Serving bliss by the slice: Floozies Pie Shop in Louisa, Virginia
[Photograph by the author]

Is any of life’s most essential necessities more inherently operatic than food? Politics and sports are divisive, but disputes regarding particular singers and souflé recipes are the stuff of fisticuffs and irreparable rifts.

Nearly a year after COVID-19 infections were first reported in the United States, cinemas, opera houses, theaters, and performance venues of all sizes remain closed or restricted to operating with reduced capacities. The resilience of Art is undiminished, but the lives of many artists continue to be direly impacted by the ravages of a virus that has affirmed the importance of togetherness by imposing separation.

Culinary artists are also fighting for their own survival and for the solvency of the projects to which they have dedicated their studies, their time, and their savings. Among countless independent businesses adapting to the unprecedented challenges of COVID-19, sister eateries Obrigado Restaurant and Floozies Pie Shop in quaint Louisa, Virginia, approach enduring a pandemic with a chef’s indomitable spirit: adjusting quantities, making substitutions when warranted, capitalizing on successes, and learning from failures, fiscal ingenuity has become an invaluable recipe, perpetually tested and tweaked.

Commonwealth cuisine: Obrigado Restaurant in Louisa, Virginia
[Photograph by the author]

Located at 109 West Main Street in downtown Louisa, directly opposite Louisa County’s historic 1905 Courthouse, Obrigado and Floozies bring sophisticated, cosmopolitan cuisine and ambience to an idyllic rural setting within two-hour drives from Charlottesville, Fredericksburg, Richmond, and Washington, DC. Focusing on creating flavorful combinations of responsibly-sourced ingredients that both honor Virginia’s heritage and assimilate global influences, Obrigado offers a vibrant, welcoming space in which buttermilk biscuits and bouillabaisse might be found unpretentiously sharing the spotlight. [The Spanish capital lacks the flair for preparing the dish that coastal towns wield, but paellas enjoyed by the author at Obrigado were superior in composition, preparation, presentation, and, above all, taste to those consumed in Madrid.]

Next door, Floozies prepares pies, cakes, and pastries that infuse the virtuosity of a Parisian patisserie with the soul of a Southern grandmother’s kitchen. Asking which Floozies pie is most recommendable is as futile as asking whether Verdi or Wagner is the better composer of opera. In truth, Il trovatore and Tannhäuser benefit equally from an accompaniment of pie.

Proximity to the shores of beautiful Lake Anna and the Washington metropolitan area makes ordering food and desserts from Obrigado and Floozies ideal for COVID-weary day-trippers seeking respite from suburbia. Even in the winter months, nature lovers can enjoy waterside picnics in the comfort of their cars, safely savoring restorative vistas and unforgettable food.

Neighbor of Floozies: Louisa County Courthouse in Louisa, Virginia
[Photograph by the author]

Like many small businesses, Obrigado and Floozies have been greatly affected by COVID-19. Limits on indoor dining capacities, fluctuating prices and availability of ingredients, strict adherence to sanitation protocols, and total commitment to maintaining relaxed but safe environments for patrons and staff have resulted in modified service hours and menus. Nonetheless, Obrigado and Floozies are open, serving, accepting to-go orders, and tirelessly exploring new opportunities to engage and nourish their community.

Please support those initiatives by planning a hiatus from fast-food drive-throughs and tired take-aways. A drive into the countryside for a date with Floozies will leave every quarantine-fatigued foodie saying, ‘Obrigado!’ Talking with a mouth filled with pie is impolite, even during a pandemic, however.

Louisa is easily accessible from Virginia’s major metropolitan areas
via Interstates 64 and 95.

For more information about menus, hours of operation, and special events,
please visit Obrigado’s and Floozies’s websites.
Please also like and share Obrigado and Floozies on Facebook.

UMBERTO GIORDANO (1867 – 1948): Fedora— Michelle Johnson (Principessa Fedora Romazoff), Jeremy Brauner (Conte Loris Ipanoff), Marcelo Guzzo (De Siriex), Maria Brea (Contessa Olga Sukarev), Samuel White (Desiré), Eugenia Forteza (Dimitri), Rubin Casas (Grech), Michael Gracco (Lorek), Brian Montgomery (Cirillo), Jordan Weatherston Pitts (Barone Rouvel), Rick Agster (Boroff), Kinneret Ely (Un piccolo savoiardo), Pavel Suliandziga (Sergio), William Desbiens (Nicola); Ezio Pelliteri, accordion; Israel Gursky, piano and conductor [Malena Dayen, director; Jon DeGaetano, lighting designer; Matthew Deinhart, assistant lighting designer; Sangmin Chae, projections; Enrico Venrice, editing; Nicole Russell, assistant conductor; Streamed performance by Teatro Grattacielo, filmed at Tagret Margin Theater, Brooklyn, New York, USA, in October 2020]

Use of only ingredients of the highest quality does not transform an indifferent cook into a Michelin-starred chef. Similarly, utilizing superlative components in the making of an opera guarantees neither the resulting score’s merit nor its success. Opera’s history abounds with accounts of the failures of many pieces with plots drawn from the revered pages of Virgil, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and other literary illuminati, but works like Berlioz’s Les Troyens, Verdi’s Macbeth and Otello, and Massenet’s Werther reveal what delicacies can emerge from musical minds when they are enticed by words worthy of their melodies.

From the first printings of his early poetry and his 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris, still one of the most familiar novels of the Nineteenth Century, Victor Hugo influenced French culture and global perceptions thereof to an extent that few of his fellow writers have approached. Three years before Hugo’s death in 1885, the vibrant Parisian theatrical community was enchanted by the much-discussed actress Sarah Bernhardt’s first performance of the title rôle in a new play by Victorien Sardou, whose work had already been before the public with varying degrees of acceptance for three decades. Their 1882 collaboration, Fédora, solidified an alliance that produced a progression of new plays including La Tosca and Madame Sans-Gêne via which Sardou and Bernhardt would challenge Hugo’s dominance—and, in the inspiration of operatic adaptations of their creations, surpass it.

The appeal of Sardou’s gritty realism extended beyond France’s borders, spilling over the Alps and into Italy’s operatic centers. In Milan, the allure of Bernhardt’s passionate Fédora fascinated the thirty-year-old Umberto Giordano, who sought a subject for a new work to match the success of his 1896 opera Andrea Chénier. Employing a libretto by Arturo Colautti that preserved the vivid melodrama of Sardou’s play, Giordano’s Fedora premièred on 17 November 1898, in Milan’s Teatro Lirico, a prestigious theater that also hosted the début performances of operas by Antonio Salieri, Gaetano Donizetti, and Ruggero Leoncavallo. The reception that Fedora garnered in Italy rivaled that received by Fédora in Paris, the widespread but short-lived popularity of Giordano’s opera, alongside the brief notoriety of the composer’s later setting of Madame Sans-Gêne and the enduring prominence of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca in the international repertory, securing Sardou’s place amongst literature’s most fecund sources of operatic fodder.

Pining to reclaim some incarnation of normalcy during the COVID-19 pandemic has spurred extraordinary ingenuity in the Performing Arts community. With countless performances having been cancelled in accordance with efforts to protect vulnerable populations from the virus, opera companies have adapted their initiatives to the same technologies that allowed businesses and schools to function remotely, uniting artists with audiences via innovative media. Never content to bow to convention even during the best of times, New York’s Teatro Grattacielo collaborated with Camerata Bardi Vocal Academy to mold a streamed production of Giordano’s Fedora into a momentous experience that both transcended the inherent detachment of the medium and recreated the visceral melodrama of Sardou’s play and Giordano’s still-under-appreciated score with greater immediacy than many lavish stagings with full orchestras and on-site audiences manage to engender.

Gli ospiti al ballo: (from left to right) baritone Marcelo Guzzo as De Siriex, soprano Maria Brea as Olga, bass Rick Agster as Boroff, tenor Jordan Weatherston Pitts as Barone Rouvel, tenor Jeremy Brauner as Loris, and soprano Michelle Johnson as Fedora in Teatro Grattacielo’s streamed production of Umberto Giordano’s Fedora, December 2020
[Image © by Teatro Grattacielo]

Performing Fedora with minimalistic scenic designs and singers donning formal attire proved wholly effective in rendering the three disparate settings for the action, the slain Vladimiro’s St. Petersburg palace in Act One, Fedora’s Paris salon in Act Two, and the princess’s Swiss villa in Act Three. Allied with the evocative work of lighting designer Jon DeGaetano and assistant lighting designer Matthew Deinhart, media artist Sangmin Chae’s projections unobtrusively created apt visual atmospheres in which interactions among characters were always the central focus. Capitalizing on the intimacy of the production’s filmed format, Malena Dayen’s direction lent the opera’s action uncommon clarity: regardless of the number of singers on screen and the sameness of their dress, the individual identities of the characters singing and the significance of their utterances were consistently apparent.

Particularly in opulent stagings, the profoundly personal nature of Fedora’s exchanges with Loris amidst the hubbub of Act Two is sometimes obscured, but Teatro Grattacielo’s Fedora elucidated every conflicted emotion and convoluted detail of the opera’s political backstory. A good Fedora brings the implausible plot to life: this Fedora intelligently and engagingly brought the realities of life during a pandemic to a century-old opera, the psychological implications of isolation, suspicion, and loss suffered in lockdown manifested in an eloquent realization of Giordano’s score.

Rather than adapting Giordano’s score for performance by a number of musicians that would have complied with restrictions on mass gatherings, Teatro Grattacielo’s Fedora partnered the singers with the dexterous pianism of conductor Israel Gursky—a sensible decision, as a substantial portion of Act Two is accompanied according to the composer’s instructions by a pianist portraying Boleslao Lazinski, a fictitious ‘nephew of Chopin.’ Hearing the full score played on the piano highlighted the influence of Chopin on Giordano’s music, particularly the Polacca and Notturno in Act Two. Gursky played the opera’s Andante mosso opening bars with elegance that evolved first into playfulness and later into desperation and grief as Act One progressed. The performance of the Act Two intermezzo was radiant, its reprise of the theme of Ipanoff’s ‘Amor ti vieta’ phrased with fervor. Complemented in Act Three by the marvelous performance of accordionist Ezio Pelliteri and aided throughout the opera by assistant conductor Nicole Russell, Gursky shaped a fittingly fervent but sensitive traversal of Giordano’s score.

Under the leadership of Artistic Director Stefanos Koroneos, Teatro Grattacielo assembled a sterling company of artists for this Fedora, both perpetuating the company’s legacy of savvy casting and demonstrating that present hardships have only galvanized musicians’ dedication to their craft. The brief song of the piccolo savoiardo in Act Three exemplified this spirit of reawakening, the lines voiced with an apt aura of bright-toned innocence by soprano Kinneret Ely that contrasted tellingly with mezzo-soprano Eugenia Forteza’s urgent singing of the traumatized Dimitri’s responses to Fedora’s interrogation in Act One. Tenors Samuel White and Pavel Suliandziga and baritone William Desbiens projected surprising individuality in their strongly-sung portrayals of Desiré, Sergio, and Nicola, and the Lorek and Grech of baritone Michael Gracco and bass-baritone Rubin Casas were similarly enlivened by insightful vocal acting. Baritone Brian Montgomery delivered Cirillo’s lament for his slain patron wrenchingly but with welcome—and rare—restraint, and tenor Jordan Weatherston Pitts and bass Rick Agster made much of Rouvel’s and Boroff’s few words, drawing impetus for their vocal colorations from the text.

La contessa capricciosa: soprano Maria Brea as Olga in Teatro Grattacielo’s streamed production of Umberto Giordano’s Fedora, December 2020
[Image © by Teatro Grattacielo]

Giordano’s music for the spirited Contessa Olga Sukarev was sung with elegance, tonal beauty, and an apt air of hauteur by soprano Maria Brea. From her first lines at Fedora’s soirée in Act Two, this was indisputably a countess who travelled in the most exclusive social circles and was accustomed to ensuring that she remains the belle of every ball. Brea sang ‘Io sono il capriccio leggero, veloce’ delightfully, contrasting with the gravitas of Fedora’s exchanges with Loris precisely as Giordano intended and producing her top As with youthful ebullience. Reacting to De Siriex’s commentary on Russian womanhood, her account of ‘Il parigino è come il vino’ was a good-natured but barbed rejoinder. Brea also lent fleeting moments of levity to Act Three, punctuating her impassioned voicing of ‘Sempre io stesso verde!’ with a shimmering top B and continuing Olga’s contest of wits with De Siriex with flippant conviction. Despite the limits on opportunities to act the rôle imposed by the pandemic, Brea’s characterization of the vivacious countess lacked nothing, the voice and the singer’s innate theatricality rendering stage antics and glittering costumes unnecessary.

La voce della legge: baritone Marcelo Guzzo as De Siriex in Teatro Grattacielo’s streamed production of Umberto Giordano’s Fedora, December 2020
[Image © by Teatro Grattacielo]

Baritone Marcelo Guzzo was a De Siriex whose burnished, imposing vocalism matched his debonair diplomacy. Subtly commandeering the questioning of the wounded Vladimiro’s servants whilst also comforting and reassuring the devastated Fedora in Act One, Guzzo’s De Siriex sang and acted forcefully. Though it is seldom included in baritones’ recital and recording repertoires, De Siriex’s aria in Act Two, ‘La donna russa è femmina due volte,’ is one of Fedora’s few easily-excerpted numbers, and Guzzo’s undaunted mastery of its quicksilver rhythms and troublesome tessitura exuding irrepressible vitality. This De Siriex neither gloated nor goaded in his conversations with Fedora, relaying rather than sensationalizing the news of the deaths of Ipanoff’s mother and brother, for which Fedora’s accusation of her lover as her fiancé’s murderer was the catalyst. His vivid sparring with Olga in Act Three revealed impishness, jovially rendering the flirtatious rapport between the decorous diplomat and the coy countess. Guzzo voiced ‘Fatevi cor contessa!’ and ‘Lui! Cadde per l’empia sua crudeltà’ with obvious cognizance of the literal and suggestive meanings of the words. Throughout the performance, the baritone’s intelligible diction heightened the refinement of his depiction of De Siriex, but the character benefited most from Guzzo’s superb singing.

L’amante e l’assassino: tenor Jeremy Brauner as Loris in Teatro Grattacielo’s streamed production of Umberto Giordano’s Fedora, December 2020
[Image © by Teatro Grattacielo]

Like Wagner’s Isolde, the titular heroine of Fedora ultimately falls in love with the object of her pursuit of vengeance, the man responsible for the death of her betrothed, though no sorcery facilitates Fedora’s romantic attraction to the brooding Loris Ipanoff. The rôle of Loris was entrusted in the first production of Fedora to Enrico Caruso, who recorded the character’s famous aria with the composer at the piano four years after the opera’s première. This established a benchmark to which tenors’ performances continue to be compared. Following the examples of singers including Ramón Vinay, Carlo Bergonzi, and Plácido Domingo, Teatro Grattacielo’s Loris, Jeremy Brauner, started his vocal studies as a baritone and later transitioned to singing tenor rôles. There were subtle reverberations of his baritonal origins in his performance of Ipanoff’s music, as well as propitious reminders not only of Caruso but of other noted interpreters of Loris, namely Bruno Prevedi and Giuseppe Giacomini.

Brauner’s first appearance in Act Two made Ipanoff’s absence from the opera’s first act regrettable, his robust vocalism immediately raising the temperature of the performance’s simmering verismo. Wooing his Fedora with the Andante cantabile aria ‘Amor ti vieta di non amar,’ sung in recitals and concerts by virtually every tenor active since Fedora’s première, Brauner advanced Loris’s suit with ardor and a fine top A. The plangency of his singing of ‘Mia madre, la mia vecchia madre’ and ‘Vedi, io piango’ garnered the listener’s empathy as ably as it captivated Fedora’s heart.

The metamorphosis of Ipanoff from grieving son and brother to betrayed and ultimately despairing lover in Act Three sometimes elicits over-emphatic vocalism that obfuscates the wronged count’s vulnerability. Brauner’s singing never lacked power, but his characterization also limned the part’s poignant nuances. There was no artifice in his articulation of ‘O bianca madre, o buon fratello,’ Ipanoff’s anguish conveyed with affecting sincerity, and his brilliant top B♭ escalated the expressive urgency of his delivery of ‘Son qui, vicino a te.’ Brauner’s tone occasionally hardened in moments of duress, but his intonation was admirably secure throughout the range. In some performances, Loris is little more than a cipher with a famous aria: Brauner’s Ipanoff was a worthy quarry for his Fedora and a fully-formed character in his own right.

La bella principessa: soprano Michelle Johnson as Fedora in Teatro Grattacielo’s streamed production of Umberto Giordano’s Fedora, December 2020
[Image © by Teatro Grattacielo]

In addition to creating the title rôle in Fedora, soprano Gemma Bellincioni was the first interpreter of Santuzza in Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and sang the eponymous spitfire in the Italian première of Richard Strauss’s Salome. First recorded in studio by Gilda dalla Rizza, considered by Puccini to be the ideal Minnie in his La fanciulla del West, Fedora has attracted sopranos—and a few brave mezzo-sopranos—with vastly different vocal endowments. No Fedora is more renowned than Maria Callas, whose 1956 portrayal at La Scala is rumored to have been documented on recordings that have never materialized, but no one is more closely associated with the rôle than Magda Olivero. There has been no other voice like Olivero’s, and her histrionic gifts were equally unique. Nevertheless, her Fedora is a model for fellow interpreters of the part, her shadow over the opera extending even longer than Caruso’s.

A successful Fedora might seek to emulate certain aspects of Olivero’s interpretation but must recognize that Olivero was inimitable. The foremost success of this production’s Fedora, soprano Michelle Johnson, was her intuitive formation of a portrayal of the dangerous but delicate princess that, like Olivero’s, honored Sardou and Giordano. It was especially gratifying to hear a singer at the height of her abilities as Fedora, the rôle so often being assigned to singers in the latter days of their careers, when the music’s demands, marginally narrower in compass and arguably less strenuous than those of Puccini’s heroines, mitigate reduced vocal resources. Johnson’s singing was commendably and often exuberantly free of compromise: the rôle was in the voice and performed with unflappable confidence.

Arriving at Vladimiro’s estate to assume her place as his intended bride in Act One, Johnson’s Fedora was discernibly a woman of a certain age, unquestionably in love with her betrothed but also enchanted by the prospect of being loved. Her statements to Vladimiro’s servants were genially imperious, but Fedora’s inner fragility was revealed in Johnson’s dulcet voicing of the beautiful Andantino espressivo ‘O grandi occhi lucenti di fede,’ her top A imparting the depth of Fedora’s affection. The simplicity of her singing of ‘Mio dolce Vladimiro! Sogno d’amor, di pace, di poesia!’ realized the full expressive potential of the music. As the gravity of Vladimiro’s condition became apparent, the change in Johnson’s demeanor was unmistakable, her Fedora’s amorous femininity acquiescing to primal ferocity as she probed Vladimiro’s household for information about his attack. Vowing to have justice, this Fedora’s ‘Su questa santa croce, ricordo di mia madre’ was genuinely moving, the soprano’s performance disclosing the shattered bond between Fedora’s happiness and her love for Vladimiro.

Johnson’s acting skills shone in Act Two, in which Fedora sets a trap for Ipanoff but ensnares herself when she falls in love with him. The magnitude of Fedora’s true objectives was apparent despite her feigned insouciance in the revelers’ company, her pursuit of Loris driven by verbal acuity and vocal potency. Reticence was audible in ‘Lascia che pianga io sola,’ the fractures in Fedora’s steely resolve widening into charms as she succumbed to her burgeoning love. Johnson thrillingly accepted Giordano’s challenge of an optional top C in the expansive duet with Loris, her voice soaring in ecstasy.

The caliber of Johnson’s artistry was confirmed in Fedora’s scene with De Siriex in Act Three. Learning that her implication of Loris in Vladimiro's assassination led to the deaths of Ipanoff’s brother and mother, Johnson’s Fedora was overwhelmed by the consequences of her actions. The soprano’s command of line yielded a stirring account of ‘Dio di giustizia, che col santo ciglio,’ but Johnson achieved still greater heights of operatic expression with her ruminative singing of ‘Se quella sciagurata perdutamente avesse amato Vladimiro?’ and ‘Se quell’infelice qui stesse ai tuoi piedi.’ The voluptuous voice reduced to a thread of emotion in the authentic Olivero fashion, Johnson enunciated ‘Tutto tramonta...tutto dilegua’ with harrowing earnestness. Dramatically, Johnson offered a fascinatingly complete portrait of Fedora. Vocally, she sang the rôle with an assurance that is now seldom heard in performances of verismo repertoire.

Combatting COVID-19 has altered perspectives on art and artists’ practices, the necessity of avoiding gathering for performances accentuating the desire for shared artistic experiences. There is no adequate substitute for sitting shoulder to shoulder with friends and strangers in a theater, not merely hearing but feeling voices rise above an orchestra, but Teatro Grattacielo’s streamed production of Fedora was an act of sustenance, not one of surrogacy. Its musical integrity and dramatic values overcoming the limitations of its genesis, this Fedora reaffirmed that opera thrives on—and in—strife.

Heil, göttliche Weib: mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig (1928 – 2021) as Fricka in Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre at The Metropolitan Opera in 1967
[Photograph by Louis Mélançon, © by The Metropolitan Opera]

Perhaps the most fascinating quality of the human voice is its variety. The basic timbres of all voices are inherently different, but the timbre of a single voice is also perceived differently by every listener. The mechanics of a voice’s journey from singer to hearer are governed by physics, but it is in the differences of hearers’ reactions to the sounds that Art dwells. Arguably, the greatest artists are rarely those whose voices please the most listeners: rather, it is often a voice that unites audiences in division that demonstrates artistry of the highest order.

Only amongst those who envied her gifts was Christa Ludwig a divisive artist. Unlike the voices of Maria Callas and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, alongside whom she participated in much-discussed recordings, Ludwig’s voice was universally acknowledged as an extraordinary instrument, one with which the singer could compellingly portray the seductive allure of Carmen and Venus, the blackguard viciousness of Ortrud, and the gleeful malevolence of Humperdinck’s Knusperhexe. The hallmark of Ludwig’s artistry was an uncanny affinity for discerning and communicating the meanings of text within music. In her performances, a Brahms Lied received the same depths of concentration and commitment to verbal incisiveness that she lavished on a Bach Passion, a Wagner opera, or a Mahler symphony. The intrinsic caliber of her vocalism was seldom questioned, even by listeners to whom her timbre did not appeal, but it is still possible long after her retirement from the stage to discover—and debate—new virtues and nuances in her performances. Was her Fricka more an offended goddess, condemning those who defied her dictates, or a wronged wife whose actions disclosed gnawing vulnerability? Was her Waltraute a loving but terrified sister or a stalwart defender of the status quo?

Ludwig’s career is documented too extensively to require further commentary, but her talents merit celebration. Fusing a meticulously-honed technique that enabled her to master the intricacies of Händel’s music for Cornelia in Giulio Cesare and the very different demands of Mozart’s Cherubino, Donna Elvira, and Dorabella with vocal compass, power, and security that brought Richard Strauss’s Marschallin, Ariadne, and Färberin within her grasp, she embodied the stylistic versatility expected of singers since World War Two. Crucially, however, wisdom arising from self-cognizance prevailed throughout Ludwig’s career. Though she sang Beethoven’s Leonore, Verdi’s Lady Macbeth, and Strauss rôles with tremendous success and included music for Brünnhilde and Isolde in concerts, she withdrew from an engagement to sing Brünnhilde in a Salzburg production of Siegfried and declined invitations to sing Isolde and other soprano rôles deemed likely to damage her voice. Words shaped her interpretations, and her technique was built upon a foundation of breath support that placed words in the voice, not merely as syllables conveyed by notes but also as thoughts borne by subtleties of phrasing.

Les amants réticents: mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig (1928 – 2021) as Charlotte (right) and tenor Franco Corelli as the title character (left) in Jules Massenet’s Werther at The Metropolitan Opera in 1971
[Photograph attributed to Louis Mélançon, © by The Metropolitan Opera]

For this admirer, Ludwig’s achievements as a singer and an artist are epitomized by her 1965 recording of Franz Schubert’s Lied ‘Der Hirt auf dem Felsen’ (D. 965) with clarinetist Gervase de Peyer and pianist Geoffrey Parsons. Ludwig’s voice almost certainly bore little resemblance to that of Anna Milder-Hauptmann, the soprano for whom Schubert composed the song, the range of which extends across two octaves to B₅, and the sentiments of Wilhelm Müller’s and Helmina von Chézy’s texts, though vivid, are simplistic when compared to the complex emotions found in Ludwig’s operatic portrayals. The mezzo-soprano’s formidable legato casts an irresistible spell in the song’s opening Andantino section, but the characteristic voluptuousness of the voice does not inhibit her dexterous delivery of the Allegretto’s bravura passages. The emphasis on textual refinement is that of a great Lieder singer. The expansive cantabile singing is that of an accomplished mistress of bel canto. The top B is that of a vocalist with absolute control over her instrument. It is indisputably, inimitably, and indellibly the work of Christa Ludwig.

JEFFREY HOLMES (born 1971): Rider of Darkness, Path of Light— Kirsten Ashley Wiest, soprano; Nicholas Isherwood, bass-baritone; Jason Hardink and Mark Robson, piano; Talea Ensemble; David Fulmer and Jeffrey Holmes, conductors [MicroFest Records M•F 15; 1 CD, 69:29; Available from MicroFest Records, Amazon (USA), and major music retailers]

Nearly seventy years after the death of trailblazing American composer Charles Ives, fear and suspicion of microtonality in Classical Music persist, particularly among artists and institutions of his native country. The earnest efforts of musicians active in many genres to promote appreciation of the uses of microintervals and alternate tonalities in diverse cultures have increased awareness but fostered sadly little progress towards widespread acceptance of modes of sonic expression that deviate from Western praxes. There is no shame in loving a Schubert melody or a Puccini phrase above all else, but innumerable beauties exist outside of the boundaries of traditional harmonies, yearning for discovery. There is also no shame in acknowledging the limits of one’s knowledge and experience by seeking new opportunities for musical exploration. Admittedly, venturing into the uncharted territory of new music can be daunting. As when visiting an unknown place for the first time, informed guidance immeasurably enriches the initial exposure.

New music offers few guided excursions into intriguing sonic environments as viscerally exciting and thought-provoking as Rider of Darkness, Path of Light, MicroFest Records’ artfully-engineered recording of works by American composer Jeffrey Holmes. The compositional voice that emerges in the pieces on this disc is one of astonishing originality. Eschewing the neo-Romantic and post-Modernist trends in Twenty-First-Century music, Holmes crafts aural tableaux in which juxtapositions of rhythmic and tonal intervals replace conventional interplay of melody and harmony. Holmes’s work is intrinsically interactive, spurring the listener to seek distinctive melodies in the undulating progressions of sound rather than presenting finite, unchanging tunes that require no engagement.

Holmes shares with Monteverdi, Händel, and Brahms an acute faculty for capitalizing on suspensions of time in his music. Wells of emotion fill as tones clash and cajole until they overflow, the deluges of feeling appearing like rays of sunlight penetrating oppressive skies, eternal but often gone in an instant. In all of the performances on this disc, Holmes’s music challenges artists and listeners alike, demanding not just to be performed and heard but to be felt. These works reveal that it is not solely in the biological sense that Holmes is a living composer. His artistry exhibits uncommon cognizance of the fact that, when performed and heard anew, all music, whether centuries or seconds old, is a living, evolving organism.

The instrumental pieces on Rider of Darkness, Path of Light disclose a Ravelian affinity for casting instruments’ timbres as characters in musical dramas, the interactions of each instrument with its brethren and its own varied tones shaping convoluted, sometimes almost contrapuntal dialogues. Conducted by David Fulmer with discernible comprehension of the music’s complementary complexities and simplicities, the musicians of Talea Ensemble—Barry Crawford (flute and piccolo), Stuart Breczinski (oboe and English horn), Marianne Gythfeldt (contrabass and piccolo clarinets), John Gattis (horn), Matthew Gold (percussion), Alex Lipowski (percussion), Lauren Cauley (violin), Elizabeth Weisser (viola), Chris Gross (’cello), and Greg Chudzik (double bass)—achieve a performance of Hagall [Haglaz– Hail] that seems to reduce its twenty minutes to mere moments.

Nature’s irrepressible fury rattles and rages in the music, but it is here the bringer of vital rejuvenation, not of indiscriminate destruction. Holmes’s writing for percussion is aptly raucous, but the skill with which he interweaves instrumental textures, especially those of the woodwinds, is captivating; even delicate. The Western canon includes many musical depictions of natural phenomena, but, performed on this disc with bracing immediacy, Hagall is an expressive phenomenon in its own right rather than an Impressionistic representation of external forces.

With Thund [Thundering Waters], Holmes proves that, like Liszt and Brahms, his imagination is as stimulated by the capabilities of the piano as by those of an instrumental ensemble. Pianist Jason Hardink offers a forceful rendering of the piece, his technique equal to the music’s formidable requirements. The virtuosity of his playing dazzles, but the sensitivity of his performance manifests the work’s prevailing ethos, limning the intangible sensations of chaos. The defining characteristic of Holmes’s compositional idiom in Thund is a perceptive use of jagged intervals that spur and then defy the listener’s expectations. Hardink’s shrewd phrasing energizes the music’s air of spontaneity, reflecting the reliable unpredictability of nature that is so integral an inspiration of the composer’s cunning.

As paired on this disc, the striking contrasts between a bass-baritone’s sepulchral tones in Urðarmána and a soprano’s brilliant upper register in Myrkriða, Ljósleiðà conjure images of the eerily symbiotic fire and frost of Icelandic landscapes. Utilizing evocative texts in Old Norse, largely of his own composition, Holmes forges—and the use of present tense is in this instance not a matter of semantics, as these are pieces that regenerate their sonic atmospheres anew and differently in each hearing—linguistic and metaphysical contexts that, befitting consequential works of art, are simultaneously unique and universal. The composer’s writing for voices is undeniably punishing for the singers, not least in its unrelenting traversals of their full ranges, yet this is never music that exploits vocal prowess for garish effects. The music’s poignant potency arises from Holmes’s unmistakably personal response to the narrative trajectories of the words.

Fittingly, the cornerstone of bass-baritone Nicholas Isherwood’s performance of Urðarmána [Moon of Fate] is incendiary singing that draws its heat from the text. As psychologically exacting as Philippe’s ‘Elle ne m’aime pas’ in Verdi’s Don Carlos and Wotans Abschied in Act Three of Wagner’s Die Walküre, Holmes’s music takes the voice to the brink of duress, but Isherwood sounds most confident when the writing is least comfortable. Collaborative pianist Mark Robson’s intrepid playing supplies the fuel with which Isherwood ignites his interpretation. The partnership of singer and pianist conveys admirable sophistication, the brashness of their exchanges developing in certain passages into a shared quest for equilibrium similar in ethos to the scene in Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges in which, moved to pity, the wronged forest creatures aid the injured child who has tormented them. In the most tumultuous moments of this performance, Isherwood and Robson accentuate the compassion at the heart of Urðarmána.

As the intensity of its emotional journey suggests, Urðarmána is not a piece that can be politely or casually sung. The primordial vigor of Isherwood’s singing belies its innate elegance, but the cogency of his interpretation of Holmes’s music relies upon technical refinement. Cognizance and respect of the voice’s limitations permit Isherwood to take artistic risks. Similar boldness, facilitated by assured mastery of the music, permeates Robson’s pianism, the unflappable musicality of his playing ideally partnering with Isherwood’s singing. Neither the intricacies nor the extravagances of Urðarmána disrupt the poetic urgency of this performance, in which singer and pianist immerse themselves—and, via the sounds they engender, the listener—in the mesmerizing modulations of Holmes’s music.

Structured in fifteen brief episodes, Myrkriða, Ljósleiðá [Rider of Darkness, Path of Light] unites elements of the Lieder cycles of Schubert and Schumann with Twenty-First Century cinema’s non-linear storytelling. Framed by series of metamorphosing reprises of the ‘Myrkriða’(‘Rider of Darkness’) and ‘Ljósleiðá’ (‘Path of Light’) segments, the piece shares with Arnold Schönberg’s Erwartung an abiding aura of spiritual analysis. Here, Holmes’s music becomes the setting for an enthralling sonic peregrination through expressive expanses that at once seem unknown and familiar. From the first pulses of ‘Nátta’ (‘Night Falling’), the performances of Tara Schwab (flute and alto flute), Yuri Inoo (percussion), Michael Kudirka (guitar and additional percussion, and the composer, who conducts and contributes percussion, enkindle an ethereal tonal world in which rhythms echo the changing moods of the words.

The kinetic energy of ‘Dagan’ (‘Daybreak’) crackles through the instruments, and the vastly different sonorities of ‘Myðr Nótt’ (‘Middle of the Night’) and the entrancing ‘Haugaeldr’ (‘Grave Fire’) are projected with wrenching conviction. Dissipating the tension that builds in ‘Ótta’ (‘Last Part of the Night’) and ‘Myrkr’ (‘Darkness’), the progression of ‘Sjóborg’ (‘Sunset’), ‘Hljoðr’ (‘Silence’), and ‘Lykð/Upphaf’ (‘End/Beginning’) proposes an uncertain resolution that, like every aspect of this music’s exegesis, perpetuates the ambiguous synergy of sound and silence.

Throughout the mercurial transitions of Myrkriða, Ljósleiðá, soprano Kisten Ashley Wiest unflinchingly overcomes the hazards of Holmes’s vocal lines whilst also demonstrating her abilities as a percussionist. As a test of the security and stamina of a soprano’s voice, Myrkriða, Ljósleiðá has few rivals in music of any era, its tessitura recalling the treacherous compasses of the Controller in Jonathan Dove’s Flight and Ariel in Thomas Adès’s The Tempest. Holmes’s writing for the voice routinely incorporates craigy ascents above the stave that necessitate extraordinary control. Wiest sagaciously safeguards her vocal resources, unleashing columns of focused sound at climaxes but reserving her most pointed tones for gentler passages.

Myrkriða, Ljósleiðá is a work that cannot be approached without thorough preparation, but Wiest’s performance exhibits understanding that reaches far beyond knowledge of notes and words. There are moments in which harshness and stridency are audible in the soprano’s vocalism, but these invariably originate with the words: when the voice is pushed, it is in pursuit of fleeting expressive details of the text that are too important to be sung sweetly. Singing this piece proficiently is a notable feat. Insightfully and movingly evincing the profundity of its drama, as Wiest does in this performance, is a hallmark of preeminent artistry.

Too often, the barriers that prevent listeners from connecting with new music are their own prejudices. Kirsten Flagstad night have sung the Königin der Nacht’s arias more easily than a contemporary composer can vanquish a reluctant listener’s preconceptions, but the highest aim of Art is to elucidate humanity’s failings in ways that elicit contemplation. In music, this is achieved, in part, by successive generations of artists devising new methods of expression, not because existing traditions are inadequate but because perspectives and relationships alter with the passage of time. As represented by the pieces on this disc, all performed with passion and precision, imparting the inescapable transience of existence is a fundamental component of Jeffrey Holmes’s music. Biases condemn humanity to riding in darkness, but, this disc intimates, embracing Art that seeks new means of deciphering the universe’s enigmas offers a path to light.

GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL (1685 – 1759): Rodelinda, regina de’ Longobardi, HWV 19– Lucy Crowe (Rodelinda), Iestyn Davies (Bertarido), Joshua Ellicott (Grimoaldo), Brandon Cedel (Garibaldo), Jess Dandy (Eduige), Tim Mead (Unulfo); The English Concert; Harry Bicket, harpsichord and conductor [Recorded in St. John’s Smith Square, London, UK, 16 – 21 September 2020; Linn Records CKD 658; 3 CDs, 200:10; Available from Linn Records, Amazon (USA), Presto Music (UK), and major music retailers]

Few periods in human history are as universally associated with the work of a single artist as the first half-century of the United Kingdom’s Hanoverian dynasty is with the music of Georg Friedrich Händel. Just as the 1714 death of Queen Anne left the British throne without a direct-line occupant, the untimely demise of Henry Purcell in 1695 deprived English music of its foremost talent, initiating a time of transition during which there was no native-born composer whose gifts earned universal acceptance as those of Purcell’s rightful successor. The 1701 Act of Settlement that denied Catholic claimants a path to Britain’s crown by recognizing scions of the German-speaking Haus Hannover as Anne’s heirs presumptive was not concerned with culture, but its implications could not have affected music in England more profoundly.

When the Hanoverian Elector Georg Ludwig was crowned as Britain’s King George I on 20 October 1714, Georg Friedrich Händel—Georg Ludwig’s Kapellmeister in Hannover since 1710—was already familiar in the refined musical circles of the English capital, where his opera Rinaldo, the earliest known opera in Italian that was composed for performance in Britain, received a rapturous welcome in 1711. This good fortune and a favorable reception from England’s nobility persuaded Händel to relocate to London, where he quickly courted aristocratic and royal patronage, the latter initiated by a generous stipend awarded by Queen Anne. Five years after his former Hannoverian employer’s ascent to the British throne, the financial backing of a consortium of titled gentlemen and the issuance of letters patent by the crown enabled Händel to establish his first Royal Academy of Music, the institution via which the composer, who became a naturalized Englishman in 1727, dominated opera in the United Kingdom for a decade.

Händel was unquestionably an opportunist who realized that the most important rôle in any opera production is that of the guardian of the purse strings. Händel’s operas often contained scenes and characterizations that Eighteenth-Century Londoners could not have failed to identify as flattery designed to appeal to influential figures’ vanity. Fêted egos reliably yielding fiscal support, the Royal Academy’s stagings were frequently populated by crowned heads, martial heroes, and long-suffering spouses whose virtues mirrored those attributed to deep-pocketed pillars of English society.

For the Royal Academy’s first new offering of 1725, Händel selected a tale of a faithful wife and mother who, erroneously believing her husband to have perished in exile, is relentlessly pursued by a libidinous usurper whose villainy encompasses leveraging a child’s life. Adapting a libretto by Antonio Salvi that was set by Giacomo Antonio Perti in 1710, Nicola Francesco Haym provided Händel with a scenario rich in possibilities for celebrating the much-prized virtues of valor and uncompromising connubial fidelity. The quality of his music for Rodelinda, regina de’ Longobardi illustrates that, its potential for increasing the Royal Academy’s stature notwithstanding, this story of misadventures and perceived betrayals appealed deeply to the famously cantankerous Händel.

First performed at London’s King’s Theatre in the Haymarket on 13 February 1725, Rodelinda reached the stage only three-and-a-half months after the première of Tamerlano and slightly less than a year after the inaugural production of Giulio Cesare in Egitto. The success of Tamerlano in October 1724 was sufficient to convince Händel of the commercial viability and artistic perspicacity of entrusting the rôles in Rodelinda to the singers who created parts in Tamerlano. The titular queen of the Lombards and her absent consort were therefore first interpreted by two of Eighteenth-Century London’s most popular singers, soprano Francesca Cuzzoni and castrato Senesino, whose portrayals of Asteria and Andronico were vital components of Tamerlano’s triumph. The parts of the scheming Grimoaldo and Garibaldo were taken by Tamerlano’s Bajazet and Leone, Francesco Borosini and Giuseppe Maria Boschi, with Anna Vicenza Dotti and Andrea Pacini, the first Irene and Tamerlano, as Eduige and Unulfo. Händel’s strategy proved to be prescient: introduced by this ideally-qualified cast, Rodelinda became one of the Royal Academy’s longest-running and most-revived works.

Regrettably, Rodelinda has not been as fortunate on recordings as it was on the London stage in the years between its 1725 première and Händel’s death in 1759. A pioneering production of the opera in 1920 occasioned German radio performances of truncated versions of the score that now offer glimpses of how Baroque opera fared prior to the renewal of interest in historically-appropriate performance practices. Handel Opera Society’s 1959 performances at Sadler’s Wells featured singers of the proper registers in all rôles, the young Joan Sutherland and Janet Baker among them, but neither this nor the first complete studio recording in Italian—a lovely performance with particularly fine singing by Maureen Forrester and Helen Watts that has never been formally available on CD—takes full advantage of advances in scholarship. Despite the participation of an ensemble of renowned singers and the use of Haym’s Italian text, Sutherland’s egregiously-cut late-career studio effort is markedly less effective than the 1959 production, and subsequent audio and video recordings of varying provenance achieved greater authenticity without producing a Rodelinda of indisputable superiority.

Under the direction of Harry Bicket, whose rendering of the continuo is reliably propulsive but gratifyingly modest in when it could be distracting, Linn Records’ Rodelinda proves to be a rare recording without weaknesses in casting, conducting, or orchestral playing. Recording a complete opera whilst adhering to pandemic-imposed distancing protocols is a fearsome prospect, but the intimacy of many of the characters’ exchanges in Rodelinda make recording this opera in studio intimidating in the best of times. Aided by assistant engineer Rodrigo Leal del Ojo and the post-production work of Julia Thomas, Linn’s producer and engineer Philip Hobbs effectuated a recorded ambience in which Händel’s music drama plays out as in a staged performance but with clarity that is rarely possible in an opera house, details of text and instrumentation always audible but never unduly accentuated.

To a markedly greater degree than in many studio recordings of Baroque operas, rhythms in this Rodelinda unerringly follow the course of the drama, stirringly taut in scenes of confrontation and defiance and affectingly expansive when sorrow and regret inundate the music. Physical distance separated the English Concert musicians during recording sessions, but the precision of their ensemble playing discloses unvarying unity of purpose. Obbligati are reliably virtuosic but also congruous with the singers’ phrasing of corresponding vocal lines. The art of fruitful collaboration is an element of professional musicians’ training, yet the continuity of this Rodelinda indicates that the spirit of community demonstrated by these musicians in the making of this recording was not merely an act of professionalism.

Responding to Bicket’s intuitive handling of the score, a noteworthy accomplishment of which is the selection of tempi that are faithful to the composer and his characterizations, the instruments and their players become participants in the drama, their sounds interacting with the voices with a rapport expected in performances of music by Wagner and Richard Strauss but heard all too rarely in Händel’s operas. Months of isolation and cancelled performances perhaps fostered inwardness that nurtured the English Concert’s connections both with one another and with the music. Amidst its devastating losses, the pandemic was the catalyst for a superb Rodelinda.

In performances that heed his instructions and utilize uncut editions of his scores, there are virtually no inconsequential or thankless rôles in Händel’s operas. There are of course numerous instances in which music was written or rewritten to suit particular singers, but even these acts of musical necessity serve legitimate dramatic purposes within their proper contexts. In the context of this recording, the performance of the rôle of Bertarido’s loyal courtier Unulfo by countertenor Tim Mead contributes invaluably to the musical integrity of the English Concert’s Rodelinda.

Setting a standard that is matched by his colleagues, Mead’s declamation of secco recitatives is appropriately conversational, unwaveringly musical, and driven by clear, unexaggerated diction. His singing of Unulfo’s aria in Act One, ‘Sono i colpi della sorte per un’alma,’ reveals great affinity for capitalizing on the emotional undercurrents that flow through Händel’s vocal writing. The voice attractive and evenly-projected throughout the range, Mead’s technical assurance facilitates performances of the arias in Acts Two and Three, ‘Frà tempeste funeste a quest’alma’ and ‘Un zeffiro spirò, che serenò quest’alma,’ that credibly depict contrasting facets of the level-headed Unulfo’s personality, lending him greater depth and involvement in the drama than he sometimes wields. Stating that a minor rôle benefits from a performance by a major singer is clichéd, but Mead’s portrayal of Unulfo legitimizes the platitude’s veracity.

The duplicitous Garibaldo, whose lust for power robs him of the most basic tenets of decency and decorum, is enlivened with adroit vocal acting and unabashedly flamboyant singing by bass-baritone Brandon Cedel. Garibaldo is a rôle in which Samuel Ramey excelled, and, though their voices are very different instruments, Cedel shares his predecessor’s dedication to heightening the character’s menace by making him luridly seductive. The flinty edge and scornful inflections of Cedel’s singing of recitatives banish any questions concerning this Garibaldo’s intentions. His account of the aria ‘Di Cupido impiego i vanni’ in Act One pulses with the sinister glee of a man who rejoices in his machinations.

Cedel also evinces the cowardice that cowers behind Garibaldo’s machismo façade, emphasizing the irony of the schemer’s bravado giving way to alarm at Rodelinda’s vow to pave her road to the throne with his severed head. In Act Two, he voices ‘Tirannia gli diede il regno’ impactfully, the voice’s steely glint reflecting the meaning of the words. Despite his depravity, Cedel’s Garibaldo is not devoid of suavity, his fiorature executed smoothly and descents below the stave focused without being forced. In Cedel’s performance, wickedness sounds irresistibly sensual.

True contraltos are no more common in opera than to-the-manner-born Brünnhildes and Isoldes. There is hardly an overabundance of rôles for contraltos in the works that populate the international repertory, but Händel’s operas and oratorios contain wonderful parts for low-voiced ladies. In this Rodelinda, the contralto rôle of Bertarido’s sister Eduige, the target of Garibaldo’s treachery, is sung by Jess Dandy, whose refined vocalism recalls that of the esteemed Alfreda Hodgson. Dandy’s singing of Eduige’s Act One aria ‘Lo farò, dirò spietato’ suggests that her bravura technique, though impressive, remains a work in progress. Dramatically, she is wholly on point, convincingly imparting concern and contempt. Her account of ‘De’ miei scherni per far le vendette’ in Act Two bristles with indignation, her vocal colorations shifting with the passions of the text. The aria in Act Three, ‘Quanto più fiera tempesta freme,’ is sung with irrepressible tenacity, this Eduige proclaiming that she is a pawn in no one’s game. The theatricality, integration of registers, and tastefulness of Dandy’s singing are delightful and promise still greater things.

Whereas almost no virtues mitigate Garibaldo’s iniquity, the actions of the crown-stealing Grimoaldo are extenuated to some extent by an earnest if somewhat masochistic infatuation with Rodelinda. Vestiges of unfeigned affection are audible in tenor Joshua Ellicott’s complex, conflicted portrayal of Grimoaldo. Without neglecting the ferocity at the core of Grimoaldo’s subterfuges, his singing conveys unexpected fragility. The first of his arias in Act One, ‘Io già t’amai, ritrosa,’ is voiced with bemused vehemence. Ellicott’s Grimoaldo is an ancestor of Richard Strauss’s Herodes and Aegisth who deploys ‘Se per te giungo a godere’ like a conniver’s credo, the tenor’s penetrating timbre sharpening the words’ subversive edge

In Act Two, Ellicott’s assertive manner of singing divisions complements the forthrightness with which he makes dramatic points, the most challenging passages of Grimoaldo’s music thereby tellingly differentiated from the part’s gentler pages. He sings first ‘Prigioniera hò l’alma in pena’ and, later in the act, ‘Tuo drudo è mio rivale, tu sposo’ with close attention to the ways in which Händel’s vocal writing advances the character’s psychological development. Vividly intelligible in every scene in which he appears, Ellicott’s diction galvanizes this Rodelinda’s dramatic electricity in Act Three, baring Grimoaldo’s competing emotions in ‘Trà sospetti, affetti, e timori.’ Moreover, the tenor’s enunciation of the accompagnato ‘Fatto inferno è il mio petto’ blends a Lieder singer’s textual acuity with a stage actor’s deft management of the interweaving of public and private sentiments. Ellicott’s contemplative voicing of Grimoaldo’s final aria, ‘Pastorello d’un povero armento pur dorme contento,’ resolves a probing musical character study of a man whose ambition is undermined by love. Ellicott affirms that, in order to be effective operatic antagonists, harsh characters need not be sung with harsh tones.

Like many of the rôles composed by Händel for Senesino, the deposed king Bertarido vents his strikingly timeless feelings of love, disappointment, and anger in music that pits outbursts of vengeful coloratura against passages of heartrending lyricism. It is with an exquisite example of the latter that Bertarido is first introduced in Act One, and in this performance countertenor Iestyn Davies seems not so much to sing the accompagnato ‘Pompe vane di morte’ as to live the king’s horror and sorrow at seeing his own funerary monument. The sustained B with which he begins ‘Dove sei, amato bene’—justifiably one of Händel’s best-known and most-loved arias, now and in the Eighteenth Century—pierces the hearts of both the character and the listener, the allure of the sound intensifying the pain and yearning that it expresses. Contemporary accounts unreservedly praised Senesino’s singing of Händel’s introspective arias, but, sung in this performance with beauty and expressivity matched on recordings only by Dame Janet Baker, ‘Dove sei, amato bene’ might have been composed for Davies. He brings equal authority to ‘Confusa si miri l’infida consorte,’ however, acting with the voice to limn the despair and desperation that seize Bertarido when he believes that Rodelinda has chosen a crown over fidelity to her husband’s memory.

As Bertarido’s fortunes unfold in the opera’s subsequent two acts, Davies continually adapts his vocal shading to fit the quicksilver progress of the drama. Both of Bertarido’s arias in the second act, ‘Con rauco mormorio piangono’ and ‘Scacciata dal suo nido sen vola,’ are splendidly sung, and Bertarido’s lines in the duetto with Rodelinda, ‘Io t’abbraccio, e più che morte aspro,’ receive from the countertenor readings of tremendous eloquence. In this performance, the Act Three scene in which Bertarido voices ‘Chi di voi fù più infedele, cieco Amor’ is gripping, and the aria ‘Se fiera belva ha cinto frà le catene’ is ardently but stylishly sung. Davies’s voice is a soft-grained instrument that woos more compellingly than it wages war, but he sings the turbulent aria ‘Vivi, tiranno’ commandingly, the roulades executed rousingly. After this display of vocal prowess, the duetto with Rodelinda ‘D’ogni crudel martir’ could seem anticlimactic, but every note that Davies sings in this performance is momentous. Davies’s preeminence as an interpreter of Händel’s music has been widely acknowledged for longer than a decade, but his portrayal of Bertarido in this Rodelinda is a marvel of Händel singing with few recorded peers.

With the rôles that he composed for Francesca Cuzzoni [in addition to Rodelinda, Teofane in Ottone, re di Germania, Emilia in Flavio, re de’ Longobardi, Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare in Egitto, Asteria in Tamerlano, Berenice in Scipione, Lisaura in Alessandro, Antigona in Admeto, Costanza in Riccardo primo, re d’Inghilterra, Laodice in Siroe, re di Persia, and Seleuce in Tolomeo, re d’Egitto, as well as Polissena in the 1728 revision of Radamisto], Händel inaugurated a tradition later expanded by bel canto composers’ parts for Giulia Grisi, Maria Malibran, and Giuditta Pasta and by Verdi’s, Puccini’s, and Richard Strauss’s writing for the soprano voice. Unlike their later counterparts, Händel’s Cuzzoni heroines have only recently enjoyed the attention of specialist interpreters, but performances by singers of the caliber of Lucy Crowe are rapidly making amends.

Like Bertarido, Rodelinda is first heard in Act One in a moment of introspection, and Crowe immediately manifests the character’s pervasive melancholy in her poignant singing of ‘Hò perduto il caro sposo.’ Her innate poise tested, this Rodelinda hurls out ‘L’empio rigor del fato vile non potrà’ on a stream of blazing sound. The trills in ‘Ombre, piante, urne funeste’ are tentative, but neither that aria’s dejection nor the determined ire of ‘Morrai, sì, l’empie tua testa’ is uncertain, the musical lines unfurled with the grace and agility of a musical gymnast. In a handful of instances, Crowe ornaments arias with interpolated notes above the stave that are marginally beyond the voice’s realm of comfort, but these brief pangs of astringency potently punctuate Rodelinda’s emotive utterances.

Singing the pair of arias in Act Two, ‘Spietati, io vi giurai’ and ‘Ritorna, o caro e dolce mio tesoro,’ with a wealth of feeling that illuminates the humanity of Händel’s musical portraiture, Crowe emphasizes the unflappable self-reliance in Rodelinda’s constitution. She partners Davies mellifluously in the duetto with Bertarido, summoning a new resolve that surges into Act Three via her traversal of the aria ‘Se ’l mio duol non è sì forte.’ Crowe’s singing is of an uncommonly exalted quality throughout the performance, but, the perils that have oppressed the character from the opera’s start lifting, she voices ‘Mio caro, caro bene! non ho più affanni a pene’ with radiance that also resounds in her singing of the duetto ‘D’ogni crudel martir.’ The success of a performance of Rodelinda relies upon the presence of a capable singer in the title rôle, but Crowe’s performance demonstrates that, when assigned to a singing actress with total fluency in Händel’s musical language, Rodelinda is a worthy sister of Norma, Élizabeth de Valois, Sieglinde, and the Marschallin.

Händel would perhaps be surprised to learn that, nearly three centuries after its first performance in London, Rodelinda is scheduled to return to the stage of New York’s Metropolitan Opera in March 2022, with Harry Bicket leading a top-rank cast that includes Iestyn Davies’s Bertarido. Ever cognizant of changing fashions, few composers in the Eighteenth Century wrote with broad aspirations or expectations of their music continuing to be performed after their careers ended. Why, then, are Händel’s operas still performed in the Twenty-First Century, when their stories of dynastic clashes and squabbles among mythological figures are so peripheral to collective cultural awareness? The characters whose tribulations are the foundations of Händel’s operas are archetypes without relevance in modern society, but their emotions remain relevant and surprisingly modern. Who in 2021 knows a queen whose consort has been forced into exile by a murderous rival, but who does not know people whose relationships have fallen victim to others’ meddling? Musically, the English Concert’s Rodelinda is a near-flawless performance of one of Händel’s most inspired scores. It is also a vindication of the enduring pertinence of Händel’s genius.

LUGWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770 – 1826) and ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810 – 1856): To My Distant Beloved– Love and Life Cycles for Mezzo-Soprano and Piano— Kindra Scharich, mezzo-soprano; Jeffrey LaDeur, piano [Recorded at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Belvedere, Tiburon, California, USA, 18 – 20 February 2019; MSR Classics MS 1762; 1 CD, 74:10; Available from MSR Classics, Amazon (USA), and major music retailers]

For those who love song, the act of singing, whether with one’s own voice or with one’s heart, is as natural—and as necessary—as breathing. To sing well, which is to sing in a manner via which melding music with text facilitates an avenue of communication that transcends notes and words, is an achievement that can be cultivated but never manufactured. To sing Art Songs well, to elevate the relationships linking music and words to their highest potential, natural gifts must be nurtured and refined, not for a season in practice rooms and lecture halls but throughout an artist’s performing life. For a conscientious champion of singing, an Art Song recital, no matter how accomplished, is always a momentary oasis, not a destination. Whether in new repertoire or new perceptions of much-travelled songs, the journey goes on, complete satisfaction always beyond the singer’s grasp.

Presented by MSR Classics in a warm, bright acoustic in which tones bloom as in a meticulously-engineered recital hall, mezzo-soprano Kindra Scharich’s and pianist Jeffrey LaDeur’s recording of music by Ludwig van Beethoven and Robert Schumann, To My Distant Beloved, is unmistakably a beginning. This is not to suggest that this is in any way a beginners’ disc. The artistry heard in these performances exhibits individual and collaborative maturity, but there are never pretensions of interpretive finality. Scharich and LaDeur approach the works on this disc with the cooperative spirit of chamber musicians, paradigms of leading and following discarded in a common pursuit of shared psychological engagement. The extraordinary talents of both performers are evident in every note of this music, but the fusion of their skills transforms this disc from a well-sung, well-played recital into a release of enduring significance in the history of recorded Art Song. These emphatically are well-sung, well-played performances. More remarkably, these are traversals of well-known music in which notes and words sound wholly new and conspicuously personal.

Beethoven was not as prolific in the genre as some of his contemporaries and successors, most notably Franz Schubert, yet he exerted indelible influence on the evolution of German Lieder, perhaps most notably by devising the through-composed ‘Liederkreis,’ a cycle of closely-related songs focused on various incarnations of a common psychological theme. Less celebrated by the broader musical community than his symphonies, sonatas, and string quartets, Beethoven’s songs are rightly prized by singers. His trailblazing Liederkreis An die ferne Geliebte was conceived during one of the most trying periods in Beethoven’s life. Unmarried, his career as a virtuoso pianist unraveling due to growing deafness, and battling his widowed sister-in-law for guardianship of her son, the composer coped with his struggles via music, his creative output diminished but never wholly disrupted by strife. A tormented quest for lasting love occupied Beethoven throughout much of his adult life and found in An die ferne Geliebte a sublime outlet that, as performed by Scharich and LaDeur, continues to powerfully promulgate the wrenching emotions of unfulfilled longing.

Partnered by LaDeur as though they were singing a duet, Scharich phrases the opening song of An die ferne Geliebte, ‘Auf dem Hügel sitz ich spähend,’ with the sort of eloquent simplicity expected of a violinist playing the slow movement of Beethoven’s Opus 61 Violin Concerto. In all of the songs on this disc, voice and piano articulate the music with sensitivity to the ways in which patterns of notes convey subtleties of the words. This is never more apparent than in ‘Wo die Berge so blau,’ which Scharich sings with disarming simplicity. Similarly, she and LaDeur delve deeply into the nuances of ‘Leichte Segler in den Höhen’ without inflating the song’s modest means of expression. The abiding sincerity of Scharich’s connection with Beethoven’s music and Alois Jeitteles’s words is keenly felt in her account of ‘Diese Wolken in den Höhen,’ her ideally-focused intonation paralleling her concentration on lucidly enunciating and interpreting the words. Their realization of the lines ‘Wenn alles, was liebet, der Frühling vereint, / Nur unserer Liebe kein Frühling erscheint’ in ‘Es kehret der Maien, es blühet die Au’ imparts an incredibly moving but understated sense of resignation, the narrator’s feelings of loneliness and sadness heightened by an awareness of inevitability. The directness with which Scharich sings ‘Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder’ illustrates a vital aspect of an insightful Lieder singer’s art, her own experiences unquestionably shaping her interpretation but imposing nothing on Beethoven’s music.

Whereas Beethoven was plagued during the composition of An die ferne Geliebte by the effects of deafness and worsening physical maladies, Schumann was less troubled in 1840, whilst writing his Opus 42 Frauenliebe und Leben, by the mental illness that so direly affected the final decade of his life. Utilizing texts by Adelbert von Chamisso that would elicit responses from a number of Nineteenth-Century composers, Schumann centered his Frauenliebe und Leben upon an omnipresent inexorability that is at once reminiscent of and quite different from that at the core of Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte. Embroiled in 1840 in litigation intended to free his beloved Clara Wieck from the obligation of receiving paternal blessing for marriage, Schumann surely found refuge from this stress in giving musical expression to von Chamisso’s depiction of a woman’s bond with her lover from its inception at their first meeting to its culmination with his death. Rather than the continuous musical progression of An die ferne Geliebte, Schumann’s cycle is comprised of eight self-contained Lieder, each intimating a leave-taking that ushers in the subsequent period in the relationship.

As in their performances of the Beethoven songs, their realization of the opening bars of Schumann’s ‘Seit ich ihn gesehen‘ distinguish Scharich and LaDeur as august interpreters of this music. The technical acumen of the pianist’s playing of An die ferne Geliebte is equaled by the mastery with which he plays Schumann, but the synergy of his rendering of the former gives way in the latter to an aloofness that limns the significance of the piano’s rôle as the voice of the narrator’s swain. In this vein, ‘Er, der Herrlichste von allen’ is an active dialogue between the woman and her wordless lover, the piano representing not her thoughts, as in An die ferne Geliebte, but the object of them. Scharich sustains conversational lightness in ‘Ich kann’s nicht fassen, nicht glauben’ and ‘Du Ring an meinem Finger,’ the voice utterly secure and stunningly beautiful throughout the range.

In this performance, the somberness that slowly permeates the latter half of Frauenliebe und Leben darkens the colors of Scharich’s vocalism without instigating interpretive heaviness. The earnestness of her voicing of ‘Helft mir, ihr Schwestern’ is augmented by the appealing freshness of the voice. Singer and pianist suffuse their performance of ‘Süßer Freund, du blickest’ with urgency, LaDeur exhibiting the emotive efficacy of fastidiously observing Schumann’s dynamic notations. Autumnal hues emerge in ‘An meinem Herzen, an meiner Brust,’ which Scharich and LaDeur present as a touching reminiscence of fleeting joys. There must have been pangs of irony for Schumann in ‘Nun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan,’ the obstacles to his union with Clara having caused him such pain. Cynics might be tempted to accentuate that irony, ending the cycle with bitterness and self-pity. Scharich and LaDeur choose reflection over regret, evoking Lord Tennyson’s postulation that it is better to endure the loss of one’s love than to never love.

To My Distant Beloved closes with an aptly atmospheric epilogue in the form of an engrossingly poetic performance of Schumann’s Opus 17 Fantasie in C major. Primarily composed in 1836 in homage to Beethoven and prefaced by a quote from Friedrich Schlegel that memorializes the music’s genesis, the Fantasie epitomizes the tumultuous Romanticism found in much of Schumann’s music, not least his Lieder. Marked ‘Durchaus fantastisch und leidenschaftlich vorzutragen; Im Legenden-Ton,’ the piece’s introduction requires particular rhythmic concentration if it is to seem rhapsodic without becoming chaotic. LaDeur maintains both flexibility and control, preferring subtlety to showmanship and managing the exposition in a manner that highlights the ingenuity of Schumann’s singular musical architecture. The arching lines of the central ‘Mäßig, Durchaus energisch’ section is sculpted with the finesse of a master’s handling of marble, each striation in the music’s textures elucidated but also hypnotically integrated into the cumulative sonority of the piece. LaDeur plays the ‘Langsam getragen; Durchweg leise zu halten’ segment with undeviating fidelity to Schumann’s instructions. The pianist’s technique meets each of the Fantasie’s many challenges with absolute assurance. His performance provides the disc not with a summation but with a musical ellipsis, a kind of entr’acte for the transition into the next phase of this wondrous odyssey.

RUGGERO LEONCAVALLO (1857 – 1945): Pagliacci— Matthew Vickers (Canio), Catalina Cuervo (Nedda), Stefanos Koroneos (Tonio), Suchan Kim (Silvio), Pavel Suliandziga (Beppe); Opera in Williamsburg Orchestra; Jorge Parodi, conductor [Naama Zahavi-Ely, producer; Marco Nisticò, stage director; Eric Lamp, costume designer; Opera in Williamsburg, Williamsburg Community Building, Williamsburg, Virginia, USA; Sunday, 6 June 2021]

The world première of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci in Milan’s Teatro Dal Verme on 21 May 1892, was unquestionably an auspicious occasion. On the podium was the twenty-five-year-old Arturo Toscanini, already a seasoned operatic veteran. Portraying Canio, the doting but tragically insecure husband at the heart of Leoncavallo’s opera, was a son of Parma, tenor Fiorello Giraud, whose post-Pagliacci career included celebrated portrayals of Wagner rôles. Canio’s spirited wife Nedda was voiced by Austrian soprano Adelina Stehle, who was subsequently heard as Nannetta and Maria in the premières of Verdi’s Falstaff and Mascagni’s Guglielmo Ratcliff. The first Tonio, Victor Maurel, had created Iago in Verdi’s Otello five years earlier and would serve the composer again a year later, interpreting the title rôle in Falstaff. Mario Ancona, Milan’s Silvio, sang Tonio in Pagliacci’s Metropolitan Opera première on 11 December 1893, in which performance he was obliged to encore the opera’s Prologo.

Few performances enjoy the serendipitous circumstances of Pagliacci’s première, but every performance has the potential to be an event that will be long remembered by its audience. Under the leadership of the company’s founder and Artistic and General Director Naama Zahavi-Ely, Opera in Williamsburg’s all’aperto production of Pagliacci was a genuine occasion, both as a much-needed harbinger of the return of the Performing Arts after the long hiatus imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and as an exhilarating realization of Leoncavallo’s score that enabled the Williamsburg audience to experience the piece much as the spectators in the opera witness the performance by Canio and his traveling troupe. Produced by Zahavi-Ely with infallible understanding of the work’s musical and histrionic challenges, the staging, presented on the grounds of the Williamsburg Community Building, involved the observer in the drama with rare immediacy, imaginatively capitalizing on the physical setting by fostering an impromptu performance’s atmosphere of spontaneity.

La scena del crimine: the porch of Williamsburg Community Building, the setting for Opera in Williamsburg’s June 2021 production of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci
[Photograph © by Joseph Newsome]

Allied with Eric Lamp’s vibrant, whimsical costume designs, virtually a character in the drama in their own right, Marco Nisticò’s direction provided the narrative clarity and consistent momentum upon which the success of a performance of Pagliacci depends. The performance space necessitated a small-scaled approach, but Nisticò’s staging intuitively utilized the intimacy of the venue to intensify the opera’s emotional impact. Performances of verismo repertoire too often lack the realism that defines the genre. By contrast, this Pagliacci was shaped not by exaggerated melodrama but by attention to details of the libretto and score. The troupe’s traditional donkey cart was replaced to splendid effect in Williamsburg by a Chrysler, their arrival heralded by enthusiastic sounding of the vehicle’s horn. After being discovered during her rendezvous with Silvio, Nedda’s reaction to Canio threatening her with a knife was not overwrought as it is in some performances: rather, Nisticò and his cast conveyed that the depth of Nedda’s concern for Silvio’s safety suggests that Canio’s violent rage was hardly unknown to her. Throughout the performance, Nisticò’s work yielded moments in which Leoncavallo’s theatrical adroitness was more apparent than it often is in more elaborate productions.

Opera in Williamsburg’s Music Director Jorge Parodi conducted the performance with emphasis on the lyricism in Leoncavallo’s music, freeing singers and instrumentalists to focus on subtleties of phrasing without decreasing the impact of the opera’s familiar dramatic tumult. Each scene was paced with tempi that exhibited thorough acquaintance with the score and the singers’ individual voices and interpretations of their rôles. The choral contributions to the opera’s opening scene were sung by the soloists, and the Chorus of the Bells was understandably omitted. Parodi’s conducting rendered the absence of this integral part of the score surprisingly inconsequential, maintaining the vitality of the public scenes by accentuating the orchestral pulse that propels the music. Parodi’s verismo instincts were astute, but there was also bel canto in his sculpting of melodic lines, particularly in the Intermezzo. With this performance, Parodi affirmed that corpuscular Italianate passion does not preclude elegance.

Like the efficacy of the modest staging, the reduced orchestration necessitated by the performing conditions facilitated uncommon appreciation of the ingenuity of the composer’s scoring. The fleet playing of assistant conductor and pianist Evgenia Truksa made the lack of a harp unnoticeable, and her colleagues in the pit—Simon Lapointe (violin), Peter Greydanus (cello), Christina Hughes (flute), Shawn Buck (clarinet), and Cody Halquist (French horn)—proved equal to Leoncavallo’s most daunting challenges and the stifling heat (94° F at the start of the performance). The eloquent, energizing sounds that emerged from the orchestra validated the legitimacy of Parodi’s measured handling of the score, each player’s performance spotlighting aspects of the music that are obscured in lavish productions.

La canzonetta d’Arlecchino: tenor Pavel Suliandziga as Beppe in Opera in Williamsburg’s production of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, 6 June 2021
[Photograph © by Joseph Newsome]

Whether depicting the character’s attempts at preserving calm amongst his fellow thespians or playing his part in the ill-fated comedy, tenor Pavel Suliandziga was a Beppe whose bright sounds shone in the opera’s dark psychological context. Demonstrating his own work ethic as an example intended to quell Tonio’s bitterness and calm Canio’s rage, this Beppe was the opera’s dulcet-toned voice of reason, unnerved but never wholly overpowered by the devolving situation in which he found himself. Suliandziga sang Arlecchino’s serenata, ‘O Colombina, il tenero fido Arlecchin,’ with boyish charm and glistening top As, gleefully projecting the humor of the ironic pantomime. His earnest efforts at averting violence thwarted, Suliandziga’s Beppe was discernibly shattered by the horror of the opera’s grisly final scene, the young tenor touchingly imparting that, for all their failings, Canio and Nedda were dearer to him than mere colleagues.

Gl’ amanti ferventi: baritone Suchan Kim as Silvio (left) and soprano Catalina Cuervo as Nedda (right) in Opera in Williamsburg’s production of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, 6 June 2021
[Photograph © by Joseph Newsome]

The embodiment of amorous youth in a smart searsucker suit, baritone Suchan Kim’s Silvio was the dapper romantic figure that the drama requires him to be. Pausing to gaze upon his lover before sweeping in for his assignation with Nedda, this Silvio seemed enthralled anew by her. The erotic tension in their duet radiated from the stage, electrifying Kim’s ardent singing of the andantino ‘Sapea ch’io non rischiavo nulla.’ He subsequently sang the andantino amoroso ‘Decidi il mio destin’ with tonal beauty and superb line. Kim was little troubled by Silvio’s many top Fs and pair of top Gs, the voice full and free throughout the range except in a handful of passages in which slight constriction affected the upper register. The terror that seized Silvio as he saw Nedda slain by Canio unsheathed the steel in Kim’s voice, but his defiance could not overcome Canio’s mania. Kim fully conquered the demands of Silvio’s music, however, his vocalism as apt for the rôle as his intrepid acting.

Ecco il prologo: baritone Stefanos Koroneos as Tonio in Opera in Williamsburg’s production of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, 6 June 2021
[Photograph © by Joseph Newsome]

The rugged, sinewy voice of baritone Stefanos Koroneos glistened and growled in Leoncavallo’s music for the volatile Tonio, both the perpetrator and a victim of his own treachery. There was much poetry in the baritone’s delivery of the Prologo, his delicate voicing of ‘Un nido di memorie in fondo all’anima cantava un giorno’ and the andante cantabile ‘E voi, piuttosto che le nostre povere gabbane d’istrioni’ partnered with powerful readings of more extroverted passages. The traditional interpolated top G was not reached without effort, but the note was undeniably thrilling. The ambiguous joviality with which Koroneos voiced Tonio’s lines in the opera’s first scene gave way to bitterness when he snarled ‘La pagherai! brigante!’ at his tormentor.

In the scene with Nedda, Koroneos sang ‘È colpa del tuo canto’ affectionately, conveying the scope of his surrender to Nedda’s alluring song, and the pathos of his voicing of the cantabile sostenuto ‘So ben che difforme’ was affecting. Nedda’s derision reignited the simmering malevolence, producing a caustic statement of ‘Per la Vergin pia di mezz’agosto.’ As Taddeo in the comedy, Koroneos ensured that Tonio’s sinister intentions were apparent, no matter how jocund the mood. His articulation of the famed ‘La commedia è finita’ unmistakably disclosed gloating self-satisfaction, but, like Suliandziga’s Beppe, the weight of the tragedy that he instigated also shown in Tonio’s demeanor. Koroneos portrayed Tonio as a man whose physical maladies had warped but not weakened his mind, his vocalism, forceful but occasionally wanting strength at the bottom of the range, revealing the crippling insecurity at the heart of the character’s iniquity.

La donna oppressa: soprano Catalina Cuervo as Nedda in Opera in Williamsburg’s production of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, 6 June 2021
[Photograph © by Joseph Newsome]

Equally vivacious and vulnerable, soprano Catalina Cuervo’s Nedda was credible as Canio’s unhappy wife, the quarry of Tonio’s libidinous pursuit, and the object of Silvio’s infatuation. Emotionlessly enunciating ‘Confusa io son!’ after Canio’s menacing outburst about his wife’s infidelity, Cuervo’s Nedda insinuated from the start that any love that she once felt for Canio was supplanted by pity. The unfulfilled wife’s imagination rekindled by the marvels of nature, her singing of ‘Qual fiamma avea nel guardo!’ coruscated with wonderment. Deploying a truly ‘dolce’ top A and laudable attempts at the trills, her account of the ballatella, ‘Stridono lassù,’ was a rousing declaration of independence that seemed all the more brilliant when the atmosphere of reawakening was shattered by Tonio’s intrusion. Cuervo drained all color from her voice to sing ‘Sei là? credea che te ne fossi andato!’ as Tonio approached and then hurled ‘Hai tempo a ridirmelo stassera, se brami!’ at him with disgust.

The edge on the voice with which Cuervo’s Nedda lashed at Tonio softened into a seductive caress upon Silvio’s entrance, though even the bliss of her reverie was tinged with apprehension. In their piquant duet, Cuervo and Kim created sparks with an economy of motion, acting with their voices and faces. The soprano’s smoldering voicing of ‘Non mi tentar!’ divulged the profundity of Nedda’s misery, her ecstatic top B♭s expressing her longing for escape from her life with Canio, but the wrenching desperation of her cry of ‘Aiutalo, Signor!’ as Canio trailed Silvio intimated that the price of freedom would be high.

An unusually sultry, provocative Colombina, Cuervo sang the gavotta, ‘Guarda, amor mio, che splendida cenetta preparai,’ teasingly at first. Each repetition of the jaunty melody grew more frenzied as the sincerity of Canio’s threats became obvious. Refusing to identify Silvio as Nedda’s paramour, Cuervo struck the unhinged Canio with stunning top Bs. There was in this Nedda’s death an aura of inevitability, as though she knew from the opera’s first scene that the only possible source of her deliverance was the blade of Canio’s knife. In this performance, Nedda’s death was a conscious act of reclaiming liberty, acted by Cuervo with poignant simplicity.

Il marito sofferente: tenor Matthew Vickers as Canio in Opera in Williamsburg’s production of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, 6 June 2021
[Photograph © by Joseph Newsome]

Tenor Matthew Vickers reminded the Williamsburg audience that, though correct in a literal sense, ‘clown’ is too one-dimensional a translation for ‘pagliaccio.’ From his first entrance, this Canio conveyed that, as the ancient Greeks surmised, comedy and tragedy are inseparably intertwined. Canio’s pride in his craft emanated from Vickers’s broadly-phrased singing of ‘Un grande spettacolo a ventitrè ore.’ This was followed by a reading of ‘Un tal gioco, credetemi’ that was at once tender and portentous. With the brief reprise of ‘A ventitrè ore,’ capped with an arresting interpolated top B, Canio’s good humor momentarily exorcised the demons of jealousy and suspicion. Finding Nedda in Silvio’s arms, the gnawing doubts returned, prompting Vickers to voice ‘Derisione e scherno!’ with startling vehemence.

The scene in which Canio laments an actor’s responsibility to the audience, requiring him to maintain a frivolous façade, is one of opera’s most hackneyed episodes, but, declaiming ‘Recitar! Mentre presso dal delirio non so più quel che dico e quel che faccio!’ with mesmerizing gravitas, Vickers communicated the psychological power that has garnered the esteem of generations of singers and listeners. His singing of ‘Vesti la giubba e la faccia infarina’ displayed an ideal combination of vocal metal and expressive sensitivity, limning Canio’s despair without resorting to excessive tears.

Casting pretense aside, the tenor’s ‘No! Pagliaccio non son’ was frighteningly explosive, but Vickers adhered to Leoncavallo’s cantabile espressivo marking in his traversal of the stirring ‘Sperai, tanto il delirio accecato m’aveva,’ the character’s dismay and hopelessness surging through the singer’s top B♭. With a glance at the exultant Tonio as Nedda lay dead at his feet, Canio movingly acknowledged having played his part in a twisted contest of wills. Canio is an iconic rôle that has been interpreted by a progression renowned tenors, of whose company Vickers declared himself to be worthy.

The panache with which all of the artists involved with this production coped with the sweltering heat was nothing short of heroic, but the most searing thing in Virginia’s Historic Triangle on this Sunday afternoon was Opera in Williamsburg’s Pagliacci.

MARCEL LANQUETUIT (1894 – 1985), LOUIS-CLAUDE DAQUIN (1694 – 1772), CÉSAR FRANCK (1822 – 1890), NAJI HAKIM (born 1955), NADIA BOULANGER (1887 – 1979), and CHARLES-MARIE WIDOR (1844 – 1937): French Flourishes from First-Plymouth— David von Behren, organ [Recorded in First-Plymouth Congregational Church, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA; David von Behren Music; 1 CD / Digital download, 43:15; Available from Amazon, Apple Music, Deezer, and major music retailers and streaming services]

In the history of Western music since the dawn of the Renaissance, extraordinary artistic genius has often manifested in composers whose prowess as organists paralleled their creative gifts. Dieterich Buxtehude’s, Johann Pachelbel’s, Johann Sebastian Bach’s, Georg Friedrich Händel’s, and Anton Bruckner’s reputations as organists are widely known and abundantly evident in their writing for the instrument, but the artistic journeys of composers as diverse as Francesco Cavalli, Camille Saint-Saëns, Olivier Messiaen, and Sir Michael Tippett were also influenced by their work as organists. An instrument capable of both monumental grandeur and entrancing intimacy, and one with intrinsic associations with spirituality for many listeners, the organ is a microcosm in which all of the colors of the orchestra and all of the nuances of human expression coexist. The rare convergences of great composers, great music, great organs, and great organists reveal the power of music in its purest form: an instrument, complex in its construction but gloriously simple in its impact, and the individual entrusted with administering its sounds become storytellers whose tales require no words.

Recorded in the inspiring space of First-Plymouth Congregational Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, French Flourishes from First-Plymouth employs one of America’s finest instruments, California-based Schoenstein and Company’s Lied Chancel organ, the more than 6,000 pipes of which encompass nine divisions and are enriched by 110 ranks and eighty-five stops, producing a panoply of voices ranging from dulcet lyricism to roaring splendor that rivals the most celebrated European organs. The instrument finds in David von Behren, a graduate of Cleveland Institute of Music and Yale University, doctoral candidate at Boston University, and Assistant Organist and Choirmaster at Memorial Church of Harvard University, an artist whose sensibilities are ideally suited to the instrument’s capacity for alternating brilliance with introspection.

Also an accomplished violinist, von Behren plays the ‘French flourishes’ on this expertly-produced recording with technical acumen that dazzles only in retrospect: as he plays, it is the profundity of his interpretive instincts rather than his meticulously-honed technique that awes. The unique sonic profile of a consequential organ within the aural environment that it was designed to inhabit is impossible to capture on a recording with absolute fidelity, but this young organist’s performance transforms the listener’s headphones or speakers into a pew in First-Plymouth’s sanctuary, from which one can contemplate the relationship between a gifted musician and a notable instrument much as Leipzigers must have done when Bach was at the console.

Opening his sagaciously-programmed and thoughtfully-ordered recital with Marcel Lanquetuit‘s engaging Toccata in D major, a piece with much in common with the organ music of the composer’s countrymen Édouard Batiste and Déodat de Séverac, von Behren establishes a celebratory atmosphere, integrating the work’s difficulties into a joyous realization of the music’s oft-neglected humor. The skill with which navigations of manuals and pedals are handled throughout the performances on French Flourishes is immediately apparent, but it is the emotional dexterity with which the Toccata’s challenges are met that distinguishes von Behren’s playing. This performance of the Toccata intensifies the futile longing for more of Lanquetuit’s music to have survived unto the Twenty-First Century.

During an illustrious career in the French capital, Louis-Claude Daquin was organist at Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, the Chapelle Royale, and Notre-Dame de Paris, for the first of which posts he successfully competed with Jean-Philippe Rameau. Though considerably more of his music is preserved, Daquin shares with Lanquetuit the dubious distinction of being assessed primarily on the merits of a single work. The tenth of the Noëls, ‘Noël, Grand Jeu et duo,’ from that work, his Opus 2 Nouveau livre de Noëls, receives from von Behren a traversal that respects the parameters of period-appropriate playing without being restricted by them. The galant style prevalent in French organ music during the first half of the Eighteenth Century permeates Daquin’s writing, but von Behren’s aptly jubilant account of the Noël also discloses unanticipated modernity in deftly-managed harmonic progressions.

At the age of thirty-five, César Franck was named principal organist at the twin-spired Basilique Sainte-Clotilde in Paris’s seventh arrondissement, a post that he held and from which he guided the development of French Romantic writing for the organ for the remaining thirty-two years of his life. Widely acclaimed in the Nineteenth Century, many of Franck’s works for organ remain staples of organists’ repertoires. For French Flourishes, von Behren chose one of the compositions that, though written in Franck’s early years in Paris, were first published in a posthumous collection fifteen years after his death. Representative of Franck’s most beguilingly inventive creations for organ, the Sortie «Laissez paître vos bêtes» (’Venez, divin Messie’) is characterized by melodic succinctness typical of its composer. Attentive to Franck’s tonal textures, von Behren phrases his performance with a Lieder singer’s sensitivity to the psychological significance of dynamics and rhythms. In the Sortie’s final bars, he engenders true resolution, meaningfully contrasting the element of catharsis in the piece’s coda with the aura of harmonic ambiguity found in many works dating from the first decade of Franck’s tenure at Basilique Sainte-Clotilde.

Like the Belgian-born Franck, Naji Hakim brings aspects of another nation’s cultural perspectives to French organ music, his work fusing Western traditions with echoes of the vibrant musical milieux of his native Lebanon. Crafted so that they can be assimilated into the Roman Rite of the Mass (in the Introitus, Offertorio, Elevation of the Host, Communion, and Sortie, respectively), Hakim’s Esquisses grégoriennes rhapsodize themes drawn from plainsong, metamorphosing the monophonic sequences into discourses between old and new. The first of Hakim’s plainchant paraphrases, the ‘Nos autem,’ is played with focus on the composer’s ingenious musical response to the liturgical text that it limns. The surging momentum of the ‘Ave maris stella,’ maintained by von Behren with unfaltering rhythmic accuracy, yields to heartfelt solemnity in the ‘Pater noster,’ approached in this performance as a discernibly personal, sincere devotion. Hakim’s adaptation of the ‘Ave verum’ allies eloquence with innovation, and von Behren utilizes the First-Plymouth organ’s intonational clarity to accentuate the cleverness of the composer’s treatment of the chant. The beauties of ‘O filii et filiæ’ are heightened by the unaffected expressivity of von Behren’s playing, his commitment to precision never obscuring the feeling with which he interprets the music.

Few musical personalities of any epoch have exerted greater influence as concertizing musician, theorist, and pedagogue than Nadia Boulanger, whose own compositions exhibit the same adventurousness evident in her indefatigable championing of the work of her contemporaries. Boulanger’s Trois pièces pour orgue were written in 1911, not long after the young composer, still in her mid-twenties, attended the première of The Firebird and befriended Igor Stravinsky. The early date of its composition notwithstanding, a mature artistic idiom emerges in Boulanger’s Prélude, particularly when it is performed with the delicacy that von Behren brings to it. His gossamer negotiations of the contrapuntal meanderings of the Petit Canon wholly avoid academic lugubriousness, paying homage to Boulanger’s daring substitution of a fugue for instrumental ensemble for the requisite vocal fugue when vying for the Grand Prix de Rome in 1908. Von Behren’s gift for musical portraiture fashions an Improvisation in which Boulanger’s inimitable persona wields timeless charisma.

Since the completion of Charles-Marie Widor’s Symphony No. 5 in F minor (Opus 42, No. 1) in 1879, the work’s dizzyingly virtuosic Toccata has served as a vehicle for showmanship for virtually every organist capable of playing it. This is music in which adequacy is admirable, but von Behren again displays affinity for eschewing convention and devising his own solutions for musical conundra. Instead of the breakneck speeds at which some organists attempt to play the Toccata, von Behren adopts—and, crucially, sustains—a tempo that facilitates crisp articulation of the profusion of semiquavers and arpeggios that decorate the piece’s underlying subject. The mercurial modulations that are sometimes a sonic muddle are here uncommonly clean. The piece’s undulating journey to the boundaries of Romantic tonality is therefore prophetic rather than frenetic, anticipating the progressive tonalities of Gustav Mahler’s symphonies. The Toccata is daunting at any pace, however, and von Behren plays it rousingly.

Legend attributes the invention of the organ to the Third-Century Roman martyr Saint Cecilia, still revered as the patroness of music and organists. This detail of the saint’s hagiography likely resulted from a mistranslation that proved too beloved to correct, but performances by important organists can convince listeners that, whatever the provenance of its origins may be, the organ is a divine gift. Allowing listeners far from Nebraska to experience the might of an instrument with few rivals in North America, French Flourishes from First-Plymouth is also a gift. However wondrous its design, the grandest organ is merely a lifeless body until a conscientious musician revives its pulse, the player’s heart becoming that of the instrument. His musicianship is formidable, but it is the heart with which he plays that marks David von Behren as a poet of the pipes.

ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810 – 1856): Carnaval (Opus 9), Grand Sonata No. 1 in F-sharp minor (Opus 11), Arabeske (Opus 18), and Romanze (Opus 28, No. 2)— Reed Tetzloff, piano [Recorded in Shalin Liu Performance Center, Rockport, Massachusetts, USA, 29 – 31 January 2021; Master PerformersMP 21 001; 1 CD, 77:30; Available from Master Performers, Amazon (USA), and major music retailers and streaming services]

It is perhaps inevitable that observers armed with the products of decades of musicological research and critical analysis scrutinize works of art for indications of the maladies both physiological and psychological that plagued their creators. Are the occasional repetitions and unresolved subplots in Dame Iris Murdoch’s novels harbingers of Alzheimer’s? Do the manipulations of gender paradigms in The Garden of Eden parallel the neuroses that undermined Ernest Hemingway’s relationships and ultimately precipitated his suicide? Are there auguries in Vincent van Gogh’s early canvasses of the insecurities that tormented him?

Music provides myriad opportunities for well-intentioned sleuthing. Why did a composer choose one key over another? Why is an expected cadence denied? Why were conventions respected or discarded? It is not surprising that listeners who are acquainted with details of the life of Robert Schumann, not least the psychosis that effected suicide attempts and necessitated institutionalization during the final two years of his life, examine performances of his music in search of aural manifestations of the composer’s mental deterioration. In this context, ignorance may well be bliss: intriguing as probing Schumann’s music for symptoms of waning sanity can be, it is far more satisfying to merely enjoy it. What abounds most plentifully in Schumann’s work is genius, and no special investigative skills are needed to perceive it.

It is also natural for attentive listeners to survey young artists’ recordings with ears attuned to suggestions of artistic evolution, career trajectories, and interpretive proclivities. Just as Schumann’s music is arguably best enjoyed without pretexts, the listener without knowledge of a musician’s training, accomplishments, and aspirations may be best able to hear and appreciate a performance on its own terms. The dedication, preparation, and study that gave rise to this inspiriting Master Performers recording of some of Schumann’s most demanding music for solo piano deserve diligent appraisal, but it is the originality of the perspectives with which Reed Tetzloff approaches the music, especially the much-recorded Carnaval, that offers the most tantalizing glimpse of this young pianist’s artistic path.

Composed during 1834 and 1835 and dedicated to Polish violinist and composer Karol Lipiński, a rival of Niccolò Paganini whose performance of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata with Franz Liszt at the piano remains one of the most legendary events in music history, Schumann’s Opus 9 Carnaval rose from the ruins of an abandoned series of variations on a melody by Schubert. In this excitingly innovative work, the young Schumann’s fascination with tonal cryptography, encoded subtexts, musical portraiture, and self-quotations yields intriguing surveys of the piano’s technical capabilities and capacity for tonal diversity. Schumann’s depictions of literary and musical influences, artistic rivalries, and facets of his own psyche test a pianist’s interpretive resources, the music’s difficulties demanding concentration that limits some performers’ explorations of Carnaval’s psychological nuances.

It was not without reason that Schumann and his beloved wife Clara, one of the most accomplished concert pianists of the Nineteenth Century, surmised that his piano music was too demanding to be viable for any but the most virtuosic pianists. In the performance on this disc, Tetzloff confronts Schumann’s challenges without hesitation, his technique winning every battle, but the interpretive prowess that his playing wields is no less remarkable. Unmistakably invigorated rather than intimidated by Schumann’s music, this young pianist immerses himself in Carnaval, elucidating the imagination with which the composer portrayed his conflicting musical personalities.

From the first bars of the Quasi maestoso Préambule, it is apparent that Tetzloff’s approach to Carnaval is informed but in no way inhibited by tradition. The music’s origins in an aborted homage to Schubert are especially evident in this performance, Tetzloff emphasizing this influence as a way of focusing the listener’s attention on the ingenuity of Schumann’s subsequent invention. The commedia dell’arte episodes that follow, ‘Pierrot’ and ‘Arlequin,’ are subtly but strongly characterized, the contrasting moods of the music projected with rhythmic articulation rather than interpretive exaggeration. Phrased by Tetzloff with eloquence befitting its title, the Valse noble here serves as a sort of processional introducing the Adagio ‘Eusebius’ and Passionato ‘Florestan,’ the manifestations of Schumann’s metaphysical dual personas. In this performance, which treats the music as a spirited discourse between the two voices, the ambiguities of both segments are meticulously explored, seriousness and frivolity given uniform prominence.

Pseudo-Baroque sensibilities transform Tetzloff’s playing of ‘Coquette’ and ‘Replique’ into a coy, courtly exchange that only partially masks libidinous undertones. The ‘Papillons’—of no relation to Schumann’s more famous creation with the same title—flutter seductively in the atmosphere conjured by the pianist’s quicksilver sounding of the notes. The ‘Lettres dansantes’ of ‘A.S.C.H.  S.C.H.A.’ are delivered with diligent adherence to Schumann’s markings, Tetzloff’s playing again suggesting an introduction to the deeply personal movements that follow. ‘Chiarina,’ the composer’s Passionato depiction of Clara, benefits from an unaffected reading, the depth of feeling permitted to emanate from the music instead of being imposed upon it.

Acquaintance with the Polish master’s musical language permeates Tetzloff’s account of Schumann’s Agitato nod to Fryderyk Chopin. ‘Estrella’ is likely a portrayal of the Austrian pianist Ernestine von Fricken, with whom Schumann fell in love soon after their first meeting in 1834, and ‘Reconnaissance’ is often regarded as a recounting of a meeting between Schumann and von Fricken, from whom the composer seemingly broke precipitously. Tetzloff effectuates the music’s youthful impetuosity compellingly but without a limiting sentimental agenda. Rather, the listener is tasked with identifying and reacting to the emotions in the music and, thereby, with becoming an active participant in the performance.

Commedia dell’arte figures return in ‘Pantalon et Colombine,’ their stylized joviality animated by the restless energy of Tetzloff’s playing of the coruscating rhythmic figurations. The ‘Valse allemande’ and its Intermezzo, vestiges of Paganini’s dazzling virtuosity igniting the latter, constitute an organic whole that is not unlike a da capo aria, and this performance illustrates this kinship with particular clarity, the melodic line rendered with the finesse of a master of bel canto. This is also true of Tetzloff’s playing of the unabashedly romantic ‘Aveu,’ in which the pianist’s fingers are transformed into the voice of an ardent lover. Both the stately ‘Promenade’ and the recapitulatory ‘Pause’ are phrased with comprehension of the music’s textural patterns that does not preclude strikingly individual handling of rhythms and harmonic progressions.

Schumann perpetrated an act of musical subterfuge in Carnaval’s final episode, the ‘Marche des “Davidsbündler” contre les Philistins,’ referencing a Seventeenth-Century subject representing the outmoded Philistines that was in fact drawn from his own Opus 2 Papillons. With his propulsive performance of the Marche, Tetzloff resolves Carnaval with a thought-provoking fusion of spontaneity and inexorability. This amalgamation is present in much of Schumann’s work but is heard in too few traversals of Carnaval. The brilliance with which Tetzloff plays Carnaval distinguishes him as a pianist with extraordinary talent. The novelty of his interpretation, wholly faithful to both the music and his own insights, exhibits artistry that equals his technical acumen.

Schumann’s Opus 11, the Grand Sonata in F♯ minor, was completed in 1835 and published with a semi-pseudonymous dedication to Clara. Now often overshadowed by his two later sonatas, Schumann’s first effort in the genre is in its structural flexibility and emotional intensity his most adventurous. The intelligently-gauged boldness and buoyancy of Tetzloff’s playing are ideally suited to Opus 11’s zeal, but, as in his performance of Carnaval, it is the expressive vitality of his reading of the sonata that reveals the depth of his respect for the music. The opening movement, evolving from ​Un poco adagio to Allegro vivace, is played with absolute commitment to observing the composer’​s dynamic markings. Tetzloff exults in the lyricism of the ​Aria​, its melodic line derived from Schumann’s Lied ‘Nicht im Tale der süßen Heimat,’ the delicacy of his phrasing adroitly creating the mandated ‘Senza passione, ma espressivo’ aura.

Tetzloff launches the Scherzo with a finely-judged realization of the requested Allegrissimo, his fiery playing of passagework thrillingly creating tension that he counteracts with a nimbly-managed transition to the D-major Intermezzo. The reprise of the Allegrissimo startles: though dictated by form, the immediacy of Tetzloff’s pianism makes the reversion to agitation unexpected. The sonata’s finale is an Allegro un poco maestoso journey from the base key of F♯ minor to F♯ major, achieved via dynamic contrasts and harmonic shifts that Tetzloff plays with unfaltering mastery. The critical sforzandi in the movement’s final pages receive unstinting power, the richness of the instrument’s timbre utilized to end the sonata with symphonic grandeur. Tetzloff’s playing of the sonata is a testament to his superlative training, but, no less significantly, it is also an irrefutable vindication of the merits of Schumann’s first sonata.

Following his superb performances of Carnaval and the F♯-minor Sonata, Tetzloff’s playing of the Opus 18 Arabeske and the Romanze (Opus 28, No. 2) provides the disc with a pair of echt-Romantic encore numbers that reveal sparkling aspects of the young pianist’s artistic temperament—his own Eusebius and Florestan, perhaps. Like those of their larger-scaled brethren, his performances of both pieces are shaped by study of the scores but are entirely his own interpretations. Rather than excessively cerebral, studio-bound accounts that, in the manner of museum exhibits encased in impenetrable glass, separate the listener from the music, the performances on this disc invite the listener to interact with Schumann’s music as though it were being heard for the first time. Communicating gracefully and intelligibly through music is a gift that Reed Tetzloff shares with the composer whose music he here plays with uncommon perceptiveness.

GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1848): L’elisir d’amore— Christine Taylor Price / Laura Martínez León (Adina), Pavel Suliandziga / Jordan Costa (Nemorino), Leo Radosavljevic / Suchan Kim (Belcore), Yuri Kissin / Oliver Poveda-Zavala (Dottore Dulcamara), Kirsten Scott / Michelle Trovato (Giannetta); Opera in Williamsburg Ensemble and Orchestra; Jorge Parodi, conductor [Naama Zahavi-Ely, producer and projections designer; Benjamin Spierman, stage director; Eric Lamp, costume designer; Joshua Rose, lighting designer; Opera in Williamsburg, Kimball Theatre, Williamsburg, Virginia, USA; Friday, 10 September 2021]

When whichever forces of destiny govern theatrical realms smile on the many elements that contribute to success on the lyric stage, whether in fleeting moments of inspiration or throughout the course of a performance, opera can be mesmerizing. There is magic in the making of opera, but it is not conjured solely by musical sorcery. Though the toil is often disguised in the finest performance by the appearance of spontaneity, countless hours of grueling work are required to provide audiences with enriching, thought-provoking experiences.

Meaningful operatic experiences like those provided by Opera in Williamsburg’s staging of Gaetano Donizetti’s bel canto comedy L’elisir d'amore were uncommon even before a global pandemic forced the Performing Arts community into a desperate struggle for survival and relevance, necessitating innovative adaptations of artistic genres to new technologies and physical spaces. [Opera in Willuamsburg’s virtual production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurdice and outdoor staging of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci were models of their kind, confirming that a company’s endurance depends as much upon the creativity of its stewards as upon financial support.] Returning to the intimate setting of the Kimball Thestre on historic Duke of Gloucester Street, Opera in Williamsburg mounted a production of L’elisir d’amore that indelibly demonstrated why opera has emerged changed but undeterred from five centuries of natural and human atrocities, economic depressions, and political unrest. It is not necessary for opera to incite controversy or spark revolutions: when produced and performed with the dedication and determination evident in this L’elisir d’amore, it can alter the world, one smile and tear at a time.

Il giovane amante: tenor Pavel Suliandziga as Nemorino in the Emerald Cast of Opera in Williamsburg’s September 2021 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore
[Photograph © by Diego Valdez; used with permission]

The deceptive simplicity of their plots makes staging bucolic opere buffe like L’elisir d’amore challenging in the best of times. Produced by the company’s founder and Artistic Director Naama Zahavi-Ely, Opera in Williamsburg’s L’elisir demonstrated rare cognizance of the necessity of sincerity in comic opera. The dramatic situations in L’elisir d’amore, deftly adapted by Felice Romani from a libretto written for Daniel-François-Esprit Auber by the celebrated Eugène Scribe, are unquestionably amusing, but the success of a performance of the opera relies upon an audience’s ability to empathize with the characters, not merely to laugh at their foibles. Zahavi-Ely’s projection designs and Benjamin Spierman’s direction yielded scenic and dramatic environments in which the singers were able to create wily, winsome characterizations. The avoidance of excessive slapstick and coy mannerisms allowed the comedy to progress organically.

Unmistakably guided by familiarity with both Donizetti’s score and the physical demands of singing, Eric Lamp’s costumes and Joshua Rose’s lighting designs complemented the unaffectedly charming staging, the former unobtrusively aiding the singers in establishing their characters’ individual and social identities and the latter enhancing the observers’ perceptions of the artists’ physical and emotional interactions. The professionalism of all of the production’s crew shone in details large and small, the subtle differences between stage action in the matinée and evening performances reflecting unusual breadth of focus on each artist’s strengths. Scenically, this was not an elaborate L’elisir, but, as the audiences’ reactions indicated, it was a beguilingly effective production.

Inebriato d’amore: tenor Jordan Costa as Nemorino in the Sapphire Cast of Opera in Williamsburg’s September 2021 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore
[Photograph © by Diego Valdez; used with permission]

It is difficult to imagine that the composer’s supervision of the opera’s 1832 première in Milan’s Teatro della Canobbiana could have engendered a more innately bel canto account of L’elisir d’amore than Opera in Williamsburg’s Music Director, Argentine conductor Jorge Parodi, achieved in the Kimball Theatre. Under Parodi’s direction, the Opera in Williamsburg Orchestra brought Donizetti’s score to life with energy and affection. Intonation, balances, and precision of ensemble were virtually flawless throughout both performances. Splendid as the string playing was, the wind players—Shannon Vandzura (flute), David Garcia (oboe and English horn), Shawn Buck (clarinet), Matt Lano (bassoon), Benjamin Lostocco (trumpet), and Cody Halquist (French horn)—earned special praise for their virtuosic handling of seamless transitions, Lano playing the obbligato in Nemorino’s celebrated romanza with great beauty. He was partnered by Alexandra Naumenko, whose mastery of the diverse sounds of an electronic keyboard offered unexpectedly authentic harp accompaniment for ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ and unflagging momentum in the opera’s secco recitatives.

Singers and instrumentalists alike benefited from Parodi’s cueing, and the music was ideally served by his sensible but exciting tempi. A few moments, especially in the evening performance, in which coordination between stage and pit faltered were admirably brief. Parodi’s conducting style is understated, with none of the mannered gesticulation of conductors who want to be a show unto themselves. In this production of L’elisir d’amore, it was his inviolable and discernibly inspiring collaborative musicianship that commanded attention.

Due Giannette al prezzo di una: sopranos Kirsten Scott (center left) and Michelle Trovato (center right), who alternated as Giannetta in Opera in Williamsburg’s September 2021 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore
[Photograph © by Diego Valdez; used with permission]

Assembling one fully-qualified cast for any of Donizetti’s operas is a daunting task, but, responding to challenges of timing and location imposed by COVID-19 and other factors, Opera in Williamsburg succeeded in bringing two superb casts to this staging of L’elisir d’amore. Designating the alternating personnel for the matinée and evening performances as the Emerald and Sapphire casts proved to be wonderfully apt, the vocal standards achieved by the young artists, many of them making rôle débuts in this production, matching the exemplary work of their colleagues in the pit, on the podium, and behind the scenes. Voices heard solely in ensembles, those of sopranos Angela De Venuto and Stephanie Lupo and tenor Diego Valdez, were uniformly attractive and sustained by well-schooled techniques that encompassed the often-elusive skill of functioning as parts of a team. As both actors and singers, their performances intensified the production’s consistent musicality.

Equally delightful without singing a note was teenager Samuel Foraker, whose vivid portrayal of Dulcamara’s assistant disclosed pantomime trumpeting worthy of Dizzy Gillespie and a scene-stealing smile. In every scene in which they appeared, not least the craftily-written quartet and the Rossinian episode in Act Two in which news of Nemorino’s inheritance is relayed to the village ladies, the sopranos who shared the rôle of Adina’s meddlesome confidante Giannetta, Kirsten Scott and Michelle Trovato, sang vibrantly, the former giving the rôle a suggestion of bemused irony, while the latter’s Giannetta was a mischievous Mistress Quickly in the making.

La sposa riluttante ed il suo fidanzato: soprano Christine Taylor Price as Adina (left) and baritone Leo Radosavljevic as Belcore (right) in the Emerald Cast of Opera in Williamsburg’s September 2021 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore
[Photograph © by Diego Valdez; used with permission]

The epaulettes of Belcore, the preening, pompous regimental sergeant who marches unceremoniously into L’elisir’s Arcadian status quo, were donned in the Emerald cast by bass-baritone Leo Radosavljevic and in the Sapphire cast by baritone Suchan Kim. Their respective entrances epitomized overwrought bravado, the antics of the officer and his small band of soldiers, consisting of off-duty Nemorino and costume designer, often redolent of Monty Python skits. Each gentleman delivered Belcore’s Act One cavatina ‘Come Paride vezzoso porse il pomo alla più bella,’ an arduous piece with no opportunity for warmup, with appropriate swagger, Radosavljevic maintaining steely power in the mid-range and Kim ascending above the stave with assurance. Belcore’s bravura lines in the trio with Adina and Nemorino and the subsequent quartet, sometimes lost in these bustling ensembles, were reliably audible and always sung with an air of testosterone-fueled superiority.

Belcore’s ‘Venti scudi’ duet with Nemorino in Act Two is one of the opera’s best-loved numbers, and the accounts of it in this production were raucously exhilarating. From his irritated utterance of ‘La donna è un animale stravagante davvero,’ Radosavljevic depicted Belcore’s annoyance and eventual glee at having lured the naïve Nemorino into military service with cunning that stopped short of true cruelty. Kim also limned the sergeant’s battle with a decidedly non-threatening foe with pointed vocal acting, each note in the rapid-fire triplets fully and accurately sung. Both singers enacted Belcore’s acceptance of his ultimate rejection by Adina with smarmy ennui, keen to dive back into a sea in which many eligible fishes were certain to come nibbling. With voices of differing timbres, textures, and ranges, Radosavljevic and Kim sang Belcore’s music dashingly.

Il dottore ed il suo paziente: bass-baritone Yuri Kissin as Dulcamara (left) and tenor Pavel Suliandziga as Nemorino (right) in the Emerald Cast of Opera in Williamsburg’s September 2021 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore
[Photograph © by Diego Valdez; used with permission]

One of Italian opera’s most appealing purveyors of ineffective cures for maladies physical and psychological, Dottore Dulcamara is indisputably L’elisir’s most modern character, an archetype of the species of relentless pitchmen who populate cable television, peddling every conceivable life-altering gadget and concoction. Donizetti heightened the allure of the figure who bursts from Romani’s libretto by giving Dulcamara music of irresistible magnetism. Opera in Williamsburg’s Dulcamare, bass-baritone Yuri Kissin in the Emerald Cast and bass Oliver Poveda-Zavala in the Sapphire Cast, brought debonair charisma and vocal sophistication to their depictions of the affable schemer. The cavatina with which Dulcamara introduces himself to the eager villagers in Act One, ‘Udite, udite, o rustici,’ was sung with technical aplomb and masterful comedic timing by both artists, Kissin evincing the character’s cunning and Poveda-Zavala accentuating his suavity. The incredulity and amusement with which Dulcamara ascertains in their duet that Nemorino’s desperation impels him to wholly believe in the power of Isotta’s legendary elixir surged across the footlights.

In the matinée performance, Kissin impersonated Senatore Tredenti in the ‘barcaruola a due voci’ hilariously, delivering ‘Io son ricco, e tu sei bella’ with a feigned toothless lisp that rarely impeded his clear diction. More of the words were obscured in Poveda-Zavala’s singing of the barcaruola, but his Dulcamara’s good-natured lechery shown through the farcical façade. Bass-baritone and bass projected Dulcamara’s lines in the quartet robustly, and their singing in the duet with Adina was fantastic, Dulcamara’s recognition of the feebleness of his ‘art’ in competition with Adina’s feminine wiles projected with amazement and a touching flicker of vulnerability. Both Kissin and Poveda-Zavala executed the rôle’s trademark patter commendably, the former’s strength above the stave complemented by the latter’s resonance at the bottom of the range. Launching the opera’s finale with ‘Ei corregge ogni difetto,’ these Dulcamare blissfully crowned themselves kings of the moment, singing with irrepressible self-satisfaction. Donizetti’s expert writing for the part notwithstanding, Dulcamara can be a boorish bore whose appearances are dreaded. In Opera in Williamsburg’s L’elisir d’amore, Kissin and Poveda-Zavala earned the audiences’ mirth, claiming Dulcamara’s rightful place at the core of the comedy.

Il dosaggio corretto: tenor Jordan Costa as Nemorino (left) and bass Oliver Poveda-Zavala as Dulcamara (right) in the Sapphire Cast of Opera in Williamsburg’s September 2021 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore
[Photograph © by Diego Valdez; used with permission]

Few are the tenors who have never sung any of Donizetti’s music for Nemorino, opera’s quintessential hapless lover, though there are more than a few among them who should have left the rôle to better-suited candidates. On the surface, Nemorino does not seem a strenuous part, especially by Donizetti’s standards: even his closest cousin, Ernesto inDon Pasquale, faces greater technical obstacles. Still, Nemorino is a punishing sing, much of his vocal line hovering in the passaggio, in which range tenors must carefully manage their resources. Perhaps the greatest feat of Opera in Williamsburg’s staging of L’elisir d’amore was casting two superlative Nemorini, Pavel Suliandziga and Jordan Costa.

Springing into the opera’s opening scene, Suliandziga and Costa sang the melodious cavatina ‘Quanto è bella, quanto è cara’ with boyish wonder, their very different timbres gleaming. In the matinée, Suliandziga’s soft-grained, silvery voice glistened in the first duet with Adina, in which the brighter patina of Costa’s tones sparkled in the evening show. The bravura writing in the duet with Dulcamara overcame neither singer, their readings of ‘Voglio dire lo stupendo elisir’ palpitating with hope. Costa capped ‘Obbligato, ah! sì obbligato!’ with a rousing top B, revealing an easy upper register that impressed throughout the evening. In the second duet with Adina, ‘Esulti pur la barbara’ drew impassioned vocalism from Nemorini emerald and sapphire. Both tenors excelled in the trio with Adina and Belcore and the frenetic quartet, always making their words heard. Suliandziga voiced the larghetto ‘Adina, credimi’ in the afternoon performance with heartbreaking sincerity, the depth of Nemorino’s despair suffusing the music, and the anguish felt by Costa’s Nemorino was palpable.

Soldato e sergente: tenor Jordan Costa as Nemorino (left) and baritone Suchan Kim as Belcore (right) in the Sapphire Cast of Opera in Williamsburg’s September 2021 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore
[Photograph © by Diego Valdez; used with permission]

In Act Two, Suliandziga and Costa sparred captivatingly in Nemorino’s scene with Belcore, both of them repeating ‘Venti scudi!’ with awed relief. In the afternoon and evening performances, ‘Ai perigli della guerra’ was sung with emotional honesty, contrasting with the comical exchanges reminiscent of Rossini’s scene for Conte Almaviva and Figaro in Act One of Il barbiere di Siviglia. The boundless enthusiasm of Suliandziga’s singing in the duet was matched by the cathartic joy of Costa’s top C, and their performances in the bustling quartet exemplified bewildered elation. The beloved romanza ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ was sung gorgeously in both performances, Suliandziga’s gossamer legato emphasizing the music’s pathos and Costa’s ably-supported mezza voce evoking Nemorino’s burgeoning optimism. The disperato ‘Poichè non sono amato’ rang out wrenchingly in afternoon and evening. There was not so much as a modicum of affectation in the devotion with which these Nemorini embraced their Adina when she at last expressed her love: a moment that is often greeted with laughter was profoundly moving in this production. Amongst notable Nemorini of the past, Suliandziga recalled Luigi Alva, whilst Costa brought Ugo Benelli to mind. Each of Williamsburg’s interpreters brought his own unique gifts to the rôle, creating an endearingly memorable Nemorino.

Quanto è bella: soprano Christine Taylor Price as Adina in Opera in Williamsburg’s September 2021 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore
[Photograph © by Diego Valdez; used with permission]

The soprano scheduled to portray Adina in the evening performance, Laura Martínez León (the lovely Amore in Opera in Williamsburg’s 2020 virtual production of Orfeo ed Euridice), was unwell and unable to sing, leaving the Emerald cast Adina, Christine Taylor Price, to sing the heroine’s music in both of Friday’s performances. By the end of the evening, Price might well have cursed Donizetti and Romani for positioning Adina’s most demanding music in the last fifteen minutes of the opera. That she sounded remarkably secure of voice after singing the rôle twice in nine hours, however, with nary a hint of fatigue audible in her vocalism, was a testament to her training and vocal conditioning.

In both performances, Price depicted Adina as a determined, independent woman whose capriciousness finally causes her to become a victim of her own strategizing. Beginning Act One, she recounted the tale of the fateful elixir of love in a delicately-phrased traversal of the cavatina ‘Della crudele Isotta il bel Tristano ardea,’ radiantly punctuated by firm top Bs. Untroubled by the plethora of top As in the scene with Belcore, she voiced ‘Vedete di quest’uomini vedere po’ la boria!’ with élan. Fervently as she professed her disinterest to her earnest swain, her dulcet singing of the cantabile ‘Chiedi all’aura lusinghiera’ did not convince the listener that this Adina’s heart did not already belong to Nemorino. The soprano lent Adina’s surprise at observing Nemorino’s seeming indifference in their second duet atypical credibility, disclosing wounded pride rather than spitefulness as the catalyst for her quest for vengeance. Price’s poised handling of the most onerous pages of the trio with Nemorino and Belcore and the quartet that precipitates the Act One finale, perhaps even finer in the second performance than in the first, enhanced her portrayal of Adina as a woman whose vivacity is bolstered by virtue.

Exasperated by Nemorino’s absence from the wedding festivities at the start of Act Two, Price uttered Adina’s aside ‘Ci fosse Nemorino! Me lo vorrei goder’ with genuine dismay. She played the reluctant coquette to the life in the barcaruola, authoritatively rebuffing the decrepit senator’s advances. The voice soaring above the ensemble, her top B and C in the quartet divulged Adina’s increasing disenfranchisement. It was apparent from the start of their duet that Dulcamara was destined to lose a contest of wits with this Adina. Price’s voicing of the aria ‘Prendi, per me sei libero’ shimmered with Adina’s love for Nemorino, her top C again used as an expressive device, and the ebullience with which she dispatched the triplets in the brief cabaletta ‘Il mio rigor dimentica’ seemed to come as much from the heart as from the vocal cords. Conquering the unenviable assignment of singing the rôle twice in a single day, Price was a rare Adina who both possessed the requisite prowess in range and fiorature and used it to communicate affectingly honest emotions.

Dulcamara’s elixir of love regrettably proves to be merely cheap wine and exalted assertions, but Opera in Williamsburg’s production of L’elisir d’amore was the remedy that it promised to be. When jollity is dispensed with the enchantment of Donizetti’s music and the unfailing exuberance of Opera in Williamsburg’s performances, the veracity of the familiar adage is affirmed: in love, in life, in sorrow, and in strife, laughter is truly the best medicine.

ANTON GRIGORYEVICH RUBINSTEIN (1829 – 1894): Piano Sonatas Nos. 1 and 3, Opp. 12 and 41– Ludovico Troncanetti, piano [Recorded in BartokStudio, Bernareggio, Monza e Brianza, Lombardy, Italy, September 2018; Movimento Classical MVC 001/43; 1 CD, 66:12; Available from Amazon, Apple Music, Spotify, and major music retailers and streaming services]

Eight years before the bicentennial of his birth will be observed, Anton Rubinstein’s importance to music both in and beyond Russia thrives, not least in the halls of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, the venerable institution of musical instruction—and alma mater of Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich—founded under Rubinstein’s guidance in 1862. Unlike his younger brother Nikolai’s fifteen-year stint as leader of the Moscow Conservatory, the elder Rubinstein’s tenure at the helm of the organization he inaugurated was brief, but his work as an acclaimed conductor, a respected pedagogue whose pupils included Tchaikovsky, and, above all, one of the Nineteenth Century’s most celebrated piano virtuosi secured a legacy that continues to shape the creation of music and the education of musicians.

127 years after his death, Rubinstein is esteemed as a composer principally on the merits of his six symphonies and his 1871 operatic setting of Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov’s seminal poem ‘The Demon,’ none of which are now widely performed outside of Russia despite the advocacy of artists of the caliber of conductor Igor Golovchin and the late baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, who excelled in the title rôle of The Demon. Sadly, Rubinstein’s reputation as a peer of Franz Liszt has enticed few of today’s pianists to explore the Russian composer’s œuvre for solo piano, a substantial body of work that encompasses pieces in a variety of styles and genres. The cornerstones of Rubinstein’s output for piano are his four sonatas, their collective genesis spanning more than three decades of his career, works of expert craftsmanship and imagination that merit but still struggle to occupy places in the repertoires of enterprising pianists.

This recording of two of Rubinstein’s sonatas by Siena-born pianist Ludovico Troncanetti is extraordinarily welcome. A resolute proponent of Rubinstein’s music for piano, Troncanetti studied with fellow pianists Leslie Howard and Pier Narciso Masi, both of whom share their pupil’s interest in rediscovering significant works that have been neglected by other pianists. In the performances of Rubinstein’s first and third sonatas on this disc, Troncanetti continues an industrious survey of the composer’s music that has already yielded an acclaimed interpretation of Rubinstein’s Opus 45 Piano Concerto in G major. The pianist had an instrument with a clear, resonant timbre at his disposal for this recording, but neither his vividly-articulated playing nor the piano’s tone is ideally served by the recorded ambiance. Lacking depth and aural perspective, the engineered sound deprives the piano’s voice of space in which to bloom. [Due to the difficulty of obtaining physical copies of Movimento Classical releases in the USA, this review is based upon hearing the recording in digital audio format.] Nevertheless, Troncanetti’s playing triumphs, transcending sonic limitations with performances distinguished by intuitive tone painting and unimpeachable musicality.

The first of Rubinstein’s four piano sonatas, his Opus 12 Sonata in E minor, is a youthful piece, too accomplished to be regarded as juvenilia but nonetheless the work of a precious teenager. The unsullied brio of the young permeates the sonata, likely written in 1847 and 1848, but the technical demands of the music irrefutably affirm that, even before reaching the age of twenty, Rubinstein was a pianist of singular ability. The sonata’s opening Allegro appassionato movement is a tour de force of tremoli, arpeggi, and triplets in octaves. Troncanetti effectuates these feats intrepidly but also sculpts the meandering, unmistakably Russian melodic line with poetic lyricism. Similarly, he phrases the expansive melody that introduces the Andante largamente movement with compelling tenderness. In this performance, the central transition from C major to A minor is revealed to be no mere stylistic formality. Troncanetti probes the emotional gravity of Rubinstein’s management of modulations, finding nuances in the music that belie the composer’s youth and relative inexperience.

Reminiscences of Mendelssohn and Schumann echo in the third movement, a playful Moderato scherzo in which Rubinstein honed his contrapuntal skills. Troncanetti brings the sort of lucid realizations of subjects and countersubjects more often heard in performances of music by Johann Sebastian Bach to his reading of Rubinstein’s scherzo. His playing exudes sensuality, harmonic progressions given the immediacy of lovers’ exchanges. The thundering octaves that propel the closing Moderato con fuoco movement, prefiguring Rachmaninoff, are rendered with staggering power, the young pianist conspicuously inspired by the young composer’s musical portrayal of the prototypical Russian soul. The majesty of Troncanetti’s performance never overextends the scale of the music, but he is also never content to simply play notes, no matter how exacting, without contemplating their consequence.

The prominence with which it appears in extant documentation of his own recital programmes suggests that it was the Opus 41 Sonata in F major, theorized to date from 1853 – ’54, that Rubinstein loved best amongst his piano sonatas. Whether this indicates some autobiographical association between composer and music can be debated, but there is no question that the third sonata is an intensely personal work in which Rubinstein fully assimilated the influences of Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Schumann into a foundational entity that fomented his mature compositional idiom. The sonata’s Allegro risoluto e con fuoco movement receives from Troncanetti a demonstration of an extensive panoply of his talent, the insightfulness of his cognizance of each phrase’s function within the broader architecture of the music allied with total psychological engagement. His percussive executions of the staccati that animate the Allegretto con moto are supported by unerring rhythmic precision that also heightens the drama of Rubinstein’s savvy changes of tempo.

The third sonata’s Andante movement is one of Rubinstein’s most hauntingly beautiful interludes for piano, almost a tone poem in its own right that anticipates the early work of Richard Strauss whilst remaining perceptibly Russian in character. The unconventional harmonies that impart the sense of yearning at the heart of the music are shaped by Troncanetti with refinement, nothing shortchanged and nothing overdone. He internalizes the passion in this music, building climaxes that are like sudden, audible outbursts in a secret discourse. The finale movement, marked Allegro vivace, assumes the guise of a frenetic tarantella, its thematic development and recapitulation defying prescribed formulæ. Troncanetti exposes the vein of savagery in the music, narrowing the divide between order and chaos that lends the movement its exhilarating aura of danger. As Rubinstein retreated from the precipice in the music, Troncanetti restores tranquility and equilibrium by playing the sonata’s final bars with particular finesse.

There are numerous passages in these performances of Rubinstein’s sonatas in which the intimacy and individuality of the pianism conjure the impression that the music is being extemporized, yet, following the scores whilst hearing the traversals of the sonatas, the fidelity with which each of the composer’s instructions is followed astonishes. This recording highlights the absurdity of pianists’ and listeners’ persistent ignorance of Anton Rubinstein’s piano sonatas. The aficionado of music for piano who questions the legitimacy of the sonatas’ quest for acceptance in standard recital repertory have not yet heard Ludovico Troncanetti play them.

WILLIAM BYRD (circa 1540 – 1623), JOHN BULL (circa 1562 – 1628), JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685 – 1750), DOMENICO SCARLATTI (1685 – 1757), LOUIS COUPERIN (1626 – 1661), JEAN-PHILIPPE RAMEAU (1683 – 1764), JOSEPH-NICOLAS-PANCRACE ROYER (1703 – 1755): La joie de vivre— Jory Vinikour, harpsichord [Capriccio Baroque, Live! at 10th and G Street, Washington, DC, USA; Saturday, 18 September 2021]

When musical and theatrical performances in all of their incarnations were first sacrificed in the pursuit of safeguarding public health in March 2020, it is unlikely that even the starkest pessimists could have envisioned that more than eighteen months of shuttered theaters and stifled voices would ensue. Like the well-heeled Washingtonians who quit the District in July 1861 for an afternoon in the country, intending to casually observe the annihilation of the Armies of the Potomac and the Shenandoah and the quashing of secession at Bull Run, many Arts lovers logically expected the world’s war against COVID-19 to be brief and decisive, clearing the path for a rapid return to normalcy.

Eighteen long, trying months after the first closures and cancellations, glimmers of hope are brightening on the horizon despite the continued oppression of ominous clouds that refuse to dissipate. It is hardly surprising that art and artists are part of the vanguard fighting diligently to reclaim senses of healing and hopefulness. The harpsichord is perhaps not an instrument to which most listeners would ascribe a capacity for precipitating social change, but world-renowned harpsichordist Jory Vinikour’s recital for Capriccio Baroque, La joie de vivre, was a performance that incited a revolution of optimism. Exulting in the eponymous joy of living, the recital was both a splendidly fulfilling musical event and a symbolic victory over strife that has sometimes seemed unconquerable.

An alumnus of Baltimore’s Peabody Institute, Vinikour has performed often in the Capital region, recent seasons having included lauded recitals at the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art, the latter featuring violinist Rachel Barton Pine, with whom he frequently collaborates in performances—and an acclaimed Cedille recording—of Johann Sebastian Bach’s sonatas for violin and harpsichord. Under the leadership of founder Carolyn Winter, whose rich-timbred 1972 William Dowd harpsichord, expertly tuned for the event by Barbara Wolf, was employed for La joie de vivre, Capriccio Baroque events have deepened Vinikour’s association with the District of Columbia. Surveying a century-and-a-half of music for harpsichord with particular focus on the development of distinct national styles of writing for the keyboard, Le joie de vivre provided both a thoughtfully-conceived artistic experience and an evening of inestimably precious musical fellowship via which a present master of an instrument of the past affirmed that, come what may, music propels the future.

The English school of composition for the keyboard flourished at the courts of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, both of whom were accomplished musicians. With the advent of the viol consort and the increasing prevalence during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries of England’s gentry owning virginals, the name by which almost all stringed keyboard instruments were called in Tudor England, English composers of the era, amongst whom William Byrd was perhaps the most renowned, adapted the complex polyphonic language of their continental counterparts to their countrymen’s tastes. One of the best-known and most dazzlingly virtuosic of Byrd’s pieces composed for the virginal, ‘The bells’ (BK38) derives initial momentum from a two-note ground bass that may represent the tolling of the eponymous bells. Essentially a series of variations of progressive difficulty, the piece served as an apt introduction to Vinikour’s capabilities. The clarity with which he sounded the ground bass throughout the work maintained a firm rhythmic foundation, upon which he built billowing cascades of sound, and accentuated the pealing of bells that ostensibly inspired the piece. The passagework was played with the dexterity expected of an acclaimed harpsichordist, but Vinikour found depths of emotion in even the most demanding bars of Byrd’s music.

Like his near-contemporary Byrd, John Bull is extensively represented in the seminal collection of Sixteenth- and early-Seventeenth-Century manuscripts now celebrated as the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. Among the most familiar pieces in the book, Bull’s ‘The Kynges Hunt’ is a​n early example of vivid tone painting. As with Byrd’s music, the paucity of verifiable documentation reduces analysis of the gestation of ‘The Kynges Hunt’ to conjecture. Whether the music represents a specific event or type of royal chase cannot now be definitively ascertained, but Vinikour’s performance of the piece was unquestionably an event worthy of regal occasions. The call-and-response effects characteristic of many musical depictions of hunts were limned with interpretive cunning, suggesting that the quarry of this finger-testing pursuit was amorous rather than bestial. The nimbleness of Vinikour’s playing ignited the music’s inner fire, illuminating the inventiveness with which Bull utilized the musical language of his time to create sonic tableaux of surprising modernity.

Almost certainly dating from the first decade of the Eighteenth Century, before the composer reached the age of twenty-five, Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 912 Toccata in D major is an imaginative piece in hexapartite form, virtually a miniature prototype for his later suites and partita for harpsichord. It is difficult to make a successful career as a harpsichordist without attaining proficiency in performing music by Bach, but Vinikour’s performance of the BWV 912 Toccata confirmed that his affinity for breathing new life into Bach’s widely-performed works for harpsichord is extraordinary. The galvanizing Presto that launches the Toccata received from Vinikour a reading that awed not merely with technical deftness but also with unerring precision in articulating ornaments.

The contrast with the subsequent Toccata’s Allegro was unusually apparent, Vinikour emphasizing this section’s more relaxed atmosphere without sacrificing momentum or brilliance. Lackluster in too many harpsichordists’ performances, slow movements are often pinnacles of Vinikour’s recitals, and Bach’s Adagio was here played with yearning lyricism, the handling of the melodic line expansive but unaffected. The composer indicated no tempo marking for the Toccata’s fourth part, allowing the performer a measure of exegetic freedom. Honoring the tradition of dance suites from which the Toccata emerged, Vinikour chose a pace that combined elegance with energy, transitioning hypnotically into the penultimate segment, which Bach instructed should be played ‘con discrezione,’ a somewhat cryptic dictate that in this performance was followed with expressive panache. The Toccata’s closing Fuga was played rousingly, the harpsichordist’s elucidation of the fugue’s principal subject paralleling his rendering of the ground bass in Byrd’s ‘The bells.’

Born in the same year in which both Händel and Bach were welcomed to the world, Domenico Scarlatti also shared with Bach the distinction of being a scion of a renowned musical family. Whereas his father Alessandro’s career was largely centered in the opera house, Domenico dedicated his creative endeavors to supplying the Spanish and Portuguese royal courts with instrumental music and sacred works in the Italian style learned from his father and his contemporaries. Of his 555 extant keyboard sonatas, Vinikour offered two of the most popular, both of them in the binary form that Scarlatti espoused throughout his creative journey. In this performance, the sonatas fashioned a pairing that was not unlike an operatic aria and cabaletta. The poetic B-minor Sonata (K 87) was played with mesmerizing concentration on the melodic line, Vinikour’s phrasing accentuating the latent Classicism in the music. The dizzingly decorative figurations of the D-major Sonata (K 535) were delivered with electrifying fervor, but here, too, pointed attention to thematic evolution yielded a performance in which the Italianate tunefulness of Scarlatti’s music was as evident as its technical ingenuity.

Having traversed music from England, Germany, and Italy before the interval, the latter half of the programme explored the wealth of music for harpsichord from Vinikour’s adopted homeland, France. The sonorities of the Dowd instrument were ideally suited to this repertoire, the differentiations among registers enabling Vinikour to exhibit the innovation with which French composers treated exchanges of subjects and countersubjects. Vinikour’s powerful performance of the twenty-seventh entry in the Pièces de clavecin catalogued by Bruce Gustafson in the Twentieth Century, Louis Couperin’s Passacaille in C major, sometimes called the ‘Versailles’ Passacaille, luxuriated in the grandeur of the piece, the richness of the writing drawing from instrument and musician an unexpected breadth of sounds. Too often, the harpsichord is perceived to have limited expressive capacity owing to its singular method of tonal production. Vinikour’s playing of Couperin’s Passacaille wholly dispelled this misconception.

Whereas Bach and Händel were creating masterful works for harpsichord that continue to be performed in the Twenty-First Century whilst they were still teenagers, Jean-Philippe Rameau began writing much of his most acclaimed keyboard music in the mid-1720s, when he was in his early forties. The five pieces that Vinikour included in La joie de vivre were drawn from the D-minor Suite (RCT 3) published in Rameau’s 1724 Pièces de clavecin. Like Byrd and Bull a century earlier, Rameau brought to music for the harpsichord an uncommonly refined gift for portraying vibrant scenes in sound. His ‘L’entretien des Muses’ was played with intensity that irradiated subtleties of Rameau’s harmonic daring. Vinikour made both ‘Les tourbillons’ and ‘Le lardon’ tours de force, their very different characters individualized not by idiosyncratic effects but by close adherence to the composer’s specifications. This performance of ‘La boiteuse’ was distinguished by kaleidoscopic tone colors, achieved by sensitive management of dynamics. Requiring great dexterity and emotional engagement, ‘Les cyclopes’ is a perfect vehicle for Vinikour’s artistry, and his performance thrilled and touched in equal measures.

Like one of his most illustrious predecessors on the French musical scene, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer was born in Italy. Arriving in Paris at the age of twenty-two, Royer served the Bourbon court of Louis XV as tutor to the royal household and shared directorship of the famed Concerts Spirituels with Jean-Joseph de Mondonville. Sadly, very little of Royer’s output has survived, but the works that are available to Twenty-First-Century musicians are of superb quality. Vinikour performed the Allemande (‘Marche avant le sacrifice’) with boldness, the chords played forcefully but gracefully. Eloquence was the cornerstone of his intelligent, understated interpretation of ‘La sensible,’ but ‘La marche des Scythes’ gave Vinikour an opportunity to demonstrate unadulterated technical prowess. Having furnished an exposition of the beauty of which the instrument was capable throughout the evening, he concluded the announced programme with an explosion of bravado.

Rather than selecting a virtuosic display piece from his considerable repertoire, Vinikour chose for his encore the well-known fifth piece from François Couperin’s 1717 Ordre sixième de clavecin, ‘Les Barricades mystérieuses.’ His performance was unfailingly agile, of course, but his reading of the piece exuded a spirit of celebration that manifested the recital’s theme. This was an evening in which the joy of living, expressed through music, eclipsed the sorrows of a prolonged season of silence.

GIACOMO PUCCINI (1858 – 1924): Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi— Marsha Thompson (Suor Angelica), Janine Hawley (La zia principessa, Zita), Margaret Ann Zentner (Suor Genovieffa), Amanda Moody Schumpert (La suora zelatrice), Alden Pridgen (La maestra della novizie), (Suor Osmina), Bonnie Blackwell (Suor Dolcina), Erica Helmle (La suora infermiera), Laura Hutchins (Una cercatrice), Katherine Ledbetter (Una cercatrice), Charli Mills (Una novizia), Sara Roberts (Una novizia), Malcolm MacKenzie (Gianni Schicchi), Jodi Burns (Lauretta), Alex Richardson (Rinuccio), Kameron Alston (Gherardo), Kristin Schwecke (La badessa, Nella), André Peele (Betto di Signa), Donald Hartmann (Simone), Scott MacLeod (Marco), Regan Bisch (La Ciesca), Connor May Kelly (Gherardino), Lawrence Hall (Maestro Spinelloccio), Scott Lee (Messer Amantio di Nicolao), Hal Garrison (Pinellino), Jonathan Burdette (Guccio), Bill Phillips (Buoso Donati); Piedmont Opera Chorus, Winston-Salem Symphony Orchestra; James Allbritten, conductor [Steven LaCosse, director; Piedmont Opera, Stevens Center of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA; Friday, 15 October 2021]

The world première of Giacomo Puccini’s La fanciulla del West at New York’s Metropolitan Opera on 10 December 1910, inaugurated a partnership between Italian opera’s most celebrated composer of the day and one of North America’s leading opera houses that, barely a month after Germany’s signing of the Armistice of Compiègne effectively ended the First World War, yielded another première, that of the trio of one-act operas christened as Il trittico. First performed on 14 December 1918, Il trittico was the realization of a project conceived by Puccini following the tremendous success of Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, the quintessential verismo melodrama in one act. Originally planned as a three-part setting of episodes from Dante Alighieri’s Divina commedia, the work gradually evolved during its prolonged gestation into a trilogy of pieces subtly linked by examinations of violent, tragic, and farcical aspects of death. Ultimately, only Il trittico’s closer, the comic Gianni Schicchi, retained an association with Dante. Divisive since its première, Il trittico is reminiscent more of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Indes galantes than of Puccini’s other mature operas. As in Rameau’s innovative work, humanity itself is the central character in Il trittico.

Puccini explicitly instructed that the three operas of Il trittico should always be performed together. He was persuaded to authorize the substitution of a ballet interlude for Suor Angelica in a London production but succinctly expressed his disapprobation upon learning that Il tabarro was also excised. Critics assessing the Metropolitan Opera première and subsequent stagings in Rome and Chicago disagreed with the composer, many of them praising Gianni Schicchi as the strongest of the three operas, musically and theatrically, and advocating for separation of each Trittico opera from its siblings. Launching the company’s 2021 – 2022 Season, Piedmont Opera’s production of Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi—the company’s first stagings of these pieces—restored two of the operas to their proper places, validating the composer’s theatrical sagacity by emphasizing the stylistic links between the two disparate stories and their musical treatments. Under the direction of Steven LaCosse, a familiar presence in opera in and beyond central North Carolina owing to his work with Piedmont Opera and UNC School of the Arts, this production relocated the operas from the Renaissance to times more familiar to the audience. Contrary to modern trends of updating operas’ settings, LaCosse’s endeavors engendered meaningful connections among the audience, Puccini’s characters, and the singers portraying them.

Placing the action in the Twentieth Century, LaCosse’s direction was rich with details that heightened the sense of community that pervaded these stagings of both operas. Suor Angelica tending to her beloved plants with palpable tenderness, the convent’s mistress of novices scribbling notes about her charges’ spiritual missteps, Betto clandestinely taming his nerves with the contents of a flask, and Simone spitefully extinguishing the votives that he lit before the discovery of Buoso’s will exemplified the scope of LaCosse’s efforts to create credible environments in which the operas’ events transpired. With an opulent suit for the Zia principessa, designed by Howard Tsvi Kaplan, that contrasted tellingly with the nuns’ austere habits and whimsically colorful attire that gave each character in Gianni Schicchi individual style, the costumes ideally complemented LaCosse’s direction, Norman Coates’s logical lighting, and Kevin McBee’s attractive but undistracting scenic designs. LaCosse, stage manager Ann Louise Wolf, and their production team ensured that a focal point was always discernible, even in moments of manic activity, centering the plots with specificity that some productions lack.

Performances of all or portions of Il trittico often impart little of each opera’s kinship with its brethren. In this performance, Piedmont Opera’s General Director James Allbritten conducted Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi with attention to the thematic and dramatic nuances that link the scores. There were passages during the first ten minutes of Suor Angelica in which the Winston-Salem Symphony’s playing was surprisingly untidy, pitch and ensemble faltering, but these proved to be momentary defects. As the evening progressed, the musicians increasingly rivaled the best work of their counterparts in renowned opera companies’ orchestras. Particularly in Suor Angelica, Allbritten’s tempi were often daringly slow, his choices unmistakably guided as much by words as by music. In both operas, ensembles were handled with the conductor’s trademark skill for elucidating each character’s unique emotions. So insightful was Allbritten’s handling of the transitions of mood that propel Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi that not only were the operas wholly credible as companions in a single evening but also the famiglia Donati of Gianni Schicchi convinced as the sort of people who might have exiled a vulnerable young woman to a convent. Typical of his work with Piedmont Opera, Allbritten’s conducting of this performance accentuated the ways in which the composer used melody to bring characters and their stories to life.

Suore ed amiche: sopranos Marsha Thompson in the title rôle (left) and Margaret Ann Zentner as Suor Genovieffa (right) in Piedmont Opera’s October 2021 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Suor Angelica
[Photograph by André Dewan Peele, © by Piedmont Opera]

Joining with the principals in portraying the denizens of the convent in which Suor Angelica has done penance without word from her family for seven years, the ladies of the Piedmont Opera Chorus sang splendidly, whether praising providential mercies, enduring hardships, or teasing one another lightheartedly. Their voicing of the liturgical texts, in his settings of which Puccini reminded his contemporaries that he was the descendant of accomplished composers of sacred music, was serene, vividly contrasting with their depictions of the jocular banter amongst the sisters. A particular example of the sagacity of Allbritten’s pacing of the performance was the broad tempo that he chose for ‘E una sorella la manca,’ the nuns’ brief lament for a deceased member of the community. Rarely given any true emotional weight in staged productions, Allbritten’s conducting and the beautiful singing in this performance lent this fleeting moment unexpected gravitas.

The success of a performance of Suor Angelica arguably relies upon the effectiveness of the singer portraying the title rôle more than any other Puccini opera, but Suor Angelica is also an ensemble piece. Perhaps inspired by the personalities he encountered when visiting his cloistered sister, Puccini populated Suor Angelica with dynamic characterizations in miniature. Piedmont Opera’s Suor Angelica was distinguished by the participation of an ensemble of gifted singing actresses, each of whom projected her character’s unique identity.

Sopranos Laura Hutchins and Katherine Ledbetter and mezzo-soprano Sarah Roberts and soprano Charli Mills respectively portrayed the Cercatrici and Novizie with girlish excitement. Soprano Bonnie Blackwell’s merrily glutinous Suor Dolcina was an utter delight, and both the Suora zelatrice of soprano Amanda Moody Schumpert and the Suora infermiera of mezzo-soprano Erica Helmle impressed, musically and dramatically. Mezzo-soprano Alden Pidgen conveyed the Maestra della novizie’s meticulous watchfulness, and soprano Kristin Schwecke sang the Badessa’s lines with benevolent sternness. Credit for the clever musical portraiture in Suor Angelica goes to Puccini, but the insightful variety of his character studies is as apparent in few productions as in this one.

A participant in UNCSA’s Fletcher Fellows program, soprano Margaret Ann Zentner portrayed Suor Genovieffa with glistening, focused tone and unaffectedly youthful acting, conveying the sister’s naïvété and kind disposition without saccharine exaggeration. She sang ‘O sorelle, sorelle, io voglio rivelarvi che una spera di sole’ with warmth and wonder, her top A aptly radiant. Zentner voiced ‘O sorelle in pio lavoro’ and ‘Soave Signor mio, tu sai che prima d ora nel mondo ero pastora’ with graceful zeal and a timbre that recalled the voice of the young Mirella Freni, exhibiting complete mastery of the art of imaginatively inhabiting a rôle, musically and dramatically.

La voce della convenzione: mezzo-soprano Janine Hawley as La zia principessa in Piedmont Opera’s October 2021 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Suor Angelica
[Photograph by André Dewan Peele, © by Piedmont Opera]

Though the duration of her appearance in Suor Angelica amounts to only twelve or so minutes, the title character’s fierce, unfeeling aunt, the Zia principessa, is justifiably regarded as one of Italian opera’s most ferocious villainesses. As such, she is sometimes portrayed as a vicious, one-dimensional figure whose vitriol is tempered by neither empathy nor psychological depth. Both Puccini and his librettist for Il trittico, Giovacchino Forzano, supplied thoughtful singers with opportunities for multi-faceted interpretation, however, and Piedmont Opera’s Zia principessa, mezzo-soprano Janine Hawley, capitalized on oft-neglected gentler dimensions of the part. The granitic bleakness of her articulation of ‘Il Principe Gualtiero vostro padre’ established an atmosphere of disquieting formality that pervaded her interpretation.

The unyielding abrasiveness of Hawley’s deportment was chilling, yet there were fleeting glimpses of vulnerability beyond the steely façade. The mezzo-soprano delivered ‘Or son due anni, venne colpito da fiero morbo’ with emotion that transcended mere indignation, suggesting that the princess was no less acquainted with suffering than her niece. Having informed Angelica of the death of the son whose conception led her to the convent, Hawley was for a moment more zia than principessa, instinctively reaching for Angelica to offer comfort before shrinking from the touch. This glimmer of compassion made the character seem all the more terrible, her frigidity unmistakably a choice. Hawley’s center of vocal gravity was slightly higher than the music requires, but she conquered the low writing without forcing the voice. Singing powerfully, Hawley depicted the Zia principessa as a glamorous but damaged woman rather than a snarling shrew.

La madre in lutto: soprano Marsha Thompson in the title rôle in Piedmont Opera’s October 2021 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Suor Angelica
[Photograph by André Dewan Peele, © by Piedmont Opera]

Witnessing a singer’s first performance of a challenging rôle can be akin to viewing an artist’s canvas before the paint dries. The shapes and colors are present, but the subtleties and shadows that contribute much to the piece’s value and integrity develop over time. Soprano Marsha Thompson’s rôle début as Angelica demonstrated commendable comprehension of the part, communicated through singing that disclosed assiduous study of the score and immersion in the character’s devastating emotions. Joining her sisters in prayer, this Angelica’s voicing of ‘Prega per noi peccatori’ was wrenchingly personal, her quest for benediction vaulting to heaven in passionate but poised tones. There was an aura of Renata Scotto’s metaphysical acuity in Thompson’s singing of ‘I desideri sono i fiori dei vivi,’ the significance of flowers to both her survival in the convent and her eventual escape from it disclosed without being unduly accentuated. Like Scotto, Thompson exhibited cognizance of the intended trajectory of her characterization from the start.

Seven years of repressed hope erupted in Thompson’s voicing of ‘Ah! ditermi, sorella, com’ era la berlina,’ the expansiveness of her reading limning Angelica’s sense of the gravity of the moment. The anger, fear, and helplessness that gripped her Angelica in the dreadful meeting with the Zia principessa resounded in the soprano’s voice, her delivery of ‘Sorella di mia madre, voi siete inesorabile!’ suffused with timbral shadings. The voice took on a biting edge as Angelica pleaded for news of her child. Learning of the boy’s death incited a transformation in this Angelica: the raw, blaring tones of a wounded woman were replaced by the resolute sounds of a mother already following her son into the freedom of death.

In Thompson’s performance, the searing aria ‘Senza mamma, o bimbo, tu sei morto!’ was lived as much as it was sung, the stirring top As directed to the child the despondent mother could not comfort. Rather than being broken as Cio-Cio San is when her child is taken from her, this Angelica found in the knowledge of her child’s death impetus to flee from the oppression of her remorse and isolation. In both ‘La Vergine ha fatto la grazia’ and ‘Ah! lodiam,’ Thompson’s glistening top Cs expressed Angelica’s new commitment to reuniting with her son. Her affection for the flowers she so painstakingly cultivated assumed fatal implications in ‘Amici fiori, voi mi compensate,’ and her ‘Addio, buone sorelle,’ crowned by a stunning top B, was the farewell of a woman certain of the inevitability of her choice.

Thompson exercised exceptional control in Angelica’s final scene, genuinely singing rather than screaming the repeated top As with which the dying mother recognizes and seeks forgiveness for her action against the divine gift of life. Her pleas to the Blessed Virgin were not platitudes addressed to an archetype. The intensity of Thompson’s singing lent Angelica’s final utterances the pathos of one grieving mother appealing to another woman who could not save her son from a cruel death. Tearing off her veil as death overtook her, she was no longer a servant of an earthly church. She was merely a mother, transfigured by returning to the presence of her child. With future opportunities to revisit the rôle, Thompson’s acquaintance with Angelica will undoubtedly develop even greater individuality, but her initial interpretation, distinguished by confident, often exhilarating vocalism that, especially in the lower octave, recalled the singing of Leontyne Price, was memorably moving.

La famiglia scontenta: the cast of Piedmont Opera’s October 2021 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi
[Photograph by André Dewan Peele, © by Piedmont Opera]

As the Catechism regards suicide as a violation of God’s dominion over human life, it is not surprising that the Catholic Church found the implicit absolution that ends Suor Angelica vexing. Its plot centering on a greedy family fraudulently depriving a monastery of a generous bequest, Gianni Schicchi might reasonably have proved to be no less objectionable to the Church—it was in hell that Dante encountered the historical Gianni Schicchi de’ Cavalcanti, after all. Musically, however, Gianni Schicchi’s sins are few and, in a performance as captivating as Piedmont Opera’s, wholly pardonable.

The fortuitous casting from which Piedmont Opera’s performance of Suor Angelica benefited was rivaled by the consistent excellence of the portraits of the embittered scions of the Donati clan. Without singing a note, Piedmont Opera Board of Directors member Bill Phillips was uproariously effective as the not-so-dearly-departed Buoso. The notary and his attending witnesses, Pinellino and Guccio, received spirited characterizations from baritone Scott Lee and basses Hal Garrison (a member of the Piedmont Opera company since 1978) and Jonathan Burdette. Baritone Lawrence Hall sang Puccini’s lines for the none-too-observant physician Maestro Spinelloccio amusingly, maintaining an uncommonly high level of musical accuracy.

Darting across the stage with the litheness of a ballerina, Connor May Kelly was a Gherardino, the seven-year-old son of Gherardo and Nella, worthy of his parents. Equaling her Badessa in Suor Angelica, Kristin Schwecke dispatched Nella’s aggrieved interjections and top C rousingly, and tenor Kameron Alston voiced Gherardo’s music with exuberance and glistening tone. Like Schwecke, Janine Hawley supplemented her riveting Zia principessa with a droll depiction of the implacable Zita. Soprano Regan Bisch and baritone Scott MacLeod sang and acted ably as the formidable La Ciesca and her wan husband Marco. Bass-baritone André Peele’s Betto di Signa handled both his music and his liquor with aplomb.

His cane and uncertain gait notwithstanding, bass-baritone Donald Hartmann’s Simone, the eldest of Buoso’s disgruntled heirs, was no bumbling dotard. Many interpreters of the part rely upon trickery to promulgate the authority that Hartmann wields solely through the voice. Allied with stagecraft redolent of the golden age of vaudeville, this Simone’s voice orated ‘Se il testamento è in mano d’un notaio’ and ‘Dunque era vero!’ potently, the words articulated with caustic wit. Fulminating against Schicchi’s duplicity, Hartmann literally stole the scene, his Simone exasperatedly pilfering the curtains from Buoso’s bedchamber as he was chased from the house he expected to inherit.

L’amore e l’avidità: tenor Alex Richardson as Rinuccio (left) and mezzo-soprano Janine Hawley as Zita (right) in Piedmont Opera’s October 2021 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi
[Photograph by André Dewan Peele, © by Piedmont Opera]

The most wily of the relations gathered in anticipation of the windfall promised by old Buoso’s demise, Rinuccio is asked to sing much of the opera’s most demanding music, including one of Puccini’s iconic tenor arias, but sometimes fails to truly emerge from the ensemble as a fully-realized character. Unabashedly emotive, athletic, and boyishly handsome, Alex Richardson’s Rinuccio was unmistakably his own man, devoted to his family but ready to defy them in order to secure his future with his beloved Lauretta. His febrile defense of Schicchi, condemned by the Donati kinsmen as a blackguard, was galvanizing, his blazing top B making ‘Avete torto!’ an argument that could not be refuted. Richardson voiced the celebrated aria ‘Firenze è come un alberto fiorito’ rousingly, untroubled by its top B♭s. Upon Schicchi’s arrival, this Rinuccio took charge, his ‘Signor Giovanni, rimanete un momento!’ prohibiting refusal. The repetitions of ‘Addio, speranza bella’ as all seemed lost were comically exaggerated but impeccably sung. Having lost the Donati fortune but won Lauretta’s hand, he voiced ‘Lauretta mia, staremo sempre qui’ exultantly, ecstatically joining Lauretta on her optional top D♭. Richardson’s Rinuccio was a man of action, not merely a lovesick boy, and his vocalism rose intrepidly to every challenge of the music.

La melodia suadente: soprano Jodi Burns as Lauretta in Piedmont Opera’s October 2021 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi
[Photograph by André Dewan Peele, © by Piedmont Opera]

Bringing coquettish enchantment reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe to her portrayal of Schicchi’s fiesty daughter Lauretta soprano Jodi Burns sang Puccini’s soaring melodic lines with unfailing musicality and lustrous tone. Romancing with Rinuccio, Burns sang sweetly but with unstinting determination to accomplish her own goals in the wake of the Donati family drama. Her account of the familiar ‘O mio babbino caro’ was rightly cheered, her tone inviolably secure and fetchingly beautiful throughout the range. Too frequently, singers try to make the aria a grand ‘moment’ like Mimì’s ‘Addio, senza rancor’ or Tosca’s ‘Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore.’ Burns presented the aria as precisely what it is: one of opera’s most melodious acts of manipulation. Lauretta prevailing in her cunning venture to convince her father of the intrinsic rectitude of coming to Rinuccio’s aid, Burns phrased ‘La mi giurasti amore!’ with an air of triumph, ascending effortlessly to top D♭. Schicchi is the architect of the plan that ultimately unites his daughter with her ardent lover, but Burns’s Lauretta had both her caro babbino and the audience in the palm of her hand from her first note.

Il padre e la sua figlia: soprano Jodi Burns as Lauretta (left) and baritone Malcolm MacKenzie in the title rôle of Piedmont Opera’s October 2021 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi
[Photograph by André Dewan Peele, © by Piedmont Opera]

Like his colleague in the title rôle of Suor Angelica, baritone Malcolm MacKenzie expanded his repertoire in this Piedmont Opera production with his first performance of the eponymous protagonist of Gianni Schicchi. When hearing performances of this opera, it is easy to forget that its name part was created in the 1918 première by the great baritone Giuseppe de Luca, then only forty-one years old and already the first Sharpless in Madama Butterfly. Casting Schicchi with singers possessing more personality than voice clearly was not Puccini’s intention, but tradition now assigns the rôle in many productions to superannuated singers whose vocal prowess no longer encompasses the technical wherewithal needed to master the composer’s writing. Piedmont Opera followed Puccini’s example by casting MacKenzie, whose vocal presence was at its pinnacle in this performance.

Entering Casa Donati with cyclonic force, MacKenzie’s Schicchi commandeered the performance with easy charisma and vocal strength. The irony of his voicing of ‘Ah! Andato? Perchè stanno a lacrimare?’ manifested Schicchi’s renowned perceptiveness. None too impressed by the haughty Zita’s snobbish denunciation of his offer of assistance, he hurled ‘Brava, la vecchia! Brava!’ at her furiously. Succumbing to Lauretta’s cajoling, this Schicchi growled ‘Datemi il testamento!’ with annoyance, begrudgingly accepting that not even his legendary savvy was a match for a daughter’s persuasiveness. Some of his fellow portrayers of Schicchi struggle with the rôle’s daunting tessitura, not least in ‘In testa la cappellina,’ but MacKenzie approached the music with unflappable assurance, producing an electrifying top G.

Allocating his devious resources to circumventing the conditions of Buoso’s will, Piedmont Opera’s Schicchi battled a parade of schemers with an array of agendas. MacKenzie responded with adaptability of which a veteran politician would have been proud, tailoring his replies to each disenfranchised Donati’s solicitation in turn. The baritone sang ‘Prima un avvertimento!’ boldly. Schicchi’s aria ‘Addio, Firenze; addio, cielo divino’ spotlights the weaknesses of some exponents of the part, but MacKenzie’s traversal of the piece exuded absolute comfort with the music. Similarly, Schicchi’s impersonation of the expired Buoso can be embarrassingly over the top. This Schicchi eschewed excessive crooning and wheezing, always attentive to musical values. MacKenzie excelled in Schicchi’s comedy, but the foremost pleasure of his performance was hearing a voice of such high caliber in the rôle. Epitomized by the work of a cast of rare distinction, uncompromising musicality was the touchstone of Piedmont Opera’s production of Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi.

GIOACHINO ROSSINI (1792 – 1868): Maometto secondo [1820 Naples version] – Ashraf Sewailam (Maometto II), Leah Crocetto (Anna Erisso), Elizabeth DeShong (Calbo), Bruce Sledge (Paolo Erisso), Matthew Hill (Condulmiero); Washington Concert Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Antony Walker, conductor [Washington Concert Opera, Lisner Auditorium, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA; Sunday, 21 November 2021]

Some of opera’s most beloved scores are products of protracted, sometimes painful processes of revision and reworking; processes that in some instances failed to produce a single authoritative edition of a piece. Twenty-First-Century audiences are less likely than their counterparts in previous generations to encounter bowdlerized versions that subjected works to atrocities like transposing rôles for vocal registers different from those for which they were composed, reordering music, and simplifying passages of particular difficulty for modern singers, but anomalies remain. Considerable sleuthing may be required to determine which incarnation of Verdi’s Don Carlos a listener is hearing, for instance, and audiences familiar only with the opera’s Paris version may be puzzled when Venus fails to appear in the final scene of performances of the earlier Dresden version of Wagner’s Tannhäuser.

In the course of a career spanning two decades, Gioachino Rossini’s creative impulses were sometimes upended by a panoply of forces ranging from singers’ whims and managerial meddling to censorial objections and legal entanglements. Changes of casting frequently necessitated musical modifications, and changes of venue could alter the basic structure of a piece. The composer’s surviving correspondence indicates that, when commissioned in May 1820 by Teatro di San Carlo to write his seventh opera for the Naples theater, Rossini dedicated himself to devising an unconventional work that would rival the boldest innovations wrought in earlier generations by Lully, Händel, Rameau, Gluck, and Mozart.

Allied with a grippingly theatrical libretto by Cesare della Valle, the ingenuity that made the Naples version of Maometto secondo one of Rossini’s most compelling scores failed to captivate the Neapolitan audience. Its powerful ensembles prefiguring Bellini’s Norma, Ponchielli’s La gioconda, and several of Verdi’s finest operas, Maometto secondo in its original form offered the discerning Neapolitans few of the dazzling arias of the sort heard in Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, Otello, Armida, La donna del lago, Ricciardo e Zoraide, and Ermione. Disappointed by the reception that Maometto secondo received at the San Carlo, Rossini substantially revised the piece for a December 1822 production at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice, reworking Act Two to replace the opera’s tragic dénouement with the lieto fine, adapted from music borrowed from the final scene of La donna del lago, expected by the Venetians. Faring better in Venice than in Naples, Maometto secondo later traveled northward, arriving in Paris in October 1826 as Le siège de Corinthe.

North America’​s acquaintance with Maometto secondo was dominated in the Twentieth Century by Beverly Sills, who débuted at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1975 in the United States première of Thomas Schippers’s edition of L’assedio di Corinto, a retooling of an Italian translation of Le siège de Corinthe prepared for a 1969 La Scala production headlined by Sills and Marilyn Horne. Fortuitously, Washington Concert Opera chose to eschew Rossini’s and others’ modifications, presenting Maometto secondo largely as it was heard in Naples in 1820. To bel canto aficionados in the Capital region, the wait for WCO’s performance of Maometto secondo may have seemed as prolonged as the Fifteenth-Century conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Venice that serves as the opera’s dramatic backdrop, but the audience’s patience was rewarded with an evening in which Rossini’s genius, too often dismissed as proficient but vapid craftsmanship, electrified the atmosphere in Lisner Auditorium.

Amanti sfortunati: soprano Leah Crocetto as Anna (left) and bass-baritone Ashraf Sewailam as Maometto II (right) in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Gioachino Rossini’s Maometto secondo, 21 November 2021
[Photograph by Caitlin Oldham, © by Washington Concert Opera]

Artistic Director Antony Walker’s conducting of Semiramide and Zelmira in recent WCO seasons demonstrated an affinity for shaping performances of the composer’s music that marked Walker as a peer of Alberto Zedda as a Rossini interpreter. The best qualities of Walker’s pacing of Semiramide and Zelmira, namely rousing but rarely rushed tempi and deft handling of Rossini’s characteristic crescendi, were elevated to new heights of expressivity in Maometto secondo, the plot’s emotional transitions guided with immersive comprehension of the part writing.

Meeting the composer’s and the conductor’s demands, the first of which are amongst Rossini’s most formidable, the playing of the Washington Concert Opera Orchestra was reliably polished throughout the performance, a few instances of imprecise string balances and intonation in the opera’s Maestoso Introduzione resolving quickly. There were moments in the ensembles that engender Maometto secondo’s singular theatrical potency in which the drive of Walker’s conducting undermined the singers’ concentration, but these incidents, too, were brief. Walker’s WCO performances invariably exhibit respect for the music at hand: on this evening, his esteem for Maometto secondo yielded a performance in which the full emotive potential of Rossini’s music was realized.

Few musical endeavors have been as adversely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic as choral singing. Despite the difficulties posed by rehearsing and performing safely, assistant conductor and chorus master David Hanlon and the Washington Concert Opera Chorus achieved a laudable standard of preparedness. In the opening scene of Act One, the chorus voiced ‘Al tuo cenno, Erisso, accolti’ vibrantly, evoking an aura of alarm, and the ladies sang ‘Misera! or dove... ahimè!’ with palpable anxiety. The choristers’ traversal of the dramatic arc of Act One culminated in an account of the act’s final scene in which the massed voices formed an engaging aural tableau from which the principals’ voices emerged with startling immediacy.

Like the first act, Act Two begins with an elaborate choral Introduzione, in which WCO’s chorus sang ‘È follia sul fior degli anni’ with dulcet grace, fostering an atmosphere of tranquility in which the opera’s subsequent events seemed all the more harrowing. Punctuating Maometto’s aria, the choristers’ interjection of ‘A che più tardi ancor?’ bolstered the Ottoman ruler’s faltering resolve, and their rapturous singing of the beautiful preghiera, ‘Nume, cui ’l sole è trono,’ gorgeously accompanied by harpist Eric Sabatino, provided an interlude of serenity before the final scene’s horrors. The ladies voiced desperate fear starkly in Anna’s rondò, and the full chorus heightened the tragic grandeur of the opera’s finale with explosive but eloquent singing. Never inhibited by the masks necessitated by safety protocols, WCO’s choristers vanquished doubts about performing during a pandemic by achieving uncompromised musicality in some of Rossini’s most ambitious choral writing.

Washington Concert Opera performances often provide District audiences with opportunities to hear young singers whose work identifies them as emerging artists of tremendous promise. Appearing only in the opera’s first quarter of an hour, the rôle of the Venetian nobleman Condulmiero was entrusted in WCO’s Maometto secondo to tenor Matthew Hill, who uttered each of the character’s few lines with a bright, focused timbre and certain intonation. Regrettably, the music for the Ottoman official Selimo, which Hill might also have sung, was omitted. Nevertheless, the impact of Hill’s singing was markedly greater than the duration of his time on stage.

Padre in conflitto: tenor Bruce Sledge as Paolo Erisso in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Gioachino Rossini’s Maometto secondo, 21 November 2021
[Photograph by Caitlin Oldham, © by Washington Concert Opera]

One of Maometto secondo’s novelties is its principal tenor rôle, written for Andrea Nozzari, whose career encompassed the creation of parts in works by composers including Rossini, Mayr, Mercadante, and Donizetti, being the father of the opera’s heroine rather than a romantic lead. Washington Concert Opera’s Erissi, padre e figlia, returned to rôles that they sang in the 2012 Santa Fe Opera production of Maometto secondo, the first staging of Hans Schellevis’s critical edition of the opera’s 1820 San Carlo version. Experience in the rôle of Paolo Erisso, the Venetian general charged with repulsing the Ottoman invasion who is appalled to discover that his daughter Anna, whose hand he intends for the young hero Calbo, has been secretly seduced by the enemy Maometto, was apparent in tenor Bruce Sledge’s performance, even in the concert setting. Making his entrance in Act One, he voiced ‘Basta, non più! V’intesi, o prodi, o veri cittadini e guerrieri’ excitingly, rising effortlessly to top C♭. The building tension in the magnificent Terzettone with Anna and Calbo spurred the singer to declaim Erisso’s lines with engrossing theatricality, his reading of ‘Dal cor l’iniquo affetto’ movingly imparting the shocked father’s ire and heartbreak.

Sledge sang Erisso’s trills and top Bs confidently, his upper register integrated with the voice’s lower reaches throughout the performance. The sole top note that threatened to crack was recovered adroitly. Hatred and indignation coursed through Sledge’s vocalism in the terzetto with Calbo and Maometto, and the tenor enunciated ‘Ah perchè fra le spade nemiche’ in the Act One finale with unstinting fortitude. In the terzetto with Calbo and Maometto in Act Two, Sledge’s singing sizzled with contempt, his tone penetrating the orchestrations from the top to the bottom of the range. Addressing the tomb of Erisso’s wife in the terzettino with Anna and Calbo, Sledge tendered a master class in the art of bel canto, his dulcet phrasing escalating the emotion of the scene. Lacking an extended solo scene, Erisso might at first glance seem an unlikely part for a singer of Nozzari’s reputation. Sledge affirmed that, when sung with the fire with which Rossini imbued it, it is one of the composer’s most riveting tenor rôles.

Amico, ‘fratello,’ e sposo: mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong as Calbo in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Gioachino Rossini’s Maometto secondo, 21 November 2021
[Photograph by Caitlin Oldham, © by Washington Concert Opera]

WCO’s Maometto secondo was an evening of uniformly superb singing, but, even in such distinguished company, the Calbo of mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong was extraordinary. Created by French contralto Adèle Chaumel, who sang in Naples under the Italianized name Adelaide Comelli and married the famous tenor Giovanni Battista Rubini a year after Maometto secondo’s première, Calbo is a rôle upon which Rossini lavished particular creativity. In Act One’s Terzettone, the character is developed via pained articulations of disappointment and disbelief, voiced by DeShong with a shining top B and incredible command of the bravura writing. In DeShong’s performance, in which passages of unison fiorature in thirds were rendered with tremendous accuracy, presages of Rossini’s later music for Arsace and Semiramide and of Bellini’s duets for Adalgisa and Norma were unmistakable. This Calbo was a galvanizing presence in the terzetto with Erisso and Maometto and the final scene of Act One, every astounding feat of technique serving the character’s uncertain predicament.

It is in another enthralling trio, alongside Erisso and Maometto, that Calbo is first heard in Act Two, and DeShong braved each of Rossini’s vocal assaults with complete comfort, manifested in her unerring navigations of wide intervals and chromatic scales. DeShong’s performance of the Andante cavatina ‘Non temer d’un basso affetto’ rivaled Marilyn Horne’s singing of the piece in the 1969 La Scala production of L’assedio di Corinto, the younger singer equaling or surpassing her illustrious predecessor in all but executing the trills in ‘Del periglio al fiero aspetto.’ Her singing in the fateful terzettino with Anna and Erisso might have been anticlimactic after such exhilarating vocalism, but DeShong immersed herself in communicating Calbo’s fleeting joy at winning Anna’s affection. Calbo’s happiness is brief, but memories of DeShong’s singing will long endure.

Eroina ingannata: soprano Leah Crocetto as Anna in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Gioachino Rossini’s Maometto secondo, 21 November 2021
[Photograph by Caitlin Oldham, © by Washington Concert Opera]

The rôle of Erisso’s courageous daughter Anna, torn between filial loyalty and illicit love for the inimical Maometto, who won her heart in the guise of a Venetian emissary, was written for Isabella Colbran, who became Rossini’s wife fourteen months after Maometto secondo’s première. Contemporary accounts of her performances in this period of her career suggest that Colbran’s voice was in decline, a supposition supported in some musicologists’ analyses by Rossini largely writing contemplative rather than fiendishly demonstrative music for Colbran in Maometto secondo. On this evening, soprano Leah Crocetto’s singing dispelled any notion of Anna being a lesser sister of Rossini’s renowned rôles for Colbran.

Crocetto introduced her complex, evolving Anna with an arresting voicing of the Andante cavatina ‘Ah! che invan sul mesto ciglio’ in which the voice was used not as a disembodied instrument but as a conduit for the text. Having negotiated the Terzettone’s trills, grupetti, and top Bs with stylistic fluency, Crocetto voiced the Andantino preghiera ‘Guisto ciel, in tal periglio’ enchantingly, her legato as mesmerizing as her coloratura. In the final scene of Act One, she sang first ‘Ritrovo l’amante nel crudo nemico’ and then ‘Rendimi il padre, o barbaro’ with abandon, ending the act with a mammoth top C.

Anna’s duet with Maometto in Act Two prefigures Verdi’s music for Odabella and Attila, and Crocetto’s Verdian credentials were evident in her sensational but sensitive singing of ‘Sì: non t’inganni...Ah, tanto la pena mi s’addoppia,’ her top C again employed to accentuate the profundity of the character’s emotions. Grief tinged the soprano’s voice with gathering shadows in the terzettino with Calbo and Erisso, memories of Anna’s mother melding with love for her father and burgeoning warmth for Calbo.

The sincerity of expression of Crocetto’s account of the preghiera ‘Ferve dunque la pugna’ was deeply touching, the delicate cantilena sustained on the breath in a manner reminiscent of Montserrat Caballé. In Crocetto’s performance, the rondò ‘Quella morte che s’avanza’ was a decisive act of defiance. Preferring taking her own life to surrendering to a dishonorable passion in the opera’s final scene, Crocetto underscored the kinship between Rossini’s Anna and Berlioz’s Cassandre. Perhaps Isabella Colbran was no longer at her best at the time of Maometto secondo’s première, but Rossini’s trust in her musical and histrionic abilities was abundantly validated by Crocetto’s magnificent singing of the rôle.

Tuono ottomano: bass-baritone Ashraf Sewailam as Maometto II in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Gioachino Rossini’s Maometto secondo, 21 November 2021
[Photograph by Caitlin Oldham, © by Washington Concert Opera]

At the age of twenty-one, the historical Mehmed II conquered Constantinople, hastening the demise of the Byzantine empire of Constantine and Justinian and inaugurating dominion in the Muslim realms that would ultimately encompass two reigns as sultan of the Ottoman empire. Contrary to the Euro-centric perception of Ottomans as plundering barbarians, Mehmed II was an avowed patron of the Arts whose actions as sultan were irrefutably shaped by an ardent social conscience. The aristocratic musicianship and stage deportment of Rossini’s first Maometto II, Filippo Galli, were sufficient to earn him the distinction of creating another notable operatic portrait of an iconic monarch, Enrico VIII in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena. In WCO’s Maometto secondo, Egyptian bass-baritone Ashraf Sewailam honored the legacies of both Galli and Mehmed II by portraying the legendary conqueror as a man whose severity was tempered by a lover’s vulnerability.

Maometto makes as dashing an entrance as any character in opera, his aria ‘Sorgete: in sì bel giorno, o prodi miei guerrieri’ requiring ironclad bravura technique and indomitable security in the upper register. Sewailam dispatched the fiorature stirringly and effortlessly projected the top Es and Fs. Dominating Maometto’s scene with the chorus, the bass-baritone matched his colleagues’ urgent vocalism in the terzetto with Calbo and Erisso. Launching the Act One finale, Sewailam voiced ‘Guardie, olà’ robustly, invoking the might of the Ottoman empire. His singing often recalled that of the preeminent recent exponent of Maometto’s music, Samuel Ramey, the two singers sharing a prowess for evincing the dramatic impetus in Rossini’s intricate music.

Sewailam partnered Crocetto brilliantly in Maometto’s duet with Anna in Act Two, voicing ‘Anna, tu piangi? Il pianto pur non è d’odio un segno’ with benevolence and concern. As Anna’s disdain for the false pretenses under which Maometto paid court to her became obvious, Sewailam’s vocalism grew more flinty, the velvet of his wooing transforming into the steel of vengeance. Sung with fury, the repeated top E♭s in the aria with chorus, ‘All’invito generoso riconosco i miei guerrieri,’ limned the sultan’s increasing exasperation.

The blustering brawn of Sewailam’s voice reverberated in the terzetto with Calbo and Erisso, Maometto having reached the limit of his magnanimity. His love thwarted by Anna’s suicide, Maometto’s humanity reached its zenith in the opera’s final scene, which in Sewailam’s performance was an affecting lament for his beloved. Singing music as demanding as Maometto’s rarely comes naturally to lower voices, but Sewailam sang Maometto unflappably, finding in Rossini’s musical obstacles aspects of a fascinating character who is too often portrayed as an insipid villain.

Mere hours after the last chord of this performance sounded in Lisner Auditorium, news of the passing of Washington Concert Opera’s founder, Stephen Crout, was announced. In the thirty-four years since the company’s first performance, the artists, staff, and supporters who bring WCO’s adventurous seasons to fruition persist in furthering Crout’s aspiration to perform lesser-known works with voices appropriate for the music. Overcoming a pandemic’s best efforts at blocking its path to the stage, WCO’s performance of Maometto secondo epitomized the spirit of Crout’s vision, presenting an exquisite score in a performance worthy of it.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770 – 1827): Fidelio, Opus 72— Alexandra LoBianco (Leonore), Carl Tanner (Florestan), Kenneth Kellogg (Rocco), Joseph Barron (Don Pizarro), Erika Baikoff (Marzelline), Jason Karn (Jaquino), Takaoki Onishi (Don Fernando), Wade Henderson (Erster Gefangener), Adam Dengler (Zweiter Gefangener); North Carolina Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Arthur Fagen, conductor [North Carolina Opera, Meymandi Concert Hall, Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA; Friday, 12 November 2021 (dress rehearsal)]

No matter how nobly they strive to esteem all of their progeny equally, artists, like parents, invariably feel greater affection for some of their creations than for others. The most logical impetus for such preferences is success, but, particularly in opera, works that troubled their creators most are often those that composers love best. Nearly two centuries after his death, it is folly to conjecture that his sole opera, Fidelio, was valued more highly than its brethren by their progenitor, but the effort expended in bringing the opera to the stage, initially as Leonore and, after painstaking revisions, as Fidelio, might well have garnered a place of honor in Beethoven’s heart for this wonderful, worrisome score.

First performed in the version most familiar to Twenty-First-Century audiences at Vienna’s Kärntnertortheater on 23 May 1814, Fidelio occupied Beethoven for more than a decade, its genesis initiated by an 1803 commission from the noted singer, thespian, and impresario Emanuel Schikaneder, who commissioned, wrote the libretto, and created the rôle of Papageno in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. Beethoven’s setting of a forgotten libretto by Schikaneder was set aside when Joseph Sonnleithner’s libretto for Leonore, an adaptation of a play that was popular with Parisian audiences in the final months of France’s four-year Directoire, came to Beethoven’s attention. The indifference that greeted Leonore’s 1805 première, resulting from influences more martial than musical, prompted substantial retooling, yielding a shortened edition of the piece that, when staged in 1806, was appreciated but ultimately sidelined by circumstances that again had little to do with music.

The final incarnation of Fidelio, its libretto having been modified by Stephan von Breuning and Georg Friedrich Treitschke, was quickly recognized as a work of unique power, surpassing other contemporaneous settings of the same source material and similar pieces in the ‘rescue’ opera genre that was fashionable during the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century. It is easy to theorize that Beethoven’s own longing for conjugal devotion deepened his connection with the story of a wife’s determination to free her wrongly-imprisoned husband at any cost to herself, but the poignancy of North Carolina Opera’s performance of Fidelio, planned to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth but postponed due to COVID-19, was anything but theoretical. A scheduling conflict, the stuff of opera lovers’ nightmares, necessitated attending the final dress rehearsal rather than the concert performance. Rehearsals must always be safe, sacrosanct environments in which artists can take risks and sort out mistakes without fear of critical censure. In this instance, however, the integrity and professionalism of the cast assembled for North Carolina Opera’s Fidelio produced a dress rehearsal that was a stellar performance in its own right; one in assessment of which no allowances for the performing conditions need to be made.

Under the baton of renowned conductor Arthur Fagen, whose respect for Beethoven’s score was apparent in every bar of his reading of it, the musicians of the North Carolina Opera Orchestra played with precision of pitch, rhythm, and ensemble that would have been remarkable in any performance. In a rehearsal, musicianship of such an exalted caliber attested to North Carolina Opera’s tremendous achievements during the past decade. From the opening bars of the Overture, the musicians’ preparedness and enthusiasm both for this music and for returning to live performance in general were evident. Fagen exhibited innate understanding of Beethoven’s musical language, emphasizing accents learned from Haydn, Salieri, and Mozart while also spotlighting the score’s originality.

Conductor and orchestra made the March that introduces Don Pizarro jauntily bombastic and strangely sinister, and the horns conquered the oft-mangled writing for their instruments in Leonore’s celebrated aria. Tempi and dynamics were faithful to Beethoven’s instructions, maintaining the elusive equilibrium between momentum and refinement. Fagen elucidated the presages of Wagner, Mahler, and Richard Strauss in the prelude to Florestan’s scene at the start of Act Two without approaching the music like a rediscovered episode from Der Ring des Nibelungen. The inevitable flaws of live performance were few and fleeting. If ever there were a perfect performance of any piece, that perfection would be a damning imperfection, for a crucial component of music’s capacity to excite is its flirtation with catastrophe. Beethoven’s music embodies a singular fusion of Classicism and chaos, and Fagen’s conducting was the catalyst for an incendiary musical reaction.

As in many of North Carolina Opera’s performances in recent seasons, chorus master Scott MacLeod’s work yielded choral singing of an exceptionally high standard. Beethoven’s writing for the chorus in Fidelio is not extensive but is both very demanding and vitally important to the drama. First as the troops who accompany Don Pizarro to the prison and, later in Act One, as the prisoners who extol a rare opportunity to enjoy a few moments of freedom from their cells with one of opera’s great choruses, ‘O welche Lust,’ the gentlemen of the North Carolina Opera Chorus demonstrated well-trained versatility, roaring with martial bravado in Don Pizarro’s scene and movingly imparting the reverent awe of inmates grateful for even a few minutes in which to uninhibitedly feel the sun upon their faces. Joined by the ladies in the opera’s final scene, the choristers celebrated the triumphs of conjugal love and decency over pride and oppression with singing that tested the structural integrity of the concert hall’s roof. The roof thankfully proved to be capable of withstanding the tide of sound, but few listeners’ emotions are likely to have remained unstirred by the chorus’s performance.

Two of the Triangle’s most gifted singers lent their voices to the lines for the pair of prisoners who emerge from the chorus in Act One. Tenor Wade Henderson voiced ‘Wir wollen mit Vertrauen auf Gottes Hilfe bauen’ with the clarity of intonation and diction and clarion tone from which many North Carolina Opera performances have benefited. Baritone Adam Dengler sang ‘Sprecht leise, haltet euch zurück!’ strongly but subtly, compellingly conveying the aura of apprehension that prolonged captivity had instilled in the prisoners.

His portrayal of Silvio in North Carolina Opera’s 2020 production of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci introduced Triangle audiences to the fantastic voice of baritone Takaoki Onishi, and his return to Raleigh to portray Fidelio’s deus ex machina, the benevolent government minister Don Fernando, was most welcome, especially as it is uncommon to hear a voice of such excellent mettle in the rôle. Onishi performed the official’s conciliatory duties affectingly, singing ‘Des besten Königs Wink und Wille’ and Don Fernando’s words of admiration for Leonore’s resilience with the vocal solidity and attractiveness that the music deserves but too seldom receives.

Another member of NC Opera’s Pagliacci cast, tenor Jason Karn is also a familiar presence in Raleigh. He excelled as Leoncavallo’s Beppe, but Beethoven’s music for Jaquino afforded greater opportunities for him to demonstrate the quality of his voice. Opening Act One with a spirited exchange with Marzelline, this Jaquino sang ‘Jetzt, Schätzchen, jetzt sind wir allein’ with the irrepressible impatience of a young man in love. Karn’s lyricism in the sublime quartet was complemented by excitingly frenetic singing in the quintet in the act’s final scene. In Act Two, Jaquino appears only in the opera’s final moments, rejoicing in Florestan’s release and celebrating the discovery of Fidelio’s true identity rejuvenating his hope for winning Marzelline’s affection. Cognizant of the difference between projection and volume, Karn was audible in even the densest ensemble, his lustrous timbre discernible but never over-prominent.

Soprano Erika Baikoff’s Marzelline was a winsome young lady, sharp-witted but dreamily romantic enough to fall victim to Leonore’s disguise. In her duet with Jaquino in the first scene of Act One, this Marzelline’s disgust at the notion of settling for her familiar suitor rather than pursuing the enigmatic Fidelio was palpable, the soprano’s singing of ‘Es wird ja nichts Wichtiges sein’ laden with good-natured but intensifying annoyance. Its music poised between Mozart and Weber, Marzelline’s aria ‘O wär’ ich schon mit dir vereint,’ though appealingly scored, can be tedious when it is sung unimaginatively. Baikoff’s performance was delightful, her top A delivered with the ebullience of a young girl’s first declaration of love. She voiced ‘Mir ist so wunderbar’ in the quartet with an apt sense of amazement, a sentiment also relayed by her gleaming top C in the trio and her zestful singing of the triplets in the quintet. The consternation with which this Marzelline learned of Leonore’s true identity in the opera’s final scene was both amusing and touching. Too good-natured to be angry, she accepted the revelation of her folly with humility, relayed with beguiling vocalism.

In too many performances of Fidelio, the musical atrocities committed by interpreters of Don Pizarro, the tyrannical prison governor, are nearly as unpardonable as the character’s torture and detention of Florestan. The sagacity of North Carolina Opera’s casting of this Fidelio filled Meymandi Concert Hall with every note sung by bass-baritone Joseph Barron, a Don Pizarro with few peers in the years since Friedrich Schorr, Josef Metternich, and Hans Hotter last sang the rôle. Rather than the travesty of off-pitch caterwauling that it is in some productions, Pizarro’s tempestuous entrance aria ‘Ha! welch’ ein Augenblick!’ was genuinely sung in Barron’s performance, the full range of the music in the voice and the words hurled into the auditorium like grenades. Though appropriately savage, ‘Jetzt, Alter, jetzt hat es Eile!’ in the duet with Rocco was also uninfringably musical, and his voicing of ‘Verweg’ner Alter, welche Rechte’ in the quintet was vicious without being discordant. In the quartet in Act Two, Barron detonated a volatile ‘Er sterbe!’ that, like all of the bass-baritone’s singing on this evening, made its point without resorting to shouting and snarling.

When sung with the proper blend of humor and humanity, the gaoler Rocco can be Fidelio’s most endearing character, a relation of Mozart’s Sarastro and Wagner’s Hans Sachs. North Carolina Opera’s Rocco, bass Kenneth Kellogg, interpreted the part with paternal kindliness and hearty joviality, maintaining an element of lightness in his delivery even at the bottom of the range. He anchored the Act One quartet firmly, his tone consistently solid, and his handsomely-sung account of the aria ‘Hat man nicht auch Gold beineben’ exuded the doting father’s delight in his own cunning. His ‘Gut, Söhnchen, gut,’ delivered to Fidelio with a potential father-in-law’s pride, was as charming as it was sonorous.

In the duet with Don Pizarro, more somber facets of Rocco’s personality shone in Kellogg’s voicing of ‘So sagt doch nur in Eile,’ horror darkening his tone as the amiable guard recoiled at his superior’s murderous instructions. The bass’s singing in the final scene of Act One, first in the duet with Leonore and subsequently in the quintet, disclosed growing anxiety, the gravity of the voice’s lower reaches suggesting that Rocco was tormented by the seeming inevitability of tragedy. Funereal severity remained in the duet with Leonore in Act Two, but Kellogg’s singing of ‘Nur hurtig fort, nur frisch gegraben’ demonstrated the character’s innate compassion. The shock of learning that the trusted Fidelio was actually Leonore was quickly supplanted by recognition of the magnitude of the events transpiring before him, the voice suffused with astonishment in the trio and quartet. Though Kellogg’s vocalism exhibited sophistication throughout the performance, his Rocco was an ordinary man who found himself in an extraordinary situation.

Beethoven’s vocal writing for the husband who inspires Leonore’s unbending fidelity is so demanding that, though he appears only in Act Two, Florestan is one of opera’s most daunting—and, frankly, frequently poorly-sung—rôles. The tenors who sang Florestan in the respective premières of the opera’s three versions were acclaimed for their performances of music by Haydn and Mozart, a fact that may seem remarkable to listeners whose exposure to Fidelio was shaped by Heldentenor Florestans like Wolfgang Windgassen and Jon Vickers. Raleigh’s Florestan, Carl Tanner, the superb Canio in NC Opera‘s 2020 Pagliacci, might be best categorized as a spinto tenor, a singer like fellow American James King whose voice possesses heft and flexibility, traits upon which he capitalized in his portrayal of Florestan.

There was no lack of raw power in Tanner’s singing of ‘Gott! welch’ Dunkel hier,’ but he also preserved clarity of line that often eludes heavier voices. His reading of the Adagio cantabile ‘In des Lebens Frühlingstagen ist das Glück von mir gefloh’n’ was hypnotic, the legato smooth and the top B♭s solid. The dramatic whirlwind of the trio with Leonore and Rocco spurred Tanner to voice ‘Euch werde Lohn in bessern Welten’ expansively, resignation giving way to hope, and his lines in the quartet were enunciated with inherent nobility. The ecstatic frenzy of ‘O namenlose Freude!’ overtaxes some Florestans’ vocal resources, but Tanner sang incandescently. Here and in the opera’s final scene, sure of his command of the music, he infused his vocalism with elation. Heroic but never hectoring, Tanner was a Florestan who merited Leonore’s selfless daring, singing the part with a level of assurance rarely heard in this music.

It is a testament to Beethoven’s approval of Anna Milder-Hauptmann’s interpretation of Leonore that she was entrusted with singing the rôle in the first performances of each of the opera’s three versions. A noted champion of Gluck’s operas, Milder-Hauptmann’s repertoire also encompassed music by Haydn, Cherubini, Spontini, and Mendelssohn. It is difficult to speculate about the amplitude of her sound based solely upon the music that she sang and contemporary descriptions of her singing, but it is likely that Milder-Hauptmann brought a leaner, nimbler voice to Leonore than has become common in the rôle in the years since Wagnerians including Amalie Materna, Lotte Lehmann, Kirsten Flagstad, Birgit Nilsson, and Dame Gwyneth Jones assumed the part. Heard in Raleigh in recent seasons as Tosca and the Siegfried Brünnhilde, North Carolina Opera’s Leonore, soprano Alexandra LoBianco, sang Beethoven’s music with a voice that was at once both dexterous and opulent in a manner reminiscent of Gertrude Grob-Prandl.

Leonore’s lines in the canon quartet in which she is first heard in Act One are placed low in the voice, reminding the listener that Leonore is in male disguise, and LoBianco sang athletically without over-reliance on chest resonance. In the trio with Rocco and Marzelline, she enunciated ‘Ich habe Mut!’ with dramatic involvement and a majestic top A♭. Overhearing Pizarro’s plot to murder Florestan, this Leonore declaimed ‘Abscheulicher! wo eilst du hin?’ bitingly, the wife’s abhorrence of Pizarro’s treachery transfiguring the singer’s voice into a column of fire. LoBianco then channeled Leonore’s love for Florestan into a reading of ‘Komm, Hoffnung, laß den letzten Stern’ that united an accomplished bel canto singer’s cantilena with a valkyrie’s valiant top Bs. A new air of tenacity permeated her voicing of ‘Nun sprecht, wie ging’s?’ in the duet with Rocco, and she closed Act One with striking ascents to top A and B♭.

Though singing the rôle in a dress rehearsal for a concert performance of the opera, LoBianco’s work in Act Two evinced total comprehension of the dramatic trajectory of Leonore’s actions. The onerous triplets in the duet with Rocco were dispatched with ease, and the soprano sang ‘Ihr sollt ja nicht zu klagen haben’ with unaffected emotional directness. Her vocalism in the trio with Florestan and Rocco promulgated the catharsis of Leonore’s reunion with her husband. In LoBianco’s performance, Leonore’s ‘Tödt’ erst sein Weib!’ in the quartet was the climax that it should be, her euphoric top B♭ declaring her triumph over Pizarro’s depravity. ‘O namenlose Freude!’ has rarely sounded more like a precursor of the celebrated love duet in Act Two of Tristan und Isolde than when sung by LoBianco and Tanner, her top B still refulgent after an evening of arduous singing. Alongside her colleagues’ affecting performances, the beauty and expressivity of LoBianco’s vocalism heightened the immense emotional impact of the opera’s final scene, crowning a portrayal of grace and grit.

On 5 November 1955, the storied Wiener Staatsoper again resounded with music after a decade of silence. Its stage destroyed by a fiery bombardment as the Second World War waned, the company celebrated the reconstruction of the house on the Ringstraße with a production of Fidelio. It was fitting that North Carolina Opera perpetuated this tradition by commemorating perseverance in the battle against COVID-19 by performing Fidelio, yet the joys of this Fidelio were not solely ceremonial. Uplifted by a team of artists giving of their best, North Carolina Opera’s Fidelio signaled that those who cherish it will liberate opera from any calamity.

MARSHALL DEERFIELD (born 1987): Travel by Haiku: Volumes 6 – 10, Far Out on the Road with Friends [A Freedom Books, 31 March 2021; 149 pages; ISBN 978-0998425832; Available from the author and Amazon]

Since the continent’s indigenous peoples first relayed their lores orally, America’s poets have continually confronted two questions: what is poetry, and what is its rôle in the American way of life? For Phyllis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Gwendolyn Brooks, poetry was an instrument of social equality. For Zitkála-Šá, Miguel Algarín, and Toshio Mori, it was the cry of the marginalized. For Emily Dickinson, it was an act of defiance. For Walt Whitman, poetry was the spirit of America; sometimes rough, sometimes refined, always indomitably original. America’s poetry has also been shaped by the endeavors of populists, poets like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Robert Frost, whose verses perpetuate the genre by appealing to readers who might otherwise reject poetry.

Poetry in Twenty-First-Century America has expanded into new dimensions that not even Edgar Allan Poe at his most inventive could have envisioned, rendering the question of what constitutes poetry irrelevant and debilitating. If the heart of poetry is rhythm, what is not inherently poetic? Song lyrics, social media posts, the sounds of rain upon windows, and the coursing of blood through veins are their own kinds of poetry; actions, reactions, and interactions that can be replicated in words.

Celebration of poetry as the art of verbalizing life’s triumphs and trivialities is a cornerstone of Volumes Six through Ten of Marshall Deerfield’s Travel by Haiku, a collaborative collection of poetry and prose musings that, as the book’s subtitle intimates, commemorates adventures ‘far out on the road with friends.’ Encompassing the work of writers as dissimilar as Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac, the travelogue is a pillar of the American literary canon, but Travel by Haiku reshapes the models of Roughing It and On the Road into a composition of individuality that advances revered traditions into a new era of heightened awareness of the significance of words.

It is fitting that Deerfield—the nom de plume of Marshall James Kavanaugh—​is based in Philadelphia. That city’s long embodiment of American ideals of liberty and innovation permeates every word of Deerfield’s writing, which in this edition of Travel by Haiku manifests a stream-of-consciousness style that is at once reminiscent of the William Faulkner of ‘Barn Burning’ and ‘Mountain Victory’ and strikingly original. An integral element of Deerfield’s poetic aesthetic is a focus on the psychological nuances of words and the subjects that they portray. There are numerous passages in which, in terms of both language and the book’s visual presentation, the words are tasked not with creating poetry but with translating natural and human landscapes into language. Deerfield shares with Ernest Hemingway a gift for producing writing that is accessible but impregnated with emotional intricacies.

Written in collaboration with Augustus Depenbrock, Travel by Haiku’s sixth volume, Desert Jesters Swim In Ancient Seas, begins with an evocation of the vastness of the American continent, ‘A wide open space / empty except for two guys.’ Inspired by a journey through the desolate Big Bend of southwestern Texas, the volume is characterized by use of imagery that fills the reader with an unsettling perception of the remoteness of the Trans-Pecos region. Each of these five volumes ofTravel by Haiku is imbued with sobering cognizance of man’s cruel intrusions into nature’s order, metaphorically expressed in Desert Jesters Swim In Ancient Seas with lines like ‘Hungry cops trying to catch you with your pants down / prowling the whole two blocks of town.’ [Emphases and italicizations in quoted passages appear here as they are in the book, but total fidelity to the poet’s spatial arrangements of texts regrettably is not possible.] The specter of man’s inhumanity haunts the texts with phantasmagoric specificity, each haiku aimed like a weapon at readers’ misconceptions about progress and Romanticized notions of the American frontier.

Further developing a theme introduced in the previous volume, Volume Seven, Scavenger Poets Tell Their Tales, continues the book’s unsparing explication of the dichotomy of rural and urban settings. Treated as a microcosmic representation of the class warfare that splinters modern society, the disorienting ambiguities of modern Texas suffuse lines including ‘Mellow vibes / A little retreat into an Austin oasis / reggae ghetto / blaster is full throttle’ with stark expressive impact. Occasionally, over-reliance upon colloquialisms, perhaps resulting from the involvement and integration of multiple poetic sensibilities, compromises the universality of the book’s narrative, but Deerfield invariably capitalizes on the vivid tableaux conjured by familiar phrases.

Here I am, take me to your leader and bring me to your artsy dive bars in a basket of old laundry and cowboy hats.

Words like these engender an atmosphere of ruggedness that contrasts markedly with humorous episodes like that of a fugitive penny seeming to have been dislodged from a rectal sanctuary. No other line epitomizes the prevailing ethos of Travel by Haiku as succinctly as that in which Deerfield writes that his goal is to ‘play a show to the passing flow.’ There is Shakespearean gravitas in this jingoistic suggestion of one man’s life being mere entertainment for a world that scarcely notices.

The scenic marvels of a voyage from Los Angeles to Seattle are mirrored in the language of Travel by Haiku’s eighth volume, Tree Clowns Climb High, Onwards & Outwards. Joined on his physical and poetical traversals of America’s Pacific coast by Shane Donnelly and Tara Lynn Faith Williamson, Deerfield intensifies his scrutiny of the conflicts between the natural and unnatural worlds, employing diction to illustrate the widening chasm between man and his surroundings. ‘Nothing is absent / eyes open to simple truths / welcome to the frontier,’ the poets opine, proposing that, for too many observers, a plane of existence without artifice is unfamiliar territory. The bond between man and earth resounds in the lines ‘Ancient melodies from trees, / haunted night spirits / amongst us and within us,’ redolent of the cacophonous sylvan sound world of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Men are both the heroes and the villains of their own epics, Deerfield’s writing imparts, the destructive consequences of their choices demonstrating perverse Transcendentalism, Thoreau’s Walden now polluted and defiled.

In the ninth volume, The Plot Thickens, Connection Deepens, poetry becomes the precipice to which humanity clings, contemplating the abyss of failure but also appreciating the beauty of survival. ‘The earth offers gifts / abundance at rainbow’s end / revealed by the storm,’ the poet confides, but the bounty can be disconcertingly deceptive. Mining the ambivalence of words with ingenuity common in French poetry but rarely ventured in verse in English, Deerfield and his colleagues survey the fallacies under which corrupt societies have buried truths that are more easily ignored than confronted. ‘If intelligence were to grow to its full potential, wouldn’t it want to go some place it couldn’t be found?’ they write, evincing the futility of logic in a time in which the devastating effects of climate change, startlingly depicted in Travel by Haiku, are willfully denied. The poets’ descriptions of Rocky Mountain, Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and Glacier National Parks harken back to the pioneering work of John Muir and John Wesley Powell. Deerfield distills the wisdom of these stewards of America’s wild places into a single line that elucidates the message that bursts from every page of Travel by Haiku: ‘Earth writes its own poetry.’

The change of perspective that gives Volume Ten, Crow Speak For The Moon To The Glaciers, its singular philosophical magnitude is apparent from its first page, Deerfield’s partnership with Stephanie Beattie and Cameron Christopher Stuart yielding an amplified voice that glorifies the wonders of friendships among people and nature’s life forces whilst warning of the cataclysm towards which the planet is hurtling. Poe wrote of the ‘poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem’s sake.’ There is no such poetry in these five volumes of Travel by Haiku, yet these pages are not laden with dogmatic proselytizing. Deerfield grasps that, just as Melville comprehended that the reader must empathize with Captain Ahab in order to circumnavigate hundreds of pages of his obsessive odyssey, his poetry must please if it is to effectively advocate for environmental responsibility and individual integrity. To its compiler’s credit, Travel by Haiku is an easy read that provokes rumination by engaging the imagination. Traveling by haiku to join Deerfield and his companions by a campfire in a wilderness equally comforting and threatening, could a reader spurn the necessity of acting to conserve the sacred intersections of earth, man, and art?

Fundamental to the genesis of the venerated Sequoyah’s syllabary of the Cherokee language was the concept of ᏗᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏧᎦᎶᎦ, the assertion that written language, disseminated by literature and correspondence, constitutes a procession of ‘talking leaves’ whereby the wisdom of past generations progresses via the present to the future. In these five volumes of Travel by Haiku, poetry is a conduit for the rediscovery of neglected voices, primeval leaves that here talk in new refrains.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770 – 1827), PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840 – 1893), and AARON COPLAND (1900 – 1990): Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125 (‘Choral’), 1812 Overture, Opus 49, and Fanfare for the Common Man– Lyubov Petrova (soprano), Nancy Maultsby (mezzo-soprano), Rodrick Dixon (tenor), Marcus DeLoach (baritone); Greensboro Symphony Master Chorale, Greensboro Symphony Orchestra; Dmitry Sitkovetsky, conductor [Steven Tanger Center for the Performing Arts, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA; Thursday, 16 December 2021]

Of the many cancellations and postponements perpetrated by COVID-19, few can have been more disappointing to music lovers than those of celebrations of the 250^th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven. It seems sadly appropriate for this anniversary to have fallen during a time of global crisis. No stranger to physical maladies and social upheaval. Beethoven lived in a world in which one century’s enlightenment was supplanted by a new era’s incongruous tenets of Romanticized idealism and pragmatic conservatism. His was the time of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Franz Grillparzer, Friedrich von Schiller, and Sir Walter Scott—and also of Klemens von Metternich, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, and the first Duke of Wellington.

In recent years, it has become fashionable to regard Beethoven’s enduring importance and influence as inflated. As communities throughout the world have grappled with vital questions about racial discrimination, economic privilege, sexuality, and gender paradigms, the continued relevance of Beethoven’s music and the legitimacy of its prominence in the international repertoire have been challenged and in some instances declared to be products of systemic prejudice and cultural narrowmindedness. It cannot be denied that, in Art as in all aspects of human existence, deprivation is an inevitable casualty of choice. Works by lesser-known composers of all ethnicities are collateral damage of decisions to perform, publish, or record music by Beethoven. Though he worked in an epoch in which the making of art still largely relied upon aristocratic patronage, Beethoven would surely denounce the elitism that uses his music to obscure other composers’ music.

The abiding atmosphere of Greensboro Symphony Orchestra’s concert honoring the 250^th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, rescheduled to the 251^st anniversary in response to COVID-19, was one of revitalization, not rehabilitation. The orchestra’s inaugural performance in Steven Tanger Center for the Performing Arts, the concert intensified appreciation of the resilience that, having been so integral a component of Beethoven’s life, resounds in his music. The irrepressible joy of performing filled the auditorium and assumed even greater significance by contrasting with the grim milestone of the loss of 800,000 American lives to COVID-19. His life plagued by catastrophic wars and personal tragedies, Beethoven repeatedly faced loss, the effects of which suffuse his music. Conducted by the orchestra’s Music Director, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, Greensboro Symphony’s concert extolled the progressive essence of his work, presenting both his music and works that bear hallmarks of Beethoven’s influence without agendas or idiosyncrasies.

Beginning GSO’s observance of the Beethoven sestercentennial with Aaron Copland’s 1942 Fanfare for the Common Man was a logical nod to the inspiration that Beethoven’s artistic ingenuity has been throughout the two centuries since his death in 1827. Copland’s writing for brass demonstrates unmistakable kinship with Beethoven’s music for winds in works like the Leonore and Egmont Overtures and Seventh and Ninth Symphonies. The nerves of the grand occasion intermittently undermined the GSO brass players’ intonation, jeopardizing the impact of Copland’s portentous flourishes. Nevertheless, Sitkovetsky and the musicians movingly imparted the Fanfare’s simple majesty​, paying homage to the common man with uncommon eloquence.

So widespread was the popularity of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 49 The Year 1812 Solemn Overture within a few years of the piece’s 1882 première in Moscow that its famously sensitive, self-critical composer expressed regret for having written it. First performed to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of tsarist Russia’s defeat of Napoleon, the Overture overcame its creator’s disapprobation to claim a central place in many orchestras’ repertoires for festive events. As GSO’s performance affirmed, the Overture’s continued currency is attributable in no small part to its memorable melodies, cleverly interwoven by Tchaikovsky to fashion one of Western culture’s most identifiably programmatic pieces. Sitkovetsky devoted obvious care to cleanly articulating the contrapuntal intricacies of Tchaikovsky’s writing without making the performance an academic exercise. Brass statements of the Overture’s familiar battle subject and the ‘Marseillaise’ lacked consistent security but generated requisite excitement. The scurrying string figurations depicting the French retreat from Moscow were brilliantly rendered. The grandeur of the music was well served, but Sitkovetsky did not allow the reading to stall in august passages. The tubular chimes’ portrayal of Moscow’s church bells was wonderfully vibrant in Tanger Center’s acoustic, resolving Tchaikovsky’s paean to his ancestors’ valor with rousing splendor.

Composition of his Ninth Symphony dominated Beethoven’s creative endeavors for nearly eighteen months, spanning all of 1823, the year in which he also completed his monumental Missa solemnis. At the time of its first performance on 7 May 1824, secured for Vienna’s Theater am Kärntnertor only after prominent Viennese musicians and patrons of the Arts lobbied the disenfranchised composer to abandon a plan to stage the Symphony’s première in Berlin, the Ninth Symphony employed the largest musical forces heard in the genre to that time. In the pages of Beethoven’s score, past and future intersect, the symphonic styles of Mozart and Mahler directly linked. The setting of Schiller’s ‘An die Freude’ with which the Symphony ends is propelled by a melody, now often deemed banal, that captivates listeners as readily in the Twenty-First Century as in 1824. GSO’s performance of the Ninth Symphony was truly an ode to joy, recovery, and optimism.

Sitkovetsky is an undemonstrative but undeniably effective conductor whose pacing of Beethoven’s music in this performance at times recalled the very different qualities that Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwängler, and Yevgeny Mravinsky brought to their conducting of Beethoven symphonies. In the opening Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso movement, Sitkovetsky accentuated the novelty of the part writing by encouraging the orchestra to play with crispness that lent the Symphony’s first bars Stravinsky-like harmonic ambiguity. Furtwängler’s legacy was evident in Sitkovetsky’s concentration on the ways in which subtle transitions of tempo drive the music. Contrapuntal expositions wielded seeming spontaneity, but each thematic journey progressed towards a finite destination. Fleeting insecurities in the orchestra’s playing of the Copland and Tchaikovsky pieces were largely absent from their performance of the Ninth Symphony, the musicians perceptibly engaged by the conductor’s goal of allowing Beethoven’s score to reveal its innovation and modernity on its own terms.

The timpani strokes that punctuate the Molto vivace movement were all the more exhilarating for being meticulously cued and sounded with unerring precision. The tumultuous energy of the music was limned by the intensity of the orchestra’s playing rather than exaggerated tempi and dynamics. As in the first movement, the music’s fugal elements were rendered with gravity, the heritage of Bach and Händel omnipresent but never oppressive. Moderation was the distinguishing characteristic of Sitkovetsky’s conducting, the orchestra’s full force reserved for those passages in which Beethoven instructed that it should be deployed. The conductor’s navigations of the abrupt shifts of momentum showed interpretive individuality that stopped short of sacrificing fidelity to the composer’s markings to creating a distinctly personal account of the Symphony.. Each musician on the Tanger Center stage approached the piece with unique perspectives, but, in even the most frenetic moments of the Molto vivace, this indisputably remained a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony.

Like Toscanini, Sitkovetsky savored the lyricism of the Adagio molto e cantabile whilst sustaining rhythmic exactness. Approaching this music as a tranquil respite from the turmoil of the Symphony’s outer movements, the conductor sculpted melodic arcs with subtlety, the interplay among instruments emerging organically from the writing. The string playing was at once rich and diaphanous, the bright patina of the violins’ high register floated above the churning lower winds. Beethoven’s tone painting evokes images of the natural world into which he often retreated, the music undulating like the Danube as it meanders through Vienna and rustling as the breezes caress the Wienerwald. In this performance, Sitkovetsky guided the listener on a trek through these scenes, so beloved by Beethoven, heightening the expressive potency of the music. Woodwind playing was superb throughout the performance but was truly magical in the Adagio molto e cantabile, in which wind textures are reminiscent of those in the slow movements of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony and Antonín Dvořák’s ‘New World’ Symphony. Still, the triumph of Sitkovetsky’s conducting was finding rather than forcing the music’s emotions.

Conductors’ reputations cannot bring them safely through the gauntlet of the Ninth Symphony’s Finale. In some performances, the recapitulations of subjects heard in the first three movements are wrongheadedly metamorphosed into a sort of miniature Wagnerian music drama, and the Symphpny’s final minutes are blared like political propaganda. Sitkovetsky avoided these missteps by perpetuating his dedication to following the music’s narrative without imposing his own subtexts on it. Above all, Sitkovetsky shared Mravinsky’s realization of the fact that, when conducting music as iconic as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, tradition is not the enemy of originality.

Aided by the conductor’s intelligent handling of the score and the orchestra’s best playing of the evening, GSO’s vocal soloists further increased the success of the performance, mastering music that fuses bel canto with the Romantic idiom of Carl Maria von Weber and Heinrich Marschner. Baritone Marcus DeLoach declaimed the recitative ‘O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!’ stirringly and phrased ‘Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium’ with exuberance. Achieving an ideal balance between vocal power and poetic sensitivity, tenor Rodrick Dixon sang ‘Froh, froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen’ boldly, rising fearlessly to the top B♭s. Mezzo-soprano (and Burlington native) Nancy Maultsby sang strongly and, more rarely in performances of the Ninth Symphony, always audibly, enunciating text with clear diction and cognizance of the meaning of the words. No announcement was made, but soprano Lyubov Petrova was audibly indisposed, cautiously avoiding many of the highest tones, most notably the pair of climactic top Bs in the soloists’ concertato on ‘Alle Menschen werden Brüder.’ She bravely attempted the plethora of top As, however, only slight shrillness betraying her vocal estate. She, too, projected the text vividly, earning admiration for a valiant performance.

The twenty-five minutes of the Ninth Symphony’s Finale contain choral writing of unrelenting difficulty, encompassing reverent recollections of Händel’s oratorios and anticipations of the Masses and motets of Anton Bruckner. It is no coincidence that, in the Ninth Symphony’s discography, the finest performances are frequently those with the best choirs. This Greensboro performance introduced the Greensboro Symphony Master Chorale, an ensemble under the direction of Jonathan Emmons and James Keith that on this evening proved to be an immense gift to this performance and to the Triad community. There is something strangely touching about observing choristers singing as affectingly as GSO’s Master Chorale sang whilst masked, this small victory of will symbolizing the tenacity of the Performing Arts. Balances among the voices were nearly ideal. The differentiations of piano and pianissimo in the Adagio ma non troppo, ma divoto ‘Ihr stürtz nieder’ could have been more pronounced, but the voices filled the hall with sounds of compelling beauty and consequence, prompting hope that a future Greensboro Symphony season will include performances of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis.

Beethoven wrote in January 1804, twenty years before the first performance of his Ninth Symphony, that ‘Musik ist wie ein Traum. Einer, den ich nicht hören’—‘Music is like a dream. One that I cannot hear.’ The cruelty of a man whose life was devoted to music being deprived of the ability to hear it is devastating, but Beethoven persevered, listening with his heart when his ears failed him. Bettering an hour in which today’s world faces uncertainty similar to what Beethoven must have felt two centuries ago, Greensboro Sumphony’s performance of the Ninth Symphony was a dream of​ rejoicing in a night of despair.

GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898 – 1937): Porgy and Bess– Thomas Cannon (Porgy), Rhiannon Giddens (Bess), Angela Renée Simpson (Serena), Michael Preacely (Crown), Robert Anthony Mack (Sportin’ Life), Indira Mahajan (Clara), Sidney Outlaw (Jake), George Shirley (Peter), Elvira O. Green (Maria), Chauncey Packer (Robbins, Crab man), Paisley Alexandra Williams (Strawberry woman), Maurio Hines (Nelson), Ernest Jackson (Mingo), Monique McLeod (Annie), Alicia Helm McCorvey (Lily), Reginald Powell (Jim), Richard L. Hodges (Undertaker, Lawyer Frazier), Donald Hartmann (Detective), Robert Wells (Coroner), Douglas Grimm (Policeman), Collin McCrea (Policeman), A. Robinson Hassell (Mr. Archdale), Levi Ponder (Scipio); Greensboro Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Awadagin Pratt, conductor [David Holley, Producer; Everett McCorvey, Stage Director; John Farrell, Set Designer; Ashley Lindsey, Choreographer; Jeff Neubauer, Technical Director and Lighting Designer; Jennifer Zumpf-Valosen, Costume Designer; Trent Pcenicni, Wig and Makeup Designer; Greensboro Opera; Steven Tanger Center for the Performing Arts, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA; Friday, 21 January 2022]

When Todd Duncan and Anne Brown created the title rôles in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess on the stage of Boston’s Colonial Theatre on 30 September 1935, the cultural landscape of American musical theater was lastingly—and controversially—expanded to include communities and stories beyond the genre’s conventional parameters. Drawing his subject from DuBose Heyward’s 1925 novel Porgy, adapted for the Broadway stage by Heyward and his wife Dorothy in 1927, Ira Gershwin collaborated with the authors to provide his brother with a libretto that, though unquestionably perpetuating derogatory stereotypes, offered the composer opportunities to celebrate the nobility of a segment of the nation’s population that few theatergoers had experienced in 1935.

Characterizing Porgy and Bess as an ‘American opera,’ Gershwin composed with his heart in the opera house and his mind on the Great White Way, knowing that a piece with Black protagonists portrayed by Black singers was unlikely to be accepted by America’s opera houses. As the centennial of the opera’s première approaches, stagings like Greensboro Opera’s long-anticipated production affirm that Porgy and Bess belongs in opera houses, alongside the masterworks of Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, and Richard Strauss.

Produced by the company’s General and Artistic Director David Holley, this staging of Porgy and Bess began Greensboro Opera’s association with Steven Tanger Center for the Performing Arts. Unfortunately, this partnership was the source of the evening’s sole disappointment. Designed with the principal aim of being Greensboro’s new home for touring productions of Broadway musicals, Tanger Center proved to be an imperfect venue for opera. Without the body microphones and sound mixing now common in musical theater, too much of the sound emanating from the stage was muddled by the auditorium’s dull acoustic. Large voices made no greater impact than their more modest counterparts, and both diction and intonation were sometimes difficult to assess. The singers adapted their performances to the room, however, and the production took advantage of Tanger Center’s spatial and technological capabilities, magnificently transforming the expansive stage into Catfish Row.

The extended delays imposed upon this production by the COVID-19 pandemic clearly intensified Greensboro Opera’s focus on realizing the full dramatic power of Porgy and Bess. Imaginatively but sensibly illuminated by Jeff Neubauer’s lighting designs and technical direction, both John Farrell’s atmospheric set designs, beautifully evoking South Carolina’s Low Country by framing the tableaux with suggestions of hanging mosses and a view of the Morris Island Lighthouse, and Jennifer Zumpf-Valosen’s vibrant costumes complemented the singers’ characterizations of the residents of—and the intruders into—Catfish Row. Trent Pcenicni’s wig and makeup designs were wholly credible for the opera’s setting, glorifying the natural beauty of Catfish Row’s inhabitants.

Dale Girard’s fight choreography yielded altercations of a level of realism rarely encountered in opera, and Ashley Lindsey’s choreography enlivened every scene, particularly those in which Sportin’ Life appeared. Stage director Everett McCorvey brought a singer’s insights and experience to his task, achieving compelling dramatic verisimilitude whilst safeguarding musical integrity. Throughout the performance, no element of the staging impeded the act and art of singing, markedly enhancing the credibility of these characters whose struggles play out in song.

Débuting as a conductor of opera, acclaimed pianist Awadagin Pratt demonstrated deft handling of the jazz rhythms that frolic in Gershwin’s music. The prominent echoes of Tin Pan Alley notwithstanding, the listener is frequently reminded that Porgy and Bess is a contemporary of Berg’s Lulu, Strauss’s Die Liebe der Danae and Die schweigsame Frau, Mascagni’s Nerone, and Enescu’s Œdipe. Pratt’s pacing of the performance accentuated the score’s modernity, emphasizing the piquancy of the harmonies. The prevailing aptness of the balances between stage and orchestra pit was indisputably more to Pratt’s credit than to that of the theater’s aural profile.

Occasionally, the conductor’s assured management of the musical forces was compromised by moments of imprecision in large ensembles, but the adroitness with which he restored equilibrium was indicative of his preparedness. Under Pratt’s baton, Greensboro Opera Orchestra’s musicians played superbly, their mastery of Gershwin’s score producing sounds that were raucous or radiant as each phrase required. Conductor and orchestra collaborated to support the singers and extol Gershwin’s genius.

The choristers assembled under the direction of James Bumgardner sang powerfully from their first utterance in Act One. [In this production, Gershwin’s three acts were arranged into two acts, with the interval following the scene in which Crown accosts Bess on Kittiwah Island.] The choral set pieces were performed with unstinting energy. The fight scene in Act One bristled with agitation and alarm, the chorus’s horrified reaction to Crown’s violence creating an aura of disquiet in which the lament for the slain Robbins, ‘Oh, we’re leavin’ for the Promise’ Lan’,’ was genuinely cathartic. The choral responses to Sportin‘ Life‘s ‘It ain’t necessarily so’ were wonderfully animated. The choristers‘ singing of the prayer for divine protection from the hurricane and the opera’s final ensemble revealed these scenes to be peers of the choral writing in Die Zauberflöte and Fidelio.

Ain’t no misbehavin’: tenor Robert Anthony Mack as Sportin’ Life (left) and mezzo-soprano Elvira O. Green as Maria (right) in Greensboro Opera’s January 2022 production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess
[Photograph © by Luke Jarmoz Photography]

The success of a performance of Porgy and Bess relies greatly upon the cast’s creation of a believable society in which the characters play distinct parts. In Greensboro Opera’s production, the west-of-East-Bay-Street figures who encroach upon Catfish Row’s delicate order seemed to emerge from a foreign realm, their lack of understanding of their neighbors’ community contrasting with the unspoken camaraderie that united the occupants of Catfish Row. Assigning all but one of the rôles of the interloping Charlestonians—parts that are sometimes embarrassingly caricatured—to singers rather than actors lent their lines uncommonly effective timing. The Honorable A. Robinson Hassell’s Mr. Archdale relayed his good tidings benevolently, and young artists Douglas Grimm and Collin McCrae crassly imparted the policemen’s low regard for their countrymen of color. Robert Wells was an earnest but anxious coroner whose discomfort in Catfish Row was palpable. The exasperation of Donald Hartmann bemused, brutal detective erupted into song when, rather than speaking, he joined his witnesses in singing their final ‘Three days and nights’ when questioning them about Crown’s untimely demise.

Amongst the many accomplishments of this production of Porgy and , none was more laudable than the casting of principal and secondary rôles. The theatrical instincts with which Gershwin gave each of the male citizens of Catfish Row a singular function in the drama prefigures Britten’s meticulous depictions of the sailors aboard the HMS Indomitable in Billy Budd. Bass-baritone Reginald Powell declared Jim’s disenfranchisement with toiling in the cotton fields potently and sang all of his music assertively. The gleaming tenor voices of Ernest Jackson and Maurio Hines lent Mingo’s and Nelson’s lines individuality, their tones reverberating in the house excitingly, and Levi Ponder was a spirited Scipio. Baritone Richard L. Hodges was as magisterial as the Undertaker as he was wily as Lawyer Frazier, the voice imposingly handsome.

The cast’s ladies uniformly rivaled the gentlemen’s vocal and theatrical prowess. Sopranos Monique McLeod and Alicia Helm McCorvey voiced Gershwin’s music for Annie and Lily​ fetchingly, their timbres distinguishable but blending gorgeously in ensembles and their upper registers easily overcoming the theater’​s sonic difficulties. Mezzo-soprano Paisley Alexandra Williams touted the Strawberry woman’s merchandise bewitchingly, her tones glistening like rays of aural sunlight.

Fishing for trouble: baritone Sidney Outlaw as Jake in Greensboro Opera’s January 2022 production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess
[Photograph © by Luke Jamroz Photography]

As vital to the advancement of diversity in opera as performances of works like Porgy and Bess is the work of artists of color, and Greensboro Opera’s staging of Porgy and Bess was immeasurably enriched by the participation of a pair of operatic trailblazers. When he substituted for an indisposed colleague to make his Metropolitan Opera début as Ferrando in Mozart’s Così fan tutte on 24 October 1961, George Shirley inaugurated a fruitful association with that company. Having been the first Black singer to win the MET’s National Council Auditions, he became the first Black tenor to interpret leading rôles at the MET.

As the honey man Peter in Greensboro Opera’s Porgy and Bess, Shirley’s singing was a testament to the importance of technique in vocal longevity. The voice retains much of its familiar clarity and recognizable timbre and was deployed with undiminished refinement. Shirley’s acting was exquisitely understated, Peter’s frightened protestations of innocence when being wrongfully arrested as a suspect in Robbins’s murder depicted with wrenching immediacy. Without exaggerating one tone, word, or gesture, Shirley commanded attention whenever he was on stage, not least when, finally released from jail, Peter quietly but joyfully returned to Catfish Row. The sincerity of Shirley’s performance made the battered but resilient honey man the show’s most unforgettably moving characterization.

Following Shirley’s path at Lincoln Center, mezzo-soprano Elvira O. Green’s 1973 début in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier began a MET career that partnered her with fellow artists of the caliber of Leontyne Price, Shirley Verrett, Reri Grist, Dame Gwyneth Jones, Fedora Barbieri, Tatiana Troyanos, Jon Vickers, and Luciano Pavarotti. In the course of her tenure at the MET, Green also sang the cookshop owner Maria in two revivals of the Nathaniel Merrill production of Porgy and Bess. [Sadly, Porgy and Bess did not receive a new staging at the MET until the opening of James Robinson’s widely-acclaimed production in 2019.]

Reprising the rôle of Catfish Row’s den mother of sorts, Green watched over her community with indefatigable authority. Whether singing or speaking, her words were not to be ignored, a lesson in which even the flippant Sportin’ Life was schooled. Despite her sternness, epitomized by a ferociously-declaimed ‘I hates yo’ struttin’ style.’ Maria’s affection for her community was unwavering. Green scowled, physically and vocally, and hurled notes at the top of the stave with aplomb, but the core of her portrayal was tenderness. Green’s Maris was a woman made better, not bitter, by hardship.

Returning to rôles that he sang at the Metropolitan Opera as recently as December 2021, tenor Chauncey Packer swept onto the Tanger Center stage with irrepressible zeal. As Robbins, the longing for diversion that leads him to his fatal confrontation with Crown saturated his febrile singing, but there was no cruelty in his rejoinder of ‘I been workin’ all day’ to Serena’s pleas for him to avoid the craps game. Packer’s rousing voicing of the Crab man’s hawking elicited an ecstatic reaction from the audience, the singer’s artistic versatility first grieving and then thrilling.

Preaching to the choir: tenor Robert Anthony Mack as Sportin’ Life (foreground right) in Greensboro Opera’s January 2022 production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess
[Photograph © by Luke Jamroz Photography]

Aside from singing the number that is arguably Gershwin’s best-known vocal piece, Clara’s rôle in the opera’s drama is largely confined to serving as a Cassandra-like foreseer of misfortune. She introduces herself to the audience with ‘Summertime,’ however, and soprano Indira Mahajan’s introduction in Greensboro was sublimely auspicious. The glowing mahogany timbre of Mahajan’s voice enabled her to project her sound above the orchestra (and through the theater’s acoustical murk) without imperiling her facility for floating tones in her upper register. A sweetly magnetic stage presence, Mahajan touchingly depicted the young mother’s unflappable devotion to her husband and child. Clara’s premonition of the approaching hurricane was harrowing, and her scream as she sighted Jake’s capsized boat seemed startlingly spontaneous. The determination with which Mahajan’s Clara rushed out into the tempest to save Jake at any cost underscored the kinship between the adoring wife and Wagner’s Senta that exists in Gershwin’s musical construction. Each of Mahajan’s phrases combined tonal beauty with dramatic intensity.

The man for whom Clara heroically sacrifices her life, the ebullient fisherman Jake, was depicted with imperturbable musicality and galvanizing physical presence by baritone Sidney Outlaw. ‘A woman is a sometimes thing,’Jake’s jovial counterpart to ‘Summertime,’ Clara’s lullaby to their child, was sung with exuberance and tonal allure, the industrious father’s easygoing philosophy stated with amiable enthusiasm. Outlaw brought resolve redolent of Der fliegende Holländer to his voicing of ‘Oh, I’m agoin’ out to the Blackfish banks,’ heightening awareness of the relationships between Wagner’s and Gershwin’s stories. In spite of his untroubled nature, Outlaw’s Jake was shadowed by tragedy from his first scene. Jake’s music afforded the baritone few opportunities for the expressive lyricism at which he excels, but he created a sensitive characterization of one of opera’s few genuinely ordinary men.

Destined to become a widow in the opera’s first half hour, Serena is the moral foundation of Catfish Row, a woman of profound faith who finds solace in the promise of heavenly reward and endeavors to guide her neighbors along a more righteous path. Still, she is a woman who seeks fulfillment in living honestly, and Greensboro Opera’s Serena was never more touching than when Angela Renée Simpson’s smile flooded the stage with warmth. The soprano’s performance intimated that a woman so accustomed to strife embracing life’s fleeting joys is proof of humanity’s bond with Providence.

Serena having watched Robbins fall at Crown’s hand, Simpson intoned ‘My man’s gone now’ arrestingly, building from a hushed start, the words too painful to enunciate, to a crushing apex of despair. When the full volume of Simpson’s voice was unfurled, heaven itself quaked with her sounds. At the picnic on Kittiwah Island, her ‘Shame on all you sinners’ was a stinging rebuke of Sportin’ Life’s sacrilege. In raising prayers for divine intervention during the hurricane and calling upon ‘Doctor Jesus’ to heal Bess, Simpson sang dazzlingly, the emotional deluges never undermining vocal placement. Porgy ends the opera with a pronouncement of optimism, but, in this performance, it was Serena who instilled the belief that, come what may, Catfish Row would endure.

The art of making an entrance: soprano Rhiannon Giddens as Bess (left) and baritone Michael Preacely as Crown (right) in Greensboro Opera’s January 2022 production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess
[Photograph © by Luke Jamroz Photography]

On Broadway, in opera houses, and on recordings, the most effective portrayers of the eerily charismatic blasphemer and ‘happy dust’ peddler Sportin’ Life have been those whose​ virtuoso singing was allied with​ expert acting. Greensboro Opera’s Sportin’ Life, tenor Robert Anthony Mack, cavorted across the stage with agility and a dangerously disarming grin, spouting heresies with the conviction of an evangelist. Always lurking on the periphery of the action, his harassment of Bess was insistent but frustratingly genial. Mack’s performance of the beloved ‘It ain’t necessarily so’ exuded showmanship, his lithe dancing reminiscent of Ben Vereen. Passing phrases betrayed the effort required to project the voice over Gershwin’s orchestrations, but Mack utilized every sound to deepen his portrayal. His voicing of ‘There’s a boat dat’s leavin’ soon for New York’ was obsequiously persuasive. Mack’s Sportin’ Life was keenly aware that the most important weapon in a trickster’s arsenal is the art of escape, but the sparkle of the tenor’s singing could not be hidden.

Baritone Michael Preacely was a Crown who unmistakably understood that, in order to repulse, he must first attract. Entering with bracing bravado in Act One, this Crown was not outshone even by the scarlet-clad Bess. This was also true of Preacely’s vocalism: amidst much wonderful singing, the excellence of his work was never overshadowed. Ever menacing, Preacely’s Crown was also atypically sympathetic, his penchant for savagery seeming to arise not from intrinsic evil or conscious choice but from a lifetime of exposure to others’ ruthlessness. The cornerstones of Crown’s liaison with Bess are lust, pride, and obsession, but the suavity with which Preacely sang, including in the scene on Kittiwah Island in which Crown’s seduction of Bess is anything but romantic, hinted that this Crown may also have truly loved Bess. Similarly, Crown’s taunting of Porgy was more juvenile than monstrous. Each word of the part was sung with meaning, the baritone rarely resorting to growling for dramatic effect. Rather, Preacely sang Crown’s music accurately and euphoniously, finding the impetus for his characterization in Gershwin’s score.

Low Country Lady: soprano Rhiannon Giddens as Bess in Greensboro Opera’s January 2022 production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess
[Photograph © by Luke Jarmoz Photography]

Eighteen years had passed since soprano Rhiannon Giddens appeared on an opera stage. Focusing on widely-acclaimed projects including recording and touring with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, she has concentrated on rejuvenating old-time string-band music. Her contributions to the preservation of America’s folk traditions are invaluable, but her return to opera was a fortuitous and rightly heralded homecoming. Casting Giddens as Bess in this production garnered considerable publicity, but her portrayal of Gershwin’s complex heroine was no mere star turn. It was apparent from her first step onto the set, attired like a refugee from Josephine Baker’s Paris, that Giddens surrendered her own artistic persona to the nuances of Bess’s character, approaching a rôle interpreted in years past by Camilla Williams, Leontyne Price, Grace Bumbry, Roberta Alexander, and Leona Mitchell with unique musical and dramatic sensibilities.

As the ranks of the part’s notable exponents indicate, Bess’s music is best served by spinto voices. Giddens’s voice is a more lyrical instrument, and there were passages in which the vocal lines required slightly more heft than Giddens could supply, yet she met the challenges without pushing the voice beyond its limits. The panic with which she delivered ‘Somebody please help me’ when the police were coming to investigate Robbins’s murder gave way to the serenity that suffused her singing of ‘Oh, the train is at the station’ at Robbins’s wake. Giddens ascended to the amorous heights of ‘Porgy, I’s yo’ woman now’​ fearlessly, her upper register gaining strength as the duet progressed.

The dramatic trajectory of the opera changes with Bess’s encounter with Crown on Kittiwah Island, and the burgeoning constaternation that shaded Giddens’s singing signaled that happiness with Porgy was slipping from Bess’s grasp. The contempt of ‘What you want wid Bess?’ was directed as much at Bess’s own addiction and carnal desire as at Crown. Reunited with Porgy, she sang ‘I loves you, Porgy’ affectionately, but the illusion of their blissful future was broken. In this performance, the wistfulness of Bess’s reprise of ‘Summertime’ instigated her flight from Catfish Row. Whereas some interpreters of the part portray Bess’s departure for New York with Sportin’ Life as a final lapse into debauchery, Giddens’s Bess was impelled to some degree by selflessness, her abandonment of Porgy freeing him from her demons. Giddens was a glamorous Bess, but hers was not a diva’s performance. Like her colleagues, she placed her trust in Gershwin’s music and sang it without artifice or affectation.

Happy never after: soprano Rhiannon Giddens as Bess (left) and baritone Thomas Cannon as Porgy (right) in Greensboro Opera’s January 2022 production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess
[Photograph © by Luke Jamroz Photography]

If love alone were sufficient to right the wrongs of the past, the love of baritone Thomas Cannon’s Porgy for Giddens’s Bess would have secured the joyous, simple life for which Porgy longed. On his terms, Porgy’s entrance in this performance was no less impactful than Crown’s, the visibility of his disability distancing him from his community. Resigned survival of an outsider’s loneliness was a momentous element of Cannon’s portrayal, his voicing of Porgy’s lines in Act One shaped by subtle melancholy. His reading of the famed ‘I got plenty o’ nuttin’’ was surprisingly subdued, an eloquent expression of self-reliance. Whether to reduce the opera’s duration or marginally narrow the part’s range, cutting Porgy’s ‘Buzzard keep on flyin’ over’ is a damaging tradition. Cannon’s exhilarating account of the number revealed the depth of influence of Bess on Porgy’s life, the baritone’s intonation more secure here than in other scenes.

Cannon’s Porgy bared his heart in his ardently-sung ‘Bess, you is my woman now,’ but here, too, an awkward shyness was perceptible, the man used only to his own company slowly leaning to open his private world to another person. Porgy’s concern for Bess during her illness recalled Golaud’s vigil at the side of the dying Mélisande, helplessness crippling Cannon’s Porgy more injuriously than his physiological malady. The exchange in which Porgy divulges that he has sensed that Bess was with Crown on Kittiwah Island was especially poignant, and Cannon voiced ‘What you think I is, anyway’ subtly, assuring Bess of his commitment to liberating her from Crown’s infatuation.

In this performance, the interpretation of the opera’s final scene was refreshingly devoid of saccharine sentimentality. Cannon proclaimed ‘Oh Lawd, I’m on my way’ with bronze-toned confidence, sure of the path before him. More than in many performances, Porgy’s way seemed to lead not to New York but to meeting his Lord. The crutch with which he killed Crown was also the crutch that carried him beyond the safety of Catfish Row, the cross that engendered his salvation. The essence of Porgy and Bess is redemption, and this superlatively-sung performance honored the redeeming grace of humble people doing their best, living and loving through calamities of man and nature.

GIACOMO PUCCINI (1858 – 1924): La bohème– Lucia Cesaroni (Mimì), Scott Quinn (Rodolfo), Shannon Kessler Dooley (Musetta), Levi Hernandez (Marcello), Timothy Murray (Schaunard), Adam Lau (Colline), Donald Hartmann (Benoît, Alcindoro), Wade Henderson (Parpignol), Jacob Cortes (Un sergente dei doganieri), Forrest Bunter (Un doganiere); North Carolina Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Joseph Mechavich, conductor [Brenna Corner, Stage Director; Steven C. Kemp, Set Designer; Ross Kolman, Lighting Designer; Martha Ruskai, Wig and Makeup Designer; North Carolina Opera, Raleigh Memorial Auditorium, Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA; Friday, 28 January 2022]

When opera companies announce seasons that include productions of Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème, some observers disgustedly ask, ‘Why do they choose to again perform La bohème?’ The answer to that question is very simple: audiences buy tickets for performances of La bohème. Paralleling Abraham Lincoln’s famed remark about the uncertainties of politicians deceiving their constituents, La bohème will never lure all potential patrons to every performances, but some aficionados would never purposefully miss a staging of the piece, while virtually all operaphiles can sometimes be coaxed by the participation of a favored singer or conductor into attending a performance of La bohème. Why, then, does Puccini’s adaptation of Henri Murger’s 1851 tome Scènes de la vie de bohème continue to appeal so strongly to audiences 126 years after the opera’s première at Teatro Regio di Torino? Luigi Illica’s and Giuseppe Giacosa’s libretto is irrefutably a work of theatrical savvy, but would even the most dedicated poet allege that purchasing an opera ticket is motivated by a desire to extol the words? What inspires audiences’ faith in La bohème’s capacity to satisfy, whether it is being experienced for the second or the seventieth time?

North Carolina Opera’s new production of La bohème, the first staging of the opera in Raleigh since 2014, offered persuasive answers to these questions, presenting the opera with unapologetic but unexaggerated sentimentality that gave new life to the opera’s familiar tragedy. Steven C. Kemp’s set designs placed Puccini’s bohemians in recognizably Parisian surroundings without subjecting them to fairy-tale over-romanticisation and anachronistic views of well-known landmarks. The costumes, originally created for Sarasota Opera, and Martha Ruskai’s astute wig and makeup designs also suited the people who wore them, physically and dramatically, attractively reflecting the era in which the opera is set but illustrating the poverty with which Puccini’s protagonists contend. In Ross Kolman’s lighting, the frigid garret and the streets of Paris, teeming with holiday revelry in Act Two and slowly awakening in Act Three, glowed with natural ambience, in which spotlighting enabled the audience to easily follow the opera’s narrative. This production contradicted the notion that traditional stagings unfailingly lack imagination and novelty. The opera’s extensive performance history demonstrates that La bohème can succeed in many guises. Rather than inventing new contexts for the librettists’ adaptation of Murger’s story, this Bohème satisfied by lifting the characters directly from the pages of Puccini’s score.

An abundance of small but significant details distinguished Brenna Corner’s direction of this production, her concentration on interactions amongst characters and their environment deployed with subtlety and intelligence. Marcello observing that the handkerchief dropped by Mimį after a coughing fit in Act Three was stained with blood was a poignant sign of the direness of her illness, and the simple act of Colline extinguishing a candle as Schaunard perceived that Mimì was dead symbolized the darkness that descended upon the bohemians’ community with the loss of Mimì. Starkly effective, too, was the muffler, only recently procured by Musetta and given in Rodolfo’s name, falling with wrenching finality from Mimì’s lifeless hands. Corner delivered the expected tumult in Act Two but avoided the frenetic business of productions like Franco Zeffirelli’s famed staging for the Metropolitan Opera, in which individual characters can be lost in the hubbub. Corner’s work was shaped by intuitive musicality, her creativity spurred by the score.

Ecco il padrone: (from left to right) tenor Scott Quinn as Rodolfo, baritone Levi Hernandez as Marcello, bass-baritone Donald Hartmann as Benoît, baritone Timothy Murray as Schaunard, and bass Adam Lau as Colline in North Carolina Opera’s January 2022 production of Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème
[Photograph © by Eric Waters Photography]

Sadly, conductor Joseph Mechavich’s comprehensive knowledge of and respect for Puccini’s music qualities that were manifested in every bar of the performance, were undermined by orchestral playing that lacked both accuracy and polish. Singers’ timing was frequently disrupted by mistakes from the pit, two of the most regrettable of which were incorrect entries by the harp that spoiled the atmosphere in Mimì’s Act One aria and her subsequent duet with Rodolfo. The coordination between stage and pit disintegrated markedly as Act Two progressed, the ensemble of children’s voices, chorus, and principals making its customary effect despite nearly devolving into chaos. Nevertheless, moments of beauty, accuracy, and true dramatic power were bountiful. Winter weather having wreaked havoc during the production’s rehearsal period, Mechavich achieved much with limited time with the singers and orchestra, his expansive reading of the score accentuating intricacies of Puccini’s orchestrations that are often inaudible. Despite the disfiguring errors from his colleagues in the pit, Mechavich supported the singers ably, enabling them to immerse themselves in their characters’ struggles without struggling to be heard.

Both the adults of North Carolina Opera’s Chorus, directed by Scott McacLeod, and the Children’s Chorus, trained by Lauren Saeger, contributed sonorously to Act Two’s festivities. The orchestra pit’s misfortunes adversely affected the choral singing, undoubtedly confusing the singers in some passages, but the choristers’ professionalism prevailed. The youngsters pursued Parpignol and his cartload of toys with restless excitement and were themselves pursued with whimsical exasperation by their adult counterparts. As the working folk who come to Paris in Act Three in order to peddle their wares on the city’s snowy streets, first the gentlemen and then the ladies of the chorus sang vividly. More so than in many productions, the choristers were here participants in and not merely observers of the opera’s drama.

The customs officer and his sergeant who guard the city gate in Act Two—or do so when not distracted, as in this production, by the female patrons of the nearby tavern—wer​e galantly portrayed by Forrest Bunter and Jacob Cortes. A familiar participant in North Carolina Opera productions, Wade Henderson sang Parpignol’s lines exuberantly, but the tenor’s voice lacked its typical clarity and brightness.

An unexpected knock at the bohemians’ door in Act One announced an impromptu visit from the landlord Benoît, demanding remittance for his tenants’ unpaid rent. Unwelcome as the intrusion is to the destitute bohemians, bass-baritone Donald Hartmann’s entrance delighted the audience, who responded to his faultless comic adroitness and firm, forceful singing, all too rare in the rôles that he sang in this production, with uninhibited mirth. Hartmann sang ‘A lei ne vengo’ with deadpan hilarity, and his disdainful, almost disgusted exclamation of ‘mia moglie,’ prompting the bohemians’ feigned censure, was lobbed like a grenade. As Musetta’s deep-pocketed suitor Alcindoro in Act Two, Hartmann was an unusually debonair figure, a fitting companion for the glamorous coquette. Exemplified by a brilliantly-timed ‘Dove?’ in response to Musetta’s sham cries of pain, his singing of Alcindoro’s music—and, indeed, he sang rather than shouting the part—recalled the performances of Salvatore Baccaloni and Pompilio Malatesta, the preeminent Alcindori of the first half of the Twentieth Century. In both rôles, Hartmann was funny without being embarrassingly farcical, relying upon Puccini’s music to provide the characters’ comedic impetus.

Prima la musica: baritone Timothy Murray as Schaunard in North Carolina Opera’s January 2022 production of Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème
[Photograph © by Eric Waters Photography]

The musician Schaunard needs a more opulent voice than he receives in many productions. North Carolina Opera entrusted the rôle to baritone Timothy Murray, whose performance drew Schaunard from the background, where he sometimes hides in the shadows of his fellow bohemians. This Schaunard’s gleeful arrival in Act One, bearing the much-fêted products of his labors, lifted the spirits of his friends and those of their audience, the scene enlivened by Murray’s engaging vocal and theatrical presence. He relayed Schaunard’s tale of the frazzled Englishman and his noisy avian neighbor with droll humor and a rousing top F, his exclamation of mock annoyance at his ravenous comrades’ inattention revealing endearing playfulness. Always discernible in ensembles, Murray’s vocalism exuded conviviality in Act Two, but it was in the opera’s final act that Murray’s portrayal was most admirable. Jesting with his friends, this Schaunard was charmingly boyish, but Musetta’s entrance with news of Mimì’s decline shattered his illusion of happiness. The tenderness with which he caressed the dying Mimì’s hand was affectingly poignant. His demeanor suggested that Murray’s Schaunard sensed that Mimì’s death was inevitable, but finding that she had quietly expired devastated him. Murray sang splendidly throughout the evening, and his acting fully explored the emotional depth of Puccini’s music for the part.

La sua filosofia è la compassione: bass Adam Lau as Colline in North Carolina Opera’s January 2022 production of Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème
[Photograph © by Eric Waters Photography]

A wily Leporello and a powerhouse Don Basilio in North Carolina Opera’s productions of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (2015) and Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia (2016), bass Adam Lau returned to Raleigh to philosophize benevolently as Colline in La bohème. Like Murray’s Schaunard, Lau’s Colline made a galvanizing entrance in Act One, the voice full and formidable throughout the range. His unkempt ‘fur’ tamed by a barber’s razor in Act Two, Lau’s Colline solemnly accepted Mimì into the bohemians’ society and bemusedly analyzed Marcello’s sparring with Musetta. When the friends’ horseplay was halted by impending tragedy in Act Four, Lau touchingly limned the crumbling of Colline’s stoicism. The bass sang ‘Vecchia zimara, senti, io resto al pian’ with disarming directness, approaching the piece not as an ode to a grand gesture but as an ordinary man’s selfless attempt at providing comfort. Lau projected his voice and his characterization without pushing the former or overplaying the latter, guilelessly amplifying the rôle’s humanity.

La voce della libertà: soprano Shannon Kessler Dooley as Musetta in North Carolina Opera’s January 2022 production of Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème
[Photograph © by Eric Waters Photography]

The rôle of the capricious Musetta was created by Camilla Pasini, a versatile singer whose repertoire included both Norina in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale and Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin. In the Puccini canon, she also sang Tosca, inaugurating a lineage perpetuated in North Carolina Opera’s production by soprano Shannon Kessler Dooley. Her Musetta’s charisma surged onto the stage like an aural avalanche in Act Two, her entrance on Alcindoro’s arm eliciting as much awe from the Raleigh audience as from Puccini’s starstruck Parisians. Her toying with Marcello was spiteful but never malevolent. Dooley voiced ‘Quando me’n vo soletta per la vita’ fantastically, executing a resplendent subito piano on one of the aria’s climatic top Bs. Triumphantly adding the bill for the bohenians’ feast to Alcindoro’s tab at the end of the act and querulously quarreling with Marcello in Act Three, Dooley’s Musetta sang with élan, commanding the stage with insouciant panache.

More profound dimensions of Musetta’s character emerged in Act Four with her realization that Mimì’s life was rapidly waning. Dooley uttered ‘C’è Mimi che mi segue e che sta male’ and ‘Intesi dire che Mimì, fuggita dal viscontino’ urgently, heightening the bohemians’ and the audience’s awareness of the severity of Mimì’s condition. The expressivity of the soprano’s voicing of ‘Forse è l'ultima volta che ha espresso un desiderio​’ was very moving, the voice imparting the breadth of Musetta’s affection for Mimì. Dooley was untroubled by the low tessitura of the prayer,‘Madonna benedetta, fate la grazia a questa poveretta,’ singing the plea for divine mercy fervently. Her chic elegance notwithstanding, this Musetta was as integral a part of the bohemians’ community as Mimì, and Dooley sang her music accordingly.

La vita è la sua tela: baritone Levi Hernandez as Marcello in North Carolina Opera’s January 2022 production of Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème
[Photograph © by Eric Waters Photography]

Baritone Levi Hernandez was a Marcello whose abiding sincerity overcame orchestral misfires and vocal obstacles. His singing of ‘Questo Mar Rosso mi ammollisce assidera’ in the opera’s opening scene disclosed the effervescence of Hernandez’s concept of the part, and his interplay with Rodolfo, Colline, and Schaunard in Act One evinced Marcello’s reliance upon the support of his friends to brave loneliness and deprivation. As Mimì discerned, the vehemence of this Marcello’s denunciations of Musetta in Act Two proclaimed that his contemptuous indifference was an ineffective defense mechanism. Hernandez catapulted Marcello’s recapitulation of the famed waltz tune and his bellow of ‘mia sirena!’ into the theater with the ardor of rekindled passion.

In the scene before the tavern in Act Three, Marcello’s fraternal love for Mimī softened the iron core of Hernandez’s vocalism. Even when begging her to leave without making a scene, there was no harshness in the voice. Rodolfo’s subsequent cataloguing of Mimì’s alleged failings restored the steely edge in the baritone’s singing, Marcello’s rebuke of his friend’s dishonesty unsparing but not unkind. Hernandez conveyed an unnerving feeling of powerlessness as Rodolfo recounted the truth of Mimì’s growing frailty, the painter’s ire tinged with relief when Musetta’s laughter was heard from within the tavern. The vitriol of his fight with Musetta was transformed into longing of equal intensity in the duet with Rodolfo in Act Four. Hernandez articulated Marcello’s lines in the final scene with vulnerability, the wearied artist humbled by Musetta’s kindness and dismayed by Mimì’s death. Marcello’s tessitura is centered slightly higher than Hernandez’s vocal comfort zone, but he sang potently and pensively, using every moment of stress to embody the character’s anguish.

Il poeta e la poesia: soprano Lucia Cesaroni as Mimì (left) and tenor Scott Quinn as Rodolfo (right) in North Carolina Opera’s January 2022 production of Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème
[Photograph © by Eric Waters Photography]

Tenor Scott Quinn was an earnest, hardworking Rodolfo whose impressive upper register was betrayed to some extent by inconsistent resonance in the bottom octave. Alongside Hernandez, Lau, and Murray, Quinn was a subdued actor, his Rodolfo seeming more lost in a daydream than experiencing the opera’s drama. Still, Quinn sang ‘Nei cieli bigi guardo fumar dai mille’ and all of his music in Act One capably and at time thrillingly, his account of ‘Che gelida manina,’ transposed downward, building to a reverberant summit. He began ‘O soave fanciulla’ with apt wonder, rising ecstatically to the unison top As but adhering to Puccini’s intentions by eschewing the oft-interpolated top C at the duet’s close. The musical and theatrical challenges of Act Two were met with similar commitment, his straightforward singing of ‘Dal mio cervel sbocciano i canti’ and the beguiling phrase ‘son io il poeta, essa la poesia’ avoiding emotional excess. A sinister aspect of Rodolfo’s psyche was glimpsed in his warning to Mimì about his jealousy, enunciated by Quinn with disconcerting matter-of-factness.

The buoyancy of Quinn’s singing in the opera’s opening scene returned with his voicing of ‘Marcello, finalmente!’ in Act Three, but the nonchalance was short-lived. Bitterness darkened his articulations of ‘Già un’altra volta credetti morto il mio cor’ and ‘Mimì è una civetta,’ giving way to open-hearted despair in ‘Invan nascondo la mia vera tortura’ and especially ‘Mimì è tanto malata.’ The tenor’s best singing of the evening was heard in the scene with Mimì, who, shaken by overhearing Rodolfo’s assessment of her worsening health, resolves to leave him. Here, Quinn’s technique enabled him to sing sotto voce passages with finesse. Again in Act Four, initial ribaldry was replaced first by wistful regret in the duet with Marcello and then by abject sorrow in the final moments with Mimì. Rodolfo’s grief was all the more piercing for being expressed without sobs and distortions of the vocal line, completing a portrayal molded by music, not histrionics.

Lucia, la portatrice di luce: soprano Lucia Cesaroni as Mimì in North Carolina Opera’s January 2022 production of Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème
[Photograph © by Eric Waters Photography]

Her timbre often reminiscent of the voice of Rosanna Carteri, soprano Lucia Cesaroni sang Mimì’s music with consistent security and tonal beauty. From her first ‘Scusi’ in Act One, she brought to her performance gladdening vestiges of long-dormant styles, integrated with her own sensibilities and vocal persona. Recalling Licia Albanese, this Mimì’s first words to Rodolfo disclosed awkward excitement tempered by unassailable propriety. Cesaroni sang ‘Sì, mi chiamano Mimì’ gorgeously, her top As ideally lofted on the breath, and, crucially, she offered Rodolfo and the audience a look into Mimì’s solitary but fulfilling world. The shrewdness of her artistry was apparent in her suggestive but shy voicing of the single word ‘curioso’ in the duet with Rodolfo, in which she ended Act One with a dulcet top C. Central to Cesaroni’s portrayal of Mimì in Act Two was a palpable awareness of belonging, the thoughtful young woman having found a place among people who appreciated and embraced her. She sang ‘Una cuffetta a pizzi’ with girlish elation, and the emotions that overtook Mimì as the act progressed—burgeoning devotion to Rodolfo, empathy for the love-scarred Marcello, comfort with Colline and Schaunard, and admiration for Musetta—were reflected in the colorations with which Cesaroni infused her voice.

The euphoria of Act Two was gone when Mimì stumbled into Act Three, her gait weakened by sickness and conflict. Cesaroni’s voicing of ‘Sa dirma, scusi’ was pained, the demure outsider of Act One supplanting the more assured lady who arrived at Café Momus on Rodolfo’s arm. Desperation propelled the soprano’s singing of ‘O! buon Marcello, aiuto,’ the top B♭s redolent of emotional crisis. Listening as Rodolfo told Marcello of the ravages of her illness, this Mimì uttered Ahimè, morire?’ with genuine fear, not having admitted to herself that her life was slipping away. Facing this reality, Cesaroni phrased ‘Donde lieta uscì al tuo grido d’amore’ with tremendous feeling. Mimì’s entrance in Act Four was harrowing, but Cesaroni’s singing of ‘O mio Rodolfo!’ and ‘Ah, come si sta bene qui’ heralded the dying woman’s consoling return to the milieu in which she knew happiness. She permeated ‘Sono andati?’ with serenity. Having lived discreetly, Cesaroni’s Mimì also died peacefully, liberated by her final reunion with the people who loved her. Cesaroni was a Mimì whose intimate death was felt by every observer who has endured the loss of a loved one. It is this connection between music and audience that keeps La bohème on the world’s stages and in listeners’ hearts.

GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1848): Linda di Chamounix– Margaret Ann Zentner (Linda), Kameron Alston (Carlo, visconte di Sirval), Danielle Romano (Pierotto), Scott Lee (Antonio), Michael Redding (Il prefetto), Lawrence Hall (Il marchese di Boisfleury), Katherine Ledbetter (Maddalena), David Maize (L’intendente del feudo); A.J. Fletcher Opera Institute Chorus; UNCSA Symphony Orchestra; James Allbritten, conductor [Steven LaCosse, Stage Director; Sarah A. Webster, Scenic Designer; Maggie Turoff, Lighting Designer; Diana Ridge, Costume Designer; Natosha Martin, Wig and Makeup Designer; Lindsey Cope, Stage Manager; University of North Carolina School of the Arts A.J. Fletcher Opera Institute, Stevens Center, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA; Friday, 4 February 2022]

In a career spanning three decades, Gaetano Donizetti composed more than five dozen operas, a few of which continue to be performed with relative frequency 174 years after the composer’s death. Despite musical and theatrical felicities, agreater number of Donizetti’s scores are seldom heard by Twenty-First-Century audiences. Between these extremes is a small group of pieces that battle with other lesser-known bel canto works for places on the periphery of the international repertory. Among these pieces is Linda di Chamounix, the  earliest of three Donizetti operas that were first performed not in his native Italy but at Vienna’s Kärntnertortheater. [The third of these Viennese works was a German edition of Dom Sèbastien, roi de Portugal rather than a wholly new piece.] Habsburg Austria hosted the inaugural production of Linda di Chamounix, but the melodramma semiserio’s first heroine was Italian, the soprano Eugenia Tadolini, to whom Donizetti also entrusted creation of the title ròle in his second opera for Vienna, Maria di Rohan. The first performance of Linda di Chamounix on 19 May 1842, was sufficiently successful to launch a journey that took the opera to three continents within a decade.

Following its tour of Europe and the Americas in the 1840s and 1850s, Linda di Chamounix gradually disappeared from theaters’ repertories, supplanted in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century by the middle- and late-period operas of Giuseppe Verdi, whose bel canto-influenced early works shared Linda’s fate. Nevertheless, Donizetti’s musical setting of librettist Gaetano Rossi’s tale of thwarted love and psychological instability, drawn from Adolphe d’Ennery’s 1841 novel La grâce de Dieu; ou La nouvelle fachon, has won notable admirers. Conducted by Tullio Serafin, the cast of the opera’s Metropolitan Opera première, the first of the eight performances in 1934 and 1935 that constitute the work’s entire MET performance history, included Lily Pons, Gladys Swarthout, Giuseppe de Luca, and Ezio Pinza. Edita Gruberová’s espousal of the title rôle brought the opera greater attention in the final quarter of the Twentieth Century, but, like many of its bel canto brethren, Linda di Chamounix continues to await the renewal of interest that the quality of its music merits.

A.J. Fletcher Opera Institute’s residency at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem—and the Institute’s commitment to staging lesser-known bel canto works—began in 2001 with a production of Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda. As Friday evening’s performance demonstrated, choosing Linda di Chamounix to continue the tradition inaugurated with Beatrice di Tenda was both logical and inspired. Echoes of Bellini resound in Linda, the bucolic atmosphere of La sonnambula permeating Donizetti’s score. Linda’s oft-recorded cavatina in Act One, ‘O luce di quest’anima,’ has much in common with Elvira’s polacca, ‘Son vergin vezzosa,’ in I puritani. The continuing popularity of Rossini’s operas in Vienna more than a decade after the completion of his final opera is evident in Donizetti’s writing for the Marchese di Boisfleury, a relation of Rossini’s wiliest buffo characters. There are obvious parallels with Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in Linda’s mad scene, but there are also abundant reminiscences of L’elisir d’amore and Don Pasquale.

Directed with keen perceptiveness and musicality by Steven LaCosse, Fletcher Institute’s production of Linda di Chamounix was a triumph over adverse conditions. A pandemic, winter weather, and an industrial fire that necessitated evacuation of part of Winston-Salem could not stop Linda from reaching the stage, LaCosse’s direction glorying in the circumstances rather than apologizing for them. Blessed with stunningly beautiful scenic designs by Sarah A. Webster, their vista of Mont Blanc astonishingly realistic, and Diana Ridge’s luxurious costumes, the production had an inviting visual setting in which, under LaCosse’s guidance, Donizetti’s villagers went about their lives with engaging naturalness. Complemented by Maggie Turoff’s warm, well-focused lighting designs, Natosha Martin’s wigs and makeup transformed the young cast into a credible Nineteenth-Century community. Fusing these elements with his work with the singers, LaCosse was attentive to both the lightness and the wistfulness that lend Linda di Chamounix its singular appeal. In this production, the opera was truly a melodramma semiserio, Donizetti’s finely-wrought balance between Rossinian comedy and Verdian tragedy fully and compellingly realized.

Il servo vigile: tenor David Maize as L’intendente del feudo in A.J. Fletcher Opera Institute’s February 2022 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix
[Photograph © by André Peele; used with permission]

In recent seasons, conductor James Allbritten has exhibited expert handling of Donizetti’s music in Piedmont Opera productions of L’elisir d’amore and Maria Stuarda. His conducting of Linda di Chamounix embodied the essence of bel canto, his management of tempi, dynamics, and orchestral balances supporting the singers’ navigations of the melodic lines. Fiorature were paced excitingly, challenging but never rushing the principals, and cantilena passages were allowed time to expand organically in tandem with the words and emotions that they communicated. The UNCSA Symphony Orchestra’s playing was not without mistakes, but the musicians followed Allbritten’s beat with absolute and warranted trust in his leadership. The conductor unfailingly elucidated the dramatic significance of details like the transitions from larghetto to allegro vivace and vivace in the opera’s Sinfonia, accentuating the ingenuity of Donizetti’s musical storytelling. Juxtaposed with the opera’s darker pages, the score’s comedic moments possessed irrepressible verve, reflecting Allbritten’s comprehension of Linda’s distinctive musical and theatrical anatomies.

One of this production’s greatest strengths was the singing of the UNSCA Chorus. In the opera’s opening scene, the choristers intoned ‘Presti! al tempio!’ reverently, their delivery imparting piety and rustic charm. The men of the village leaving their Haute-Savoie home in the Act One finale in order to earn their living in Paris, the voices combined sublimely, voicing Donizetti’s music with immediacy that would not have been out of place in a performance of a Bach Passion. Owing to time constraints and the unavoidable disruptions in the rehearsal schedule, cutting the choral introduction and Brindisi in Act Three was understandable. The jubilation of the opera’s final scene was heightened by the choristers’ exuberant singing and acting, their celebration of the restoration of Linda’s sanity manifesting the sense of community that they projected throughout the performance.

The sole regret roused by tenor David Maize’s singing was that Donizetti did not allot more music to L’intendente del feudo. Though his time on stage was brief, Maize established a lasting presence with his assured vocalism. Wielding a gleaming timbre, he was easily heard above the orchestra, each word of his part enunciated with accurate intonation and admirable diction.

I genitori sconsolati: baritone Scott Lee as Antonio (left) and soprano Katherine Ledbetter as Maddalena (right) in A.J. Fletcher Opera Institute’s February 2022 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix
[Photograph © by André Peele; used with permission]

Linda’s doting mother Maddalena was portrayed by soprano Katherine Ledbetter, whose vocalism glowed with maternal affection. University productions often offer propitious casting of rôles assigned in other companies’ performances to singers whose vocal resources are no longer ideal for the music. Particularly in the period in which Fletcher Institute’s production was set, a young lady of Linda’s age would likely have been the daughter of young parents. The freshness of Ledbetter’s tones was especially valuable in passages in which Maddalena sings the top line in ensembles. The mother’s love and fear for her daughter were omnipresen​t in the soprano​’s performance, as was accomplished musicality.

Attenzione indesiderate: baritone Lawrence Hall as Il marchese di Boisfleury (left) and soprano Margaret Ann Zentner as Linda in A.J. Fletcher Opera Institute’s February 2022 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix
[Photograph © by André Peele; used with permission]

A close relation of Dottore Dulcamara in L’elisir d’amore, the Marchese di Boisfleury provides much of Linda di Chamounix’s comedy despite the character’s libidinous pursuit of the virtuous Linda. In baritone Lawrence Hall’s portrayal, the Marchese’s iniquitous machinations were unquestionably vexing, but he never seemed like the sort of smarmy aristocrat who might attempt to exercise his droit du seigneur. Hall sang the Marchese’s Act One cavatina, ‘Buono gente, noi siamo chi siamo’ confidently, the nobleman’s arrogance evinced by the singer’s insouciant top F. In the scene with Linda in Act Two, this Marchese accosted the object of his desire with determination, her rejections making the game all the more enjoyable for him.

Hall was at his best in the aria buffa in Act Three, ‘Ella è un giglio di puro candore.’ His lyric instrument was tested by the rôle’s Rossinian patter and tessitura, but his technique prevailed in every vocal contest. Recalling Angelina’s forgiveness of the ill treatment that she receives from Clorinda, Tisbe, and Don Magnifico in Rossini’s La Cenerentola, the moment in the opera’s final scene in which, as the Marchele starts to announce himself as the cause of Linda’s troubles, Linda embraces him as her future uncle-in-law was unusually touching in this performance, Hall having made the Marchese atypically forgivable.

Il padre ed il prefetto: baritones Scott Lee as Antonio (left) and Michael Redding as Il prefetto (right) in A.J. Fletcher Opera Institute’s February 2022 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix
[Photograph © by André Peele; used with permission]

UNCSA alumnus Michael Redding returned to Winston-Salem to serve as Linda di Chamounix’s moral foundation, and his depiction of the Prefetto, an Alpine cousin of Raimondo in Lucia di Lammermoor, exuded vicarial probity. Having revealed that the Marchese’s interest in Antonio’s family is motivated by lecherous designs on Linda, Redding’s vigilant Prefetto voiced ‘Quella pietà sì provvida​’ in the Act One due​t with the humble farmer nobly, the voice’s evenness throughout the music’s range heightening the effect of his singing here and in the burghers’ farewell to their departing kinsmen.

In the Act Three scene in which the despondent Carlo returns to Chamounix in search of Linda, Redding sang the Prefetto’s lines plaintively, evey tone disclosing the character’s regard for the forlorn girl and her parents. Redding initiated the unaccompanied Preghiera in the opera’s finale powerfully. Two months before the Vienna première of Linda di Chamounix, Donizetti’s first Prefetto, Prosper Derivis, created the rôle of the high priest Zaccaria in Verdi’s Nabucco. Redding’s thoughtful, orotund singing of the Prefetto’s music honored the legacy of the part’s first interpreter.

L’uomo ghironda: mezzo-soprano Danielle Romano as Pierotto in A.J. Fletcher Opera Institute’s February 2022 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix
[Photograph © by André Peele; used with permission]

The timbre of UNCSA’s Pierotto, Danielle Romano, often brought the voice of Québécoise mezzo-soprano Huguette Tourangeau to mind. First heard in Act One from off stage, Romano sang ‘Cari luoghi ov’io passai’ evocatively, the boy’s song introducing a sense of foreboding into the scene’s Arcadian tranquility. [Pierotto’s appearances were often accompanied by keyboardist Neil Mitchell’s beguiling representation of the lad’s hurdy-gurdy.] Romano’s account of the melancholy ballatta ‘Per sua madre andò una figlia’ was unaffected but compelling. Her voice strongest at the upper and lower extremities of the range, the mezzo-soprano’s singing was sometimes covered by the orchestra, but she sagaciously avoided forcing the voice.

The suffering that Pierotto endured on the streets of Paris was palpable in the softness of Romano’s singing in the duet with Linda in Act Two, the feeling with which she phrased ‘Al bel destin che attendevi’ redolent of relief. Pierotto’s defense of Linda’s honor in the trio, ‘In un palazzo poco discosto,’ was as vehement as his horror and alarm in the mad scene were believable. Entering with the still-distubed Linda in Act Three, Romano’s Pierotto’s frustration was tempered by tenderness. ‘Ed ecco in qual maniera abbiamo fatto’ was captivatingly sung. Convincingly masculine without overdoing the puckishness, Romano enlivened every scene in which Pierotto graced the stage.

Sull’orlo della tragedia: baritones Scott Lee as Antonio (left) and Michael Redding as Il prefetto (right) in A.J. Fletcher Opera Institute’s February 2022 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix
[Photograph © by André Peele; used with permission]

Baritone Scott Lee’s portrayal of ​​Linda’s father Antonio was one of the production’s foremost joys. The paternal prudence and weariness that his performance imparted were astonishing for so young a singer. Antonio’s first interactions with his wife at the start of Act One divulged well-honed artistry, and the stylistic acumen of Lee’s traversal of the romanza ‘Ambo nati in quest​a valle,’ the top Es dispatched robustly, affirmed the thoroughness of his training. Antonio’s music in the duet with the Prefetto was voiced with emotional intensity, the father’s trepidation for his daughter movingly relayed.

Wandering through Paris, unable to find his daughter, Antonio’s entry into Linda’s opulent residence in Act Two was the dramatic apogee of the performance. Prefiguring Verdi’s scenes for Violetta and Giorgio Germont in La traviata and for Aida and Amonasro, Antonio’s duet with Linda contains some of the opera’s most impassioned music. Lee voiced ‘Un buon servo del visconte’ simply, emphasizing the gentle man’s humility. The pain of Linda’s seeming dishonor burst from Lee’s singing in the trio with Linda and Pierotto frighteningly, but the father’s love for his daughter remained obvious in Lee’s depiction of the moment of fury in which Pierotto prevented Antonio from striking his daughter. In Lee’s performance, Antonio’s vivid reactions to Linda’s return and psychological recovery in Act Three were no less gratifying than the young lovers’ reunion. The opportunity to experience a staging of Linda di Chamounix was a rare gift to UNCSA’s audience, but singing such as Lee’s is still rarer, not only in student production but upon all of the world’s stages.

Gli amanti ardenti: soprano Margaret Ann Zentner as Linda (left) and tenor Kameron Alston as Carlo (right) in A.J. Fletcher Opera Institute’s February 2022 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix
[Photograph © by André Peele; used with permission]

It can be argued that, when Alfredo Kraus sang the rôle of Carlo, visconte di Sirval, at Teatro alla Scala in 1972, the opera might justifiably have been rechristened as Il sire di Sirval. Donizetti’s music for Carlo is often ravishingly melodious, but its tunefulness is also perilous. The melodic fecundity is bolstered by daunting technical requirements, not the least of which is unfailing breath control. Harkening back more to another noteworthy Carlo, Ugo Benelli, than to Kraus, tenor Kameron Alston approached the rôle with tonal and technical suavity. In the Act One duet with Linda, he sculpted the line in ‘Da quel dì che t’incontrai’ delicately, maintaining poise without applying pressure to the voice. Carlo’s romanza in Act Two, ‘Se tanto in ira agli uomini,’ was also sung pensively, the top A♭s caressed, but the upper register’s security faltered in the coda. Alston regained vocal solidity in the subsequent scene with Linda, voicing ‘Ah! dimmi...dimmi, io t’amo’ stirringly.

The grief that plagues Carlo as he fruitlessly seeks Linda at the start of Act Three burgeoned in Alston’s voicing of ‘Ciel, che dite? Linda è morta!’ in the duet with the Prefetto. The Act Two romanza is Carlo’s most familiar music, but, in this performance, the aria ‘È la voce che primiera’ was his most memorably appealing selection, the tenor’s timbre shimmeringly youthful across the compass. Aside from a few phrases in the stretta in which the top of the voice sounded fatigued, Alston’s voicing of ‘Di tuo pene sparve il sogno’ in Carlo’s final duet with Linda brilliantly proclaimed the viscount’s exultation. In Alston’s performance, Carlo was a nuanced Romantic figure whose singing was balm to both Linda’s psyche and the audience’s ears.

La bella pazza: soprano Margaret Ann Zentner in the title rôle of A.J. Fletcher Opera Institute’s February 2022 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix
[Photograph © by André Peele; used with permission]

Soprano Margaret Ann Zentner was a Linda who reminded the audience that, although the part was sung in the opera’s sole Metropolitan Opera production by Lily Pons and was associated later in the Twentieth Century with the light voices of Margherita Carosio and Margherita Rinaldi, the eponymous heroine was sung on the opera’s first widely-available studio recording by Antonietta Stella, a singer more renowned for performances of Verdi and Puccini rôles than for her forays into bel canto. A particular pleasure of Zentner’s performance was hearing Linda’s music sung by a voluptuous voice.

Brightening the stage with her first entrance in Act One, Zentner sang ‘Ah! tardai troppo, e al nostro favorito convegno io non trovai’ strikingly, the character’s amiable disposition cascading beyond the footlights. Her performance of Linda’s best-known number, the cavatina ‘O luce di quest’anima,’ was the effervescent expression of a young girl’s excitement rather than a singer’s display of vocal prowess. Similarly, Zentner sang ‘Son più misera di te’ in the duet with Carlo bewitchingly but straightforwardly. The voice soared in the Gran Preghiera, the words felt rather than merely sung.

The lushness of Zentner’s vocalism suited the luxury in which Linda finds herself in Act Two, the viscount-in-disguise having confessed his true identity and installed his intended bride in his Paris villa. Looking and sounding like Ruth Ann Swenson at the outset of her career, Zentner joined Romano in a subtle account of Linda’s duet with Pierotto. There was little subtlety in the Marchese’s goading of Linda in their scene, and the soprano slapped her baritone colleague with stinging top Bs in ‘Io vi dico che partiate’ before resorting to a physical blow. The duet with Carlo that followed could hardly have been more different, and Zentner’s singing took on more subdued colors.

Dismayed by her father’s unexpected appearance in her Paris lodgings, where he first fails to recognize her and then erroneously surmises that she has been living not as a chaste bride-to-be but as a kept woman, Linda is reluctant to acknowledge her identity. In Zentner’s portrayal, Linda’s hesitation was the first indication of her mental distress. Her singing in the potent trio with Pierotto and Antonio throbbed with agitation, but her musicianship was never sacrificed to dramatic involvement. As with the popular cavatina in Act One, the impression made by Zentner’s vocalism in the Gran scena del delirio was primarily one of empathy for Linda’s vulnerable state rather than admiration for virtuosity. Ascents above the stave were not effortless, but the fiorature dazzled. Nonetheless, it was the expressivity of her reading of ‘A consolarmi, affrettati’ that awed.

Zentner’s vocal acting in Act Three was the work of an artist who knows and trusts the potential of understatement. Led back to Chamounix by the exhausted Pierotto, Zentner’s Linda was lost in a realm of silence and isolation, but her thoughts resounded with music, fragments of tunes that, when reassembled, were memories of her life before the calamities of Act Two. Returned to her parents’ house, reconciled with the Marchese, and assured of Carlo’s fidelity, this Linda reconstructed her life one beautifully-sung note at a time.

The modern concept of music therapy had not yet been devised in the era in which Linda di Chamounix was written, but, even if only empirically, Donizetti clearly intuited music’s capacity for healing. After two years of pandemic, Fletcher Institute’s engrossing Linda di Chamounix was wonderfully therapeutic.

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This review is dedicated with love and gratitude to the memory of James Forrest, a cherished friend of Voix des Arts and the Performing Arts whose contributions to music criticism are incalculable.