Dip Your Ears: No. 271 (Gounod, the Pianist)

Charles Gounod Piano Works Roberto Prosseda Decca, 2018

Something Different from Mr. Gounod

We know Charles Gounod as the composer of the grand opera Faust, perhaps also Roméo et Juliette, and of course the “Ave Maria” which, in any case, is mostly Bach. That’s a rather limited view for a composer otherwise so well known. This disc of Roberto Prosseda performing a selection of his piano works broadens that view most pleasantly. Gounod melodic gift shines, the works are simple, sweet, and, in the case of the Sonata for Four Hands (with Enrico Pompili) downright brilliant! Even that Ave Maria is making an appearance in its first iteration as a piano transcription, in which it is yet still closer to the Bach original – and no less delicious for it.


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Suzanne Farrell Ballet preserves more Balanchine

Elisabeth Holowchuk and Kirk Henning in Danses Concertantes, Suzanne Farrell Ballet (photo by Rosalie O'Connor)
The Suzanne Farrell Ballet, we learned last month, will disband next year. The Kennedy Center's resident ballet company has never come under review before at Ionarts. As critic Sarah Kaufman put it, it is a company composed of different members for each performance, who do not work together for more than a few weeks. The first program of their fifteenth season, seen on Friday evening at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater, was devoted to three choreographies by George Balanchine.

Farrell was Balanchine's "muse" at New York City Ballet in the 1960s and early 1970s, known especially known as the Dulcinea in his Don Quixote. For the last decade and a half she has led the Balanchine Preservation Initiative, attempting to use her own knowledge of the choreographer's work, among other resources, to ensure that Balanchine's work can be appreciated by future generations. This installment brings together three works that were new to me live, two of them extraordinary and well worth saving. The third one, Stars and Stripes, seems hopelessly outdated, especially in the current political climate.

Balanchine was the first to choreograph Stravinsky's Danses Concertantes, composed in 1942 for the Werner Janssen Orchestra of Los Angeles. In the composer's neoclassical style, it was one of the projects done entirely during Stravinsky's time in California. Although it was conceived as a ballet score, the music was not made for any particular choreography. Balanchine began with the central part of the score, a theme with four variations, each one given to a set of three dancers costumed in bright costumes of green, blue, violet, and red -- "like a box of crayons," as Miss Ionarts described it (costumes designed by Holly Hynes, inspired by the work of Eugene Bermann).

Associations from the commedia dell'arte (à la Pulcinella) permeate the costumes and the comic movements of the dancers, with more serious counterparts in the paired principal dancers, costumed in bright yellow. In the opening Marche, the whole company moved across the stage, shortened by a colorful backdrop, which was raised to reveal a larger space for the main action. The violet variation, here danced by Jane Morgan, the tall and graceful Leah Slavens, and Ted Seymore, was especially beautiful, as the three wove intricate patterns of interlaced arms and extended poses, the latter especially during the lush string coda that ends this section of music. Valerie Tellmann-Henning had light, skittish movements to go with the flute solo in the Pas de Deux.

Charles Gounod's first symphony (D major, 1855) was rediscovered in the 1950s and is still largely unknown, except perhaps as the basis of study for Gounod's student Georges Bizet as he prepared his own Symphony in C. Balanchine, who more famously set that Bizet work to choreography, premiered his Gounod Symphony with the New York City Ballet in 1958, and it has not been revived by a professional company since 1993. It features a large corps, twenty women alternately paired with ten men, lit in silhouette as the curtain is raised. The black and white costumes (Holly Hynes) enhance the sense of an abstract painting set in motion: tea dresses for the women, black for ten dancers and white for the other ten, with the men in white tops and black leggings. The company's corps work is not its strength, as evidenced by the lack of unity among the dancers here and elsewhere, but Natalia Magnicaballi stood out in the gold-costumed principal pair, tall but seeming weightless in the air. Balanchine gave the second movement to the soloists, with the little fugato passage played out by pairs of women.

The evening closed with Balanchine's Stars and Stripes, a display of American patriotism that borders on the grotesque in the era of "Make America Great Again." Premiered in 1958, at the end of the McCarthy era, the work has enough military salutes, baton twirling, and drill corps marching to turn my stomach. Hershy Kay's adaptation of Sousa marches is bombastic, large enough in scoring that the orchestra's percussion and brass had to be piped onto the stage from another location. (A bizarre cadenza for French horn at the end of the "Fourth Campaign" was only the tip of iceberg when it came to strange orchestration.) Conductor Nathan Fifield, who had struggled keeping the Stravinsky score together earlier, could not always coordinate the two halves of the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, as the sound from the speakers and from the pit did not always line up.

This program repeats today, in the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater.

Ionarts in Santa Fe: Further Thoughts on 'Roméo et Juliette'

Susan Vishmid (dancer), Emily Fons (Stéphano), and Beth Miller (dancer) in Roméo et Juliette
(Photo © Ken Howard for Santa Fe Opera, 2016)
Charles T. Downey, Santa Fe Opera, part 1: Celebrating 60 with two rarities and Strauss (of course)
Washington Post, July 31

Gounod, Roméo et Juliette, A. Gheorghiu, R. Alagna, J. Van Dam, S. Keenlyside, Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, M. Plasson (Warner, 2010)

FURTHER THOUGHTS:
The first time that Santa Fe Opera ever staged a Gounod opera was Faust in 2011. The second Gounod opera they have done, not surprisingly, is this season's Roméo et Juliette, heard on July 29, and it will likely be the last as Gounod's other operas rarely see the light of day. Stephen Lawless also directed this new production, and he made as much of a muddle of it as he did with Faust.

The French libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré hews quite closely to Shakespeare's play in most respects, and there are some beautiful pieces in the score. Ailyn Pérez's voice has grown admirably, with a broad and confident tone that filled the house up to B-flat and optional high C at the end of Je veux vivre, Juliette's big waltz showpiece. Only above that, in the couple places where the role ranges up to high D in Act I, did the sound turn a little acidic. Occasional shortcomings of intonation were still present, but also much improved. Tenor Stephen Costello was cast as Roméo, likely before the two singers divorced, but he fell ill the day of this performance. His cover, Joseph Guerrero, was called in the afternoon of the performance and saved the show. Guerrero, who is in the Los Angeles Opera young artist program and took second prize at the Operalia Competition in 2014, had a beautiful sound, the vibrato tightly coiled but most not in an unpleasant way.

Raymond Aceto, who was a solid Hunding in the Washington National Opera Ring Cycle, was even stronger here as Frère Laurent. Others made less auspicious company debuts, with Tim Mix showing some charming stage presence but some limitations in volume as Capulet, and the handsome face of Elliot Madore not quite matched with a handsome voice as Mercutio. Apprentices were featured further down the cast list, none to great distinction, but Peter Scott Drackley, whom some Washington listeners may know, had a nice turn as Benvolio.

Even after the debacle of Stephen Lawless's staging of Faust in 2011, the director was allowed to do a similar sort of updating of the story into the 19th century, when the opera was composed. For Faust it was a sort of freak-show circus background, and here it was the American Civil War. (Get it? Because the two families are bitterly opposed to each other.) The Capulets and Montagues wore blue and red Civil War uniforms, respectively, and the ladies were costumed in huge hoop skirts and bonnets (sets and costumes by Ashley Martin-Davis), although the director missed a golden opportunity to costume the exceptionally tall Soloman Howard's Duke as President Abraham Lincoln. The set backdrop in place for the entire opera was a curved mausoleum wall, with inscriptions on some of the panels, and the staging opened with the burial of the two lovers, casting the opera as a flashback (an idea somewhat undermined by having the chorus fling off their mourning black on stage as the Act I party scene began).

Other Reviews: James M. Keller, Gounod’s ‘Roméo et Juliette’ at Santa Fe Opera (Santa Fe New Mexican, July 17) John Stege, Death-Mark’d Love on Opera Hill: SFO’s Shakespearean 'liebestod' (Santa Fe Reporter, July 20)

Actually, for a while the concept almost worked -- Frère Laurent doubles as a surgeon in an infirmary -- or at least did not make me angry until we reached the end of the third act. That is where Roméo's page, Stéfano, sings my favorite aria in the opera, and in this case where Stéfano appeared in the guise of what, I guess, was a cantinière, just with a ridiculous fake mustache. For reasons that are not entirely clear, Lawless turned this scene into some sort of drag cabaret act, complete with choreography (created by Nicola Bowie) involving two supernumerary dancers (pictured above). Lawless scores double for directorial perversity by inserting dancers into this scene and in Act I, while ignoring the Act IV ballet that here, as in almost every other production of this opera, was cut.

At the podium Harry Bicket led a capable performance from the orchestra, long on loud brass and featuring dizzying chromatic runs from the woodwinds in the Queen Mab aria and ardent, balanced sound in the divisi cello sections. The highest marks go to fight directors Rick Sordelet and Christian Kelly-Sordelet, who marshaled the cast, chorus, and a team of acrobats in some of the more impressive sword fights we have seen in an opera.

This production continues through August 25 at Santa Fe Opera.

Ionarts in Santa Fe: 60th Anniversary Season (Part 1 of 2)

Barber, Vanessa (orig. version), E. Steber, N. Gedda, R. Elias, Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus, D. Mitropoulos (Sony)

Charles T. Downey, Santa Fe Opera, part 1: Celebrating 60 with two rarities and Strauss (of course) (Washington Post, July 31)

Some companies celebrate anniversaries with a world premiere; but the Santa Fe Opera, which has staged its share of them over the years, is celebrating its 60th anniversary this summer with three rarely-performed 20th-century masterpieces, instead. Samuel Barber’s “Vanessa,” heard for the first time in the company’s history, crowned the season in its opening performance on Saturday evening.

In Gian Carlo Menotti’s taut libretto, set in a manor house in rural Denmark, Vanessa has been waiting for over twenty years for her lost love, Anatol, with her silently hostile mother and her niece Erika. At the start of the opera, an Anatol arrives who turns out to be the lost lover’s son, and he sets about seducing both aunt and niece. When Vanessa asks Erika to read to her in the first scene, Erika chooses Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex,” lines spoken by Oedipus just at the moment when he is revealed on stage having struck out his own eyes. You can guess that the story will not end well.

Soprano Erin Wall had shattering power in the title role, her voice revealing all of Vanessa’s pent-up frustration, but with a striking high pianissimo also in her arsenal...

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