ‘the addition of the fictional love triangle among Elizabeth, Mary, and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, adds fuel to the confrontation scene fire.’ The conflagration, while precipitating Maria’s grisly demise, also enables the beleaguered monarch to defy protocol and express her truest feelings. ‘Life for Mary has always been out of her own control,’ Burns noted. ‘Here, in our story, as she stands tall against Elizabeth, she takes hold of her own fate, perhaps for the first time. In the [Act Two] finale, she sings, “now guide me to death,” for she has finally spoken freely. Her next scene offers her the opportunity for confession and atonement, and she ultimately ascends the stairs to be beheaded with a clear conscience; and, in her mind, on the path to sainthood.’ The opera’s tragedy is made all the more poignant by the fact that Maria owes these glimpses of self-reliance, freedom, and divine reward to Donizetti. ‘Donizetti gives her this path the victory,’ Burns opined. ‘The grace and goodness and peace she could never have in life, she will achieve in death.’

Chauvinism and misogyny are unfortunate but undeniable aspects of opera’s social constitution, regrettably prevalent both on and off stage, and reconciling the sometimes antiquated attitudes towards gender rôles encountered in opera with current sensibilities can be a difficult task for singers of any gender identity. ‘As a Twenty-First-Century woman, it is always challenging to look upon women’s rôles in Western History without a heavy smudge of disbelief weighing upon one’s brow,’ Burns mused, ‘but I have to say, in this opera, the two queens are presented as being self-possessed and also as bearing quite different demeanors and temperaments. They are not entirely one-dimensional female characters, and most of this information about them is to be found in the music.’

This process of developing a character through mastery of the nuances of her music is an integral component of Burns’s artistry. ‘One of the great joys and challenges of bel canto repertoire is just this,’ she declared. ‘Mary’s music is long lines, often with seemingly stream-of-thought storytelling. She is impulsive and emotional, proud and loyal. Elizabeth’s music is often more angular, and her thought processes occur with a different musical and emotional language.’ Still, as a modern woman, Burns is sensitive to the dated viewpoints on femininity in Maria Stuarda. Examining the opera’s depictions of Mary and Elizabeth, she reflected, ‘Is either of them a “woke” representation of a powerful woman? No—largely due to the added love story.’

The failures of the past engender opportunities for today’s artists, not to make amends but to create new, better-informed trends, and Burns sees in the characterizations of the title rôle in Maria Stuarda and other bel canto heroines unique possibilities for reevaluating these ladies without patriarchal prejudices. ‘We do our best to wade through their depths and bring forth the most human representations we can find through the music written on the page,’ the soprano imparted. ‘Bel canto is cool like that. There are a myriad of interpretations one could choose to engage, based on whether the notes rise or fall, the rhythms are jaunty or smooth. A large chord played by the full orchestra could be surprise or anger or a large physical gesture. We just have to hope to use the right paintbrushes at the right times to make these women multi-dimensional.’

From the point of view of a modern singer devising her own interpretations of well-known rôles, Burns feels a particular responsibility to portray Donizetti’s Maria as a woman whom the historical Queen of Scots would recognize. ‘I have to work hard to analyze each choice she makes from what would have been her perspective,’ she said, but a conscientious artist like Burns never neglects the joy of singing music as gratifying as Donizetti’s. ‘This is Italian opera, baby! It’s larger than life, even at its most quiet moments. To discover the rôle of Maria, all of its intricacies, and still make it read all the way to the back row, that’s a big challenge. But I accept it with gratitude and honor and hope to paint her with as many colors as I can.’

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To learn more about Jodi Burns, please visit her official website.

Piedmont Opera’s production of Maria Stuarda opens at the UNCSA Stevens Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, at 8:00 PM EDT on Friday, 18 October 2019. Additional performances are at 2:00 PM on Sunday, 20 October, and 7:30 PM on Tuesday, 22 October. To obtain more information or to purchase tickets, please visit Piedmont Opera’s website or phone 336.725.7101.

Jodi Burns will be joined in the Maria Stuarda cast by Yulia Lysenko as Elisabetta, Kirk Dougherty as Leicester, Jonathan Hays as Talbot, Dan Boye as Cecil, and Brennan Martinez as Anna. Steven LaCosse directs, and James Allbritten conducts.

Sincerest thanks to Ms. Burns for taking time from her grueling rehearsal schedule for this interview.

GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1848): Maria Stuarda— Jodi Burns (Maria Stuarda), Yulia Lysenko (Elisabetta I), Kirk Dougherty (Roberto, Conte di Leicester), Jonathan Hays (Sir Giorgio Talbot), Dan Boye (Lord Guglielmo Cecil), Brennan Martinez (Anna Kennedy); Piedmont Opera Chorus, Winston-Salem Symphony Orchestra; James Allbritten, conductor [Steven LaCosse, Stage Director; Howard C. Jones, Designer; Piedmont Opera, The Stevens Center of the UNCSA, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA; Friday, 18 October 2019]

Insensitive as it may seem, tales of prominent people meeting tragic ends make for great opera. From Dafne’s arboreal metamorphosis and Euridice’s fatal encounter with a serpent to Seneca’s mandated suicide and Sant’Alessio’s martyrdom, opera’s early development relied upon tragic subjects both to inspire composers and to engage audiences. Its emphasis on stories involving deities and royal personages is sometimes cited as evidence of opera’s inherent snobbishness, but the reality is far more practical. Before the modern age ushered in instantaneous global communication, celebrity was an extraordinarily rare commodity. A miller in Tudor England and a blacksmith in Stuart Scotland are unlikely to have possessed any awareness of one another, but both of them may have known of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. Its nobler aspirations notwithstanding, opera is entertainment, and is a miller in England more likely to purchase a ticket to be entertained by the story of a Scottish blacksmith who is no more real to him than a mythological beast or the pageantry and passions of queens whose visages grace the coins in his pockets?

When Friedrich von Schiller’s play Maria Stuart was first performed in 1800, 213 years after its subject was beheaded at the behest of Elizabeth I, Mary Stuart retained the admiration and sympathy of much of Catholic Europe, where she was remembered as a proud woman who suffered the indignities of being deprived of her rightful throne, accused of conspiring to usurp the throne occupied by the illegitimate progeny of a heretical king, and executed by a rival with no jurisdiction over her. Like his dramatizations of the lives of Jeanne d’Arc and the Spanish Infante Carlos, both of which received operatic settings from Giuseppe Verdi, Schiller’s account of Mary Stuart’s conflict with Elizabeth I was markedly romanticized, supplementing history with scenes that heighten the story’s theatricality.

Compagni in periglio: tenor Kirk Dougherty as Leicester (left) and soprano Jodi Burns as Maria Stuarda (right) in Piedmont Opera’s October 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda
[Photograph © by André Peeler & Piedmont Opera]

When rehearsals for the first production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda began in Naples in 1834, the visceral sentiments of Donizetti’s and his seventeen-year-old librettist Giuseppe Bardari’s setting of Schiller’s imagined meeting between Mary and Elizabeth proved to be too personal for the production’s leading ladies. The queens’ vitriol infected the singers, who abandoned musical skirmishing in favor of physical pugilism. Scandal ensued, the queen of Naples, herself a descendant of the Stuarts, objected to the depiction of an ancestor who uttered words like ‘vil bastarda,’ and the censors banished Mary from her own opera. With a new scenario drawn from Dante’s Divina Commedia, the piece was disguised as Buondelmonte, given seven poorly-received performances, and quickly forgotten. On 30 December 1835, Mary regained her crown when Maria Stuarda was first performed in its proper form at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala. Still admired on the Continent as a paragon of Catholic virtue, Mary thereafter rapidly expanded her domain to include many of Italy’s opera houses.

Maria Stuarda’s performance history in the past century suggests that the New World does not share Europe’s fascination with the eponymous Queen of Scots. [Exacerbated by too-literal supertitle translations, the frequent laughter in Winston-Salem suggested that Twenty-First-Century audiences also have little sympathy for Mary’s plight.] In the decades since the acclaimed 1967 American Opera Society concert performance in New York’s Carnegie Hall with Montserrat Caballé as Maria and Shirley Verrett as Elisabetta, the work has been performed with varying degrees of success in Chicago, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and elsewhere, but the widespread popularity of L’elisir d’amore, Lucia di Lammermoor, and, in recent years, Don Pasquale and La fille du régiment has eluded Maria Stuarda, which was not heard at the Metropolitan Opera until 2012. Arguably, the most memorable post-World War Two production of Maria Stuarda in the United States was New York City Opera’s 1972 staging, in which Beverly Sills’s Maria sparred with the formidable Elisabette of Pauline Tinsley and Marisa Galvany. Despite a lauded reprise with Sills in 1974, a 2001 Opera Orchestra of New York concert performance with Ruth Ann Swenson and Lauren Flanigan, and a revival in the MET’s current season, Maria Stuarda continues to be an infrequent visitor to America’s opera houses.

Una vera amica: mezzo-soprano Brennan Martinez as Anna Kennedy in Piedmont Opera’s October 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda
[Photograph © by André Peeler & Piedmont Opera]

Staging Maria Stuarda is an ambitious endeavor, the work’s musical and scenic complexities making considerable—and costly—demands on an opera company’s resources. The superb quality of Piedmont Opera’s production was therefore both a triumph for regional opera and a vindication of the company’s decision to present this daunting work. Fashionable film and television depictions of Sixteenth-Century England have given many modern observers generalized notions of how life in that era looked and sounded, some of which are of dubious historicity. A high degree of historical accuracy was neither Schiller’s nor Donizetti’s aim, but the collective efforts of costume designer Kathy Grillo, wig and makeup designer Martha Ruskai, scenic designer Howard C. Jones, lighting designer Liz Stewart, and accomplished director Steven LaCosse brought a credible recreation of Elizabeth’s England to the Stevens Center. Costumes were suitably opulent without being so fantastical as to unduly impede movement or vocal production. Likewise, the scenic designs provided visually pleasing environs in which the drama transpired without the distractions of unnecessary scenic minutiae. LaCosse’s direction largely relied upon conventional operatic prancing and posing, but physical motion was an extension of the drama’s emotional currents, forceful but never forced.

It was apparent in his pacing of the company’s March 2019 production of L’elisir d’amore [reviewed here] that Piedmont Opera’s General and Artistic Director James Allbritten is a peer of the world’s finest conductors of bel canto repertoire. Stylistic versatility is a critical component of an opera conductor’s artistry, but the work of few of Allbritten’s colleagues exhibits similar fluency in an array of musical languages. Despite moments of untidy ensemble, the playing of the Winston-Salem Symphony demonstrated clarity and immediacy, the delivery of melodic lines by the woodwinds exemplifying the art of bel canto. Piedmont Opera’s chorus also augmented the aesthetic cultivated by the conductor. Opening Act One with a performance of ‘Qui si attenda, ell’è vicina’ that established an aptly anticipatory atmosphere and singing the Inno della morte in Act Three plaintively, the choristers persuasively imparted all of the points of view assigned to them by Donizetti. Indeed, persuasiveness was the foremost hallmark of this Maria Stuarda: complementing the production team’s achievements, Allbritten paced a performance of compelling bel canto authenticity.

Ministro della morte: bass-baritone Dan Boye as Guglielmo Cecil in Piedmont Opera’s October 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda
[Photograph © by André Peeler & Piedmont Opera]

As Maria’s companion and confidante Anna Kennedy, mezzo-soprano Brennan Martinez sang incisively, her musicality, dramatic sincerity, and youthful tone making a strong impression despite the brevity of her part. Compared with Anna, the implacable Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Guglielmo Cecil, offers his interpreter more opportunities to display his prowess as a singing actor. Especially in the Act Three duet in which Cecil entreats Elisabetta to sign Maria’s death warrant and the scene in which he callously informs Maria of her condemnation and imminent execution, bass-baritone Dan Boye sang boldly, hurling out Cecil’s hateful words with histrionic power that was only marginally lessened by unmistakably non-native Italian diction. Nonetheless, the maleficence of his characterization overcame occasional weaknesses in his vocalism, revealing Cecil as the true author of Maria’s fate.

Conte fedele: baritone Jonathan Hays as Giorgio Talbot in Piedmont Opera’s October 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda
[Photograph © by André Peeler & Piedmont Opera]

Baritone Jonathan Hays’s portrayal of Giorgio Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury, evinced pervasive empathy for Maria. He voiced ‘Questa imago, questo foglio’ in the Act One duet with Leicester with suavity, his virile, flinty timbre lending his utterances a paternal sincerity. Even finer was his command of legato in the Act Three confession scene with Maria, contrasting meaningfully with his emphatic singing of conversational passages. Humbled by his recognition of Maria’s innocence and the dignity with which she accepts her impending death, Hays’s Talbot touchingly prefaced the doomed queen’s prayer with a heartfelt blessing of her final hours on earth. Throughout the performance, Hays conveyed the frustration of a benevolent man who finds himself on the edge of a precipice and unable to prevent those for whom he cares from plunging into the abyss.

Difensore della virtù: tenor Kirk Dougherty as Leicester in Piedmont Opera’s October 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda
[Photograph © by André Peeler & Piedmont Opera]

Adaptability to a broad assortment of musical styles is as important to a modern singer’s success as to that of a conductor, and tenor Kirk Dougherty excels in repertoire ranging from bel canto to Pinkerton in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Nikolaus Sprink in Kevin Puts’s Silent Night, the last of which he sang to acclaim in Piedmont Opera’s 2017 production. Returning to Winston-Salem as Roberto Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, in Maria Stuarda, Dougherty infused the performance with febrile romantic ardor. Attempting to assuage Elisabetta’s antipathy towards Maria in his first scene in Act One, this Leicester pleaded without whining, Dougherty’s vocalism firm and focused. His impassioned account of ‘Ah! rimiro il bel sembiante’ disclosed the depth of Leicester’s affection for Maria, and his fervent singing in the subsequent duet with Talbot, ended with a splendid top C, reiterated the Earl’s commitment to shielding Maria from Elisabetta’s ire. Dougherty mellifluously caressed the melodic line of ‘Era d’amor l’immagine’ in the duet with Elisabetta, but his resonant top B was a reminder of his dogged determination.

The tenor’s singing in Act Two was no less galvanizing, not least in the duet with Maria and the superb sextet, nearly the equal of its better-known counterpart in Lucia di Lammermoor, but it was in the Act Three terzetto with Elisabetta and Cecil that Dougherty was at his best, articulating ‘Ah, deh! per pietà sospendi’ with irrepressible despair. There and in the opera’s final scene, as Leicester grappled with his inability to alter the course of Maria’s destiny, Dougherty’s singing was shaded by moving morbidezza. Unfortunately, his voice did not project into the auditorium with ideal freedom and was sometimes covered by the orchestra, but he consistently sang well and believably portrayed a man who loves one queen and is loved by another.

Regina della crudeltà: soprano Yulia Lysenko as Elisabetta I in Piedmont Opera’s October 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda
[Photograph © by André Peeler & Piedmont Opera]

With the casting of soprano Yulia Lysenko, previously heard in Winston-Salem as Mimì in Puccini’s La bohème, as Elisabetta, Piedmont Opera strengthened Maria Stuarda’s dramatic thrust with a fierce antagonist who was more dangerous because her ferocity masked vulnerability. At her entrance in Act One, this Elisabetta’s demeanor betrayed none of the uncertainty that plagued the monarch throughout her reign. Lysenko’s performances of the cavatina ‘Ah! quando all’ara scorgemi’ and cabaletta ‘Ah! dal cielo discenda un raggio’ radiated regal—and vocal—confidence, epitomized by the soprano’s resplendent top B. Her singing in the duet with Leicester divulged Elisabetta’s jealousy and pettiness but also declared the breadth of her unrequited love for the Earl.

In Act Two, Lysenko launched the sextet electrifyingly and unleashed a cyclone of fury in the confrontation scene. Her enunciation of ‘Quella vita me funesta io troncar’ in the Act Three duet with Cecil asserted that this Elisabetta was keenly aware of the Chancellor’s unyielding manipulation. Lysenko’s voice soared in the terzetto with Leicester and Cecil. The soprano’s unaffected execution of Elisabetta’s hesitant, pained exit after signing Maria’s death warrant was unexpectedly gripping and received an ovation from the audience. Lysenko avoided employing chest resonance in virtually all of her music, depriving the lowest notes of the part of requisite muscle, but the brilliance of her upper register, the vigor of her singing of bravura passages, and the acuity of her acting offered ample compensation.

Bontà incoronata: soprano Jodi Burns in the title rôle in Piedmont Opera’s October 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda
[Photograph © by André Peeler & Piedmont Opera]

First heard in Act Two [the latter half of Act One in Piedmont Opera’s production], Maria makes her entrance with a scene in which, in the only period of relative tranquility that she enjoys in the opera, she muses on her far-from-idyllic but happy youth in France. From the first bars of her traversal of the cavatina ‘O nube! che lieve per l’aria ti aggiri,’Jodi Burns was a Maria in the class of the most gifted interpreters of the rôle, her performance recalling Leyla Gencer’s fearlessness, Montserrat Caballé’s glorious pianissimi, Beverly Sills’s purity of line, and Sondra Radvanovsky’s absolute immersion in the drama. The ebullience of Burns’s singing of the cabaletta ‘Nella pace del mesto riposo’ fostered a mood of guarded optimism.

Maria’s elation at Leicester’s arrival was destroyed by his news that Elisabetta was close at hand, having come at his urging to meet Mary in the flesh. In the duet with Leicester, Burns first sang ‘Da tutti abbandonata’ with wrenching simplicity, her Maria genuinely lamenting her situation rather than indulging in self-pity, and then declaimed ‘Ah! Se il mio cor tremò giammai’ with renewed resolve. Her lines in the sextet were always audible and engendered a righteous aloofness that set Maria apart from the vengeful Elisabetta. The celebrated ‘dialogo delle due regine’ spurred Burns to singing of incredible energy and dramatic potency. She exclaimed the stinging ‘figlia impura di Bolena’ and ’vil bastarda’ with startling spontaneity, warranting the look of shocked vexation that flashed across Elisabetta’s face. As the English queen haughtily left the stage, Burns brought the curtain down with a magnificently defiant and cathartic top D.

Whether designated as Act Two, as in Piedmont Opera’s production, or as Act Three, the concluding scenes of Maria Stuarda constitute one of the most remarkable sequences in Italian opera. Burns’s Maria received Cecil‘s proclamation of her sentence with stoicism, but a spark of umbrage ignited her response to his spiteful suggestion that she meet with a Protestant minister in order to be reconciled with God. Exercising her faith on her own terms in the eloquent ‘duetto della confessione’ with Talbot, this Maria voiced ‘Quando di luce rosea’ ravishingly. In Burns’s performance, wonderfully supported by the chorus, the preghiera ‘Deh! tu di un umile preghiera il suono’ was exquisite. Her voicing of the ‘aria del supplizio,’ ‘D’un cor che muore reca il perdono,’ was phrased with innate understanding of bel canto.

After performing the repeats of the foregoing cabalette, omitting the repeat of ‘Ah! se un giorno da queste ritorte’ was regrettable, especially as Burns’s ornamentation of her music was unfailingly tasteful, but excising the repeat undeniably produced a more abrupt conclusion that significantly increased the emotional tension of the final scene. Apart from a pair of very brief instances in which high pianissimi threatened to crack, Burns’s vocal control was impeccable, and the tonal beauty that she brought to Maria’s music was profoundly satisfying. The essence of bel canto is beauty of expression, however, and Burns brought one of the most difficult rôles in the soprano repertoire to life with the kind of unfeigned expressivity and pathos of which only true artists are capable.

There is a pertinent scene in Miloš Forman’s cinematic adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus in which Mozart, at work on an opera about a servant and his fiancée, and representatives of the imperial musical establishment debate the importance of operatic subject matter. Does an audience’s ability to relate on some psychological level with the characters on stage determine an opera’s theatrical viability or intrinsic artistic value? More than four centuries after the death of its heroine, can an Italian composer’s operatic setting of a German playwright’s dramatization of the enmity between an English queen and her Scottish contemporary possibly hold any significance for American audiences in the Twenty-First Century? Piedmont Opera’s Maria Stuarda avowed that opera’s vitality is defined not by the characters who populate it but by the feelings that they portray and inspire. It is unlikely that anyone who experiences Piedmont Opera’s Maria Stuarda can relate to a queen’s tribulations, but, whether wearing priceless diamonds or dime-store pearls, who cannot relate to feelings of love, loss, fear, and freedom?

♫      ♫      ♫      ♫      ♫

Additional performances of Piedmont Opera’s production of Maria Stuarda are at 2:00 PM on Sunday, 20 October 2019, and at 7:30 PM on Tuesday, 22 October.

GREGORY SPEARS (born 1977): Paul’s Case— Jonathan Blalock (Paul), Keith Phares (Father), Melissa Wimbish (History Teacher, Opera Singer 1, Maid 1), Erin Sanzero (Drawing Teacher, Opera Singer 2, Maid 2), Amanda Crider (English Teacher, Maid 3), Michael Slattery (Yale Boy), James Shaffran (Principal, Bellboy); American Modern Ensemble; Robert Wood, conductor [Recorded in Performing Arts Center Recital Hall, Purchase College, State University of New York, Purchase, New York, USA, 6 – 8 August 2018; National Sawdust Tracks NS-027; 2 CDs, 82:10; Available from National Sawdust Tracks]

When eminent novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicler of life on the Nebraska prairie Willa Cather died on 24 April 1947, the America of which she wrote in the iconic works O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia was a nation at a crossroads. The optimism of the new century and the Roaring Twenties obliterated by two cataclysmic World Wars and the Great Depression, America in 1947 was a nation in search of renewed identity and purpose, the wounds of past generations still aching beneath new layers of discord and discrimination. Even before the wrath of war and economic collapse upended Cather’s worldview, there were glimpses of darker horizons in her work, their ominous, disquieting hues likely drawn from the recesses of her own temperament. Cather portrayed America as a confederation of microcosms in which the actions of individuals are manifestations of the nation’s spirit.

First published in McClure’s Magazine and subsequently included in the collection entitled The Troll Garden, Cather’s 1905 short story ‘Paul’s Case’ is to a certain extent a thematic anomaly in her output. Examining the tragic consequences of an imaginative young man’s disenfranchisement with the social and fiscal restraints imposed by the reality of his mundane life, the story inhabits a philosophical world that is very different from the Great Plains pragmatism of the works upon which her reputation is based. From a literary perspective, this deviation from the subject matter with which she was most familiar makes ‘Paul’s Case’ one of Cather’s most significant works.

In this story, the suspicion of the industrialization and urbanization of America typical of her work is turned on its head: rather than a rural outsider gazing into the strange world of the emerging bourgeoisie of manufacturing centers, Paul is a denizen of that world who seeks fulfillment beyond the perceived shortcomings of his own environment. The story’s title suggests a deliberate ambiguity that permeates the story. Scientist and specimen, Paul’s social experiments perhaps reveal more about his own psyche than about the community he spurns. Much of Cather’s writing possesses overtly operatic qualities, but Paul is no conventional operatic protagonist. Morally, socially, and sexually ambivalent, Paul is, as Cather subtitled his ‘case,’ ‘a study in temperament.’

Four years before the triumphant world première of Fellow Travelers, his operatic rumination on same-sex relationships in the hostile milieu of Joseph McCarthy’s America, his quest for inspiring texts led American composer Gregory Spears to ‘Paul’s Case.’ Collaborating with eminent writer Kathryn Walat, author of the critically-acclaimed plays Creation and Bleeding Kansas, he transformed the story’s narrative into a work for the stage in which the nuances of Cather’s subtexts are allied with skillfully-managed motivic writing. Shaped by the rhythms of the words, Spears’s musical language creates an aural atmosphere that, like an anthem that to some hearers celebrates freedom but to other ears symbolizes oppression, is at once both claustrophobic and liberating. There are passages in the score that are reminiscent of the melodic expressivity of Finzi, the stylistic sophistication of Britten, and the harmonic complexity of Tippett, but it is Spears’s singular, unmistakable idiom that creates the piece’s hypnotic sound world. Allied with Walat’s masterful wordsmithing, Spears gives the complicated, in some ways repulsive youth of Cather’s story his own irrepressibly alluring voice.

The advocacy of noted champion of contemporary music Robert Wood contributed indelibly to the success of the 2013 première of Paul’s Case by UrbanArias at Artisphere in Arlington, Virginia, and his acquaintance with the score continues to yield tremendous energy and eloquence in this recorded performance. Like vocal works by Philip Glass and Michael Nyman, Paul’s Case needs a conductor capable of facilitating an equilibrium between rhythmic precision and emotive flexibility. The music must be allowed to breathe, simmer, and evolve, but singers’ collective ability to execute their parts with the requisite musical accuracy relies upon a clear, consistent beat. Wood, who also produced the recording, conducts this performance of Paul’s Case with the authority of an artistic steward who has known the score since the ink was still wet. Under his direction, the orchestral forces of American Modern Ensemble rise to the score’s every challenge, playing each note with comprehension of its individual rôle in the opera’s cumulative narrative. The musical foundation of Paul’s Case is a series of understated emotional responses that illustrate the isolation at the opera’s core, intensifying like static electricity until the energy is discharged in climaxes that stun both the characters and the listener. Wood and the American Modern Ensemble musicians handle the opera’s invigorating currents with extraordinary skill and perceptiveness.

It may seem foolish to state that the vocal writing in Paul’s Case is uncommonly singable, but there are far too many instances in which glancing at a few bars of a modern composer’s score reveals ignorance of the science of singing. The voice is a mechanism, but neither a voice nor the singer who operates it is a machine. Physics and physiology govern the production and projection of sound, but the psyche is responsible for giving sounds emotional depth. In this performance of Paul’s Case, tenor Michael Slattery brings an ideal sound to the rôle of the San Francisco-born Yale student who travels to New York City in search of diversion. Spears’s intuitive writing for the part creates a coddled, pied-piper persona that is alternately loathsome and irresistible, and Slattery sings appealingly, every syllable of the text clearly enunciated with the whiff of arrogance expected of an Ivy League man. He perfectly portrays the type of spoiled university student more likely to be found at a fraternity party than in a lecture hall; the type destined to hide his debauched urges and assume his societally-appointed places in a corner office, a smart house in the right part of town, and a seat on a front pew in a smugly respectable church.

As the Principal of the school at which Paul struggles, caught between the miseries of peers who do not understand or accept him and teachers who, prejudiced by their own experiences, perhaps understand him too well, baritone James Shaffran personifies the proverbial bureaucratic despot, mundane and inexplicably menacing. Vocally, the part recalls the low-voiced denizens of mythological realms of death and despondency in Seventeenth-Century Italian opera: Shaffran’s Principal articulates Paul’s offenses with the same bemused repugnance with which the Demonio goads the godly hero of Stefano Landi’s Il Sant’Alessio. With his statement of ‘I’m somewhat sympathetic,’ the Principal succinctly asserts the establishment’s noncommittal credo. Duty demands an attempt at compassion, but conventionality prevents any true connection. Shaffran’s vocalism is reliably steady and sonorous, his well-honed technique enabling him to descend to the part’s lowest notes without faking or forcing. Verbally, as the Principal and the hotel bellboy, the baritone’s diction exhibits a clinical coldness that echoes the characters’ disdain and disinterest.

It is not only assigning multiple rôles to several of the singers that makes Paul’s Case an ensemble piece. The various identities assumed by the three female singers are direct descendants of Dante’s Erinyes and the Drei Damen of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. Portraying Paul’s teachers, opera singers, and maids at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where Paul indulges in temporary luxury after fleeing Pittsburgh with the proceeds of his theft, sopranos Erin Sanzero and Melissa Wimbish and mezzo-soprano Amanda Crider sing incisively and, despite the apathy of many of the words that they utter, with palpable involvement in the drama. Sanzero’s performance imparts an unmistakable sense of ennui, the ladies she voices having become indifferent to the social order that mutes their identities. Wimbish wields sensational security in voicing music akin to Jonathan Dove’s writing for the Controller in Flight and the stratospheric lines for Ariel in Thomas Adès’s The Tempest. Crider is vocally and dramatically effective in each of the parts she plays, but her singing of the English teacher’s ‘Years ago I walked down the aisle with a wayward boy,’ distinguished by the simplicity of absolute sincerity, is truly touching.

Whilst rehearsing for the still-controversial 1946 NBC broadcast performance of Verdi’s La traviata, Arturo Toscanini, who had first conducted the score six decades earlier, counseled the young Robert Merrill on the integral rôle played by fatherhood in an effective depiction of the impetuous Alfredo’s father Giorgio Germont. The eminent conductor’s meaning was of course more figurative than literal, but baritone Keith Phares’s performance as Paul’s father in this account of Paul’s Case rekindles the spirit of Toscanini’s observation. His father is the symbolic figurehead of the forces that oppress Paul, but Phares portrays him not as an archetype but as an ordinary man. The strain of attempting to parent an intractable son unnerves Paul’s father, a stereotypical American man of his time for whom nonconformity is not just inconvenient but genuinely dangerous, but Phares discloses the tenderness that prompts the father’s terse treatment of his son. Society alleges that a failed child is also a parent’s failure, and the parent in this performance is acutely cognizant of his own inability to bond with his son. Phares’s vocalism is unfailingly handsome and sagaciously shaded to suit every mood of the text.

Like Monteverdi’s Nerone, Wagner’s Parsifal, Puccini’s Giorgetta, and virtually all of Britten’s operatic protagonists, the title character in Paul’s Case is troubled by a pervasive sense of discomfort with the society in which circumstance places him. He is a dreamer with a hunger for decadence that his blue-collar existence cannot feed. Spears’s and Walat’s characterization of Paul is Freudian in scope, but the music via which the spirited young man makes his ‘case’ necessitates no marvels of penetrating psychological analysis. As sung by tenor Jonathan Blalock, Paul’s music enables the listener to feel the boy’s loneliness, the pain of rejection, and the disappointment and desperation that saturate his flippant words. There is in Paul’s exaggerated politeness a self-delusion that is not unlike Cio-Cio-San’s impassioned insistence that Pinkerton will return to her in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Blalock’s sweet-toned but iron-willed singing intimates that Paul’s pretentious chivalry is an act of self-preservation.

Often facing dauntingly high tessitura, the tenor voices Paul’s preternaturally poised music with astounding assurance, glorying in the bel canto essence of Spears’s writing. The interaction between Paul and the Yale student is no typical operatic love duet, but, as Paul’s sole grasp at carnal pleasure, albeit superficial, Blalock approaches the music with an awestruck lover’s ardor. Like the denouement of a Greek tragedy, Paul’s suicide is inevitable. In nature, a thing that cannot survive in its environment is cast out, and Paul’s taste of life, however fleeting, makes returning to a living death impossible. The serene beauty of his singing in the opera’s final minutes is the pinnacle of Blalock’s performance. There are agony and despair in the voice, but the prevailing feeling is one of fulfillment. Death is a culmination, and his gruesome means of achieving it is a neglected boy’s quest for notoriety. Spears and Walat gave Paul a voice: Blalock gives Paul’s voice expressive profundity as moving as that of any character in opera.

In the tradition of Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and all successful critics of societal injustice and hypocrisy, Willa Cather humanized the communities about which she wrote by populating them with characters who earn readers’ affection and empathy. In ‘Paul’s Case,’ Cather asked readers to embrace an irascible, ill-adjusted boy trapped in his own fantasies. In a sense, opera is a fantastical escape from reality, and Cather’s Paul finds in Gregory Spears’s and Kathryn Walat’s Paul’s Case a refuge from an artless world of tattered textbooks, accounting ledgers, and dead-end jobs. With this marvelous National Sawdust Tracks recording, Paul’s Case finds a home amongst the finest recorded opera performances of the Twenty-First Century.

JOHANN STRAUSS II (1825 – 1899): Die Fledermaus [sung in English translation by Ruth and Thomas Martin] — Tamara Beliy (Rosalinde), Claire Griffin (Adele), Sean Toso (Alfred), Michael Friedrich (Gabriel von Eisenstein), Bailey Lail (Prinz Orlovsky), Sophie Caplin (Doktor Blind), Lorenze Sparks (Doktor Falke), Mujun Xie (Ida), Guy Chambers (Frank), Rafael Alejandro Garcia (Ivan), Robert Wells (Frosch); UNCG Opera Theatre Fledermaus Ensemble and Orchestra; David Holley, conductor, stage director, and producer [Pingyi Song, chorus master; UNCG Opera Theatre, UNCG Auditorium, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA; Thursday, 24 October 2019]

Some clichés get it right. Music is indeed a universal language, and, in the treatment of music-receptive ailments, laughter is a highly-effective medicine. This is no less true in America in 2019 than it was in Europe in the 1870s, when the continent was already experiencing the conflicts between nationalism and imperialism that would eventually erupt into the First World War. Encompassing the native lands of diverse peoples in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire was the epicenter of ethnic clashes: it was Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, that precipitated the start of the Great War. It was into this volatile environment that Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus first spread its wings, only seven years after the adoption of the new constitution that hastened the end of the House of Habsburg’s power.

First performed on 5 April 1874, in Vienna’s famed Theater an der Wien, where not only several of Strauss’s operettas but also Beethoven’s Leonore—the earliest incarnation of Fidelio—and Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe received their premières, Die Fledermaus was immediately acclaimed by audiences as a masterpiece of the Viennese operetta genre. By the time that Die Fledermaus reached the stage, the forty-eight-year-old Strauss had been celebrated as a composer for three decades. Continuing his short-lived father’s espousal of the waltz, Strauss had by 1874 come to represent the musical life of Vienna, both in Austria-Hungary and throughout the world. All of Europe danced to his polkas and waltzes, but the success of Die Fledermaus contributed markedly to Strauss’s global fame. Within months of its première, Die Fledermaus had been heard in a host of European cities and had even crossed the Atlantic, receiving its first performance in the United States in New York City on 21 November 1874.

With an uproarious plot drawn from Das Gefängnis, an 1851 comedy by the little-remembered playwright Julius Roderich Benedix that also inspired a once-popular comédie en vaudeville by Jacques Offenbach’s frequent librettists Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac, Die Fledermaus is a riotous romp through timeless themes, all of which ultimately involve affairs of the heart. With marital infidelity, mistaken identities, prison sentences, and grand theft timepiece transpiring in champagne-soaked three-quarter time, what could possibly go wrong? Showcasing the tremendous wealth of talent in the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Die Fledermaus confirmed that, in musical comedy, anything that can go wrong must go wrong—and when things go wrong as brilliantly as in this performance, how right it is!

Falling down on the job: baritone Robert Wells as Frosch in UNCG Opera Theatre’s October 2019 production of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus
[Photograph © by Amber-Rose Romero, Tamara Beliy, & UNCG Opera Theatre]

With UNCG’s Director of Opera David Holley at the helm, this production of Die Fledermaus was destined to be a show of which cast, crew, university, and community could be proud. Both in his rôle at UNCG and as Artistic Director of Greensboro Opera, Holley brings steadfast integrity to his work, but his staging of Die Fledermaus revealed anew that a vital component of his artistry is not taking himself too seriously. Supervising an entrancingly simple staging in which the action took place in front of the closed curtain, Holley genuinely participated in the performance, not merely as a conductor on the podium but also as an actor with perfect comedic timing. The production’s small scale lent this Fledermaus an intimacy that the score possesses but many stagings lack. Big budgets can buy lavish sets, extravagant costumes, and aggressively-promoted singers, but these expenditures do not guarantee success. The enthusiasm that Holley instilled in this Fledermaus, epitomized by unwavering musicality and clever humor, cannot be bought.

Under Holley’s baton, the excellent orchestra—pianists Anja Arko (Ouvertüre and Act One) and Xiaoxiong Chen (Acts Two and Three), flautist Janet Phillips, oboist Thomas Turanchik, clarinetist Darkson Magrinelli, double bassist Rebecca Marland, and percussionist Erik Schmidt—interacted with the drama rather than merely accompanying it. Fledermaus is a richly-orchestrated score, but not even in the famous Ouvertüre did the playing of UNCG Opera Theatre’s small instrumental ensemble disappoint. In fact, their numbers were perfectly matched with the dimensions of the production, transporting the audience to a chic Viennese café. A few suspect pitches and missed entrances notwithstanding, the musicians’ work was an integral part of the evening’s fun. Similarly, the choristers, drilled by the aptly-named Pingyi Song, sang with gusto—and with English diction that could be understood! Holley’s leadership ensured that every musical detail of the performance was as clear as the chiming of Einsenstein’s troublesome watch.

Warbling warden: baritone Guy Chambers as Frank in UNCG Opera Theatre’s October 2019 production of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus
[Photograph © by Amber-Rose Romero, Tamara Beliy, & UNCG Opera Theatre]

The rôle of Ivan, Prinz Orlovsky’s majordomo, is barely noticed in many productions, but he heightened the hilarity of Act Two in this Fledermaus in a wonderfully droll performance by bass Rafael Alejandro Garcia. Catering to the whims of the Prinz’s snobbish guests clearly inconvenienced this servant, a fact that Garcia communicated with rolled eyes and stony expressions of contempt and annoyance. It is a pity that a solo number was not invented for him, perhaps using music from another Strauss score and a purpose-written text: like Leporello in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, what stories he might tell! The master not to be outdone by a student, eminent baritone and UNCG faculty member Robert Wells’s much-lauded experience in the Gilbert and Sullivan Savoy operas was apparent in his scene-stealing turn as the chronically-inebriated jailer Frosch. This bumbling keeper of the keys was unquestionably an ancestor of Barney Fife: thankfully, his boss did not trust him with a pistol and a bullet. With an offstage assist from Alfred, Wells’s Frosch pantomimed Nemorino’s ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ from Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore better than some tenors sing it.

Partners in wine: baritone Guy Chambers as Frank (left) and tenor Sean Toso as Alfred (right) in UNCG Opera Theatre’s October 2019 production of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus
[Photograph © by Amber-Rose Romero, Tamara Beliy, & UNCG Opera Theatre]

Looking stunning in a sapphire-hued gown, Beijing-born soprano Mujun Xie sparkled, musically and dramatically, as Adele’s worldly sister Ida. Though she occasionally seemed uncomfortable with the English dialogue, her comfort with the music was conspicuous. Likewise, soprano Sophie Caplin coped handily with an awkward assignment. There is an established tradition of casting a tenor rather than a mezzo-soprano—or, in recent years, a countertenor—as Orlovsky, but it is far rarer to encounter a female singer as Eisenstein’s blissfully inept solicitor, Doktor Blind. Caplin made the most of Blind’s patter in the Act One trio with Rosalinde and Eistenstein, and she displayed expert comic acting in the put-upon attorney’s appearance in Act Three.

In his guises as the prison warden and his party-going alter ego Chevalier Chagrin, Frank received from baritone Guy Chambers a vibrant, vividly-sung characterization. Launching the trio in the Act One finale, when Frank arrives to convey Eisenstein to prison but, unbeknownst to himself and the absent Eisenstein, finds Rosalinde in the company of her would-be paramour, Chambers sang attractively. Fantastic as the not-quite-French Chevalier Chagrin in Act Two, the baritone managed to avoid being upstaged in Act Three, first with a bit of boisterous stage business involving the predictably incendiary results of falling asleep with a lit cigar and a newspaper and then with a touching suggestion of humility when his real identity as the plebeian warden was revealed to Adele and Ida. Chambers’s vivacious personality and his lovely, evenly-produced voice made Frank’s every moment on stage a delight.

The prince and the prankster: baritone Lorenze Sparks as Doktor Falke (left) and mezzo-soprano Lailey Bail as Prinz Orlovsky (right) in UNCG Opera Theatre’s October 2019 production of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus
[Photograph © by Amber-Rose Romero, Tamara Beliy, & UNCG Opera Theatre]

The aristocratic boost to her emergence as an actress that Adele sought from the fraudulent Chevalier was ultimately pledged with self-congratulatory magnanimity by the glamorously androgynous Prinz Orlovsky of mezzo-soprano Bailey Lail. Act Two is Orlovsky’s realm, and Lail crowned her portrayal of the petulant, avowedly hedonistic nobleman with a rousing account of the couplets in which the Priz articulates his anything-goes credo, ‘Chacun à son goût.’ Strauss’s writing for Orlovsky is often unwieldy, especially for modern singers with higher centers of vocal gravity than their Nineteenth-Century counterparts likely had, necessitating difficult changes of register. [The voice of the first Orlovsky, Irma Nittinger, was sufficiently unique that, when she fell ill, scheduled performances of Die Fledermaus at the Theater an der Wien in late Spring 1874 were postponed until she recovered in the autumn.] Lail navigated the rôle’s challenges with aplomb and verbal acuity, though the mandated Russian accent, here sounding as though the Prinz arrived in Vienna via Warsaw, distracted more than it entertained. To distort a conceit often repeated by this production’s Prinz, hearing one Orlovsky in no way equates with having heard all interpreters of the part, but Lail was an Orlovsky whose performance was a joy to hear.

Euphoniously opening Act One with a serenade of melting lyricism, tenor Sean Toso deployed an arsenal of hysterical Italian tenor mannerisms in his portrayal of Rosalinde’s ‘special friend’ Alfred, an obvious randy relation of the great Enrico Caruso. Eisenstein’s well-timed departure facilitating an impromptu assignation with his beloved, this Alfred eagerly began his pursuit of his amorous quarry. In the Act One finale, Toso voiced the Trinklied with the zeal of a man used to playing the lover on and off the stage. In addition to the sputtering ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ commandeered by Frosch, Toso’s Alfred enlivened his time in prison with a few bars from the Duca di Mantova’s ‘La donna è mobile,’ the Brindisi from La traviata, and Radamès’s ‘Celeste Aida,’ and seizing Rosalinde’s hand after her arrival at the jail offered an irresistible chance to sing the first phrase of Rodolfo’s ‘Che gelida manina.’ Toso sang all of these excerpts appealingly, but it was in his singing in the trio with Rosalinde and Eisenstein, the latter posing as Blind in an attempt to elicit a confession of wrongdoing from his wife and her lover, that the tenor’s affinity for musical comedy was most evident. The fervor of his Alfred’s wooing of Rosalinde and his impressive sampling of music from other scores whetted the appetite for hearing Toso in Romantic—and romantic—rôles.

No time for tidying: soprano Claire Griffin as Adele in UNCG Opera Theatre’s October 2019 production of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus
[Photograph © by Amber-Rose Romero, Tamara Beliy, & UNCG Opera Theatre]

Should anyone hear her cheerful banter and beguilingly ebullient music and think that the rôle of Rosalinde’s stagestruck maid Adele is an easy sing, considering the fact that the first note of the part is a top B should initiate a return to reality. Nevertheless, soprano Claire Griffin electrified UNCG Opera Theatre’s Fledermaus with an Adele so captivating that singing her demanding music seemed to be as natural as breathing. From her first entrance, reading the letter purportedly containing her sister’s exhortation to use the excuse of a sick aunt to procure an evening off in order to attend Orlovsky’s ball, this Adele had a solution for every problem. In the scene with Rosalinde and the subsequent trio with the chambermaid’s mistress and master, Griffin sang splendidly and animated the rôle with uninhibited antics that included exasperatedly perching herself on clarinetist Magrinelli’s knee whilst Rosalinde and Eisenstein exaggerated their sorrow at facing an eight-day separation. Adele’s couplets in the finale were dispatched with comedic flair worthy of Lucille Ball.

Orlovsky may be the most lascivious host in Vienna, but Griffin’s Adele was irrefutably the belle of the ball in Act Two. Initially the proverbial fish out of water, she quickly perceived that, whether their ranks and titles were real or fictitious, the people around her were inherently fake. Adele’s laughing song is one of the score’s best-loved numbers and on this evening fully earned that distinction. In Griffin’s performance, Adele’s couplets in Act Three were nothing short of a tour de force. Appropriating Holley’s baton, she literally became the director of her own show. Frank and Orlovsky were convinced of the viability of her theatrical abilities, and who could doubt the discernment of a warden and a prince? That Griffin accomplished such a dynamic characterization without even marginally sacrificing musical values exclaimed that she was born for a life upon the wicked stage—the operatic stage, that is.

Boys will be boys: tenor Michael Friedrich as Gabriel von Eisenstein (left) and baritone Lorenze Sparks as Doktor Falke (right) in UNCG Opera Theatre’s October 2019 production of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus
[Photograph © by Amber-Rose Romero, Tamara Beliy, & UNCG Opera Theatre]

Settling a score with Eisenstein, who abandoned him in the wee hours after a masquerade ball and left him in a public place to be discovered in a bat costume, it is Doktor Falke who organizes the events that propel the plot of Die Fledermaus, but the voices to which the part is entrusted sometimes fail to embody Falke’s importance in the operetta. This is a shortcoming of which UNCG Opera Theatre’s production cannot be accused, Falke having been brilliantly sung and acted in Greensboro by Lorenze Sparks. Falke is a rôle in which one of the foremost masters of Viennese operetta, Austrian bass-baritone Erich Kunz, was greatly acclaimed [he also recorded both Frank and Frosch], and the fact that Sparks’s performance often brought the wit of Kunz’s Falke to mind is indicative of the caliber of the young singer’s efforts.

His range hugging the divide between baritone and tenor, Sparks exhibited vocal assurance throughout the compass of Falke’s music, making his Act One duet with Eisenstein as effective musically as it was comedically. Sparks’s Falke was literally and figuratively the life of the party in Act Two, conspiring with Prinz Orlovsky to bring off his plans in memorable fashion and initiating the ‘Brüderlein und Schwesterlein’ canon with burnished vocalism. Claiming victory in the final act, this Falke rejoiced without overwrought gloating. Vocally and histrionically, Sparks’s performance wielded the complexities of an Austrian Sachertorte: decadent, layered, and filled with a concoction of contrasting sweetness and tartness, it was unforgettably delectable.

Keeping watch: soprano Tamara Beliy as Rosalinde (left) and baritone Michael Friedrich as Gabriel von Eisenstein (right) in UNCG Opera Theatre’s October 2019 production of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus
[Photograph © by Amber-Rose Romero, Tamara Beliy, & UNCG Opera Theatre]

Despite an extensive history of the music being sung honorably on stage and in recording studios by baritones, Strauss intended the rôle of Gabriel von Eisenstein, the butt of Doktor Falke’s retributory jest, for a tenor. In many instances, a tenor voice blends more pleasingly with his colleagues in ensembles, and a higher, brighter voice can give the errant husband a more youthful demeanor. Michael Friedrich’s performance in this Fledermaus was an example of a tenor Eisenstein who validated the composer’s choice of vocal range. Devilishly handsome, debonair, and as lithe as a Monty Python trouper, Friedrich’s impersonation of Eisenstein combined the slapstick shenanigans of the young Charlie Chaplin with the vocal elegance of Heddle Nash. Bemoaning the ineptitude of his counselor of record with the temper of a man sentenced to the gallows, he simultaneously sweet-talked Rosalinde and abused Doktor Blind in their Act One trio.

Prospects of champagne baths and frolicking ballerinas galvanized Friedrich’s singing in the duet with Falke, and he could not take his leave of his distracted wife and her meddling maid quickly enough. Like Chambers’s Chevalier Chagrin, Friedrich’s Marquis Renard was a ripping parody of a pretentious grand seigneur. Ensnared by his wife’s cunning, this Eisenstein reacted to the loss of his lady-baiting watch with comical tantrums and pouting. Reporting to serve his jail sentence only to find his cell occupied by a substitute Eisenstein, he was quick to recognize Alfred as a rival and to hypocritically denounce Rosalinde’s inconstancy. Mirroring Falke’s good-natured enjoyment of his revenge, Eisenstein accepted defeat and admitted his own culpability without bitterness. Never pushed beyond its natural lyricism, Friedrich’s voice was as seductive as his smile.

Lady of the house: soprano Tamara Beliy as Rosalinde in UNCG Opera Theatre’s October 2019 production of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus
[Photograph © by Amber-Rose Romero, Tamara Beliy, & UNCG Opera Theatre]

An imaginatively capricious Meg Page in UNCG Opera Theatre’s ambitious April 2019 production of Verdi’s Falstaff [reviewed here], soprano Tamara Beliy sang Rosalinde in Die Fledermaus with the same intelligence, forthrightness, and musical resourcefulness that characterized her portrayal of the merry wife of Windsor. In the scene with Adele in Act One, Beliy’s Rosalinde was the personification of domestic malaise, so lost in her own thoughts that Adele’s pleading for an evening’s holiday went unheard. The top Bs in the trio with Eisenstein and Doktor Blind rang out imposingly. Here and in the trio with Adele and Eisenstein, there was no confusion about whose will was dominant, chez von Eisenstein. Beautiful of visage, figure, and, most importantly, voice, Beliy gave Rosalinde an aura of cinematic enchantment.

Shocked to meet her husband at Orlovsky’s ball when he is supposed to be serving his jail sentence, this Rosalinde’s composure was only momentarily upset, but Beliy’s vocal control was never compromised. Toying with Eisenstein as she contrived to secure evidence of his duplicity by depriving him of his watch, Rosalinde’s trills and top Bs were sung with the supremacy of a woman who knows that she has the upper hand. Beliy voiced the familiar Csárdás, in which Holley proved to be the rare conductor who did not reduce his Rosalinde to gasping and panicking with an impossibly quick tempo for the Frischka, with panache and persuasively-feigned patriotism, and her top D at the piece’s conclusion was considerably more substantial than the shrieks typically heard. The explosions of indignation in the Act Three trio with Alfred and Eisenstein were handled without resorting to vocal harshness. In some singers’ performances, Rosalinde’s better qualities are hidden behind a minxish façade, but Beliy’s Rosalinde was as sympathetic in anger as in jubilation. In this young soprano’s graceful, expressive singing, Rosalinde’s benevolent spirit was always discernible.

That Die Fledermaus was one of the first scores to be taken into a studio in the early years of sound recording reflects the special affection that audiences have long had for the piece. That 1907 recording omitted the Ouvertüre and much of the dialogue and imposed cuts on the vocal numbers, but these and its technological limitations do not lessen its value as a glimpse into the performance history of a cherished work then only thirty-three years past its world première. With decidedly modern theatrical sensibilities that suited the staging’s ethos, UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Die Fledermaus wrote its own chapter in the operetta’s history, replacing decades’ worth of accumulated artifice with earnest exuberance. Amidst the disconcerting events of the Twenty-First Century, laughter of the operatic variety is truly one of the best medicines.

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The second performance of UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Die Fledermaus featured Lilla Keith as Rosalinde, Amber-Rose Romero as Adele, Angela Farlow-Rumball as Doktor Blind, Jenna Fife as Ida, Abigail Coy as Prinz Orlovsky, and Forrest Bunter as Frank. Other rôles were performed by the artists who appeared in the 24 October performance. Regrettably, I was unable to attend Saturday’s performance.