Ghosts at Versailles and in the Supreme Court

Corigliano, The Ghosts of Versailles, T. Stratas, H. Hagegård, R. Fleming, M. Horne, Metropolitan Opera (1992)

Charles T. Downey, Ghosts, Ginsburg Given Justice As Summer Delights
Classical Voice North America, July 22

WASHINGTON, D.C. – For opera to thrive, companies must be willing to commission new works and, just as important, to revive recent operas so they can be heard more than once. Two summer festivals near Washington did their part, premiering a new comedy and reviving one of the great operatic successes of the late 20th century.

Wolf Trap Opera, a young artist training program based in a national park in a far Virginia suburb of the District, aimed high with its first production of John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles, heard at its final performance on July 18. A “grand opera buffa” (Corigliano’s term) commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera for its centennial celebration, Ghosts was sized in every way to the cavernous proportions of the Met, where it received its premiere in 1991....

[Continue reading]

Corigliano, The Ghosts of Versailles
Wolf Trap Opera

Wang, Scalia/Ginsburg
Castleton Festival

SEE ALSO:
Robert R. Reilly, 'Ghosts of Versailles' at Wolf Trap (Ionarts, July 12)

Robert Battey, A return to grand style for Wolf Trap Opera with ‘Ghosts of Versailles’ (Washington Post, July 13)

Mark Swed, 'Scalia/Ginsburg' opera underscores how opposites can be in harmony (Los Angeles Times, July 13)

Philip Kennicott, ‘Scalia/Ginsburg’: An affectionate comic opera look at the high court (Washington Post, July 12)

Geoff Edgers, From ‘rage aria’ to ‘lovely duet,’ opera does justice to court, Ginsburg says (Washington Post, July 8)

Nina Totenberg, Judicial Differences Take Center Stage In 'Scalia V. Ginsburg' (NPR, July 10, 2013)

Fabio Luisi Steps In at Castleton

N. Medtner, Piano Sonatas, A. Taverna (1201 Music, 2015)

Charles T. Downey, Young players bolstered by pros in last classical performance at Castleton (Washington Post, July 21)

The Castleton Festival struggles on in Rappahannock County, a year after the death of its founder, Lorin Maazel. The programming is sharply reduced, with jazz taking over from classical music for the final two weeks, and all performances open with pleas for donations. A smaller, less-assured orchestra, made up of young apprentice players bolstered by professional ringers in some first chairs, gave the last of just three concerts of symphonic music on Sunday afternoon in the Castleton Festival Theater.

Maazel’s absence at the podium is the festival’s biggest problem... [Continue reading]

Castleton Festival Orchestra
Alessandro Taverna, piano
Fabio Luisi, conductor
Castleton Festival

Castleton Festival's 'Madama Butterfly'

Back at the Castleton Festival on Sunday afternoon, the performance of Puccini's Madama Butterfly was very strong, with a combination of a no-expense-spared approach to set design (Erhard Rom) and costumes (Lauren Gaston and Jonathan Knipsher), plus a cast of singers well suited vocally for their roles. There was an ever-present Japanese attention to detail, from gorgeous kimonos with proper footwear, rice paper sliding walls, and a full moon that crossed the night's sky, to an historically accurate 45-star United States flag incorporated into the set. Technology was cleverly used to add motion while at times moving the plot forward, with projections on screened backdrops. Gentle waves of the Nagasaki Harbor, stars in the night sky, and the slow-evolving projection of Lt. Pinkerton's ship, "The Lincoln," returning from a distance were highly effective.

However, having quick motions cartoonishly projected behind the set, such as close-up waves of the sea or fluttery butterflies drew too much attention to what should just function as a backdrop. There were two extraordinary lighting changes (Tláloc López-Watermann) that occurred precisely with plot and musical shifts. First, from blue to gold with the striking of the gong, as the intense Bonze of bass-baritone Joseph Barron interrupted the Christian wedding party of Cio-Cio San. The second was the abrupt transition to red upon Cio-Cio San's seppuku (ritual suicide). This unsubtle programmatic approach to lighting allowed all in the audience an almost synesthetic experience.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Wolf Trap Opera, Castleton Festival launch unevenly but laudably on same weekend (Washington Post, June 30)

Conductor Bradley Moore, standing in for Castleton Founder Lorin Maazel, who was still indisposed, incited a focused inspiration from the orchestra, which was a great improvement from the Mozart opera the previous night. Soprano Ekaterina Metlova as Cio-Cio San sang with a warm, smooth voice with either tragic strength, sublime tenderness, or everything in between. Her approach to portamento (the elision of notes) could have been more creative as it became somewhat predictable. Tenor Jonathan Burton as Lt. Pinkerton sang with expressive fortitude and memorable high notes, while baritone Corey Crider as Consul Sharpless demanded the audience's ear with his commanding voice. Mezzo-soprano Kate Allen as Cio-Cio San's servant Suzuki was superb vocally, and a particularly good vocal match to her mistress. The opera ended with a blistering intensity.

This production will be repeated on July 11 and 20.

Castleton Festival's 'Don Giovanni'

Saturday evening’s Castleton Festival production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni had much to offer. Set designer Collette Pollard created depth and breadth within the Festival Theater’s chamber-like dimensions by creating vertical rectangular shapes from dark-hued wooden beams to produce different levels onstage. Piers on both sides of the orchestra pit brought the marble-like stage further into the room, which convincingly allowed singers to have independent spaces onstage. For example, Don Giovanni (baritone Javier Arrey) would be center stage busy using his powers of seduction, while his servant Leporello (bass-baritone Tyler Simpson) would offer comic quips stationed on one of the piers close to the audience (stage direction by Diandomenico Vaccari).

Other Reviews: Robert Battey, In ‘Don Giovanni’ at the Castleton Festival, one key player is missing (Washington Post, July 7)

Arrey’s ability to change expressive character within a phrase or single note was most memorable. Tyler Simpson’s deeply resonant singing as Leporello, and as Donna Elvira, soprano Jennifer Black's command over her entire range with particularly effective low notes of jealousy were the highlight of the casting. Audience favorite Ottavio (tenor Tyler Nelson) had a smooth, creamy tone that made up for his less than memorable stage presence and vocal intensity. The chorus, with ladies in flowery summer dresses and gents in slacks and collared shirts, added pleasing support for the dance and party scenes.

Conductor Salvatore Percacciolo, standing in for Castleton founder Lorin Maazel, who has been suffering from exhaustion and is thankfully on the mend, was not fully connected to his orchestra, which led to accuracy issues. Instead of being a conduit between stage and pit, Percacciolo oddly mouthed most of the text of the opera to the singers and let many orchestral details fall to the wayside. In fairness, Act II of the production seemed better rehearsed and executed, though had Maazel been at the podium, the orchestra players would have been at their best for the entire opera instead of being seemingly bored. Kudos to the harpsichord player, whose name was unlisted, for ravishing playing during the fluent recitativos.

This production repeats on July 12 and 18.

Castleton Festival Closer

Charles T. Downey, Castleton Festival offers excellent tribute for Benjamin Britten centenary
Washington Post, July 29, 2013

J. Bridcut, Britten's Children

What to make of the Benjamin Britten centenary? The final concert program of the Castleton Festival, heard Saturday night, offered an excellent tribute to the British composer. How does one square one’s admiration for the beauty of Britten’s music with a clearer understanding, thanks to a well-researched and not sensationalized book by John Bridcut, of Britten’s attraction to teenage boys? [Continue reading]

Castleton Festival Orchestra
Music by Britten, Tchaikovsky
Castleton Festival

Of his song cycle Les Illuminations, Britten wrote to a performer that the eighth song, Parade, "should be made to sound creepy, evil, dirty, and really desperate." Because of the text's listing of various kinds of men, Philip Brett once wrote that this song depicts "cruising."

W. H. Auden, Rimbaud
The nights, the railway-arches, the bad sky,
His horrible companions did not know it;
But in that child the rhetorician’s lie
Burst like a pipe: the cold had made a poet.
Drinks bought him by his weak and lyric friend
His senses systematically deranged,
To all accustomed nonsense put an end;
Till he from the lyre and weakness was estranged.
Verse was a special illness of the ear;
Integrity was not enough; that seemed
The hell of childhood: he must try again.
Now, galloping through Africa, he dreamed
Of a new self, the son, the engineer,
His truth acceptable to lying men.

Gorgeous 'Fanciulla del West' at Castleton

The high point of this summer's Castleton Festival, edging out a fine double-bill of La Voix Humaine, was a rather spectacular production of Puccini's La Fanciulla del West, heard in the final performance on Sunday afternoon. Made for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where it was premiered in 1910, Fanciulla would get my vote for the most beautiful, most accomplished score that Puccini composed -- reportedly Puccini's favorite, too, as well as of scholar Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, author of an excellent biography on the composer -- and yet it is rarely performed. In fact, this was the first time the opera has ever been under review here at Ionarts, although I have been publicly calling for Washington National Opera to stage it instead of another Butterfly or Turandot. So much the better that it should come under Lorin Maazel, who has a way with the stretch and pull of Puccini's scores, the shameless emotionalism, the breadth of nobility in the sentiments.

It is an over-sized opera in many ways, "a work that is not small," as Puccini wrote to a friend (Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, Puccini: A Biography). In a sense, the story could only work in opera. It revolves around Minnie, the eponymous girl, who has raised herself up out of poverty to become the beloved central figure of a California Gold Rush town, where she serves drinks to the boys, has them all wrapped around her little finger, and teaches them a daily Bible lesson to boot. The local sheriff, Jack Rance, is one of several who plan to marry her, but she falls in love instead with a man who passes through town, Dick Johnson. She does not discover until later that he is actually Ramirez, a wanted bandit, with a heart of gold. Along the way, Puccini doles out one gorgeous set piece after another, weaving the whole into three continuously running acts, with hints of Wagner, Strauss, Debussy -- all of the big composers Puccini obviously heard in the several years between his last opera, Madama Butterfly, and this one.

Puccini, La Fanciulla del West, M. Zampieri, P. Domingo, La Scala, L. Maazel

Maazel and his musicians and cast gave the musical side exceptional beauty, the surge and gush of the lush orchestration adding vivid narration to the story, supporting and even sometimes engulfing the singers in a thrilling way. Soprano Ekaterina Metlova was a capable Minnie, with plenty of zing in the upper register if sometimes little in the lower passages, pretty and flirtatious, if just a little awkward in her movements. The vocal power she could summon up carried over most of the emotional climaxes of the role, as in the Bible lesson in Act I, on the great penitential psalm (Psalm 51), a lesson that shows itself well learned at the end of the opera. Tenor Jonathan Burton had a confident, ringing tone as Dick Johnson, while the Jack Rance of baritone Paul LaRosa was physically rakish but lacking some snarl in the voice. The supporting cast, made up of Castleton young artists, made a fine ensemble, especially in the many male chorus scenes, none more moving than the nostalgic folk song about home in Act I, which is a truly beautiful moment, and the reconciliation ensemble at the conclusion, a moment imbued with mercy in a way that reminds me of the forgiveness shown to the Count at the end of Le Nozze di Figaro.

Maazel made some waves last month when he lashed out against what he called the "Philistinism of some present day opera staging concepts." His target was opera directors who make changes that he disagrees with, distorting the story, although the negative examples he used were all ridiculous ("casting Butterfly as a hash-slinger in a San Diego diner" or turning "Falstaff into a retired sumo wrestler at a Caracas brothel"), rather than specific. Opera-goers, he concluded, had to protest against theater directors who give "the manipulators, axe-grinders and mafiosi" the upper hand and vote with their pocketbooks. Maazel, with his own summer festival, has done that one better, and Castleton's productions should perhaps be judged by the criteria that he himself set out.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, ‘Girl of the Golden West’ gives audiences sound and sight to revel in (Washington Post, July 18)

For the last few years, Maazel entrusted the entire festival to a resident stage director, William Kerley, a position he held until last year. For Fanciulla, Giandomenico Vaccari's direction did not stay slavishly close to the libretto -- Minnie's entrance on horseback in Act III was soft-pedaled, for example (Puccini wanted "eight to ten horses" in this scene at the Met in 1910 and got eight) -- but the staging was clearly set in the 19th century. Vaccari took his inspiration from Western movies, complete with a video backdrop that brought some of the colors of the American West into the stage. The two-level set clearly evoked the Polka Saloon, Minnie's (rather large) mountain hut, and a gold mine for the final scene, and the costumes added to the setting quite convincingly (sets and costumes designed by Davide Gilioli). It was beautiful and it drew you into the story, rather than deconstructing the libretto and its themes in a postmodern way that encouraged ironic distance. Backing up the storytelling in the pit, it made for a solid emotional punch in the gut that exalted the profound, almost spiritual moments in this beautiful score.

'La Voix Humaine' at Castleton

Dietlinde Turban-Maazel, La voix humaine, Castleton Festival, 2013 (photo by E. Raymond Boc)

The Castleton Festival was inaugurated with the chamber operas of Britten, an auspicious choice to make a new summer opera destination stand out from the crowd. Lorin Maazel, a Puccini specialist, soon was turning instead to more standard fare for his summer vacation, chestnut operas that may have more mass appeal but that one can hear lots of places. This summer has Verdi -- Otello, a difficult choice when you are relying mostly on young singers -- and Puccini, but the third offering goes back to the festival's roots in chamber opera, with Francis Poulenc's one-woman, one-act La voix humaine, heard on Saturday afternoon in the festival's original venue, the small theater in the Maazels' old house. Rather than a double-bill with another 20th-century one-act opera, as is often done, the Poulenc was introduced by the performance of an English translation of Jean Cocteau's original play version, from which Poulenc's libretto was derived.

The spoken monologue was delivered by Dietlinde Turban-Maazel, the festival director's wife, in charming German-accented English. In a silken red dress on a set evoking a well-appointed Parisian apartment (scene and costume design by François-Pierre Couture -- a suspiciously appropriate name for a costume designer), she brought the character of the femme délaissée to pathetic life. Gripping the receiver of an old-fashioned black telephone like a lifeline, she wheedled and lied her way through a final phone conversation with the man who has abandoned her, on the eve of his marriage to another woman. Cocteau identifies the character simply as Elle (She), but the coincidence of Cocteau's writing of this play, in 1930, with the publication of Le livre blanc, in 1928, makes one wonder if the monologue is based on something more autobiographical. Le livre blanc, the confession of a man's homosexual attractions, was published anonymously, but it is now generally accepted as Cocteau's work, not least because he later provided a set of illustrations for it. Many of the lines in the play receive interesting twists if the speaker were instead a man, speaking to a lover about to marry a woman.

Other Articles: Karren L. Alenier, The Human Voice: Poulenc via Cocteau (The Dressing, July 21) Joan Reinthaler, Castleton Festival’s ‘La Voix Humaine’ and ‘Otello’ (Washington Post, June 21) Tim Smith, Castleton Festival delivers strong lineup of opera, theater (Baltimore Sun, July 17) Eve Barnett, Castleton Festival: A Musical Meeting of the Minds (The Georgetowner, July 17) Roger Piantadosi, The Castleton Festival: right turn, no red (Rappahannock News, July 11)

When Francis Poulenc adapted the play into a short opera, premiered in 1959 at the Opéra-Comique by Denise Duval (watch the film version on YouTube), Cocteau reportedly said that he now knew exactly how the lines of his play were to be delivered (written in a letter to Poulenc -- "Mon cher Francis, tu as fixé, une fois pour toutes, la façon de dire mon texte"). Cocteau's reaction is understandable because seeing the two versions side by side revealed Poulenc's melodramatic opera as the more powerful of the two. Jennifer Black, who was a memorable Micaëla in the 2006 Carmen in Santa Fe and has impressed us many times, was a knockout vocally in the role, with a velvety tone from bottom up to a ringing, fully assured top. Antonio Mendez led the musicians crammed into the small pit, with the harpist relegated to one side of the house, and did some nice things with many details in this beautiful score. Poulenc alternates among many types of sounds -- the jangling xylophone for the phone's ring, jarring dissonances when Elle is upset, suave Romantic sweep when she recalls happier days of the relationship, even a bit of swing for the music she hears in the background of the phone call at one point.

This production will be repeated once more, this coming Saturday (July 27, 3 pm) at the Castleton Festival.

Lloyd Webber's Requiem Lives Again

Charles T. Downey, At Castleton Festival, a take on 2 composers
Washington Post, July 22, 2013

Barber, Violin Concerto (inter alia), J. Ehnes, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, B. Tovey

Somewhere in between the operas at the Castleton Festival, Lorin Maazel takes his Festival Orchestra out for a spin. At a concert on Saturday night in the Festival Theater, Maazel led his young musicians, most of them talented conservatory students, in a comparison of two 20th-century composers, whose careers showed that accomplishment and acclaim do not necessarily coincide.

The program opened with Samuel Barber’s overture to “The School for Scandal,” the comedy of manners by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. It was Barber’s first piece for orchestra, composed in 1931, when he was about the same age as most of Maazel’s players and still a student at the Curtis Institute of Music. This solid, fun performance captured the piece’s bubbly joy and its youthful brashness, with some pretty oboe and English horn solos for good measure. [Continue reading]

Castleton Festival Orchestra
Dmitri Berlinsky, violin
Lorin Maazel, conductor
Andrew Lloyd Webber, Requiem Mass

'Otello' at the Castleton Festival

In a formidable stride in its fifth season in the picturesque fields of Rappahannock County, Virginia, the Castleton Festival’s production of Verdi’s tragic Otello was almost a triumph. Conducted by Castleton founder Lorin Maazel in the Festival Theater, which except for the pit and stage is something of a barn-like tent structure, grand opera was offered in a chamber setting.

Maazel’s show-stopping orchestra of young musicians set the bar for musical precision and expressive agility; however, some of the lead singers did not exploit the intimacy of venue in this Glyndebourne production by Sir Peter Hall. The Iago of baritone Javier Arrey channeled evil through sinister facial expressions and body language furthered by his clear, resonant singing in Shakespearean soliloquys like the Creed aria. Similarly, bass-baritone Davone Tines' quick acting as Lodovico -- particularly with his eyes -- in combination with an immediacy in singing compelled one's focus and trust. Tenor Kirk Dougherty's gentle singing as Cassio reinforced his aloofness while being framed by Iago as Desdemona’s gallant adulterous lover. The chorus of young singers in summer residence sang with exceptional energy, while the two-story staging (directed by Lynne Hockney) helped create that grand opera feel from a cleverly simple set (designed by John Gunter).

Other Articles: Joan Reinthaler, Castleton Festival’s ‘La Voix Humaine’ and ‘Otello’ (Washington Post, June 21) Tim Smith, Castleton Festival delivers strong lineup of opera, theater (Baltimore Sun, July 17) Roger Piantadosi, The Castleton Festival: right turn, no red (Rappahannock News, July 11)

Alternatively, the opera’s leads, Otello (tenor Frank Porretta, stepping in for an indisposed Rafael Rojas for three performances) and Desdemona (soprano Joyce El-Khoury) seemed distant musically and visually, with quite broad acting. This cool, steady approach might be better suited for halls or giant arenas that seat thousands, rather than the hundreds such as at Castleton. Porretta seemed more focused on singing than fully embodying his self-destruction contrived by Iago. Desdemona, though vocally more impressive, especially in the Ave Maria, did not supersede Otello’s befuddled temperament, leaving one with the feeling that this production, albeit close, did not reach its potential. Without the listener being totally convinced artistically by the main characters, the concluding murder of Desdemona by pillow suffocation was bizarrely as banal as it was repugnant.

This production continues through July 28, at the Castleton Festival, in Rappahannock County, Virginia.

Ionarts-at-Large: MPhil Season Opening Concerts

After two introductory concerts (Mahler and Wagner/Bruckner), Lorin Maazel’s first season with the Munich Philharmonic was well under way in a variety—deliberately varied—of concerts. The inclusion of works by Bach, Schubert, Strauss, Stravinsky, Puccini, Fauré, and Ravel was no accident, it’s all part of the consistently stressed, heavy handed at times, repertoire-diversity that Maazel is meant to bring to the Munich Philharmonic. The less-than-subtle suggestion that that’s what was missing under his predecessor never far away. At least it’s a better narrative than the 82-year old, by now tottering Maazel being the future of the orchestra.

On the four-concert program on the 13^th, 14^th, 15^th, and 16^th of September (as if two or three weren’t enough) was Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No.5, Schubert’s Fourth Symphony, and Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra. Bach, with the slightly silly inclusion of a harpsichord in the 2500 arena that is the Philharmonic hall of the Gasteig, is good to play for the orchestra, and they should do more of it by all means. It’s music that philharmonic audiences all over the classical world are increasingly deprived on, but shouldn’t. Eventually, as familiarity with the idiom is being re-introduced to the orchestra, it will be good to hear, too.

Schubert’s Fourth, “Tragic”, Symphony was next in this ‘travel-through-the-style-periods exercise’. It’s said that there is quite a bit of Schubert in Bruckner; on this occasion there was quite a bit of Bruckner in Schubert. The most tragic thing about the work is that

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Castleton 'Carmen'

Charles T. Downey, Castleton Festival’s ‘Carmen’ is a group effort
Washington Post, July 9, 2012

Bizet, Carmen (film directed by F. Rosi), J. Migenes, P. Domingo, R. Raimondi, Orchestre National de France, L. Maazel (1984)

One of the virtues of Lorin Maazel’s Castleton Festival has been its presentation of interesting, rarely seen operas. The first three seasons included works by Stravinsky, Falla, Weill, Ravel and most of the smaller operas by Benjamin Britten, all of which were enticement enough to make the trip to Rappahannock County. Some Puccini was thrown into the mix in the past two seasons, but the fourth season has turned that virtue of adventurous programming on its head, with productions of “The Barber of Seville,” “Carmen” and Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music,” that last part of a disturbing trend among opera companies and festivals.

If the gamble on staging the predictable was for sold-out houses, it did not pay off at the second performance of “Carmen” on Friday night, although the heat and violent storms may be keeping some listeners away. The enlarged Festival Theater now showcases the festival’s other virtue, with a pit large enough to seat the fine orchestra of young musicians Maazel hosts each summer. No need here for a reduced score, as is often the case in the smaller Barns at Wolf Trap, so that Bizet’s excellent scoring, with a full complement of winds and brass, provided a sweeping canvas for Maazel’s broad-stroked interpretation. The playing, a few false entrances aside, was crisp and coordinated, making the orchestral introductions to each act among the evening’s highlights. [Continue reading]

Bizet, Carmen
Castleton Festival

SEE ALSO:
Jeffrey Brown, Maestros Mix With Students for Castleton Music Festival (PBS Newshour, July 6)

Anne Davenport, Castleton Festival Is Part Celebration, Part Training Ground for Musicians and Singers (PBS Art Beat, July 6)

Anne Midgette and Charles Downey, At ‘Don Giovanni’ and other outdoor performances, storm is a show-stopper (Washington Post, July 2)

Joan Reinthaler, Lorin Maazel’s sprightly ‘Barber of Seville’ opens Castleton Festival (Washington Post, June 25)

WATCH:
Olivier Py's new red light district staging of Bizet's Carmen from the Opéra de Lyon

Reviews Deferred

Anne Midgette and Charles T. Downey, At ‘Don Giovanni’ and other outdoor performances, storm is a show-stopper (Washington Post, July 2, 2012)

Don Giovanni survived at Wolf Trap on Friday night. There was thunder and lightning, to be sure, but those special effects accompanied not a descent into hell but the storms that passed overhead and wiped out the power just as Olivia Vote, a young mezzo, was gearing up to begin Donna Elvira’s aria “Mi tradi” (“He betrayed me”). All that betrayed her, though, were the lights, which flickered and flashed and then went out, leaving Vote standing in darkness.

There were a few bright hopes, voiced from the stage — first by a staffer and then by Kim Witman, the company’s director, illuminated by flashlights and the gentle glow of exit lights powered by the emergency generator — that the power could be gotten up and running again, but after a few minutes the company conceded defeat. “This guy gets to live tonight,” Witman said when she finally dismissed the audience, taking the stage with Craig Irvin, who played Giovanni. Few present had yet realized the magnitude of the storms, or the fact that the show would be silenced for the whole weekend: Sunday’s matinee performance of “Don Giovanni” was also canceled (as was Saturday’s scheduled performance at the Filene Center of “The Pirates of Penzance”). [Continue reading]

The resourceful performer always has a piece or two memorized and ready to play at the drop of a hat. That was the lesson for young musicians to learn on Friday night, when a violent storm swept through Rappahannock County and knocked out power to the Castleton Festival, meaning that resourceful General Director Nancy Gustafson was looking for musicians ready to keep the audience occupied.

Thanks to a small generator that provided power to the festival’s other venue, Theater House, I was able to hear a recital of singers from the Castleton Artists Training Seminar on Saturday afternoon. Like most events of this type, there was admirable promise as well as room for improvement. Big sounds came from baritone Darik Knutsen, with the lusty brindisi from Thomas’s Hamlet, and dramatic soprano Jing Zhang, in a scorching rendition of “Depuis le jour” from Gustave Charpentier’s Louise (in need of more French diction coaching). Bass Brandon Cedel scored high points for his choice of music, with an earnest but earthbound rendition of Mahler’s song Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen. His performance of Purcell’s “Arise, ye subterranean winds,” Prospero’s aria from The Tempest, roared and rattled in imitation of the previous night’s tempest.

Weill and Ravel at the Castleton Festival

Friday evening, situated in the picturesque mountains west of Washington, D.C., the Castleton Festival offered an impressive double bill of Kurt Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins and Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges in their newly renovated Festival Tent. The Castleton Residency, began in 2006, is now a full-fledged festival with 220 young artists from over twenty countries spending two months together refining their skills on Lorin Maazel and Dietlinde Turban-Maazel's 550-acre farm. This musical menagerie produces performances of the utmost quality and with unhesitating fluency. This focus is undoubtedly cultivated by the lack of frustrating urban distractions and ample practice time awarded to (or inflicted on) the musicians on Castleton Farms, where nearby neighbors blithely brag that there is not a single stoplight in all of Rappahannock County, Va.

The backdrop of Kurt Weill's ballet chanté The Seven Deadly Sins was a giant map of the United States, with lights following the route of Anna I (soprano Kate Mangiameli) and Anna II (dancer Toni Melaas) as they criss-crossed the country experiencing sloth, pride, anger, gluttony, lust, greed, and envy for seven years, all while attempting to earn money to send home to their greedy family to build a house. Castleton Resident Stage Director William Kerley created diverting, simultaneous settings onstage between the Annas on the road and the family in Louisiana, with fat suits and fake tattoos that reinforced the particular sin of the moment. Mother, robustly sung by bass-baritone Tyler Simpson, was particularly memorable in her giant pink night gown and hair curlers. This also compensated for the somewhat less than imaginative, yet concise compositional style of Weill. One wished Mangiameli had as many splendid musical opportunities to shine as Melaas did dancing, as they both worked to create the single persona of Anna. The male quartet comprising the family back home were equally strong as soloists, particularly tenor Tyler Nelson as Father, and as a barbershop quartet singing "gluttons never go to heaven." Presenting this entertaining work over a new Britten production or revival was a smart choice programmatically, even if some in the audience were annoyed and disinclined to clap heartily. Levi Hammer conducted assuredly.

Lorin Maazel led a big orchestra and cast in Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Spells), a work as much seeped in fantasy as the Weill was starkly in over-the-top reality. Due to an onstage fall during rehearsal, the ill-behaved Child taunted by his animate objects, was sung in the pit by Cecelia Hall as planned, yet mimed by Norra Graham Smith on stage. Set in the Child's bedroom on a big wooden platform with colorful wallpaper, and later in a garden, over twenty soloists were able to have their moment onstage. From a clock (Alex DeSocio), a dragonfly (Elizabeth Reiter), caterwauling coital cats (Ricardo Rivera and Jessica Klein), and a children's chorus skillfully spouting word problems and arithmetic, it was fun for all. After much creativity in costuming (Nicholas Vaughan) and orchestration, Ravel's score builds most beautifully in the garden scene where the Child mends the wound of a squirrel he injured. The angry animals and objects soon soften and mend the Child's wound after injuring him, leading him home to his mother (mezzo Margaret Gawrysiak).

Other Reviews: Terry Ponick, Castleton Festival's classy Weill and Ravel (Washington Times, July 11)

The main shortcoming of the Festival Tent is its lack of hard surfaces from which the sound can reverberate, such as the beautiful wood in the smaller Theatre House on the property. Friday night, singers often sounded distant and easily overpowered by the orchestra, although this was less a problem Saturday night at La Boheme. The impact of versatile soprano Sungji Kim's role as Fire, in which she remarks "I warm the good, but burn the bad," was greatly diminished due to the Tent's less than ideal acoustics. In any case, any weak vocal aspects of the evening, due to the room or not, were made up for by the crack orchestra and innovative stage direction, set, and spare-no-expense costume design. In the end, the full ovation was saved for Maestro Maazel.

This performance will be repeated on Saturday (July 23, 2pm).

Where to Listen This Summer

See my round-up of classical music attractions this summer at Washingtonian.com:

Ways to Get Your Summer Classical-Music Fix (Washingtonian, May 31):

Now that Memorial Day weekend has come and gone, we are officially in the summer classical-music season. After mid-June, many concert venues around town will be shuttered or mostly dark until September. There is still music to be heard, but it may mean taking a short (or long) drive to another destination. Here are some of the best options.

GO TO LORIN MAAZEL'S HOUSE
Lorin Maazel, the 81-year-old star conductor and former music director of the New York Philharmonic, has a country house in Rappahannock County. Several years ago, he built a concert hall in his house and started to host performances there, in a bucolic landscape complete with farm animals, a tranquil pond, and views of the Shenandoah mountains. In 2009, he made these semiregular performances at his property, Castleton Farms, into a summer festival, modeled after Glyndebourne in Great Britain. Rechristened the Castleton Festival the program features young instrumentalists and singers who are given training and a major résumé-building boost. Now in its third year, the event has drawn widespread media attention, including from international publications such as the Financial Times and Opernwelt. The opera productions this year include Puccini’s ever-popular La Bohème, a double-bill of Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale and Falla’s Master Pedro’s Puppet Show, and a double-bill of Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins and Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges.

Other one-off performances include recitals with mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, concerts by the Festival Orchestra, and a few performances in other venues, including the Hylton Performing Arts Center in Manassas, the Music Center at Strathmore (a Shakespeare extravaganza including recitations by Helen Mirren and Jeremy Irons on June 30), and the Inn at Little Washington. The festival runs June 25 through July 24. [Continue reading]

Opening of the Castleton Festival

The Puccini Companion, ed. W. Weaver and G. Puccini G. Puccini, Il Trittico, I. Cotrubas, R. Scotto, M. Horne, T. Gobbi, P. Domingo, London Symphony Orchestra, L. Maazel Online scores: Il Tabarro | Suor Angelica | Gianni Schicchi

Lorin Maazel took a risk last summer by inaugurating a summer festival of opera and orchestral music on the grounds of his country house in Rappahannock County, Virginia. The gamble may not have paid off financially, but it seems unlikely that Maazel was really worried about turning a profit. The audience was not at capacity for the second edition's opening gala on Friday night, but scheduling a festival opening on Independence Day weekend was a risk for that very reason. What has paid off is that with the Castleton Festival, Maazel can indeed showcase a significant number of promising young musicians, both singers and instrumentalists, in a series of polished and dramatically effective chamber operas.

To kick off this summer's festival Maazel chose a composer with whom he has a particular affinity, Giacomo Puccini. Maazel's recording of the late trilogy Il Trittico, which headlines this year, remains a classic (re-released very cheaply, but not remastered). As Leonardo Pinzauti wrote in an essay ("Giacomo Puccini's Trittico and the Twentieth Century") in The Puccini Companion, edited by William Weaver, Il Trittico came at an important cusp in world and music history, coinciding with the end of World War I and the precipice of the final dissolution of tonality. Indeed atonal influences can be heard burrowing into Puccini's harmonic style, in the organ grinder's waltz of Il Tabarro (called "a prophecy of Wozzeck" by Fedele d'Amico), shimmering in vibrant colors in Suor Angelica, and underscoring the clever deception in Gianni Schicchi. Pinzauti explored the shift in Puccini's style further:

the sense of crisis that the three little operas represent in Puccini's later life and in the panorama of European music in the first part of this century [is part of a] transition from a confessional theater to a theater that suggested the logical absurdity of the encounter between word and music ... A more or less calculated 'exaggeration' became evident, tending to a sense of detachment, of alienation, between the work of art itself and the emotions of its creator (pp. 229-30).

The musical performance was excellent, as we have come to expect from the operas presented by Maazel, not least because of his confident knowledge of the score, a sure presence at the podium coordinating singers on the stage with the musicians in the pit. The orchestra sounded polished and surprisingly full, given that the limited pit -- actually dug into the ground this year, part of an enlarged and sturdier festival tent -- required a somewhat reduced orchestration (the edition was by Bryan Higgins, with a smaller number of strings and not all of the wind and brass parts). The singers, as one would expect from a young artists program, were heavy on raw talent and variable as far as finished product but overall well cast both musically and dramatically. Standout performances came from the impassioned if slightly uneven Luigi of Noah Stewart, the brooding Michele of Nicholas Pallesen, the rich, vibrato-heavy mezzo of Margaret Gawyrisiak (both La Frugola in Il Tabarro and Zita in Gianni Schicchi. The most rounded, experienced singer on the stage was Corey Crider, whose comic timing, Italian diction, and vocal power were spot-on as Gianni Schicchi. Soprano Tharanga Goonetilleke was featured beautifully in a number of ensembles (as Nella in Schicchi and Suor Osmina in Angelica) but felt underutilized.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Young cast of Puccini's "Il Trittico" makes Castleton Festival worth the trip (Washington Post, July 5) Tim Smith, Lorin Maazel's Castleton Festival opens with potent Puccini production (Baltimore Sun, July 6)

William Kerley, the festival's resident director, created well-conceived stagings for each work, with minimal but suggestive sets (Nicholas Vaughan) and fluid acting direction that allowed the singers to delineate their characters and work with the drama of each libretto. The updating of Schicchi, set in a modern Italian home with Buoso's famous mule made into a priceless Damien Hirst formaldehyde sculpture, was quirky but did not undermine the story. For some reason, the order of the last two operas was reversed, a decision that moved the dramatic high point of the trilogy, the transcendent Suor Angelica (reportedly Puccini's favorite of the three -- perhaps because of the personal connection that Puccini's sister, Giulia Enrichetta, was a professed nun living in a convent), to the end of a long evening. A delicious dinner served during the two intermissions made for a long night that tested the endurance of some listeners. Joyce El-Khoury, who was a charming Lauretta in Schicchi, stepped in at the last minute to replace an ailing colleague in the title role of Angelica, and Matthew Plenk filled in for Zach Borichevsky as Rinuccio in Schicchi (a substitution that was not announced).

Il Trittico will be repeated, in whole or in part, on July 9, 10, 11, 18, 22, and 24. The other productions in this year's Castleton Festival include two Britten revivals from last year, The Turn of the Screw and The Beggar's Opera, as well as a new double-bill of Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat and Falla's Master Pedro’s Puppet Show.

Castleton Festival Comes to a Close

The Festival Tent was filled to the brim for the closing concert of the inaugural Castleton Festival, by the Castleton Festival Orchestra. The air-conditioned space, a new addition for this summer’s Festival, could pass for a barn given its location in the middle of a picturesque field and its resident tenor frog, who joined in for the second half of the performance. Musicians from the Royal College of Music, the Qatar Philharmonic, and Charlottesville High School took up the majority of the Tent’s floor space, making for an up-close-and-personal musical experience in works of Bartók, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Britten, and Verdi.

Festival Artistic Director Lorin Maazel began at the podium for Bartók’s Giuoco delle coppie movement from the Concerto for Orchestra, with a patient demeanor teaching and guiding the orchestra with a light touch. Along with the audience, Maazel assumed good intentions from all participants, who played their hearts out in a work offering a virtuosic moment for everyone. An example of this supportive atmosphere occurred when the flute duo was more than a bit behind Maazel: instead of a sneer, roll of the eyes, or scrunch of the nose, one sensed acceptance and encouragement from Maazel and fellow musicians. Kudos to Maazel for creating an un-stuffy, positive teaching environment for all.

Cellist Han-Na Chang’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations was particularly intense, given the immense resonance of her instrument. Chang at times appeared detached from her instrument, often spending more energy listening than playing, the outcome of which was exceptionally sincere. Maazel enjoyably offered a great flexibility in tempo. At one point, Chang overshot a high note by one tone and subtly turned it into an appoggiatura, while making a forgiving look, a handful of the cellists in the orchestra smiled in complete sympathy.

Fifteen-year-old Korean pianist Seongjin Cho joined Associate Conductor Andreas Weiser in Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor. Cho’s approach was to play simply, beautifully, and perfectly, though often lacking invention and at times power. Weiser’s tense conducting featured gestures equally large for both loud and soft material, and overall he did not offer the orchestra much with which to connect; however, Weiser poetically set up the orchestra’s mysterious emergence from Cho’s second movement cadenza.

Other Reviews: Joan Reinthaler, Orchestra Concert Sets Castleton's Double Bar (Washington Post, July 21)

Associate Conductor Timothy Myers, who had deftly conducted the afternoon performance of Albert Herring, took the podium to lead Britten’s A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, which opens with Agincourt’s Hymn and then soon falls apart into a virtuosic wonder, frog included. The winds and brass had much flair while the orchestra responded rapturously to Myers’s quiet, poised conducting. Most of the Herring cast was standing to the sides of the tent -- not enough chairs -- hooting and hollering in support of Myers when he entered the stage. By the work’s end, they again were again euphoric in praise of Myers, which again was an example of the camaraderie and positive relationships built through the Festival. Maazel closed the concert with Verdi’s Overture to La forza del destino, complete with The Godfather soundtrack phrasings, pungent brass, powerful percussion, and, of course, the frog pervading the dramatic silences between the opening brass chords.

Summer Opera: Castleton Festival 4

(L to R) Jennifer Check (Lady Billows), Benjamin Bloomfield (Superintendent Budd), Ashleigh Semkiw (Miss Wordsworth), Tyler S. Nelson (Mr. Upfold), Alexander Tall (Mr. Gedge) in Albert Herring, Castleton Festival, 2009 (photo by Leslie Maazel)

The first year of Lorin Maazel's Castleton Festival came to a close this weekend, meaning one last road trip to Rappahannock County for me to see the final production: Michael Lodico will have some thoughts about the festival's closing day tomorrow. Of the four Britten chamber operas on the schedule, Albert Herring, composed in 1947, is my least favorite. At its best, it is a very funny opera, making it a favorite for collegiate opera companies, with a charming, if somewhat overlong libretto by Eric Crozier, adapted from Guy de Maupassant's short story Le rosier de Madame Husson (translated into English as Madame Husson's Rosebush). In a way, Albert Herring is the obverse of the Peter Grimes coin, a little like a slapstick parody of that much greater work, with the social outcast transformed from sociopath to awkward mama’s boy (in fact, Claire Seymour noted numerous self-borrowings Britten made from Grimes in Albert Herring). Although Crozier's first impulse was the thought of writing a comic opera after seeing performances of Così fan tutte and The Bartered Bride, is Albert Herring really a "parable of liberation," as Philip Brett once described it?

One suspects that the attraction Britten, Pears, and Crozier felt to Albert was, on some level, returning to the idea of a man who knew he did not fit in. Is the reason that Albert has remained so virtuous and pure that he simply does not like girls, as suggested in a homosexual reading mined from the opera by Michael Wilcox? If that was in the back of their minds, the creators did not go in that direction as the work took shape, and a certain distance between Britten and Albert always strikes my ears. Albert Herring Anglicizes the Maupassant tale, making the prudish busybody Madame Husson into the imperious Lady Billows, transferring the day of the festivities from August 15, the Feast of the Assumption, to May Day, and moving the story from the provincial closed-mindedness of Gisors to a hypocritical Suffolk village (given the imaginary name Loxford, likely based on Yoxford, a town not far from Aldeburgh). It also removes some of the French original's caustic bite -- Maupassant's Isidore, after losing all of his prize money on an all-night bender after the festivities, becomes the town drunkard and later dies in an attack of the DT's, leading the locals to name all of the local drunks le rosier de Mme Husson -- and that sanitizing seems a little dishonest in Britten.

Adrian Kramer (Sid), Tammy Coil (Nancy), Benjamin Bloomfield (Superintendent Budd), Jennifer Check (Lady Billows), Alexander Tall (Mr. Gedge), Rachel Calloway (Mrs. Herring), Tyler S. Nelson (Mr. Upfold), Kristin Patterson (Florence Pike), Ashleigh Semkiw (Miss Wordsworth), Brian Porter (Albert Herring) in Albert Herring, Castleton Festival, 2009 (photo by Melody Mudd)

Rising soprano Jennifer Check, who may not have impressed in recital a few years ago, has had considerable success at the Met and other opera houses. On Friday night, she reigned over the cast as a most potently voiced and absurdly draconian Lady Billows, slicing effortlessly through the many, generally noisy ensembles and reacting with good comic timing to the direction of William Kerley. The other women, somewhat overshadowed, included a slightly strained but husky Kristin Patterson as Lady Billows's assistant, Florence Pike, the flutey soprano of Ashleigh Semkiw as Miss Wordsworth, and the edgy bite of Tammy Coil's Nancy. Among the men, the gullible, sweet-voiced Albert of Brian Porter was upstaged by the more stentorian voices of Adrian Kramer's Sid, a little roughshod, and the more subtle Mr. Gedge of Alexander Tall. Much like Così fan tutte this is an ensemble opera, and the cast was a cohesive and well-balanced group, giving clear renditions of the vocal fugues of the opening scene, for example.

None of the possible dark subtext of Albert Herring figures in the Castleton production. Not that it should, since on the surface, the opera is a simple comedy of manners, although the ambiguity of the conclusion strikes the ears as at least inconclusive. Maazel has made a point of railing in print, on many occasions, against the excesses of directors who apply the rules of Regietheater to opera. In his new Resident Stage Director for the Castleton Festival, William Kerley, Maazel has found a traditional director after his own heart. Like his other three festival productions, Kerley's vision of Albert Herring is mostly traditional, down to the meticulously coached English accents (only in The Rape of Lucretia, not actually set in Great Britain, were American accents allowed). The set, designed once again by Nicholas Vaughan, features a grass-green sloping staircase at the back, with miniature building shapes that evoke the cozy village. Little details bring out comic moments, like the hell-flash lighting that highlights the copy of John Foxe's Book of Martyrs given to Albert at the May King ceremony.

Other Reviews: T. L. Ponick, 'Herring' sparks festival (Washington Times, July 20, 2009) Anne Midgette, Lorin Maazel, Fostering Artistry at Home (Washington Post, October 13, 2008)

Young conductor Timothy Myers, who was also at the podium for Wolf Trap's production of Così earlier this month, stood in for Maazel at all three performances, shaping the score confidently and managing to get everyone back on track after a nervous slip by Florence Pike put her ahead of the pit. The talented musicians from the Royal College of Music seemed mostly to go with Myers, who not only conducted the production but prepared it, having fun with the many comic effects of whistles, clunky string harmonics, timpani glissandi, and giving a pleasant swing to the jazz-influenced courting music of Sid and Nancy. The horn calls that open the second act, played by Samuel Pearce, were especially fine, as were the wild warbling of running notes in the winds and the lengthy interscenic dialogue of bass clarinet and (alto?) flute.

Summer Opera: Castleton Festival 3

Read my review in the print edition of today's Washington Post:

Charles T. Downey, 'Lucretia': Death and Depravity, Well Sung
Washington Post, July 13, 2009

The third opera of the Castleton Festival, Britten's "The Rape of Lucretia," opened Friday night. The appeal of this chamber opera -- precisely calibrated to fit eight voices and 13 instrumentalists -- was heightened by the intimate theater on Lorin Maazel's Rappahannock County estate. Performing so close to the receptive audience, the singers enunciated every word clearly, making the supertitles projected above the stage unnecessary.

Britten's 1946 work -- about an Etruscan prince's violation of a virtuous Roman wife -- was his first in the series of chamber operas at the heart of the festival's first year. Mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford reprised her devastating performance in the title role from two years ago, with an opulent tone and molten lower register that incarnated the character's wounded grief. The music of the women's scenes, airy textures featuring the clear-fingered harp of Jane Yoon, enveloped her in the lambent soprano of Marnie Breckinridge (Lucia) and the anchored chest voice of Alison Tupay (Bianca). [Continue reading]

Britten, The Rape of Lucretia and The Beggar's Opera
Castleton Festival
Châteauville Foundation (Castleton Farms, Va.)

Previously:
Britten, The Turn of the Screw | The Beggar's Opera | The Rape of Lucretia (2007)

July 4th at the Castleton Festival

As part of the opening weekend celebration of the Castleton Festival, Lorin Maazel and Dietlinde Turban-Maazel welcomed the public to their home at Castleton Farms on the Fourth of July for an open house featuring art, opera, and fireworks. Just a week after his retirement as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, having conducted Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand (live recording to be released soon), Maestro Maazel has upgraded the musical activities on his 550-acre Virginia estate from a twice-yearly residency to a full-fledged three-week summer festival. With 200 young musicians on hand, it is featuring four Britten operas and fifteen conducting masterclasses among other performances. The Festival Tent, an additional performance venue, has been constructed to supplement the 130-seat Theater House built in 1997. A current Festival conducting apprentice summed up the experience in two words: “It’s Maazel.”

The Castleton Festival is gently raising its public profile with last weekend’s glowing story on National Public Radio by Robert Siegel; however, as Executive Director Douglas Beck pointed out to me, the vision behind the festival is more about outreach toward the participants rather than the audience. Beck also mentioned the challenges of bringing together an entire cast for one-off performances at the Kennedy Terrace Theater, where they have a standing invitation, although an audience would be easier to attract in Washington. Perhaps it would be possible to bring 2010 Festival productions the sixty miles to Washington during the Festival when everyone is available. For those able to obtain some of the limited number of tickets to the festival's operas, the experience of Castleton Farms is incredibly rewarding both musically and as an escape into the countryside.

The art exhibit that opened on Saturday afternoon displayed works by Virginia artists, which beyond the expected landscapes included realist photos and descriptions of impoverished rural Virginians of all races. The works lined the walls of the long tunnel connecting the Manor House (where the Maazels live, shown at left) to their pool house. Tours of the Manor House and bowling alley were also available. A picnic lunch was catered by Market Salamander of Middleburg, at a site near the other eccentric residents of Castleton Farms: emus, zonkey, camel, and a lone swan.

The 5 pm performance of Britten’s Turn of the Screw was, according to Beck and conducting apprentice Paul Kim, significantly smoother than the opening night performance the prior evening. At their best, the operatic productions at Castleton Farms match musical excellence with stage direction of the utmost vision. Turn of the Screw, a complex ghost story based on a novella by Henry James, was absolutely haunting. Given that only Britten operas have been offered over the past few years, one wonders how the Festival’s repertoire will evolve -- perhaps a new chamber opera might be commissioned?

The evening was capped with an illustrious fireworks display, followed by dancing with a live band in the Festival Tent. The casual atmosphere and welcoming environment of the Castleton Festival made it the perfect summer day trip for music lovers.

The Castleton Festival continues the next two weeks, with two more opera productions: Britten's Rape of Lucretia (July 10 to 12) and Albert Herring (July 17 to 19), among many other performances and events.

Summer Opera: Castleton Festival 2

Donald Groves (Filch) and Melissa Parks (Mrs. Peachum) in The Beggar's Opera, Châteauville Foundation (photo by Nicholas Vaughan)

The second production of Lorin Maazel's new Castleton Festival, sponsored by the Châteauville Foundation at the Maazels' estate in Rappahannock County, Virginia, is The Beggar's Opera, heard at its opening on Sunday night. The afterlife of John Gay and Christopher Pepusch's history-changing comic opera includes Benjamin Britten's ingenious 1948 adaptation of the work, in which Britten streamlined the work by selecting among the many airs and giving them new harmonizations and orchestrations. We commend Maazel for mounting an all too rare staging of the Britten version, already reviewed by our own Michael Lodico last year. Britten was a great admirer of historical British music, seen in his adaptations of Purcell (A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra) and Dowland (Lachrymae, among others), and he once called the ballads and other tunes recycled by Gay and Pepusch as "among our finest national songs."

The problem with reconstructing The Beggar's Opera is that the printed sources indicate only the name of the tune to which Gay's new words were sung (see this facsimile of the 1765 edition). Pepusch's overture and short scores of the tunes, just melody and bass line, were written down, but later performances all have to rely on arrangements, like the one by Frederic Austin. Britten not only made the work leaner, by not setting all of the tunes or keeping all of the dialogue, he made the work flow much better, by providing some musical bits under the spoken lines, which helps link together a work that can come off as quite fragmentary. It is not a reconstruction as much as a reimagining of this crucial work in operatic history, an early comic opera that laid the foundation for the English operetta tradition of Gilbert and Sullivan, as well as for the American musical. Within two decades of the work's 1728 premiere, The Beggar's Opera was staged in New York and other American cities: according to Donald Grout and Hermine Weigel Williams (A Short History of Opera, 4th ed., p. 566), a performance of the work in Upper Marlborough, Maryland, was the first American operatic performance that had a full orchestral accompaniment for the singers.

Sarah Moule (Lucy Lockit), Julia Elise Hardin (Polly Peachum), Dominic Armstrong (Macheath) in The Beggar's Opera, Châteauville Foundation (photo by Nicholas Vaughan)

William Kerley's production gallops and romps its way through the first and second acts, on a crudely assembled raked stage in a temporary pavilion erected near a field serving as the festival parking lot. A painted backdrop sets the action in the city of London, with the Cathedral of St. Paul's prominently featured, and the audience and part of the playing area surround the makeshift pit space, just large enough to accommodate the small chamber orchestra called for by Britten. Stock 18th-century costumes (sets and costumes designed by Nicholas Vaughan) mostly kept the action in the original period, with clownish white face make-up on all the actors encouraging our perception of the characters as buffoonish types rather than individuals. With superb comic timing, the singers captured the rakish, literary tone of the text: Gay was, after all, a member of the Scriblerus Club, and the idea for The Beggar's Opera reportedly came from a remark Jonathan Swift made to Alexander Pope.

Tenor Dominic Armstrong was a charming Macheath, with a sweet upper register if not necessarily the profile of a dashing criminal. Michael Rice's Mr. Peachum was garrulous and single-minded in his greed, while the Mrs. Peachum of mezzo-soprano Melissa Parks was a full-bodied presence vocally and physically. Julia Elise Hardin gave Polly a soubrette lightness, while Sarah Moule's Lucy Lockit was noteworthy more for the acting than the singing, which was a little strained, especially in the upper register. Darren Perry and Donald Groves gave fine supporting performances as Lockit and Filch, respectively. A chorus of fourteen singers had an almost too powerful sound for the size of the venue, adding ridiculous extras in the background. The young musicians of the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra, whose Kennedy Center concert with Lorin Maazel we sadly had to miss earlier this spring, played with poise and accuracy. The flutter-tongued flute accompanying Polly's turtle dove song and piccolo (Nicole Pressler) and melancholy English horn in the prison scenes (Svetlin Doytchinov) were particularly fine.

Other Reviews: T. L. Ponick, Pitch-perfect 'Beggar's' (Washington Times, July 7)

After such a promising beginning, Kerley came down like a ton of bricks on the Newgate Prison scenes, putting Macheath and his conspirators in orange jumpsuits and, under harsh fluorescent lighting (credited to Rie Ono), underscoring the horror of imprisonment and hanging. We are not intended to take seriously the characters' defense of their larcenous way of life, their mercenary approach to love and marriage, their vicious sexism -- the libretto must hold the record for the sheer number of times words like slut, hussy, and wench are pronounced. Are we not also to laugh at, and thereby understand the seriousness of (the purpose of ironic parody, after all), the thought of Macheath being hanged? The sermonizing tone adopted by Kerley sucked all of the oxygen out of the production, bringing the forward movement to a halt in the final scenes.

This production will be repeated this Sunday (July 12, 7 pm) and twice the following week (July 16, 7:30 pm; July 18, 2 pm). Assistant conductor Jordi Bernàcer will take the podium for the performances on July 12 and 18.