Richard Sasanow - Page 5

The new opera season started out for me far from Lincoln Center’s madding crowds, in Brooklyn’s Irondale Center, near BAM, with a pair of short pieces by French composers that definitely had their charms.

I’ve heard much praise about the quality of the vocal writing of Jake Heggie from singers who adore the way his music caresses their voices. But THREE DECEMBERS, performed this past weekend at the Berkshire Opera Festival at Pavilion Theatre, PS21 in Chatham, New York, was the first time I heard a complete dramatic work by the composer. As characters from FOLLIES by Sondheim--a composer whose music echoes in Heggie’s score--said about showing up at the reunion that frames that musical, “I’m so glad I came.”

Last week, “The Angel’s Share”--which falls under the 'Death of Classical' umbrella--kicked off its new season at Green-Wood with a deeply poignant piece, Sarah Kirkland Snider’s MASS FOR THE ENDANGERED, a re-imagining of the Latin Mass with text, combining traditional and new, by poet Nathan Bellows.

You’d have thought that the Met Orchestra would have had enough by the end of the season in the opera house, but, no. Their New York season really ended at Carnegie Hall this week with a pair of concerts combining some opera excerpts with orchestral pieces by composers also known for their opera work.

While I was watching the Met’s current beautiful yet somehow languid production of the Igor Stravinsky and WH Auden/Chester Kallman opera THE RAKE’S PROGRESS the other night--with only two more performances until it goes back into mothballs for probably many years--I couldn’t help wishing that the opera house was more like Broadway.

Is there another Shakespearean drama filled with as many quotable quotes as “Hamlet” (even when they’re used out of context and given a foreign meaning)? But “To be or not to be” is surely the most referenced and, certainly, in the new operatic HAMLET currently at the Met by Brett Dean and Matthew Jocelyn, in Neil Armfield’s thoughtful, urgent production, it's given the best showcase. Indeed, it helps shed a different light on the hero of the story.

On Saturday night, Version 2.0 of the Mason Bates-Mark Campbell opera, THE (R)EVOLUTION OF STEVE JOBS, opened brilliantly as a mainstage production of the Atlanta Opera, in its East Coast premiere, under Tomer Zvulun’s taut direction and Michael Christie’s smart baton. To say the audience greeted the work joyfully would be an understatement.

Well, no one can say that the Met doesn’t have guts. After the tepid response that subscribers gave its Las Vegas version of Verdi’s RIGOLETTO by Michael Mayer, no one would have suspected that they’d come up with a version of Donizetti’s LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR that made anything else it’s produced look tame. And while the new LUCIA isn’t something that will send every Met attendee into quivers of excitement--I don’t think I’ve ever heard so many pros and cons discussed at an intermission before--it also won’t send them to sleep either.

Joyce DiDonato’s recitals-as-events--where she introduces her personal philosophies as well as her art into the evening--have their ups and downs. Sometimes they are marvelous. Saturday night at Carnegie Hall, the concert, directed by Marie Lambert-Le Bihan with lighting by John Torres, that also served as part of her publicity tour for her new recording, EDEN (Erato), seemed less than the sum of its parts.

Celebrating its 10th anniversary season, On Site Opera gave its audiences a present: The lively, fun-filled GIANNI SCHICCHI--the only comedy in Puccini’s trifecta, IL TRITTICO, which had its world premiere at the Met in 1918 and is surely its most popular of the triptych of one-acts. Of course, the composer’s written about greed, love and violence before, but never in a way to lift the spirits and tickle one’s fancy, using Giovacchino Forzano’s libretto.

Richard Strauss’s ELEKTRA is simply overwhelming--particularly when you have Nina Stemme and, especially, Lise Davidsen, as the title character and her sister Chrysothemis, ably abetted by Greer Grimsley as their brother, Orest, and an incredible supporting cast top to bottom.

I couldn’t help thinking of a new science fiction-comedy series on Amazon during the local premiere of UPLOAD, the opera by Michel van der Aa at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday. Both had the same name. Both explore a near future where technology controls everything, including the afterlife, as a person can choose to “upload” its consciousness to continue living digitally. Both pose questions, though in different ways, about humanity, technology, consumerism, and so on.

Can you imagine the Met--or any other major opera house--cutting the length of a new opera so commuters could make the last train? That’s what baritone Etienne Dupuis told me about the world premiere in Paris of Verdi’s DON CARLOS (1867). Dupuis is starring as Don Rodrigue, Marquis de Posa, at the Met these days, in the new David McVicar production of the Verdi opera.

Another work salvaged from this year’s Covid-aborted Prototype Festival has shown up in New York--at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse, this time--and it couldn’t have been further away from the last I experienced, Taylor Mac’s THE HANG, if it tried. BOOK OF MOUNTAINS & SEAS is the work of composer/librettist Huang Ruo (music influenced by Chinese folk melody, Western avant-garde and other styles, but unlike anything else you’ve heard) and director/designer puppeteer Basil Twist (a MacArthur “genius grant” winner in 2015). The four tales included in the piece, which Huang describes as “abstract and eternal,” kept the audience in its thrall for 80 minutes.

If Friday night’s performance of Handel’s RODELINDA sometimes seemed like it was never going to end--it was quickly approaching the witching hour by the time the curtain calls were over, having started at 7:30--it certainly wasn’t the fault of the cast but Handel himself and librettist Nicola Haym. With ornamentation galore and da capo arias that strung phrases along one time after another (and a plot to make your head spin), it set challenges for everyone on stage, both musically and dramatically. And they were certainly up to it.

The original title of the Sondheim-Laurents ANYONE CAN WHISTLE was THE NATIVES ARE RESTLESS, though the crowd at Carnegie Hall on Thursday for the MasterVoices concert performance of the trouble musical were hardly fidgety. They were willing and able to sit through the cockamamie book and story Arthur Laurents concocted to hear the wonderful score by the late and very lamented Stephen Sondheim. And, believe me, Ted Sperling, leading the orchestra and big chorus, with a couple of strong guest performers, showed how good much of this score can be.

I flipped over Lise Davidsen when she made her Met debut in QUEEN OF SPADES—the voice, the acting, the overall subtlety--but I was still unprepared for the performance she gave as the Prima Donna who became Princess Ariadne of Crete in Strauss’s ARIADNE AUF NAXOS. She was altogether divine.

DON CARLOS--Verdi’s original French language version, for the first time at the Met, of the opera better known in these parts as the Italian DON CARLO--was as grim as its setting in the Spanish inquisition in the new David McVicar production introduced last night. And about as long (though for once it ended earlier than expected)--Verdi's longest opera.

When this year’s PROTOTYPE Festival was put off for a year because of Covid concerns, some of the pieces went into mothballs. Taylor Mac’s THE HANG, under the auspices of HERE, one of New York’s major downtown arts organizations, based in Tribeca, decided to, uh, hang around.

It’s no secret that many of the standard repertoire’s most famous operas had troubled premieres but Beethoven’s FIDELIO had more than its share. Thanks to the efforts of Heartbeat Opera, which performed its revised version at New York’s Met Museum this past weekend (before a short tour), we can see the forest for the trees, with many of the work’s problems dealt with in a surprisingly effective way and the story brought up to date without destroying its integrity.