Review: CENTER STAGE at Opera Theatre Of Saint Louis

It was a grandly exciting evening of opera!  I “bravo”ed and shouted myself hoarse as the large troupe of singers took their bows—and so did the rest of this huge audience.  It was the Center Stage evening—the icing on the top of another glorious summer festival at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis.

Center Stage is a showcasing of brilliant young talent featuring the singers in the Gerdine Young Artists program.  This program, under the direction of the great soprano Patricia Racette, gives emerging artists intensive training and professional experience.  There are master-classes, one-on-one coaching, industry auditions, and the singers perform in OTSL productions—as chorus, or supporting roles, or as “covers” for major roles.  And they prepare this  Center Stage evening.

GYA alumni are sometimes brought back as “Richard Gaddes Festival Artists” in subsequent years to perform in OTSL productions.  

The Gerdine Young Artists program is a helping hand into this most demanding and competitive profession.   

It was a fine, moderately warm summer evening.  The beautiful grounds of the Loretto-Hilton Theatre at Webster University were filled with patrons enjoying light picnic suppers. 

We entered the theater.  Comfortable.  Elegant.  On stage the musicians from the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra were assembling.  Not in the pit—on the stage.  Shortly Maestra Daniela Candillari, with a whiff of baton, sent the orchestra off into a delightfully entertaining performance of Glinka’s overture to Ruslan and Ludmila.  What fun!  Scampering strings, celli smooth as cream.  What vigor!  What gentleness! 

With (by my rough count) over fifty musicians playing I was stunned by the precision, the microscopic synchrony they displayed.  The wonderful acoustics of the hall let one hear distinctly every thread of this great musical tapestry—the timbre of every individual instrument. 

And then the singers! 

The program this evening consisted of twenty-one operatic scenes performed by thirty-three singers.  This seemingly difficult directorial challenge was resolved with the utmost simplicity:  the five stage directors deftly blocked their singers in the narrow space below the orchestra—the “apron” as it were.  Thus, these superb voices were presented as close to the audience as possible.  

The scenes performed were of marvelous diversity—romantic, tragic, comic, risqué, heroic, grim, delicious, silly.  They were:

Dvořak’s Rusalka:  “Hou hou hou, stoji music and vodou”
Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame:  “Uzh vecher”
Donizetti’s Don Pasquale:  “Mi volete fiere”
Mozart’s Don Giovanni:  “Soal, sola in buio loca”
Bernstein’s Candide:  “We Are Women”
Weill’s Street Scene:  “Ice Cream Sextet”
Puccini’s La boheme:  “Mimi, tu piu non torni”
Saint-Saёns Samson et Dalila:  “J’aurais du deviner ta haine …”
Tchaikovskky’s Eugene Onegin:  “V vashem dome, kak sni zolotiye”
Britten’s Peter Grimes:  “Old Joe Has Gone Fishing”
Britten’s Albert Herring:  “Come Along, Darling”
Verdi’s Attila:  “Te sol, te solquest anima”
Donizetti’s Lucia di Lamermoor:  “Chi mi frema in tal momento”
Handel’s Rodelina:  “Dunque è proprio finite”
Gounod’s Faust:  “Alerte!  Alerte!  “Ou vous êtes perdus!”
Mascagni’s Cavelleria Rusticana:  “No, no, Turrido, rimani”
Catan’s Il Postino:  “Duo de amor No. 3”
Sondheim’s A Little Night Music:  “A Weekend in the Country”
Jones’ The Fantaticks:  “I Can See It”
Flaherty’s Ragtime:  “Wheels of a Dream”
Puccini’s La Rondine:  “Bivo al tuo fresco sorriso” 

This was a smorgasbord of all dessert and no veggies.  It was sung in the original languages (with supertitles, of course). 

At intermission the audience retired to the lovely grounds, which were filled, magically, with scores of fireflies, drifting over the lawn in the twilight.  To add to the various beauties we’d just experienced there were two young girls—maybe eight or so—in light summer dresses, barefoot—flitting like gentle dryads around the lawn, catching the “lightning bugs” whenever they could.

Then we returned to more splendid music.

The singers were: 

Sopranos:  Nina Evelyn Anderson, Alexandria Crichlow, Melissa Joseph, Lilah Kirves, Victoria Lawal, Anastasia Malliaras, Kathleen O’Mara, Erin O’Rourke, Chase Sanders

Mezzo-sopranos:  Rachel Barg, Amani Cole-Felder, Maria Consamus, Hanna Jeané-Jones, Olivia Johnson, Kaswanna Kanyinda, Gabriela Linares, Elissa Pfaender, Xiao Xiao

Tenors: Adam Catangui, Camron Gray, River Guard, Yuntong Han, César Andrés Pareño, Ajit Persaud, Namarea Randolph-Yosea, Jeremiah Tyson

Baritones:  Chancelor Barbaree, Yazid Gray, Shavon Lloyd, Titus Muzi III, Kellen Schrimper,

Bass-baritone:  Keith Klein, Joseph Park

Bass:  Casey Germain

Stage directors for the various scenes were:

Claire Choquette
Diane Machin
Patricia Racette (Artistic Director of the Young Artists Program)
Ian Silverman
James Robinson (Artistic Director of OTSL)

All the singers were of Olympic quality, and ordinarily I wouldn’t attempt to comment on each of the thirty-three.  But one voice so strongly impressed me that I simply must give some individual praise.  Soprano Kathleen O’Mara, who sang in the Donizetti and the Gounod selections, and in the achingly beautiful piece from Puccini’s La Rondine, shows a voice of such purity and power—of such generosity.  She so easily, so naturally, so graciously fills the hall—fills our hearts—with the marvel of operatic song.

Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, with its Center Stage evening, has once again shown that St. Louis is rich in world-class opera.

(Photos by Jessica Flanigan)

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