New York City Ballet enters the next phase

Gonzalo Garcia and Sterling Hyltin in Jerome Robbins, Opus 19/The Dreamer. Photo: Paul Kolnik
New York City Ballet returned to the Kennedy Center Opera House Tuesday night, as it has done regularly since 1974. Everyone involved with the company seemed a little nervous, starting with a slightly awkward pre-curtain announcement from newly appointed artistic director Jonathan Stafford and associate artistic director Wendy Whelan. They took the reins after longtime ballet master Peter Martins retired from the company in 2018, following allegations he had abused dancers both physically and sexually. Martins denied the charges, and an internal investigation by the company did not corroborate them.

The selection of ballets seemed tailor-made for touring, mostly abstract and without any set pieces. Opus 19/The Dreamer, choreographed by Jerome Robbins, was a highlight because of the graceful, searching movements of Gonzalo Garcia in the title role. In the only white costume, he was seemingly all muscle as he sought among the other dancers dressed in shadowy blue-purple (costumes by Ben Benson). Set to the gorgeous music of Prokofiev, the ethereal Violin Concerto No. 1, the shimmering violin solo (played ably by Kurt Nikkanen) mirrored Garcia's dream-like motions, in fascinating color pairings with harp, piccolo, and other instruments. Principal dancer Sterling Hyltin, taking the lead role often danced in the past by none other than Wendy Whelan, was elusive and pretty.

Other Reviews: Sarah L. Kaufman, It’s hit or miss for New York City Ballet in first Kennedy Center program under new directors (Washington Post, April 3, 2019) Alastair Macaulay, The Unstuffy Gala: City Ballet Delivers Youth and Style (New York Times, September 29, 2017)

It made a bracing pairing with George Balanchine's Kammermusik No. 2, with a more abrasive score by Paul Hindemith and somewhat similar costumes in light blue or gray-black, also by Ben Benson. Abi Stafford and the tall, striking Teresa Reichlen excelled as the tandem pairing that shadowed the contrapuntal part of the piano solo from the virtuosic Stephen Gosling, often with hand following hand just as ballerina followed ballerina gesture for gesture. A small group of male dancers, often with interlocked arms, formed complicated shapes echoing the dissonant musical clusters.

For an appetizer, NYCB brought Composer's Holiday, a commission from the young choreographer Gianna Reisen. The three sections showed a pleasing balance and variety, in a poised, short ballet that moved from intriguing vignette to intriguing vignette. It opened with dancers on one side pointing to a woman lifted in the air, for example, and the first scene closed with a woman hurled into the air just as the lights went dark. The choice of Lukas Foss's Three American Pieces for Violin and Piano (played capably by Arturo Delmoni and Susan Walters) was also savvy, music that is just as enigmatic as the movements Reisen chose.

Two dancers took falls in the evening, unusual for this company, and only one that looked painful. That was in the otherwise triumphant final work, Balanchine's Symphony in C. It showcased the NYCB corps of women, all in sparkly white costumes, in the active first movement of Bizet's Symphony in C, an early work in Mozartean style. The second movement, with its plangent oboe theme, inspired in Balanchine, that most musical of choreographers, a scene of heart-breaking tenderness, spotlighting in this case the graceful dancing of Sara Mearns and Jared Angle. Through a sleight of hand, Balanchine does not make clear until late in the work just how many dancers are involved. In the fast changes of the finale's episodes, the numbers on stage grow and grow to a delightful climax.

This program by the New York City Ballet repeats only on April 7, with a different program scheduled for April 4 to 6.

BSO Plays More World Premieres

A. Clyne, Night Ferry / M. Bates, Alternative Energy, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, R. Muti (CSO-Resound, 2014)

Charles T. Downey, World Premieres Spice Centennial Of Baltimore SO
Classical Voice North America, May 11

NORTH BETHESDA, Md. – One hundred years ago, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra played its first public concert. It is remarkable enough that the ensemble pulled through the economic crisis in 2008 and even more that it continues to thrive in today’s climate of declining audiences. Marin Alsop, who became music director in 2007, and the BSO are celebrating the centennial with a series of new commissions. After debuting pieces by Kevin Puts and Christopher Rouse, the first of which the BSO played at Carnegie Hall in April, the orchestra gave two more world premieres in the Music Center at Strathmore.

The evening opened with Joan Tower’s Sixth Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, adding to her most famous work, launched in 1987 and completed in five parts in 1993...

[Continue reading]

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
World Premieres by Joan Tower, Anna Clyne
With Alexandra Soumm, violin
Music Center at Strathmore

SEE ALSO:
Robert Battey, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra debuts two works from two ‘uncommon’ women (Washington Post, May 9, 2016)

Charles T. Downey, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra finds its rhythm in Thursday’s concert (Washington Post, September 19, 2015)

---, Slatkin and the NSO, As If He Never Left (Ionarts, November 12, 2011)

---, A Classical Makeover In Baltimore (Washington Post, September 11, 2008)

Philadelphia Orchestra's Fabulous 'Firebird' at Strathmore

Rachmaninoff, Variations, D. Trifonov, Philadelphia Orchestra, Y. Nézet-Séguin (Deutsche Grammophon, 2015) Vieuxtemps, Violin Concerto No. 4, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, P. Järvi (Deutsche Grammophon, 2015)

Perhaps it was the news that just hours before Monday evening’s concert by the Philadelphia Orchestra at Strathmore -- presented by Washington Performing Arts -- the ensemble, its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Daniil Trifonov had been nominated for a Grammy for best classical solo performance. (Actually, it was just one of two Grammy nods for Nézet-Séguin and Trifonov.) Or maybe it was the thrill of performing to a sold-out house on the road. Either way, the Philadelphians and Nézet-Séguin leapt into an energetic rendition of Georges Bizet’s Suite No. 1 from Carmen (arr. Hoffman), the conductor gesticulating wildly on the podium, the players providing lots of volume and music flying by, ending with the Toreadors moving so quickly they’d have had little trouble outrunning their bulls. Yet even at that speed the orchestra, particularly its famed string sections, moved as one marvelous, precise instrument. This aspect of Nézet-Séguin’s group would return repeatedly during a night that featured much more satisfying interpretations than the bustling Bizet.

Next, all eyes turned to violin soloist Hillary Hahn. By the end of the four-movement Violin Concerto No. 4 in D minor, op. 31, of Henri Vieuxtemps, a contemporary of Bizet, it was clear that Hahn remains a virtuoso performer and Nézet-Séguin’s reputation as an excellent collaborator is warranted. Less clear, though, is why the Vieuxtemps, written in 1849-50, isn’t better known. The concerto, which Berlioz called “a magnificent symphony with principal violin,” contains large orchestral passages without soloist and extended room for the soloist to shine unaccompanied. Its Scherzo is a playful vivace that Hahn and Nézet-Séguin clearly enjoyed, and the Finale marziale is similarly spirited. While there were a few rough patches for the orchestra, Hahn’s technique and tone were flawless throughout. Best, of course, was the sense that soloist, orchestra and conductor were completely in synch interpretively.

Read more »

Young Concert Artists: Seiya Ueno

Charles T. Downey, Flutist Seiya Ueno’s local debut performance sells itself (Washington Post, October 14)

Young classical musicians sometimes feel they have to turn to superficial or entrepreneurial ways to distinguish themselves. The local debut of flutist Seiya Ueno, presented by Young Concert Artists on Tuesday evening at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, was a reminder that the best way for a musician to sell himself is by playing in a way people want to hear.

The success of this recital came down to one pairing, Claude Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” and Pierre Boulez’s “Sonatine.” The Debussy arrangement showed off Ueno’s rich, polished bottom octave... [Continue reading]

Seiya Ueno (flute) and Wendy Chen (piano)
Young Concert Artists
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

Second Cast of WNO 'Carmen'

Charles T. Downey, Washington National Opera’s ‘Carmen’ is halfway through run
Washington Post, September 28

Washington National Opera’s production of “Carmen” is halfway through its run. The company has fielded a second cast for the four lead roles, heard on Friday night at the Kennedy Center Opera House.

French mezzo-soprano Géraldine Chauvet, who was a nondescript Fenena in WNO’s “Nabucco” in 2012, had much less vocal heft than Clémentine Margaine, her counterpart in the first cast. Chauvet’s Carmen was a saucy flirt rather than a femme fatale, and where there was almost no laughter in the audience on opening night... [Continue reading]

Bizet, Carmen (second cast)
Washington National Opera
Kennedy Center Opera House

SEE ALSO:
Charles T. Downey, Clémentine Margaine Seduces Vocally in WNO 'Carmen' (Ionarts, September 21)

Clémentine Margaine Seduces Vocally in WNO 'Carmen'

Clémentine Margaine (Carmen), Michael Todd Simpson (Escamillo), and cast, Carmen, Washington National Opera (photo by Scott Suchman)
It is too soon for another production of Bizet's Carmen, reviewed just last year at Santa Fe Opera, Wolf Trap Opera, and Virginia Opera. The last time Washington National Opera mounted the work was only in 2008, and yet here it was again, opening the company's 60th anniversary season on Saturday night in the Kennedy Center Opera House. The thing that this version has going for it, in an otherwise variable production, is French mezzo-soprano Clémentine Margaine at the top of the first cast.

Carmen is not a dancing role, and it is not about playing the castanets, although a singer who can do either of those things convincingly may have a leg up in her characterization. Carmen is a role for an operatic mezzo-soprano, and that is where Margaine excelled, by using her powerful voice, which filled the hall amply with a sort of whiskey-infused burn, to create the character. This was a Carmen who demanded attention, who could roar and impose herself on others, who could seduce -- all principally with her voice, which is ideally how an operatic character should reveal her nature.

The dancing was mostly handled by a pair of flamenco dancers (Fanny Ara and Timo Nuñez, choreography by Sara Erde), and the castanets were left to a capable player in the pit. Margaine got off to a slightly rough start, pushing her pitch flat in the first act a couple times, but the voice only grew on me as an exemplar of the brusque, almost mannish type of Carmen, able to shake the rafters with her cries of "La liberté!" One moment could stand for an entire evening of such vocal characterization: when Escamillo, at the end of the Toreador Song, exchanged a motif ("L'amour") with Frasquita, Mercédès, and Carmen, there was no doubt to whom he would be attracted, for her voice left the others in the dust (see picture above).

Unfortunately, little else in this production was quite so certain. Tenor Bryan Hymel took part of the summer off for vocal rest this year, backing out of Rigoletto at Santa Fe Opera, and it sounded like that was a good idea. Some uneven moments crept into the voice here and there as Don José, although he still had the goods for a mostly polished performance of "La fleur que tu m'avais jetée." Soprano Janai Brugger was not as free and pure on the high notes of Micaëla as best suits the character's innocence, and Michael Todd Simpson had an extremely off night as Escamillo, singing out of tune and often not really reaching either low or high notes. The robust Mercédès of mezzo-soprano Aleksandra Romano stood out in the supporting cast.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, WNO’s ‘Carmen’: Enlivening the familiar (Washington Post, September 21) Philip Kennicott, The 2015-2016 Season begns at WNO (PhilipKennicott.com, September 20) Alex Baker, Thank you for smoking (Parterre Box, September 21) Jessica Vaughan, ‘Carmen’ at Washington National Opera (D.C. Metro Theater Arts, September 20)

Other than the flamenco dancers and some colorful costumes (designed by François St-Aubin), the production directed by E. Loren Meeker was fairly workaday, with abstract painted backdrops in lieu of sets for some of the scenes (designed by Michael Yeargan). The last act's arena was done cheaply but effectively as an audience stand that cut across the stage, where the chorus waved and cheered. In the third act, the smugglers make camp in a ruined church, with the vestiges of what looked like a painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which might imply that the action has been transposed to Mexico. Superimposed on the image of the Virgin was a mysterious hand marked with symbols, probably meant to be a reference to the Tarot and palm-reading activities of Carmen and her compatriots, but looking to me like a Guidonian hand more than anything else.

It was surprising to see conductor Evan Rogister back on the podium after his somewhat shaky outing in Moby-Dick last season. Rogister's technique remains baffling to my eye, as he seems to conduct with his head, arms, and shoulders simultaneously, sometimes in different tempi. The frenetic style of gesture did little to unify the performers, either in the pit or on the platform, leading to a couple near-disasters in big choral scenes. Rogister and Meeker chose to use some of the spoken dialogue and some of the later recitatives, all in French, with the aim of keeping the drama moving. Any impetus gained was counteracted by Rogister's tempo and rubato choices, which dragged out many parts of the score.

This production runs through October 3, at the Kennedy Center Opera House. Some performances feature a second cast, whom we will review later this week.

Karine Deshayes, At Last

French Romantic Cantatas, K. Deshayes, Opera Fuoco, D. Stern (Zig Zag, 2014)

Charles T. Downey, Mezzo-soprano Karine Deshayes at the Kennedy Center
Washington Post, February 5

Pierre Bernac, the singer and authority on the French “mélodie,” summed up this late Romantic song genre as “the art of suggestion,” characterized by its “subtle poetic climate, intellectual refinement, and controlled profundity.” Rarely does one hear this delicate, pastel-hued music performed as authoritatively as on the Washington debut recital by French mezzo-soprano Karine Deshayes, presented by Vocal Arts D.C. at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater on Tuesday evening.

An entire program of languorous French songs, ranging from Hector Berlioz to Henri Duparc, might seem like too much of a good thing. With the fine qualities of Deshayes’s singing... [Continue reading]

Karine Deshayes, mezzo-soprano
Carrie-Ann Matheson, piano
Vocal Arts D.C.
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

Ionarts in Santa Fe: 'Carmen'

Chorus in Act IV, Carmen, Santa Fe Opera (photo by Ken Howard)
Charles T. Downey, The personal is political in Santa Fe’s incendiary border-crisis “Carmen”
The Classical Review, August 7

Santa Fe Opera’s new production of Carmen is the third staging I have seen this year alone. An opera that is mounted this often invariably receives a lot of mediocre performances, but when a director does something new with his staging, and when there is a major vocal discovery to be made...

Previously:
Last Carmen at Santa Fe Opera (2006)

Other Reviews:
Heidi Waleson, Santa Fe's Modern Makeovers (Wall Street Journal, August 5)

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, A Film-Noirish Carmen, Down Mexico Way (New York Times, July 30)

'Carmen' at Wolf Trap

Wolf Trap Opera's important work is in the intimate indoor venue of the Barns, like Handel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto last month. The company, a training ground for young singers, also usually gives at least one performance in the Filene Center, a cavernous outdoor venue that appeals for some reasons -- the feel of summer, lawn seating, a large audience -- but is annoying for others, including the necessity of amplification for the singers. This year's Filene offering, a rather plain semi-staging of Bizet's Carmen, fell on Friday night, when the weather was perfect.

The sound experience of this performance was disconcerting on many levels, as the amplification system made it impossible to judge the quality of the singers' voices. Maya Lahyani had enough magnetism to pull off the title role, with a dark, viscous voice that had most of the compass needed, with some iffy notes on top. New York-born tenor Kevin Ray brought out the dorky qualities of Don José -- "il est trop niais," jokes Carmen at one point -- and had some ringing high notes, although the amplification spoiled the sound of his head voice, so crucial in the character's big aria, La fleur que tu m'avais jetée. Melinda Whittington's Micaëla was full-bodied and not so innocent that she wanted anything to do with Don José by the end of the third act, while the Escamillo of Norman Garrett left little impression, either vocally or dramatically.

Other Reviews: Tom Huizenga, Wolf Trap Opera’s ‘Carmen’ could use a little more of the original’s edginess (Washington Post, July 28)

Balances were made difficult by the amplification, so the supporting voices of the quintet were hard to distinguish. Worse, the National Symphony Orchestra, which played quite well, was placed on stage behind the singers, making the softer instruments, especially harp and flute, hard to hear, even with amplification. A large host of singers from the Washington Chorus were even further away behind the orchestra, not always lining up with the chorus members on stage, and although conductor Grant Gershon, resident conductor of the Los Angeles Opera, had a good handle on the score, he had no way to connect to the lead singers, who were behind him. Tara Faircloth's bare-bones production, with projections by S. Katy Tucker to suggest locations and costumes by Rooth Varland, was about as traditional and boring as they come.

Rather than trying to improve any of these shortcomings, the folks at Wolf Trap expended a lot of effort on some completely unnecessary technological bells and whistles instead. Subtitles that could be beamed to your tablet or other device reportedly did not work most of the evening. David Pogue, a technology writer and opera fan, also came on stage as a supernumerary wearing a Google Glass headset. This coincided almost perfectly with the appearance of Jerry Seinfeld on the cover of Wired as their "Guest Glasshole." No further comment is required.

Another Year, Another 'Carmen'

Charles T. Downey, Virginia Opera stages ‘Carmen’
Washington Post, April 14, 2014

An opera company is unlikely to have a triumph, in the critical sense, by staging “Carmen,” but Georges Bizet’s story of passion and murder will fill a house. It worked for Virginia Opera, which staged the opera on Friday night at George Mason University Center for the Arts. With some talented singers and a handsome production, updated by director Tazewell Thompson to Franco-era Spain, it was bound to be a crowd-pleaser.

Mezzo-soprano Ginger Costa-Jackson... [Continue reading]

Bizet, Carmen
Virginia Opera
GMU Center for the Arts

VIRGINIA OPERA, 2013-14 SEASON
Falstaff | Magic Flute | Ariadne auf Naxos

Sadly, Virginia Opera will celebrate its 40th anniversary season by giving over half of its productions to music theater and operetta. It is a long way from the company's daring 2011-12 season.

NSO Opens Fourth Season with Eschenbach

A gala performance, like the National Symphony Orchestra's annual Season Opening Ball concert, is often dangerously close to a pops concert. Christoph Eschenbach, at the start of his fourth season as the NSO's Music Director, has mostly avoided that pitfall in his first three seasons. His fourth season opener, heard on Sunday evening in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, veered dangerously close to that edge, especially in the second half, but remained an event just as much about the ears -- as well as a big social event that raised $1.3 million for the NSO. The smell of paint, a new coat of cream color that has lightened the room considerably, was still discernible, from work finished over the summer -- fortunately, as Kennedy Center Chairman David Rubenstein joked in his post-intermission remarks, completed before the Federal government was shut down.

The NSO musicians were featured in a couple of blockbuster showpieces, neither of them performances with much to remember. Tchaikovsky's fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet is far from the sort of trivial overture often used to open such concerts, but with enough famous tunes to please a crowd. As required, the fast bits were thrilling, with climactic sweeps of sound, and Eschenbach kept the slow parts from wallowing in syrup. On the second half, Bizet's second suite from Carmen served much the same purpose, with the added benefit of featuring some principals in beautiful solos: especially trumpeter Steven Hendrickson, bold of tone in the Habanera and Toreador Song, a fine piccolo duet in the children's chorus from Act I, and concertmaster Nurit Bar-Josef, surprisingly demure in Micaëla's aria from Act II.

Read more »

American Ballet Theater at the Kennedy Center

Marcelo Gomes and Julie Kent in The Moor's Pavane, American Ballet Theater (photo by Gene Schiavone)

American Ballet Theater is back in town for a week-long visit to the Kennedy Center Opera House, a company we last reviewed in their charming Nutcracker a couple years ago. The distinguished touring company, established to bring the best ballet to the citizens of the Unites States and once led by Mikhail Baryshnikov, is now under the artistic direction of Kevin McKenzie, with the talented, envelope-pushing choreographer Alexei Ratmansky serving as Artist in Residence. Its first program, a triple-bill of shorter, more abstract ballets, opened last night, with Anna-Marie Holmes's revision of the classic Marius Petipa choreography of Adolphe Adam's Le Corsaire to open tonight.

George Balanchine's choreography to the music of Georges Bizet's Symphony in C goes back to a 1947 production for the Paris Opera Ballet called Le Palais de Cristal. The more abstract version danced by ABT, premiered in 2001, has no set (staging by Merrill Ashley and Stacy Caddell, lighting by Mark Stanley), just a neutral gray screen as backdrop. The women, who open the work in a group of ten, are costumed in shiny white tutus, with the men in black, further enhancing the sense of a sort of abstract painting set in motion. Balanchine hewed closely to the music, bringing in his soloist in the first movement, here the lively Paloma Herrera, with the theme presented by the solo oboe, for example. She was paired with James Whiteside, who made her glide about elegantly in many lifts. The prettiest dancing was in the second movement, which begins with six women floating in en pointe, with Balanchine again delaying the entrance of his soloist (here Hee Seo) until the oboe solo. The six dancers stood motionless until the fugue, when the music activated them to follow the entrances of Bizet's contrapuntal subject. (For a student work, composed when the 17-year-old Bizet was studying with Gounod at the Conservatoire de Paris, it is a remarkably put-together piece.) Among the dancers Daniil Simkin, male soloist in the third movement, stood out for the height and ease of his leaps and turns and the overall litheness of his movement. The fluttery choreography of the fourth movement matches the agitation of the fourth movement's music, with a group of dancers appearing with each return of the rondo theme, ending up with a large corps at the conclusion.

Other Reviews: Sarah Kaufman, American Ballet Theatre works at Kennedy Center attest to a company in fine fettle (Washington Post, April 11) Alastair Macauley, Swirls and Shifts in a Kaleidoscope (New York Times, October 20, 2012) Brian Seibert, For the Love of Shostakovich, the Destroyer (New York Times, October 12, 2012)

José Limón's ballet The Moor's Pavane was next, loosely based on the story of Othello and using appropriately courtly music by Henry Purcell (including Abdelazer, The Gordion Knot Untied, plus a pavane). It is not exactly Shakespeare's Othello but quite similar, a story of a jealous moor like that in the play The Moor's Revenge, for which Purcell wrote the Abdelazer music. Again there is no set, and the overall atmosphere is dark, a black background against which the tall, brutal Moor of Marcelo Gomes, in a rich burgundy robe, is turned against his wife (the white-clad, innocent Julie Kent) by the poisonous friend (danced by Cory Stearns with an almost predatory, homoerotic twist), in a trick that does involve a stolen handkerchief. Ballet's roots in courtly dance, which was the origin of Purcell's music, is continuously evoked by Limón as the four characters more often face one another, in approximations of court dances, than the audience.

While the playing of the small ensemble, with harpsichord, for the Purcell selections was quite beautiful, the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra sounded off-kilter in the Bizet symphony, with far too many splatted notes in the trumpets and horns especially. Perhaps more of the rehearsal time went to the closing work, Shostakovich's peppy ninth symphony, in a new choreography created for ABT by Alexei Ratmansky, which sounded forceful and fun. Shostakovich originally planned to write his ninth symphony as a celebration of Soviet victory in World War II, a work "about the greatness of the Russian people, about our Red Army liberating our native land from the enemy," as scholar Laurel Fay has quoted him. The struggle had been, he wrote, "a war of culture and light against darkness and obscurantism, a war of truth and humanism against the savage morality of murderers," but his plans for a massive work with chorus and solo singers were never realized. After the dreamed-of victory had actually been achieved, with official celebrations in Red Square in May 1945, Shostakovich abandoned what he had completed up to that point and produced a small-scale symphony -- five movements in 25 minutes -- "lacking all pretensions to gravity and majesty, [...] almost the antithesis of expectations," as Fay put it.

The very lightness of the work, its occasional grotesque turns, brought the composer all sorts of trouble from Soviet cultural authorities in the years after its premiere, but it is precisely that giddy wit that Ratmansky seized on in his striking choreography. He plans to integrate this choreography into a trilogy of Shostakovich ballets, to be premiered this spring in New York. Ratmansky told an interviewer that what draws him to Shostakovich is that "You can learn the history of the country from his music." This vigorous, often mysterious choreography, with its stark blacks and whites, its curious gestures -- dancers lying down and falling asleep mechanically, leaping and twisting, large groups in conflict -- holds great promise for the entire project.

The visit by American Ballet Theater continues this evening, with performances of Le Corsaire in the Kennedy Center Opera House, through April 14.

'Pearl Fishers'

Charles T. Downey, Virginia Opera’s ‘The Pearl Fishers’ may signal a turn to the conventional
Washington Post, October 16, 2012

Bizet, Les Pêcheurs de Perles, B. Hendricks, J. Aler, Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse, M. Plasson

Last season the Virginia Opera positioned itself as the local opera company most willing to challenge its audiences. It had accomplished this in the wake of a leadership schism in 2011, when founding music director Peter Mark was ousted by the company’s board. The company’s new season opened with a blandly traditional staging of Bizet’s flawed “The Pearl Fishers,” heard on Sunday afternoon at the George Mason University Center for the Arts. It may be the first sign of a turn back to the conventional, a season of mostly old favorites that will conclude with a musical.

What this production had going for it was an excellent soprano at the top of the cast. Heather Buck, who gave a sexy, icy sheen to the role of La Princesse in last winter’s outstanding production of Philip Glass’s “Orphee,” had an alluring presence and glimmering voice as Leila, the priestess who comes between two friends on the shores of ancient Ceylon. With pure, high notes even at pianissimo, beautifully controlled breath support and unobtrusive vibrato, Buck gracefully dispatched the trills and coloratura of the showpiece “O Dieu Brahma,” at the end of Act I. [Continue reading]

Bizet, The Pearl Fishers
Virginia Opera
GMU Center for the Arts

SEE ALSO:
Terry Ponick, Virginia Opera's bright, affecting 'Pearl Fishers' at GMU (Washington Times, October 15)

Charles T. Downey, Bizet's 'Pearl,' Dusted Off (Washington Post, September 22, 2008)

---, Opera Preview: Les Pêcheurs de Perles (Ionarts, September 18, 2008)

Nathan Gunn Celebrity Recital

An opera star recital can be a wonderful thing, which is why Plácido Domingo established the Washington National Opera's Celebrity Series. One can present a first-tier singer, whom the company could probably never engage for a full production, and it brings in revenue with a minimum expenditure. It really only works when the singer is of the caliber to drive ticket sales -- in the last two seasons, Angela Gheorghiu, Bryn Terfel, and especially Juan Diego Flórez have fit that bill -- and when the music on the program is associated with the singer's best achievements. On neither account, really, did Sunday's Celebrity Recital by baritone Nathan Gunn succeed. We did not expect it to, which is why it did not appear among either our picks for the year or for the month of September, and the sparse audience -- padded with some listeners who did not behave like opera regulars -- showed that plenty of people agreed with our assessment. Having half of the selections consist of Broadway music by Sondheim and Loewe, I note with some sense of Schadenfreude, did not bring in the huge crowds of people wanting to hear opera singers sing music theater.

Gunn has been resting on his laurels for some time: his last solo performance to reach these ears, at Shriver Hall in 2008, fell just as flat as this uneven recital did. The voice, once mellifluous, sounded faded and gritty at times, and other than in the comic pieces, which obviously engaged him much more, he sang without much charm. The operatic roles he chose to feature seemed beyond his voice: Figaro's high notes in selections from The Barber of Seville at the edge of control and strained, the French in music from Bizet's The Pearl Fishers mostly incomprehensible (his Italian was better), and the toast aria from Ambroise Thomas's Hamlet a little skittish rhythmically and not uproarious in tone. More and more, Broadway musicals are taking over Gunn's schedule, including Francesca Zambello's Camelot at Glimmerglass next summer. He would not be the first singer to make that transition -- Ezio Pinza and Todd Duncan are a couple examples -- but it makes him far less interesting a performer for my money.

Other Reviews: Robert Battey, Verve and versatility at Washington National Opera’s concert series (Washington Post, September 25)

Gunn was outshone by his recital partner, tenor William Burden, who floated above Gunn in the famous duet "Au fond du temple saint" from The Pearl Fishers and showed up his French and his emotional connection to the audience in "Ah, lève-toi, soleil" from Gounod's Roméo et Juliette (the only piece to elicit much cheering from the audience up to that point). Soprano Emily Albrink, who had an admirable WNO Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist outing as Sophie in last spring's Werther, did not sound quite as comfortable in this recital. A lack of breath support at the end of long lines dragged her intonation flat, but the top of her voice sounded just as effervescent and she was a charming Zerlina in "Là ci darem la mano" and Susanna in "Crudel, perchè fin'ora." Conductor Ted Sperling was obviously more comfortable in the music theater selections, but he kept himself largely out of the way in the overtures from Barber of Seville and Marriage of Figaro, pieces the WNO Orchestra could probably play in their sleep.

The lack of supertitles limited the audience's reactions to the funnier moments in the foreign-language pieces. It was good, however, to remember that this was how opera was before supertitles: either you understood the language or you relied on the singer's expressions and gestures to understand. This drew attention to Gunn's often emotion-less demeanor -- here there was no supertitle machine to deliver the punchline. The biggest laughs of the evening came from unplanned accidents, as when Gunn nimbly incorporated a loud audience sneeze into his performance of "Largo al factotum." The lighting system in the Kennedy Center Opera House went haywire before and during Gunn's performance of Goundod's Queen Mab aria, cycling through all of its color specials and spotlights, caused by a computer malfunction we were told by departing director of artistic operations Christina Scheppelmann (perhaps it was Queen Mab up to her usual tricks). After stopping mid-aria at the first incident, Gunn and the orchestra bravely soldiered on when it happened a second time, with some players using their mobile phones to light their standmates' music.

Notes from the 2012 Salzburg Festival ( 8 )Simon Rattle conducts Carmen

Georges Bizet • Carmen

Miscast, well conducted: Salzburg’s Carmen was smoothly and accent-free performed by Simon Rattle and the Vienna Philharmonic. Anyone expecting musical exoticism might have disappointed, but then how exactly do you authentically fake faux-Spanish flavor with an Austrian Orchestra led by an English conductor, supporting an international cast in a French opera? The singers meanwhile weren’t able to distinguish themselves quite as much.

This Carmen (in the Oeser edition) is something of a road show, first aired (and recorded) in Berlin, with the same cast but the Berlin Philharmonic. Then it traveled to the Salzburg Easter Festival, where it had Aletta Collins’s production fitted. [Edit: The other way 'round: First at Salzburg's Easter Festival, then on the road in Berlin.] And on August 14th it was billed as a premiere (again) at the Summer Festival. To imagine Collins’s work, think Baz Luhrmann, minus any excitement: An ever so slightly modern take on the most traditional-imaginable concept; a laborious direction that relies almost entirely on its perfectly gorgeous sets (Miriam Buether); the dreamt-up early 20^th century idea of a tobacco factory in act one; the sumptuous, velvety red-and-black lounge and bar with mini-stage in act two; the conveniently hygienic sewer under the border wall in act three; and finally the embarrassingly campy, colorful Spanish pre-arena cityscape / costume-processional of act four.

Magdalena Kožená as a tall, read-headed Carmen, is cast against the grain, intentionally, not unlike Anne Sofie von Otter was, ten, twelve years ago. Instead of being a counterintuitive revelation, she ended up a decent Carmen, but a vulgar one that never quite clicked. The part was successfully enough sung and with redeeming fourth-act moments of character-maturation, largely stipulated by a dowdy red, tulip shaped skirt (costumes Gabrielle Dalton) that prevented her, at long last, from squatting like a two-dime hooker, which had been her modus operandi in the first two acts. Apart from her barefooted ‘look-at-me-I’m-a-hooker’ gyrations, Kožená wasn’t an eventful Carmen. As a thin-lipped redhead of attractive maturity, she could have developed a particular sensuality, indirect and quite different than would a sultry black-maned wildcat. But neither she nor the direction played to those strengths. Her smoky, heaving Habanera was tarter than it was seductive.

Jonas Kaufmann wasn’t at his most impressive, or even anywhere near it; on this occasion his tenor, slightly fuzzy and lachrymose, noodled along harmlessly, only occasionally rousing, ma non troppo. He did look ever so lovely, though, which suited the production in its shallow ways.

G.Bizet, Carmen, S.Rattle / Berlin Philharmonic Kožená, Kaufmann, Kühmeier et al. EMI

Kostas Smoriginas, who had already struggled through the part of Escamillo during the Easter performances, was truly out of his depth: He cracked and whimpered, capitulated before the low notes, and was substituted at half time since a sudden allergy attack (so we were told), left him in no condition to sing any further (this we didn’t need to be told). He still got to play-act his part on stage, limply mouthing his words vis-à-vis Kaufmann and Kožená, while Massimo Cavalletti (Marcello in Salzburg’s Bohème) belted the music very impressively from the sidelines.

Genia Kühmeier, who has a lovely voice—in fact the most impressive of the night: clear and responsive through the entire range she needs—and she uses it well. But unless a part is dramatically spelled out for her, she’s as interesting as watching paint dry. Christina Landhamer and Rachel Frenkel as Frasquita and Mercédès, in lush comparison, provided a dash of diversion as kinky blonde twin entertainers. The Salzburg Festival kid’s chorus (directed by Wolfgang Götz) was well coached and—very unusually—nearly believable in their dramatic hoppings-about.

So safe was this production, so seemingly inoffensive, so very eager to please—and yet the Festival audience booed poor Aletta Collins, who doesn’t at all seem the kind of director who thrives on-, or even expects boos. As I quietly watched myself, I gained some newfound respect for the Salzburg audience, apparently unwilling to be pandered to, all-too explicitly.

All pictures courtesy Salzburg Festival, All © Forster, except (excerpted) picture of Jonas Kaufmann above, © Luigi Caputo

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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

In Brief: Muzz Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to online audio, online video, and other good things in Blogville and Beyond. (After clicking to an audio or video stream, press the "Play" button to start the broadcast.)

• Watch Olivier Py's new red light district staging of Bizet's Carmen from the Opéra de Lyon (embedded video). You could just listen to the audio, but then you would miss the topless chorus of the cigarières. [France Musique]


• Watch the production of Verdi's Il Trovatore from Brussels, available for streaming through July 27. Marc Minkowski conducts (!) this staging by Dmitri Tcherniakov. [Theatre Royal de la Monnaie]


• Watch the production of Les Troyens from the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, recorded on July 5. [The Space]


• Listen to Daniel Barenboim lead the Berlin Staatkapelle in Bruckner's eighth symphony, from the Wiener Festwochen. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• You can watch the New York Philharmonic's Philharmonic 360 concert, recorded at the Park Avenue Armory, with music based on the idea of spatial separation, from Gabrieli to Stockhausen. [Medici.tv]


• Christian Thielemann leads the Dresden Staatskapelle in music of Brahms and Reger, with Maurizio Pollini as soloist in the Brahms first piano concerto. [France Musique]


• The second Brahms piano concerto, with Yefim Bronfman and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, plus Esa-Pekka Salonen leading Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra. [France Musique]


• [UPDATE] You can watch three concerts featuring the late pianist Brigitte Engerer, recorded at the festival of La Roque d’Anthéron and the Folle journée de Nantes. [ARTE Live Web]


• Listen to Nikolaus Harnoncourt lead Concentus Musicus Wien and the Arnold Schoenberg Chor in Mozart's Missa longa (C major, K. 262) and Litaniae de venerabili altaris sacramento, K. 243, with soloists including baritone Florian Boesch, from the Styriarte Festival at the Pfarrkirche in Stainz. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• The Hallé Orchestra performs music by Strauss, Holst, and Elgar in Manchester. [France Musique]


• Listen to a performance of Jaromir Weinberger's opera Švanda dudák (Schwanda the Bagpiper, from 1926), recorded last March at the Dresden Semperoper, conducted by Constantin Trinks. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Chausson's Concert pour piano, violon et quatuor à cordes with pianist Michel Dalberto, violinist Nicolas Dautricourt, and the Quatuor Modigliani, plus music by Debussy and Ravel, recorded last month at the summer festival in the Abbaye de l'Epau. [France Musique]


• Listen to a concert of Handel arias with Alan Curtis and Il Complesso Barocco, featuring soprano Emöke Baráth, recorded in May in a festival at Melk Abbey. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Watch a recital by Beatrice Rana, who won first prize at the Montreal International Competition last year when she was only 18, the youngest winner in that competition's history. She plays music by Clementi and Scriabin, plus the op. 28 preludes of Chopin, recorded at the Flâneries Musicales de Reims. [Medici.tv]


• Watch another teenager, Esther Yoo, who won fourth prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition, perform at the Flâneries Musicales de Reims, with music by Tartini, Mendelssohn, Ysaÿe, and Franz Waxman, accompanied by pianist Robert Koenig. [Medici.tv]


• Listen to the Sommernachtskonzert performed by the Wiener Philharmoniker at the Schönbrunn, Gustavo Dudamel conducting. The program is actually pretty good. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Franz Welser-Möst conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in Dvořák's fifth symphony and some Brahms. [France Musique]


• A classic recording of Verdi's Rigoletto, with Anna Moffo, Alfredo Kraus, and Robert Merrill, conducted by Georg Solti in Rome in 1963. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Two concerts from the Piano-s Festival in Lille. [France Musique]


• A concert from the Festival Juventus, with music of Corelli, Vivaldi, Handel, and other, at the Théâtre de Cambrai. [France Musique]


• The Orchestre National de France plays a concert of summer fare at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées: music by Dukas, Saint-Saëns, Ravel, Berlioz, Offenbach. [France Musique]


• An unusual theatrical event based on the life of Haïm Lipsky, who survived the Shoah by playing the violin, a work created by Gérald Garutti on an idea by Shifra Sluchin. Anouk Grinberg narrates, and the role of Lipsky is portrayed by his violinist grandson Naaman Sluchin. [ARTE Live Web]


• The Proms open this Friday, and you can listen to those concerts online. [BBC iPlayer]


• The Proms, a huge event every year (nothing quite like being in the Royal Albert Hall for one of those blockbuster concerts), is happening at the same time as the London Olympics this summer. Jessica Duchen has some thoughts and a preview of the music on offer. [The Independent]


• Mark your calendars: you can watch a live Internet broadcast of the production of Götterdämmerung from Munich on July 15. Curtain is at 11 am EDT. [Bayerische Staatsoper]

NSO Is Packing Its Bags

This post was modified after publication, with a clarification provided by Patricia O'Kelly, the Managing Director of Media Relations for the NSO.

Christoph Eschenbach is coming to the end of his second season with the National Symphony Orchestra, and the news continues to get better. The ensemble's latest program, heard last night in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, featured some of the pieces being readied for their upcoming tour of Central and South America, the group's first international tour in quite some time and an ambitious undertaking in an era when this sort of large-scale tour is less and less common. The NSO and its audience gave a warm ovation to three stalwarts in its membership, who will all be retiring at the end of this season: principal flutist Toshiko Kohno, the cellist David Howard, and principal percussionist F. Anthony Ames, all of whom have given three or four decades of service to the group. Along with principal horn player Martin Hackleman, who will retire resign at the end of next this season, that leaves a substantial number of seats to fill, more canvas for Eschenbach to paint on.

The program was another in the series of concerts without a high-profile soloist, giving us a chance to focus on the sound and temperament of the orchestra, who played with commitment and verve, signs of the ongoing rejuvenation of an ensemble that had lapsed just a bit into blandness through desuetude. A world premiere, a little firecracker bonbon by Sean Shepherd, the composer-in-residence with the Cleveland Orchestra, popped and crackled appropriately as a concert opener. It was hard to detect any signs of the fires of hell in Blue Blazes, which is one of the things the composer, in a charming and self-deprecating introduction to the work, indicated as an inspirational thought for the work. Opening with a pizzicato walking motif, the work percolated with a lot of ideas, punctuated with pseudo-Latin percussion touches (egg shaker, among others). Touches of Schoenberg-like chromatic atonal harmony permeated the second section, with a dreamy slow section featuring Bernstein-like wind writing and poetic violin solos, all of it shaped admirably by Eschenbach, before it returned to the opening ideas in the final measures. It was very much cut from the same cloth as the composer's Wanderlust, heard from the NSO last November, pleasing and skillfully compiled but probably not bound to endure.

Shepherd has said that he conceived the piece knowing that it would be introducing the other two works on this program, Richard Strauss's ebullient and tender suite from Der Rosenkavalier and Beethoven's seventh symphony, part of Eschenbach's ongoing Beethoven symphony cycle. The Strauss received a fine performance, better in many ways than the ill-fated one given by the Vienna Philharmonic earlier this spring with Lorin Maazel. Eschenbach led with a pleasingly elastic beat, so that the sighing motifs had a languid vitality but without distorting the waltz section too much with mannerism. He gave the brass section free reign, making for ecstatic horn swoops and some great crashes of sound, including a near-manic, circus-like atmosphere for the waltz's return at the work's conclusion, but protecting the soft passages, especially the solo sections, in a contained envelope of sound.

Other Articles: Anne Midgette, Christoph Eschenbach and National Symphony Orchestra are having fun (Washington Post, June 1) Emily Cary, What in the 'Blue Blazes' (Washington Examiner, May 31)

The Beethoven was more mannered and therefore less successful, but with much to admire along the way. The first movement seemed lethargic, or perhaps intentionally deliberate and insistent for the tempo marking of Vivace. With such a large number of strings seated, it made some sections too heavy with this approach, like the leaden turbulence of the recapitulation, where there is all that activity on the dotted-note motif. By contrast, the second movement had a good sense of movement to it, with careful attention to dynamic contrasts, like the pianissimo repeats of many sections. The third movement was not too fast, which can happen in some performances, and the trio, slowed down considerably, had the feel of a nostalgic, pastoral horn call across an Alpine valley. The finale brimmed with brio, capping what many, myself included, consider to be Beethoven's best contribution to the classical symphony. The NSO also got to try out an encore piece for the tour, surprising the swaths of people who make an early exit to the parking garage: the "Bohemian Dance" from Bizet's Carmen, which could use a little more rehearsal to get it to a diamond-like polish.

This concert repeats tonight and tomorrow night (June 1 and 2), in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall.

Cinematic, Beautifully Conducted 'Carmen'

Bizet, Carmen, A. C. Antonacci, A. Richards, L'Opéra-Comique, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, J. E. Gardiner (re-released on November 9, 2010) FRA Musica 004 | 2h50

You may recall reading about this production of Bizet's Carmen, mounted last summer in the renovated Salle Favart of the Opéra-Comique, where this opera was premiered. That institution, which had turned more and more toward music theater -- indeed, this was the first production of Carmen there since the 1990s -- went in an exciting direction with the appointment of Jérôme Deschamps as music director a few years ago, including more productions of Baroque operas with HIP ensembles and their conductors. The idea played out beautifully in this re-thinking of one of the theater's most famous operas, one that has been done and re-done in so many bland versions. Conductor John Eliot Gardiner leads the svelte and expertly honed Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, on period instruments, in a suave but edgy performance, using the new critical edition by Richard Langham Smith. It includes some sections routinely cut from the score, like the conclusion of the soldiers' opening scene, and prefers the original dialogue over the recitatives added later.

Anyone who thought they would never hear a fresh musical take on Carmen should think again. Gardiner takes a daring approach to the music, pushing tempi in both directions and ignoring most of the commonly heard rhythmic manipulations while adding new ones. All sorts of unexpected colors rise out of the pit, especially from the quirky wind instruments, and the singers of Gardiner's exquisite and responsive Monteverdi Choir are nothing short of stunning, both musically and dramatically, in the choral parts. Gardiner has a fine partner in the direction of Adrian Noble, who comes to opera from the Shakespearean theater tradition, conceiving the action with a cinematic eye, including some convincing slow-motion scenes.

The only reservation holding back a full recommendation of this still rather expensive DVD is the casting. There is certainly no trouble with Italian soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci, who sings with such dramatic force, her character propelled by equal parts sexual desire and misanthropic disgust. Few have made this role quite so -- and so properly -- ugly. Things go down quickly from the top of the bill, however, with the Micaela of Anne-Catherine Gillet wavering in tone, often short of the pitch on the flat side, the Don José of American tenor Andrew Richards plagued by often terrible French pronunciation and a less than heroic (and in tune) top range, and the leathery Escamillo of Nicolas Cavallier. This means that this version is not likely to please anyone looking for a single DVD of Carmen -- the 2008 Covent Garden release (Decca), also with Antonacci but with the added benefit of Jonas Kaufmann, is more likely to please more traditional operatic tastes. Still, for the location, the conducting, and the production this makes for a must-hear comparison to challenge one's assumptions about the Carmen you thought you knew.

Have Black Tie, Will Travel

Read my review published today in the Style section of the Washington Post:

Charles T. Downey, BSO's gala concert Saturday features Latin flavor and plenty of local talent
Washington Post, September 13, 2010

September is the month for gala concerts, and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra hosted one such black-tie affair on Saturday night at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. To kick off her fourth season as music director, Marin Alsop offered a buffet of Latin-flavored amuse-gueules that went down just as easily as the food served in the tent outside.

Showcasing her laudable efforts to extend the orchestra's reach into the greater community of Baltimore, Alsop once again featured local performers. Flamenco dancers livened up three tired selections from Bizet's "Carmen" suites, with Anna Menendez especially effective in her form-fitting dress and castanets. Four guitarists, all students of Manuel Barrueco at the Peabody Institute, traded phrases with the orchestra in a bubbly movement from Joaquín Rodrigo's "Concierto Andaluz," effervescent but insubstantial. Soprano Jennifer Edwards, another promising Peabody student, gave a luminous performance of the Cantilena from Villa-Lobos's "Bachiana Brasileira No. 5," with the BSO's cello section. [Continue reading]

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
Gala Celebration Concert
With Nadja Salerno-Sonnenburg
Meyerhoff Symphony Hall (Baltimore, Md.)

PREVIOUSLY:
Jennifer Edwards (née Holbrook) in The Yellow Wallpaper (Peabody Opera) | Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg with the BSO (2008)