Opera Bel Cantanti's 'Amahl'

This review is an Ionarts exclusive.

Menotti, Amahl and the Night Visitors (original television cast), NBC Symphony Orchestra, T. Schippers (RCA, 1951)

In my early years, it seemed like Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors was an annual December tradition. Perhaps memory deceives, but there always seemed to be a church company somewhere that mounted a production, probably in an uninterrupted succession since its premiere, on NBC Television in 1951. Without any data on the matter, productions seem far rarer in the last decade or two, and so it was that even a culture maven like Miss Ionarts had not experienced any production of this opera for children until Saturday night, when Opera Bel Cantanti revived its production, heard at opening night in the parish hall of the Concord-St. Andrew's United Methodist Church in Bethesda.

The cast featured some excellent singing, led by the Mother of soprano Jennifer Lynn Waters, whose voice has grown admirably in control and power since we last heard her in the Washington National Opera Young Artists performance of Madama Butterfly in 2011. The three kings made a beautiful sound together, with bass Ethan Lee Green, a recent graduate from Maryland Opera Studio, standing out especially. Hannah Slayton, a seventh grader from Charlottesville, was confident and well prepared in the title role, just slightly wan at the top of her voice. In keeping with most productions of this opera, the staging was charmingly homespun, with the company's general director, Katerina Souvorova, providing the accompaniment on an electronic keyboard, with some of the harp and flute effects added via a second synthesizer. Costumes (Linda Jenks) and sets (Olga Shpitalna) were simple but effective.

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Ionarts at Santa Fe: 'The Last Savage'

Thomas Hammons (Maharajah) and Dancers, in The Last Savage Santa Fe Opera, 2011 (photo by Ken Howard)

Gian Carlo Menotti’s comic opera The Last Savage received a second chance at Santa Fe Opera, in an antic, lavishly appointed production, seen on Friday night. It has long been one of the company’s goals to give a fair shot to under-appreciated operas of the 20th century. In an economic climate that seems to be going from bad to worse, it is a courageous stand to take, and it paid off yet again in a staging that tickled the funny bone and pleased the eyes. The experience justified the more or less favorable assessment of the late critic Alan Rich, one of the few reviewers not to have trashed the work at its premiere, saying that it was funny, melodic, and while perhaps not a masterpiece, pleasing enough (see my preview article for more background on the opera). Menotti’s admiration for Rossini, Verdi, and Puccini, whose heritage he likely saw himself taking up, is clear in some haunting tunes, complex ensembles, and rhythmically rollicking overture in the score. It is also certainly worth hearing.

That turn backward to the tonal tradition was not only self-conscious on Menotti’s part but overt, referenced in a deliberate skewering of the atonal Darmstadt school. When Kitty brings her savage back from India to Chicago to civilize him, at a hilariously parodied 60s cocktail party -- complete with a Gershwinesque appropriation of jazz -- beat poetry, hip atheism, abstract expressionism, and the sexual revolution all come in for parody. However, the best-targeted satire is saved for a performance of a new piece in the “aleadodecaphonic style,” a brilliant aping of a Sprechstimme song by Schoenberg or Webern. In a sense, with this opera and later works in a similar vein, Menotti was attempting, in a somewhat more high-minded, compositionally accomplished way than Bernstein, the hybridization of opera and American musical theater.

Jennifer Zetlan (Sardula), Jamie Barton (Maharanee), Kevin Burdette (Mr. Scattergood), and Thomas Hammons (Maharajah) in The Last Savage, Santa Fe Opera, 2011 (photo by Ken Howard)

The cast, variable in terms of vocal distinction, all took to the comic demands of this rather silly opera with obvious relish. Thomas Hammons had another pleasing turn in a character role as the pompous Maharajah, who attempts to marry his son off to an American girl, matched at every step by Kevin Burdette as the girl’s father, who had just as sharp comic timing and a more robust voice. Versatile and funny mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton stole the show as the enormous Maharanee, ferried around on a pink carriage. Tenor Sean Panikkar, who caught our ear last season at Washington National Opera, again sang with lovely resonance as Kodanda, the Indian son who manages to find his way out of the arranged marriage. Anna Christy had the right sort of nasal, fluffy soubrette voice for Kitty, the American girl who wants to find the last savage for her anthropology thesis, but the very high notes were too squealy. Baritone Daniel Okulitch's Abdul (the savage), chosen perhaps just as much for how he would look in his Tarzan costume as for his voice, was a dead ringer for Mel Gibson from a distance.

Other Reviews: Sarah Bryan Miller, Santa Fe Opera: A drop-dead funny 'Last Savage' (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 11) George Loomis, The Last Savage, Santa Fe Opera, New Mexico (Financial Times, August 8) Lawrence A. Johnson, Santa Fe Opera’s revival of Menotti comedy is savagely delightful (The Classical Review, August 7) "Maria Malcontent," Just Salvage (Parterre Box, August 7) John Stege, Comedic Justice (Santa Fe Reporter, July 26)

Director Ned Canty went all out on a grand, crazy staging, with 60s-era costumes and set pieces (designed by Allen Moyer), complete with a gyrating chorus of tattooed swamis, in white turbans and loincloths in the Indian scenes (choreography by Seán Curran). Menotti went a little overboard on the vignettes poking fun at the 1960s, the fruity tailors who measure the savage, blowhard scientists, society ladies and debutantes, and on and on: some of it could certainly be cut, but Canty gave it all carefully directed attention for maximum impact. The zany atmosphere, all sight gags and crazy dances, was reminiscent of another influence heavy on Menotti, the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, including many slightly twee rhymed couplets (“You were smoking a Melachrino / You looked like Rudolph Valentino”), complete with an improbably family relation uncovered at the conclusion to tie up the end of the opera.

Santa Fe Preview: 'The Last Savage'

Menotti, The Last Savage, N. Gedda, R. Peters, T. Stratas, Metropolitan Opera, T. Schippers (live recording, 1964)

The Santa Fe Opera has a distinguished history of presenting world and American premieres of new operas. For example, the company gave the world premiere of Gian Carlo Menotti's Help, Help, The Globolinks in 1969, which was the only Menotti opera produced in Santa Fe until this season. Typical of the Santa Fe Opera spirit, the forty-year Menotti drought will be broken not with one of the better-known operas but with The Last Savage, a work that was almost universally declared a failure. Menotti labeled the work a "grand opera buffa," which gives a good idea of the mixture of philosophical and absurd in the story of a rich-girl Vassar anthropology student who goes to India to locate the "last savage" for her senior thesis. Hilarity ensues, to be sure. Menotti wrote his own libretto, in Italian, which was translated into French for its disastrous world premiere at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1963, and then back into English (both times by someone other than Menotti) for its equally catastrophic Metropolitan Opera debut in 1964. If the libretto was not already a mess before that, it certainly was afterward.

Other Articles: Brian Holt, Rumble in the Jungle (Out West Arts, July 28) James M. Keller, Santa Fe Opera salvages 'Savage' (Santa Fe New Mexican, July 24) Barry Singer, Salvaging the Savaged (Opera News, May 2011)

In spite of it all, I have to admit that I am thrilled to be seeing The Last Savage this summer. Menotti did revise the work for a couple revivals, including one for his 70th birthday celebration at the Spoleto Festival. Among the people who remember that version fondly is none other than Santa Fe Opera's general director, Charles Mackay, who worked for the Spoleto Festival at the time. As Mackay told another reporter: "I just think it's important to revisit contemporary works that were not necessarily well received." And so it is. What better time to reexamine The Last Savage than the 100th year since Menotti was born, on July 7, 1911?

The idea of encountering the un-encountered, a tribe that has not had contact with other humans, is still seductive, enough to be able to fool people. The Romantic notion of the "noble savage" comes in for more satirical treatment here by Menotti, as Kitty, the daughter of millionaire parents, is duped into believing that an Indian man, planted in her path after being paid a large sum of money to act like a savage, is the actual last savage she has been hoping to find. Along the way, modern notions of art and civilization, including contemporary forms of art and music, are ridiculed as being incomprehensible to this simple man. At the heart of the work, and in many ways of the scathing criticism of it, is Menotti's avoidance of atonal musical ideas in his score. It may be an overlarge set of ideas on which to hang a comic opera. Maybe not, though: the late critical giant Alan Rich fondly remembered himself as "the man who liked Gian Carlo Menotti's The Last Savage," a judgment seized on by some "to establish my perversion." He defended his review by saying that "its musical faults were apparent, but that the work was thoroughly enjoyable in its own simple-minded way."

Patricia Racette Excels in Poulenc and Menotti

The Vocal Arts Society presented soprano Patricia Racette on Friday night at the Austrian Embassy, in a recital combining art songs and cabaret songs. Few who experienced Racette in the roles of Ellen Orford and especially Jenůfa at Washington National Opera, or as Leslie Crosbie at Santa Fe Opera, were left with any doubts about her startling ability to incarnate a character’s anguish with her voice. She can deploy her complex tone, thick with vibrato and other colors like the tannins in a potent red wine, to pack an emotional punch that can knock out the listener with its urgency. It was clear from her stage presence that she understood and has considered the words of the songs she sang, but she always stopped short of grossly emoting, making for a deeply satisfying performance. This was all the more remarkable in that Racette coughed and drank water throughout the performance: one suspects that the record pollen counts in the local air this week have played havoc with her voice.

The high point of the program was a set of Poulenc mélodies, refined songs to exquisite poetry by Jean Anouilh, Max Jacob, Colette, and Guillaume Apollinaire, to name a few. Poulenc’s music remains one of the best examples of how successfully to integrate popular idioms into classical music: by fusing them into his personal harmonic and melodic language to make a hybrid greater than the popular source, rather than merely a pale shadow of it. Racette used a broad palette of vocal colors and gestures to incarnate the various characters of the poetry -- semi-bitter recollection (Les chemins de l'amour), a skittish maidservant prattling in an anxious prayer (La petite servante) followed by a serene entreaty to the Virgin Mary (Priez pour paix), and so on. Here especially her associate artist, Craig Terry, showed an always sensitive hand at the keyboard -- capable of taming Poulenc's large-handed piano parts with ease but also finding the right color and dynamic with a finely tuned touch to put his singer at her ease.

Racette called a set of songs by Italian opera composers her "spaghetti and meatballs section," and indeed by comparison to the refined flavors of the Poulenc set this was bistrot fare, solid, tasty, and above all cheap. These songs showed off the pointed, affecting top of Racette's voice, a sound that can pull at the heartstrings very effectively. As songs, they were at best harmless if not profound, and at worst dangerously near-banal: for example, rather than trying to make something significant out of the meager introduction to Puccini's Menti' a l'avviso, Terry could just as well have omitted it. The performance of a scena ("To this we've come... Papers, papers") from Menotti's The Consul, an opera Racette admitted to having "fallen in love with," made one hope that a savvy company somewhere -- hello, Washington National Opera? -- is planning a production of this opera for Racette to sing the role of Magda Sorel. Racette was filled with such angst and frustration, after having pointed out in her introduction to the piece the irony of performing a scene set in a consulate in the Austrian Embassy.

Other Reviews: Joe Banno, Patricia Racette at the Austrian Embassy (Washington Post, April 12)

The program opened with an odd duck, the famous aria "Lascia ch'io pianga" from Handel's Rinaldo, which stuck out from a program of much more recent songs like a sore thumb. What the performance lacked in historically informed performance touches, but with a few nice embellishments on the later part of the A section repeat, it made up for in dramatic strength, a wrenching sadness that was communicated by both the loud and soft extremes of Racette's dynamic range. As if to prove the point Anne Midgette made in a recent article about the mixture of high and low culture in American song, Racette also performed a second half of cabaret songs, by Kurt Weill, Vernon Duke, Edith Piaf, and 80th birthday boy Stephen Sondheim, among others.

The next recital in the Vocal Arts Society's season will feature baritone Christopher Maltman (April 27, 7:30 pm), at the Austrian Embassy (note the new VAS Web site), while the American Music Festival continues through May 30. As for Patricia Racette, she is headed to New York, to replace Karita Mattila in the title role of Puccini's Tosca at the Met.

Gian Carlo Menotti, 1911-2007

The death of composer Gian Carlo Menotti, at age 95 in Monaco on February 1, could hardly have escaped anyone's notice. Tributes, of a length rarely seen for a classical composer, have been published in a startling number of news sources around the world, mostly in English: The Times, BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg News. None of the major French dailies have published an obituary. Bloggers, too, have chimed in, including Alex Ross, Daniel Felsenfeld, and Opera Chic. Menotti spent a lot of time here in Washington, premiering some of his operas and in other ways, connections that are detailed in Tim Page's tribute in the Post. Not least, Menotti composed a late work, Goya, at the request of Plácido Domingo, premiered here in 1986.

Menotti was a consummate man of the theater, and he should be remembered for many accomplishments. Most importantly, he opened up new vistas for opera composers, most successfully with Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951), the first opera composed specifically for performance on television (sadly, a trend that has not gone anywhere). One of his greatest accomplishments was not even in composition, but in writing the libretto for Samuel Barber's American masterpiece, Vanessa, which should qualify, as Tim Page put it, as Menotti's third Pulitzer Prize.

Available at Amazon: Gian Carlo Menotti, The Saint of Bleecker Street, Spoleto Festival, Richard Hickox

One of the things that Menotti did was to continue to open up the suitable territory for operatic subjects. Why could operas not be about everyday things that happen to everyday people? He based the characters in his early work Amelia Goes to the Ball on people he met at dinner parties. (The Met picked up this opera for performance after it was premiered at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia in 1937 -- those were the days.) The Medium relates the story of a bullshit artist who makes a living as a spiritualist, and in The Telephone, a man tries to propose to his girlfriend but is constantly interrupted by telephone calls.

In an attempt to find a middle way between the American musical and opera, those last two operas were presented as a double bill in a Broadway theater. Perhaps his greatest opera and certainly my favorite, The Saint of Bleecker Street, for which he won his second Pulitzer, was also premiered on Broadway. That opera, as well as the equally tragic and menacing The Consul, for which Menotti won his first Pulitzer, should put the lie to any accusations sometimes advanced, that Menotti was a lightweight or really only a Broadway composer. He will be missed.