Opera in the French Revolution

V. Johnson, Backstage at the Revolution: How the Royal Paris Opéra Survived the End of the Old Regime (University of Chicago Press, 2009)

Charles T. Downey, Opera Lafayette delves into the French Revolution
Washington Post, May 1

The French Revolution changed many things beyond political systems, from a short-lived reorganization of the calendar to the invention of the metric system. The Paris Opera, that most royal of institutions, somehow continued to mount productions throughout the turbulence. Opera Lafayette, the D.C.-based period-instrument ensemble focused on 18th-century French opera, closed out its season by presenting three long excerpts from French operas of the Revolutionary period, heard on Friday evening at Lisner Auditorium.

Victoria Johnson, in her book about the Opera during the revolution, quotes a company log from the year 1789. It records the violent death of finance minister Joseph Foullon de Doué on July 22, whose “head was cut off and body paraded and dragged through the streets”... [Continue reading]

Opera Lafayette
Music by Sacchini, Martini, Cherubini
Lisner Auditorium

SEE ALSO:
Charles T. Downey, Sacchini's Œdipe à Colone (Ionarts, May 15, 2005)

Something Missing from 'Une éducation manquée'

(L to R) Sopranos Amel Brahim-Djelloul and Sophie Junker in Une Éducation Manquée, Opera Lafayette (photo by Louis Forget)

People should perform the music of Emmanuel Chabrier more than they do. The good folks at Opera Lafayette have done their part, adding Chabrier to their list of revivals of 19th-century operas. On Tuesday evening in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, the company presented a staged version of Chabrier's Une éducation manquée, a charming one-act operetta composed two years after L'étoile. On the basis of what I have heard so far, put me down for any performances of Chabrier's other comic operas or his serious work Gwendoline.

The libretto, by Eugène Leterrier and Albert Vanloo, recounts the dilemma of a young married couple, played by two sopranos, who have reached their wedding night without really knowing about what they are supposed to do with each other when the lights are out. The husband, Gontran, calls back his drunken tutor, Master Pausanias, to berate him on account of this deficiency in his education, but the elderly abbé is not much help. Only when lightning and thunder strike, driving the wife, Hélène, into her husband's arms, does the hapless couple figure things out.

Soprano Sophie Junker was a wide-eyed Hélène, with some bell-like top notes and a beautiful overall tone, with soprano Amel Brahim-Djelloul a little more tested at the high end but showing a charming boyishness in the trouser role of Gontran. Baritone Dominique Côté had smart comic timing as Pausanias, if some tentative qualities on the high parts of the role. Opera Lafayette extended the short work to about an hour of music by introducing the opera with four of Chabrier's charming animal-themed songs (Villanelle des petits canards, Pastorale des cochons roses, Les Cigales, and the hilarious Cocodette et Cocorico, in which a hen and rooster find each other). For these scenes director Bertrand Deletré created little vignettes showing the charmed youth of the two leads, played by an adorable group of child supernumeraries.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, An evanescent French rarity by Chabrier returns to the stage (Washington Post, February 4)

Chabrier debuted the opera, in a semi-private performance, in his own piano reduction, but that does not seem like a sufficient reason to forego the composer's orchestral version of the score. Pianist Jeffrey Watson did the piano version justice, with probably unnecessary direction from conductor Ryan Brown, creating an intimate ambiance as heard from the close rows. Perhaps a future project could focus instead on Darius Milhaud's expanded version of this opera, created for Sergei Diaghilev in 1924, with Milhaud's recitatives and new number (Couplets de Mariette) for Hélène.

This performance repeats Friday and Saturday, at the French Institute Alliance Française in New York.

Opera Lafayette Makes Further Case for Grétry

Talise Trevigne (Mme. Hubert) and Sophie Junker (Denise) in L'Épreuve Villageoise, Opera Lafayette (photo by Louis Forget)
André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry (1741-1813) was one of those composers who enjoyed vast notoriety during his life and is now almost completely forgotten. His opera L'Amant jaloux played in the newly built Opéra Royal de Versailles in 1778, where Mozart may have heard it, and was the staged opera that reopened that theater in 2009. His operas were taken around the world, including to theaters here in the newly born United States. Opera Lafayette has not forgotten Grétry, branching out into later territory for a 2011 performance of Le Magnifique. This weekend the ensemble mounted a staged performance of the composer's slender but charming opéra-bouffon L’Épreuve Villageoise, heard at the second of two performances on Saturday evening, in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, a fine conclusion to the company's twentieth anniversary season.

Belgian soprano Sophie Junker brought a pretty voice, stronger at the top than the bottom, and lovely stage presence to the role of Denise, the village girl wooed by two men. Both hope to share in the farm she will inherit from her mother, Mme. Hubert, sung with a luscious sound by soprano Talise Trevigne. Baritone Thomas Dolié was a puffed-up La France, the nobleman who tries to woo Denise after having already failed with her mother, although his tendency to rush undermined many of the numbers in which he took part. As André, Denise's intended from the village, tenor Francisco Fernández-Rueda brought more rustic humor than vocal accomplishment. Ryan Brown led his orchestra of period instruments in a vibrant reading of the score, enlivened in the choral scenes by the addition of a rustic accordion on stage, and a small chorus provided enough of a flavor of the village festivities.

You can hear the parts of Grétry's bubbly score that likely made an impression on the young Mozart, especially the duets and ensembles that both move the action forward and delineate characters from one another. L’Épreuve Villageoise, set to the first libretto by Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Choudard, dit Desforges -- a colorful character who penned a wide-ranging memoir called Le Poète -- takes up the trend of paysannerie, the idealization of peasant speech and manners in worldly Paris and Versailles. Grétry provides a musical counterpart to the bad grammar and country idiom of the libretto's vivid characters, as noted by scholar David Charlton in his book Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-comique: "Repeated-note phrases, a restricted melodic range, and rather stiff rhythms gave rise to a music that seems to walk on short country legs. With a start of surprise the English-speaking music lover [hears] the prototype of ditties in Arthur Sullivan's Savoy operas. [...] It already enshrines the spirit of the American musical."

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Exhuming ‘L’Épreuve Villageoise’ for a fun evening, with a tried and true story (Washington Post, June 1) Anthony Tommasini, ‘L’Épreuve Villageoise,’ a Rare Gem, at Gould Hall (New York Times, May 28)

Nick Olcott's staging got off on the wrong foot, as he does too often, by staging the overture with shenanigans, a moment that should break the visual tie to the real world through an absence of images. Shifting the opera to pre-Civil War New Orleans was an interesting nod to the transplantation of Grétry's music to the early theaters of that city, but to make the shift while completely ignoring the history of slavery in that region is too much, unless evoking the spirit of the minstrel show was what Olcott intended. The staging was so basic -- three screens with what looked like early printed depictions of a Southern plantation, plus some colorful costumes -- that it was easy to forget what Olcott claimed to be doing.

The next season from Opera Lafayette will include performances of Vivaldi's Catone in Utica (November 28 and 29), Chabrier's Une éducation manquée (February 2 and 3), and a selection of scenes from operas by Martini, Cherubini, and Sacchini (April 29).

Opera Lafayette Brings Rameau to Life

Rameau, Les Fêtes de l'Hymen et de l'Amour, C. Santon-Jeffery, C. Sampson, B. Staskiewicz, R. van Mechelen, Le Concert Spirituel, H. Niquet (released on October 28, 2014) Glossa GCD921629 | 113'36"

The last time that Opera Lafayette played the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, with Gluck's Armide in 2010, it was a triumph. The company returned to the venue on Monday night, with a house not quite as full but still respectable and very enthusiastic, to give a rare revival of Rameau's Les Fêtes de l'Hymen et de l'Amour, an unusual ballet héroïque from 1747. It is not the first in the modern era, a distinction that falls to Le Concert Spirituel, a performance at Versailles to be released on disc later this month: see my review yesterday for more background on the work. Opera Lafayette gave the piece a not unwelcome modern twist, engaging three different dance companies working in different styles to choreograph the dances that are interspersed with the music.

The musical side had its ups and downs, but this was a mostly satisfying evening. French bass François Lis's Canope stood out for a booming voice, perhaps too booming at times and at others almost out of control toward the top, that gave sonic thrill to the overflowing of the Nile in the second entrée. Soprano Ingrid Perruche, matched with him as the nymph Memphis, used her searing tone and grand presence to give affecting weight to her character's more plaintive moments. In the big roles of Orthésie and Orie, soprano Claire Debono could fill the room with sound but did not seem quite the right type of voice for either role, where one missed a lighter ease at the top. Jeffrey Thompson had an even odder stage presence here, in the haute-contre roles of Osiris and Aruéris, than he did earlier this year in Philidor's Les Femmes vengées, which was exceeded by his affected vocal mannerisms, squeezing out top notes (except for some of the highest ones in the first entrée, which he did not quite get) and exaggerating straight-toned crescendi.

Some voices, like soprano Kelly Ballou (Amour and other small roles) and mezzo-soprano Laetitia Spitzer Grimaldi (Hymen and other small roles), would have fared better in the Terrace Theater but were often swallowed up in the larger acoustic. Regrettably, tenor Aaron Sheehan was under-utilized in smaller roles, where he excelled. With the orchestra placed at the back of the hall's large stage, the sound of the woodwinds was a little muted, perhaps justifying Hervé Niquet's doubling of all of the wind parts on his recording. The placement of conductor Ryan Brown with the musicians also caused a few problems in coordinating with the singers, in spite of a video monitor placed at the edge of the stage for the cast. The chorus sounded strong and was always on the mark, although their location in the chorister seats above the stage took them out of the action in a way that went against the integration of music, dance, song, and visuals -- all flowing into one another without boundaries -- that Rameau and his librettist, Louis de Cahusac, were after.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Opera Lafayette celebrates 20th anniversary, and Rameau (Washington Post, October 7) James R. Oestreich, Those Dancing Gods of Love (New York Times, October 12)

The only element that was missing was the stagecraft, the wondrous mechanical stage effects that made Baroque opera into the spectacle it was. Aside from minimal staging, some evocative lighting, and pretty costumes, it was the dancing by three different companies, in choreography created by their respective directors, that bridged the gap. Catherine Turocy's New York Baroque Dance Company provided the period-appropriate courtly dance, with heels and masks, familiar from any number of Opera Lafayette's performances, while Anuradhu Nehru's Kalanidhi Dance gave a subcontinental twist to the Amazons in the first entrée. The most striking was the vocabulary of modern dance movements drawn on by Seán Curran's self-named company as the Nile gods, in shiny aqua unitards, who bolted down the hall's aisle and washed, wavelike, over the stage as the surging waters of the Nile.

This performance will be repeated tomorrow (October 9, 7:30 pm) in the Rose Theater at Lincoln Center in New York.

Opera Lafayette Celebrates Rameau

This review is an Ionarts exclusive.

Harpsichordist Olivier Baumont

Jean-Philippe Rameau died in 1764, 250 years ago this year. Opera Lafayette is marking the year with two performances, one on either side of the anniversary (September 12). If you missed Wednesday night's "Salon"-style selection of chamber and vocal music, the better part of this double celebration remains for this fall, a staging of Rameau's Les Fêtes de l'Hymen et de l'Amour, the first in the modern era, scheduled for October 6 in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. As for the first part, heard last night in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, it featured some welcome discoveries but also some regrettable shortcomings.

Starting with the good, there was French harpsichordist Olivier Baumont, whom we last reviewed at the Library of Congress ten years ago. From the composer's delightful body of keyboard music, he gave a graceful and varied performance of the A minor suite (1706), the opening of the prelude free and improvisatory in style, the Allemande not too fast and with notes inégales that were not mannered, and some pleasing embellishments on repeats, especially in the Courante. The two Sarabandes were not overly slow, with an interesting registration choice to distinguish the second one. On the second half, Baumont sat secondo to Andrew Appel's first harpsichord, for the composer's own transcription of some of the dance music from Les Indes Galantes, something that was as unexpected as it was delightful -- I am now searching for all the double-harpsichord arrangements I can find.

By comparison the other instrumental contributions to this concert were not nearly as fine, from the company's artistic director, Ryan Brown, on violin and Donna Fournier, who stepped in at the last minute on viol. This made the first of Rameau's Pièces de clavecin en concert and the accompaniment of some of the concert's vocal pieces somewhat disappointing. Four singers sang the various vocal parts, with airy soprano Gaële Le Roi impressing most, in an occasional cantata composed by Rameau for the feast day of St. Louis, a work brought to light about forty years ago by musicologist Mary Cyr. Laetitia De Beck Spitzer, Kelly Ballou, and baritone David Newman made mostly slender contributions to a few comic airs, plus three rather funny and complicated canons, the texts for most of which were risqué enough to be left out of the program. It was a charming but lightweight overview of some of Rameau's lesser works.

Briefly Noted: 'Lalla Roukh'

F. David, Lalla Roukh, M. Fiset, E. G. Toro, N. Paulin, B. Deletré, Opera Lafayette, R. Brown (released on March 25, 2014) Naxos 8.660338-39 | 1h47

Ryan Brown and his ensemble, Opera Lafayette, were thinking about this opéra comique by Félicien David at least as far back as 2008, when they performed some excerpts of it at the National Gallery of Art. I liked what I heard very much then and regretted not being able to hear the complete performance of it, which was staged last year at the Kennedy Center. The exotic setting in India -- was brought to life with costumes by the New Delhi-based designer Poonam Bhagat and dances performed by the Kalanidhi Dance company. The excerpts performed in 2008 were to the accompaniment of a piano reduction, and the Naxos recording of the full score, made back around the time of the Kennedy Center performance, makes clear how much one misses without the orchestration. The full-length overture, which opens with evocative horn calls and is tinged with triangle and other unusual colors, is worthy of consideration by symphony orchestras as an alternative concert-opener. The rest of the score is no less accomplished, adding to the sense that David is a composer whose time for a reassessment has come.

The libretto is drawn from a once-popular but now largely forgotten book by Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779-1852), Lalla Rookh, a frame narrative about the eponymous Mughal princess who is traveling to Uzbekistan to be married. As she makes the long journey, a minstrel keeps her distracted with tales, written in verse unlike the frame narrative, which is in prose. At the end of the book it is revealed that the minstrel is none other than the King of Bukhara, whom she is supposed to marry. David was not the only composer to adapt the work, or one of its stories, into music, a list that included Gaspare Spontini, Anton Rubenstein, Charles Villiers Stanford, Joseph Jongen, Frederic Emes Clay, and Robert Schumann. As reshaped by librettists Michel Carré and Hippolyte Lucas, the princess is being guided to the meet her new husband by one of his servants, Baskir, a comic bass-baritone role, a conniving servant brought to life here by veteran singer Bernard Deletré. Soprano Marianne Fiset is perhaps not all that extraordinary in her legato pieces, like the Act I mélodie Sous le feuillage sombre, but shows a nice pyrotechnical touch in showpieces like Si vous ne savez plus charmer. The princess is joined by the mysterious minstrel, Noureddin, sung by tenor Emiliano Gonzalez Toro, heard to impressive effect in Opera Lafayette's 2011 performance of Grétry's Le Magnifique, but not in great voice here. Among the supporting cast, soprano Nathalie Paulin, who has impressed with the Washington Concert Opera and Opera Lafayette before, stands out as the princess's servant, Mirza. This worthy release is also distinguished by an excellent booklet essay by expert scholar Ralph Locke, of the Eastman School of Music, who sums up the significance of this recording: "Lalla Roukh has waited too long to be rediscovered." The other good news is that David also composed a pile of other scores, waiting to be heard.

Opera Lafayette: 'Les Femmes vengées'

It is always exciting to see a long-vanished work of music live again, especially an opera that comes back to life on the stage. This is what Opera Lafayette does, in earlier years in concert performance and lately on the stage of the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater and other venues. In many cases, the thrill of seeing the revival is where it ends, with the rediscovery of a work that one feels can then return to its well-earned obscurity, but once in a while one finds a work that deserves to rise more permanently from the dead. Les Femmes vengées, premiered in Paris in 1775, is such an opera, brought back to the stage in a production based on its original one on Friday night.

This is the matching wing of this season's infidelity diptych from Opera Lafayette, which began with a French version of Mozart's Così fan tutte last fall. As grafted on to each other in this pairing, Despina has married a painter, Monsieur Riss, and corresponding to the crossed lovers of Lorenzo da Ponte's libretto are two married couples. When the husbands begin to stray, making advances to Madame Riss, she plans a clever revenge, bringing their wives into the apartment. While the husbands watch and listen, hidden in a closet and unable to speak out for fear of betraying their own infidelity, Monsieur Riss is left alone with each of the wives and pretends to seduce them, advances that the women pretend to find tempting -- or do they pretend? The plot was drawn from Les Rémois, a rhymed conte by Jean de La Fontaine.

Read more »

'Ainsi font-elles toutes'

Mozart, Così fan tutte, V. Gens, B. Fink, Concerto Köln, R. Jacobs

The idea of Opera Lafayette's new season, called The French Così, is intriguing. Seeking a French connection for the libretto of Mozart and Da Ponte's Così fan tutte -- one of the operas we have reviewed the most over the years -- the company is pairing it with Philidor's Les Femmes Vengées. To make the connection clearer, this production was sung in the French adaptation by L. V. Durdilly, from the late 19th century and with spoken dialogue instead of recitatives, heard at its first performance last night. The idea is that the Philidor opera is like a sequel to the Mozart, with the two couples grown older. To make the cast list parallel, Despina has to become Madame Riss, the wife of a famous painter, so director Nick Olcott has inserted the man she is to marry, Monsieur Riss, as a silent character in Così. Jeffrey Thompson was a busy presence in the role, taking a shine to and seducing the maid Delphine, although his continued silence in scenes with other characters speaking and singing was hard to justify dramatically, unless he was meant to be someone physically unable to speak.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Opera Lafayette’s delightful ‘Cosi’ gives tradition a whole new look (Washington Post, October 22) Previous productions: Jonathan Miller (Washington National Opera, 2012; Covent Garden, 2010) Eric Einhorn (Wolf Trap, 2009) Dieter Dorn (Munich, 2007) James Robinson (Santa Fe, 2007) Andrea Dorf (WNO Young Artists, 2007) Joe Banno (Opera Theater of Northern Virginia, 2006)

Neither the singing nor the playing was all that extraordinary, but perhaps this seems so because the sound of Les Violons du Roy and Stephanie Blythe earlier this week is so prominent in my memory. Mezzo-soprano Blandine Staskiewicz's Dorabelle stood out for the most present and richest tone of the quartet of mixed-up lovers, often overshadowing the compact, somewhat tense Fleurdelise of Pascale Beaudin, who did not always have what it takes to ride the top of the ensembles. Tenor Antonio Figueroa (Fernand) and baritone Alex Dobson (Guillaume) had entirely too much fun in their roles, taking joy in seducing each other's beloved but ending up a little scared that they were succeeding, although occasionally so enthusiastic that they were ahead of the beat. Claire DeBono's Delphine was pert and bright, because slightly nasal, and Bernard Deletré, the veteran of many of our favorite Baroque recordings, was an august, officious Don Alphonse, sometimes just a little behind the beat.

It is such a good opera, even without the recitatives and with a few cuts taken here, that it sparkles even in circumstances that are not optimal. Olcott's staging was wry and consistent, with astute acting direction ruling the day, helping us see the little wrinkles of thoughts and nuances in this beautifully characterized work. Only the clumsy dumb show action of the staged overture seemed inapt. Sets by Misha Kachman and costumes by Kendra Rai were solidly 18th-century, to particularly hilarious effect in the disguises for the male lovers, set here as fur-bedecked Canadian trappers. Conductor Ryan Brown kept a handle on the complex score, in spite of some stickiness in the woodwind runs here and there and the occasional early entrance. To find out how or if Mozart truly dovetails with Philidor's Les Femmes Vengées, you will have to wait until its performance on January 17.

Oh Dear, Poor Actaeon

Charles T. Downey, At the Kennedy Center, Opera Lafayette performs Charpentier’s ‘Actéon’
Washington Post, May 4, 2013

M.-A. Charpentier, Actéon, A. Sheehan, Boston Early Music Festival, P. O'Dette, S. Stubbs (cpo, 2010)

The vengeful gods of ancient Greece devised devilishly clever punishments. The hunter Actaeon found that out when he glimpsed Artemis bathing in a pool. The goddess, her chastity offended, transformed Actaeon into a stag, to be hunted down and killed by his own pack of dogs.

The legend was the subject of “Actéon,” a hunting party pastoral composed in 1684 by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, given a rare revival by Opera Lafayette on Thursday night at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater.
[Continue reading]

Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Actéon
Rameau, Les Fêtes de l’Hymen et de l’Amour (excerpts)
Opera Lafayette
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

Emmanuelle de Negri with Opera Lafayette

Soprano Emmanuelle de Negri (photo by Bdallah Lasri)

Hurricane Sandy, among many other far more dastardly things, disordered the Washington concert schedule. On Tuesday night, the planned WPAS recital by András Schiff was canceled: it has now been rescheduled for next April, but Schiff will no longer play the second book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, replacing it with his next tour programming, Bach's French Suites. Although it was a shame not to hear Schiff's preludes and fugues (review of the fine recording forthcoming), the cancellation did provide the chance to hear another concert I had regretted missing, the Opera Lafayette recital featuring the company debut of French soprano Emmanuelle de Negri. The program was a little unusual for Opera Lafayette, with a Baroque first half, accompanied by a small ensemble of historical instruments, followed by a selection of late Romantic songs with piano. Strikingly, de Negri sang the entire recital from memory, creating little dramatic vignettes for each piece in the first half.

The 17th- and 18th-century selections showed de Negri's voice in the best light, a clear-toned, bright, agile instrument with verve and energy. Much of the appeal of French Baroque music has to do with the poetic recitation of text, and there were no complaints with de Negri's diction: her attention to the texts and charming, often funny vocal characterizations brought this music to life. For the opening set, drawn from André Campra's opera-ballet Les Festes Vénitiennes, she wore a masque as the character of Amour, dancing and moving about gracefully. Standout discoveries included a melancholy passacaille by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Sans frayeur dans ce bois, and the knock-out sleep aria from Le Sommeil d'Ulysse by Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (1665-1729). Introduced by the sweet tones of Colin St. Martin's transverse flute with cello and theorbo, de Negri sang this piece seated, while reading from a book, as if narrating, floating long high notes that hung in the air limpidly. Other beautiful discoveries included the ardent Laissez durer la nuit by Sébastien Le Camus (1610-1677) and two delightful airs by Michel Lambert (1619-1696), especially the pathetic Vos mépris, which sounded a lot like the famous aria Pur ti miro, pur ti godo, probably not by Monteverdi, from the end of L'Incoronazione di Poppea. Sopranos in search of an unusual encore piece may want to take a look at the cute aria Rien du tout, by Nicholas Racot de Grandval, sung by a diva who refuses to sing.

Other Reviews: Cecelia Porter, Opera Lafayette’s passionate ‘Invitation’ (Washington Post, November 1)

The idea behind including the set of songs by Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, and Henri Duparc -- all on exquisite poetry that evoked the fantasy Arcadia of the 18th century, prefaced by de Negri reading a poem from Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal -- was stronger than the execution. Something happened to de Negri's voice at the top of the range presented by these songs, revealing a tone that was a little constricted, a little brittle. Not that there was not much to admire in these songs, especially those by Duparc, a composer who destroyed all but a very small number of his songs, all of which are perfectly formed jewels. Pianist Jeff Cohen, filling in for Susan Manoff (who was still listed in the program), often overshadowed de Negri in terms of vigor and flair, giving an acrobatic wackiness to Debussy's Fantoches, for example. The two were best together in the final two songs, the drunken post-party revel of Ravel's Sur l'herbe and the radiant ecstasy of Debussy's C'est l'extase langoureuse. Two encores continued in the same vein, the neo-Baroque A Chloris by Reynaldo Hahn and Debussy's Mandoline.

The next performance by Opera Lafayette will be Félicien David's Lalla Roukh (January 26, 8 pm), at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater. This exotic opéra-comique, set in India and Uzbekistan, will feature choreography by Kalanidhi Dance.

Opera Lafayette and the Other 'Barber'

Louise Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Portrait of Giovanni Paisiello, 1791 (composer shown with score of his opera Nina on the clavichord)

Most listeners today can hear Mozart's Marriage of Figaro and Rossini's Barber of Seville and not think of Giovanni Paisiello's evergreen predecessor, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, in the background. That is, however, how nearly everyone heard those now much more popular works when they were premiered. Paisiello's music has faded almost completely from performance and remains mostly unrecorded, although over the years we have had reason to mention both another opera, Nina, and an oratorio, the Passione di Gesù Cristo. His most famous work, a quick-and-dirty adaptation of Beaumarchais's hit play Le Barbier de Séville (libretto by Giuseppe Petrosellini), made during a near-decade spent in the court of Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg, is still not available in a major recording, and a rather confused source editing situation remains to be sorted out by musicologists. So, bravo to Opera Lafayette for bringing this opera to the light of day, in a concert performance with some light staging, on Saturday night in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater.

It did so in more or less the St. Petersburg version of the opera, with spoken dialogue instead of the recitatives added later when the composer was back in Italy. Since the Italian pronunciation of the singers was less than beautiful, the dialogue could have easily been spoken in English, allowing even more of the immediacy of the work -- many segments have been translated more or less directly from the Beaumarchais play -- to come through. Beaumarchais's opening scene, which showed Figaro working out the details of a serenade he was composing, is set ingeniously in Paisiello's score, with little recitative interjections interrupting the flow of the orchestral score -- a scene that Rossini's later version chose to excise, beginning instead with Almaviva's serenade to Rosina. Figaro's expressions of class conflict ("I thought myself all too happy to be forgotten by the powers that be, persuaded that a nobleman does well enough by us when he does us no harm," for example), not surprisingly, are mostly ironed out, so as not to offend the empress's ear. The jokes about writing opera peppering the libretto, an example of the composer and librettist poking fun at themselves, are icing on the cake.

The cast was a good assortment of strong local singers, including notable character tenor Robert Baker as Count Almaviva and baritone James Shaffran as a Figaro more bumbling than clever. The strongest singing came from bass-baritone Eugene Galvin as a nail-spitting Dr. Bartolo and Peter Becker as a dim-witted Basilio. Soprano Jennifer Casey Cabot, a singer on the rise, was a full-bodied Rosina, with only a vibrato perhaps just a notch too active susceptible to criticism. Her window aria, in dialogue with the pale flauto traverso, was one of the evening's highlights. Young artists Andrew Sauvageau (with whom the author has occasionally sung in choir) and William Bouvel hammed it up to hilarious effect as the yawning and sneezing servants, respectively. This scene is extended musically from Beaumarchais's characters La Jeunesse (who is very old and sneezes constantly) and L'Éveillé (who is young and stupid and always falling asleep -- the character names are obviously ironic).

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, ‘Positions 1956’ and ‘Barbiere di Siviglia’ (Washington Post, April 16)

Conductor Ryan Brown's position, standing in front of the first row of seats in the theater, occasionally made it difficult for some of his musicians, arrayed across the stage, to see him. This caused a few alignment issues all evening long, most noticeably with the percussionist, who was placed directly behind the platform where most of the action was staged. Paisiello's orchestration, while perhaps not masterful, offers many unusual combinations, especially his use of a pair of clarinets, generally in amorous settings. A particularly beautiful aria for Rosina is set with a fetching combination of horns, bassoon, and clarinet, and Basilio's calumny aria -- an important model for Rossini's version later -- had impressive thunder effects provided by drums. Nick Olcott's generally pleasing semi-staging -- minimal costumes and a couple set pieces -- was effective. The decision to place the musicians in and around the action is a little dangerous, with Shaffran tripping over the edge of the platform at one point and almost knocking into one of the violinists. At another point, Shaffran sat teetering on the top of a ladder, representing the high window of Bartolo's house, and one feared for the musicians just beneath him.

Opera Lafayette also announced its 2012-2013 season. The two complete operas to be performed will be the modern premiere of Félicien David's Lalla Rouhk (based on a taste of the work we had from the company in 2008, this will be well worth your while), in a production with an Indian dance company, and Charpentier's charming pastoral Actéon. There will also be a recital featuring French soprano Emmanuelle de Negri.

Reviving Monsigny

P.-A. Monsigny, Le Déserteur, Opera Lafayette, R. Brown (Naxos, 2010)

Charles T. Downey, Monsigny’s “Le Roi” receives admirable revival from Opera Lafayette (The Classical Review, January 24)

Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny (1729-1817) was a primary force in creating the genre of the opéra comique, in partnership with librettist Michel-Jean Sedaine. Monsigny did this in spite of deficits in his musical education and compositional technique. Critics of the 18th century often found his harmonic and contrapuntal skills wanting while generally admiring the freshness of his melodic imagination. After enjoying world-wide success, including export to the newly constructed stages of the New World, Monsigny’s operas were eclipsed by works in other styles and almost completely forgotten.

Almost, were it not (in part) for the work of Opera Lafayette, the historically informed performance ensemble based in Washington, D.C. The group revived Monsigny’s Le Déserteur in 2009, with a recording of the work joining the live series released by Opera Lafayette on the Naxos label. Director Ryan Brown has now turned to another of this neglected composer’s most successful works, Le Roi et le Fermier, heard Sunday night in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater.

[Continue reading]

SEE ALSO:

• Libretto by Michel-Jean Sedaine
• A costume sketch for Richard
• Joe Banno, Opera Lafayette presents ‘Le Roi et le Fermier’ (Washington Post, January 23)
• Tim Smith, Opera Lafayette uncovers Monsigny work once sung by Marie-Antoinette (Baltimore Sun, January 24)

Opera Lafayette

Charles T. Downey, At Kennedy Center, duo adds to Opera Lafayette’s cachet
Washington Post, October 26, 2011

Lambert (et al.), Airs de cour, Jean-Paul Fouchécourt [MP3]

One can count on Opera Lafayette to choose lesser-known but worthwhile music and to perform it beautifully. This was true Monday night in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, when it performed an assortment of French and Italian music for solos and duets, featuring two of the ensemble’s favorite guest singers.

Soprano Gaële Le Roi and tenor Jean-Paul Fouchécourt were sympathetically matched in the duets, such as the lovely “Qu’il sait peu son malheur” from Lully’s “Atys,” two never-overbearing voices that blended with and supported each other.

Fouchécourt was at his best in the comic solos, camping it up in the cross-dressed role of the old nurse Berenice, in excerpts from Cavalli’s “Ipermestra,” an opera rediscovered at the Utrecht Early Music Festival in 2006. Le Roi, who is a formidable singing actress, excelled in the dramatic recitatives for Galatea, bewailing the death of Acis in “La Galatea” by Loreto Vittori. [Continue reading]

SEE ALSO:
Cavalli, Ipermestra (performed at the Utrecht Early Music Festival in 2006) [Part 1 | Part 2]

Handel's 'Acis and Galatea'

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

Charles T. Downey, Opera Lafayette charms intimately with ‘Acis and Galatea’ at Kennedy Center
Washington Post, April 7, 2011

Handel premiered “Acis and Galatea” at Cannons, the palatial home of the future Duke of Chandos, one of the composer’s most important patrons. Tuesday night, an intimately scaled performance of the work recalled the private circumstances of its premiere nearly 300 years earlier. In the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, the ensemble of period instruments concluded Opera Lafayette’s season by returning to this charming pastoral work, which it first performed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 2000. John Gay’s bubbly, balladic libretto, drawn from a short passage in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” (by way of Dryden’s English translation), has many pleasing comic touches that adorn its central tragedy.

Bass-baritone Peter Becker stole the show as Polyphemus, the jealous Cyclops who crushes his rival Acis with a large stone, trembling with rage and plenty of bluster in his low notes. Tenor Thomas Michael Allen made a pleasing company debut as Acis, singing with great agility in the fast passages and true intonation. The tone was a little constrained at the top and not as generally pretty as one might have liked.

Rosa Lamoreaux had an elegant turn as the sea-nymph Galatea, but the top of her voice did not have the ideal shimmer for the role. She could not compete with the memory of the versatile Rebecca Duren, who once performed the most difficult arias while suspended upside-down on ropes in the crazy circus-themed production of the work presented a few years ago by the now-defunct American Opera Theater that was in Baltimore. [Continue reading]

Handel, Acis and Galatea
Opera Lafayette
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

OTHER ARTICLES:

• Background on Handel and Acis and Galatea: A Stone's Throw (Ionarts, April 6, 2011)
  
• Boston Early Music Festival's production of Acis and Galatea: Allan Kozinn, Finding Many Ways to View One Myth (New York Times, April 5, 2011) -- their cast includes the tenor I would have preferred as Acis, Aaron Sheehan

Reviving Grétry: Opera Lafayette's Latest

The mission of Opera Lafayette, to perform largely forgotten French operas of the 17th and 18th centuries, is so important and so near and dear to my musicologist's heart that it might seem ungrateful not to praise every one of their performances to the skies. Thanks to the leadership of conductor Ryan Brown and the veteran hands of his talented instrumental ensemble, the group's musical performances are always stylish and a delight for the ears, with greater or lesser pleasure depending on the vocal casting, which is generally quite good. The question that must be asked, including of their latest performance on Saturday night -- the modern world premiere of Le Magnifique by André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry (1741-1813), at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater -- is whether or not the work revived holds interest beyond a first hearing. Opera Lafayette's performances are always worth the listener's time, even when one of these forgotten works turns out to be justly forgotten, and their recordings of hitherto unrecorded works merit a place on every library's shelf, but is there any interest for reasons beyond the obvious musicological ones?

D. Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-comique

Grétry was a Belgian composer, born in Liège, who spent most of his life working in Paris. He received his musical education at the collégiale of St. Denis de Liège, where his musician father played the violin. When the boy was a teenager, an Italian comic opera troupe took up residence in Liège, and he was able to spend time listening to and studying the form from the orchestra pit. A period of independent studies in Rome left him fluent in Italian and worldly: his Mémoires, ou essai sur la musique is a delightful read. His works were the toast of Paris for a time beginning in the 1770s, although almost none of his fifty-odd operas, comic or otherwise, are remembered today in spite of having been performed not infrequently in the early United States. Only a few of them have been recorded, and sometimes not particularly well: exceptions include the Andromaque by Hervé Niquet and Le Concert Spirituel, La Caravane du Caire by Mark Minkowski, and Richard Cœur de Lion and a few others, championed for nationalistic reasons by Edgard Doneux and the Orchestre de Chambre de la Radio Télévision Belge, re-released on EMI.

Le Magnifique was first performed at the Comédie-Italienne on March 4, 1773. It was Grétry's first experience working with a libretto by Michel-Jean Sedaine, who was formerly the collaborator of Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny (on Le Déserteur, among others). Grétry was lucky to work with some excellent librettists, Voltaire not least among them: Sedaine took the story from La Fontaine, who in turn had adapted it from Boccaccio's Decameron (Day Three, Novella Five), in which a man arranges a tryst with another man's wife during a meeting where the wife is not allowed to speak. The ruse in Boccaccio is that he "speaks" for both of them, with the woman's implicit approval, giving instructions that she later follows to the letter. Sedaine changes the pursuit from an adultery to the courtship of a sheltered girl, Clémentine, by a Florentine grandee named Octave. Known as Le Magnifique, Octave has generously paid his own money to rescue Clémentine's father, Horace, and his servant, Laurence, from slavery, into which they were sold following a shipwreck nine years earlier.

Tenor Emiliano Gonzalez Toro

Le Magnifique tricks Aldobrandin, the girl's deceitful tutor and guardian, out of his chance to force the girl to marry him. (Beaumarchais was working on a similar character, Bartolo, in his Le Barbier de Séville, which had been rejected by the Comédie-Italienne as a comic opera libretto the year before.) Although Clémentine is not allowed to speak to Le Magnifique during their 15-minute conversation, he tells her to drop the rose from her hand if she is pleased by his proposal of love. In his Mémoires, Grétry says that a friend of Rousseau's introduced him to the libretto: it was the rose scene that seduced him, he writes, although he sensed the difficulty of setting it to music, the longest such scene attempted up to that time, in his estimation. Grétry was a great melodist, and he was particularly talented at what contemporaries called déclamation, that is, creating musical lines that mimicked the meaning of the words being sung. An example of this in Le Magnifique is Alix's short, excited exclamations of "C'est lui!" as she thinks about the unexpected return of her husband from slavery in Turkey, which the fine soprano Marguerite Krull rendered with girlish nervousness in this performance.

Grétry's characters can often be identified by melodic motifs that pepper their arias, like Aldobrandin's octave-leap motif that sounds like a donkey braying, which French specialist tenor Jeffrey Thompson incorporated into his antic characterization of the role. The best singing came in the American debut of Swiss tenor Emiliano Gonzalez Toro (pictured above), who was imposing and polished as Le Magnifique, a voice of impressive power and even distribution over the role's considerable range. As Clémentine, soprano Elizabeth Calleo sounded much as she did in Opera Lafayette's revival of Philidor's Sancho Pança dans son isle last spring: some lovely high notes but an overall vocal production that was tight in the jaw and that wilted flat and sounded a little shallow at the top and rather pale at the bottom. Karim Sulayman, who was announced as ill, drew attention to himself mostly for a grotesquely hammy performance as Aldobrandin's silly servant Fabio. Douglas Williams had a promising, solid sound as Laurence, and Randall Scarlata was authoritative as the narrator of Nick Olcott's time-saving compression of the French spoken dialogue, who then steps into the action as Horace. The relatively effective semi-staging, with no dancing, was the work of Catherine Turocy.

Other Articles: Joe Banno, Opera Lafayette's 'Le Magnifique' (Washington Post, February 7) Emily Cary, Opera Lafayette performs the modern premiere of 'Le Magnifique' (Washington Examiner, January 29)

In essence, the operas of Grétry are a stepping stone, a way for later giants to stand on his shorter shoulders, to reverse an old metaphor. Mozart, who admired Grétry's scores, took what Grétry did with his ensembles -- like the lively Act I chatter trio and Act II finale in Le Magnifique -- much farther, and the earlier scores of Rameau and the later ones of Berlioz are of much greater interest in terms of orchestrational variety. Grétry gives most of the rhythmic interest to the violins, with the winds mostly doubling, except for a brief moment for the horns and woodwinds alone at the opening of Act III. The opera does contain interesting moments that have been singled out as important for the transformation of the opéra-comique into a weightier genre, not least the "extended mime sequence" of the overture, calling for a procession of extras (there being no chorus at the Comédie-Italienne and rather limited space). Grétry wrote in his memoirs that he observed actual processions of this kind when composing the overture: he quotes the Air d'Henri IV for the entrance of the priests and creates a cacophony of different melodies and sounds that are heard simultaneously. Horns and drums are used (perhaps overused) for martial effect, and the trumpets in the score are the first in the history of opéra-comique, according to scholar David Charlton. The closing music of Act III is supposed to accompany a final divertissement, a pantomime where Clémentine and Le Magnifique release the other captives from their chains, but in this performance, it served simply as the "bow music."

This opera will be repeated on Wednesday (February 9, 7:30 pm), in the Rose Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City. The final performance of Opera Lafayette's season will be Handel's Acis and Galatea (April 5, 7:30 pm), in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater.

Opera Lafayette: 'It's Alive!'

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

Charles T. Downey, Opera Lafayette at the Terrace Theater
Washington Post, November 17, 2010

Clérambault, La Muse de l'Opéra (inter alia), Les Arts Florissants

A stylish performance by Opera Lafayette breathed life into more forgotten music of the French baroque on Monday night at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. This ensemble of historical instrument specialists is most effective when the music in question is worth the effort of resuscitation. And it certainly was, particularly in a brilliantly programmed first half of rarely heard works that looked back at the golden age of French opera, during the austere conclusion of Louis XIV's reign.

Louis-Nicolas Clérambault's cantata "La Muse de l'Opéra" featured the limpid, silken soprano of Judith van Wanroij as our tour guide to the operatic delights of the era. Contrasting characters were presented in pairs: military Mars and tender Venus, tempest and bucolic spring, birdsong and sweet sleep. Van Wanroij was at her best in the soft, pastoral parts, particularly the excellent duet with flutist Colin St. Martin in "Oiseaux, qui sous ces feuillages." The second half -- instrumental and vocal excerpts by Jean-Philippe Rameau and Jean-Féry Rebel -- was, by contrast, a survey of the state of the operatic art in the mid-18th century. [Continue reading]

Opera Lafayette
With Judith van Wanroij, soprano
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

Opera Lafayette: Philidor's 'Sancho Pança'

Composer and chess expert François-André Danican Philidor

Opera Lafayette closed its 15th anniversary season with the first modern American revival of Sancho Pança dans son isle, a 1762 opéra-comique by François-André Danican Philidor (1726–1795), in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. A slender work, clocking in at 90 minutes without intermission, it turned out to be the low point in a year of striking successes. The performance of Gluck's Armide drew a capacity audience to the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, a venue far more vast than the company's normal haunts, and the one concert last fall was a pleasing performance of Charpentier's Les Arts Florissants. Antoine-Alexandre-Henri Poinsinet (1734–1769) created the libretto of Sancho Pança from a particularly mean-spirited passage in Cervantes' Don Quixote. The knight of the mournful countenance has promised his simple-minded squire, Sancho Panza, the governorship of an island for his faithful service — a dream that the duke and duchess featured in Part 2 fulfill as part of an elaborate series of tricks played on Don Quixote and Sancho. When faced with the "real demands" of governing this imaginary land — the island of Barataria — Sancho quickly renounces all interest in being a governor.

In adapting Poinsinet's libretto into an English version, Nick Olcott took a "meta-theatrical" approach, framing the outline of the action within the history of the troupe that performed it. Shortly before the premiere of Philidor's Sancho Pança, the comic opera companies of the Parisian foires were merged into the royally sponsored Comédie Italienne. Olcott's version plays with the rivalry of the factions and presents some of the history of this performer-led company, as they rehearse a new work, Sancho Pança, to present it to all of their voting members for approval: actor John Lescault (last seen with the company in Le déserteur) took the speaking part of Poinsinet himself and conductor Ryan Brown, with a hair-extending ponytail, stood in as Philidor. This adaptation had the benefit of compressing the work so that it could be performed by a smaller cast. It did little, unfortunately, to improve the work -- for all the shameless mugging and flogging of weak jokes, the piece was still leaden.

This should hardly be surprising, since on July 15, 1762 -- within days of hearing the premiere -- Baron von Grimm noted in his Correspondance littéraire with Diderot (my translation) that the work had "a mediocre success" because it was "burlesque without being gay," a description that so perfectly fits my reaction to this performance, in which one knew there were things that were meant to be funny but that mostly were not, I cannot improve upon it. Grimm goes on:

A poet who could not make something of the governorship of Sancho Pança should be strangled. M. Poinsinet did not know how to provide situations to the composer either. Except for the scene with the coward who fights with Sancho, dying of fear just like him, I hardly see anything in it that merits the name of situation; and worse, most of the airs do not have much effect. M. Philidor spent a lot on harmony and noise, and not much on melody or musical ideas. He repeated himself in several places; in others he borrowed bits from On ne s'avise jamais de tout and even Annette et Lubin. In a word, this new work by M. Philidor will not hold up to the reputation of Le maréchal ferrant.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, "Sancho Pança" lumbers and sparkles at the Kennedy Center (Washington Post, May 26) Tim Smith, Opera Lafayette takes comic turn with 1762 work about Sancho Panza (Baltimore Sun, May 26)

A weak work was not helped by a young, slightly raw cast and bare-bones production (directed by Catherine Turocy) that any university opera program would be proud to present. Both baritone Darren Perry (Sancho) and soprano Meghan McCall (Juliette et al.) have sounded much stronger in previous outings than they did here. Perry had the most present voice in a cast that was often covered by the small, generally good orchestra of period instruments, even though it was placed in the pit for this performance, but both the top and bottom of his range were a little ragged. Karim Sulayman (Lope Tocho et al.) and character tenor Tony Boutté (Le Docteur et al.) contributed more in terms of character and comic timing than vocal quality. While the opera largely deserves the obscurity it had lain in for all this time, there are numbers worth hearing, not least Sancho's boule aria, in which he imagines his travails on the island making him like a ball bounced around every which direction in a children's game, and that same duel duet for Sancho and Don Crispinos that Grimm singled out in his pithy review. For the historically curious, Opera Lafayette has plans to release a recording of the work in its series for Naxos.

Plan now for Opera Lafayette's next season, which will include La Muse de l'Opéra (November 15, 2010), Grétry's Le Magnifique (February 5, 2011), and Handel's Acis and Galatea (April 5, 2011).

Gluck Sells Out the Concert Hall

Gluck, Armide, Les musiciens du Louvre, M. Minkowski Lully, Armide, Opera Lafayette, R. Brown

To celebrate its 15th anniversary, Opera Lafayette, the talented and adventurous company specializing in French opera of the grand siècle, rented the Kennedy Center Concert Hall for a performance of Gluck's Armide. With tickets priced to move at $15, the performance quickly sold out, even after initial plans not to seat people in the highest tier were abandoned. This seems to provide some solid evidence that if you program interesting music (other than the same dull chestnuts), perform it well, and offer it at ticket prices that are not prohibitively expensive, people will come. It is a heartening sign that the star over the operas of Christoph Willibald Gluck rises further with this performance, too. Any audience that can stomach a Mozart opera will likely find that Gluck goes down just as easily, and nothing could please me more that his operas are apparently on an ascendancy. This summer, during an interview with Santa Fe Opera General Director Charles MacKay, I told him that I hoped their performance of Gluck's Alceste would inaugurate an annual tradition in which the company replaced its regular Mozart opera with one by Gluck. In related news, Washington National Opera will finally get around to staging its first Gluck opera next season with Iphigénie en Tauride.

Armide (check out the online score of the 1783 edition scanned by the University of North Texas Libraries) is one of the lesser-known of Gluck's operas, judging from the number of folks who commented casually that Monday night's performance was the first time time they had heard it. With the opera's 1777 premiere, Gluck famously stood on the shoulders of giants, setting a libretto adapted (quite faithfully, although cutting the sycophantic prelude) from the brilliant one written by Philippe Quinault for Lully. It is an opera that I studied at some length for my doctoral dissertation (reading not for the faint of heart) and that I have written about here before, in reviews of the lone recording, by Marc Minkowski, and in a 2007 staging by Maryland Opera Studio. Opera Lafayette's Ryan Brown conducted that performance, presented in conjunction with his company's performance of Lully's Armide the same year, but it was hardly surprising to see Opera Lafayette return to the work this season, this time with much more appropriate dancing for the ballet music, performed by their regular partner, Catherine Turocy's New York Baroque Dance Company.

Brown felt compelled to make some cuts, to keep the performance time to three hours with an intermission: Minkowski made cuts, too, and his recording fits onto two CDs. The decision makes sense in terms of a live performance. , but one hopes that the group has set aside some time to record the music cut in concert, for the sake of their recording of the work, planned with Naxos. (I will reserve final judgment until I hear Opera Lafayette's recording, of course, but having all the music would be another consideration likely to tip my recommendation for a recording of the opera away from Minkowski.) [I have since been informed that this performance was not being recorded for Naxos.--Ed.] What they did perform sounded quite good, with Brown's conducting at his accustomed alternation of fluidity and crisp attack. There was only one noticeable blip, at the transition into Esprits de haine, a minor flaw that can be replaced with the tape from the New York performance. The strings played with an impressively tight sense of ensemble, especially in the many fast passages pulsating with tremolos, recalling the Dance of the Furies from Orphée et Eurydice, for example. The best solo performance came from flutist Colin St. Martin, who stood for his part in the sommeil scene ("Plus j'observe ces lieux"). He sounded just as good in the Air Sicilien in Act V, following Gluck's indication that the piece "doit être joué avec beaucoup d'expression."

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Opera Lafayette marks 15th anniversary with sold-out performance in a big space (Washington Post, February 3) Anthony Tommasini, Love and Sorcery in a Religious War (New York Times, February 4)

The singing was quite good, too, a fine balance achieved by placing the orchestra and singers on a platform at the back of the stage, which also left a space for the dancers at the apron. Tenor William Burden sounded much better as Renaud than he did as Vere in Santa Fe's Billy Budd two summers ago, with a heroic ping at the top of his voice, a cleaner attack and less noticeable scoop, and only a few of the highest notes that showed some strain. He was seconded by strong performances from tenor Robert Getchell, whose Artémidore and Chevalier Danois were high points, and the versatile baritone Darren Perry as Aronte and Ubalde. William Sharp sang well as Hidraot, but it was hard not to miss the obvious choice for this role, François Loup, who performs regularly with the company. He would have added some needed heft and a more venerable presence, but perhaps the part lay too high.

Among the women, the tall, confident Stephanie Houtzeel stole the show as La Haine, singing with a fierce, barbed tone and malicious presence, quite in keeping with what we have heard from her in the title role of Lully's Armide and in Handel and Haydn with Opera Lafayette. Gluck's Armide, however, lies much higher, and while soprano Dominique Labelle had a dramatic, cutting edge to her tone, the top was disappointingly strained, turning acidic. (With the orchestra tuned to A430, those high notes are still pretty high.) In the supporting cast, Dutch soprano Judith van Wanroij's Sidonie stood out for the clarion resonance of her voice, overshadowing the lighter but still lovely Nathalie Paulin as Phénice. The talented chorus sang well, with a present sound that stayed remarkably unified from their unfortunately distant position in the chorister seats above the stage.

Opera Lafayette will close its 15th anniversary season with the modern American premiere of Philidor's Sancho Pança (May 24, 7:30 pm), in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater.

Music, the Only Innocent Pleasure

Opera Lafayette’s 15th anniversary season opened to a full house at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, with a program featuring the collaboration of Charpentier and Molière. Opera Lafayette Artistic Director Ryan Brown reminded the audience in his concise spoken introduction that music of the French Baroque equally encompasses both the “high and low brow,” a goal to which Monday evening’s program aspired. Following a falling-out with Lully, Molière, not long before his untimely death, began working with Charpentier to produce “comédies-ballets,” three scenes of which comprised the first half of the program.

The Ouverture to Le Sicilien, ou l’amour peintre (1695 version) showed off Opera Lafayette’s crack band of three standing violin players (including Brown) and continuo, who approached notes inégales rhythms gently and relished Charpentier’s calculated dissonance. In a tuxedo, La Peinture (tenor Tony Boutté) expressively sang and cried to his love under her locked window. Her old Guardian (François Loup) soon interrupted, with great vocal presence in the hall, encouraging him to sing major scales instead of minor. The Guardian continued to dash La Peinture’s hopes by referring to the lady as a “deceitful tigress,” and the scene quickly devolved into cat hisses from both gentlemen as they ran offstage.

Tenor Karim Sulayman was most animated in the wife-bashing (“hellish follies…”) scene from La Comtesse d’Escarbagnas. His use of vibrato as a tool for ornamentation instead of as a given was most stylish. Choreographer Catherine Turocy had the gentlemen playing cards during a brief Menuet movement. Dramatic actions onstage were always subtly subservient to the music -- well, that is, until the three gentlemen in Le Mariage forcé were flitting around singing on nonsense syllables, all rhyming with “pantalon,” followed by vocal imitations of the dogs, cats, and nightingales of Arcadia. Musical and dramatic events swiftly unfolded in this program of seventy minutes.

Following a brief pause for retuning and the addition of two Baroque flutes, the “high brow” half of the evening began with the five lightly staged scenes of Charpentier’s chamber opera Les Arts Florissants. Although the libretto is by an anonymous author, a memorable quote quite fitting of Molière proclaimed music the “delight of the spirit, the only innocent pleasure.” La Musique (soprano Ah Hong, heard two years ago in Opera Vivente’s production of Alcina) sang her invitation (“let my divine harmony fill your hearts”) with a lovingly relaxed agility. The chorus portrayed its roles of warriors and furies, depending on the scene, with orchestral interludes elegantly danced or pantomimed by Caroline Copeland. Soloists representing poetry (Stacey Mastrian), architecture (Monica Reinagel), discord (William Sharp), and war (François Loup) expounded the virtues of their respective embodiments.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Lafayette's frothy delivery delights at Kennedy Center (Washington Post, October 21)

Soprano Nathalie Paulin’s sublime portrayal of peace (“Even the hardest warriors shall prefer peace to fighting…”) was underscored by a blissful continuo combination of theorbo, some sort of early guitar, harpsichord, and mellifluously played gamba. Brown conducted the second half of the program most effectively, but he might consider minimizing his presence: his hands mirrored each other 95% of the time, while lateral dance-like motions were somewhat distracting to the audience and perhaps confusing to those onstage trying to focus on a moving target. The outstanding quality of Opera Lafayette’s soloists combined with meticulous preparation made for a remarkable evening in a venue much more appropriate than some past programs in the drafty atrium of La Maison Française.

Mark your calendars -- in celebration of their 15th season, all tickets to Opera Lafayette’s next performances, of Gluck's Armide (February 1 in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall and February 3 at Rose Hall in New York), will be only $15.

Opera Lafayette: Happy and Pensive, Not Moderate

Ryan Brown, director of Opera Lafayette

If Opera Lafayette's current season has had its ups and downs, Friday night's performance of most of Handel's L'Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato, from 1740, at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater was one of the ups. Charles Jennens adapted the libretto from two separate poems by John Milton -- one in the voice of a happy man, L'Allegro, and the other melancholy, Il Penseroso. Jennens chose excerpts from the two poems, interweaving them in a quasi-operatic dialogue, as if they were trying to convince one another to change moods. Jennens then added a third part, in the voice of a man whose mood is a mixture of the two, Il Moderato, who is neither entirely happy nor entirely melancholy. Handel assigned the parts freely, with any of the four vocal soloists incarnating any of the characters, sometimes with the personal pronouns switched to the plural for the chorus to join the dialogue. In this way, L'Allegro is closest to the libretto of Messiah, which Jennens also authored and Handel set to music one year after L'Allegro, in that there are no roles associated with any particular singer. It is a sort of third genre, separate from the more traditionally operatic oratorios.

At this point in his life Handel's health was in an extremely poor state, a subject documented by Handel specialist David Hunter (see the article by Stephanie Pain in New Scientist this month). Coinciding with the failure of his operatic ventures, Handel's binge eating and ballooning weight contributed to many health problems, a paralysis of his hands, increasing irritability and depression, perhaps caused by lead poisoning from excessive indulgence in lead-laced food and wine. It is not clear what benefit was gained from Opera Lafayette cutting the third part of the oratorio, Il Moderato, which adds up to only about 20 minutes of music, other than trying to focus on Milton's poetry, although exclusively in its diced-up form, pieced together by Jennens in the libretto. Is it possible that Jennens at least partially intended the message of moderation for Handel himself? One could certainly read the following lines from the bass's opening pieces that way:

Hence, boast not, ye profane,
Of vainly-fancied, little-tasted pleasure,
Pursued beyond all measure,
And by its own excess transform'd to pain. [...]
Sweet temp'rance in thy right hand bear,
With her let rosy health appear.

One of the likely concerns was to avoid the score's excessive longueurs, and like any Handel score, there are some snoozers in L'Allegro. The inclusion of recitations of the libretto text was more laudable in intent than in practice, as the actors invited gave at best mediocre recitations. Omitting them would have left more than enough time to give a complete performance of the work. The only encore offered was the luscious duet As Steals the Morn, from the deleted third part, featured on the Handel disc of the same name by Mark Padmore two years ago, leading one inevitably to wonder if the performance would not have been more worthy with the complete score.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Everybody's Talkin' in 'L'Allegro' (Washington Post, April 6)

Of course, this is a Handel Year (he died 250 years ago this month), and an exhibit in honor of the event is about to open at the Handel House Museum in London, curated by none other than Christopher Hogwood. (I'm sure that Jessica Duchen will have a full report.) As a way to remember Handel this was most pleasurable, with an overall performance that, while not exactly free of problems, was on the whole very good. The vocal soloists all sang admirably, especially the young tenor Nicholas Phan, whose voice has a pleasing, resonant ping without sounding forced. His crisp sense of attack and clarity served particularly well in one number with the chorus, Haste Thee, Nymph. Soprano Christine Brandes sounded much better here than she did in her last performance to reach these ears, with steely high notes and more than enough strength of sound.

Soprano Ann Monoyios replaced Kirsten Blaise, still listed in the program but described as "ill and unable to perform" in an insert, but the change was not all that recent. Monoyios sang well, although struggling with flatness throughout the evening (especially bad with the solo cello in But oh, sad virgin). She shone in the extended duet with Colin St. Martin on flauto traverso (Sweet bird, that shun'st the noise of folly), where the avian warblings of both were elaborated with charming embellishments. Baritone David Newman, cheated of some of his already smaller portion of music (cut with the third part), sang with a tone that matched the earnestness on his face. The orchestra was generally fine, under the inimitable style of conductor Ryan Brown, all pointed fingers and marching in place. The chamber chorus sang with flair and stylistic subtlety, with the exception of a prominent false entrance in the bass section during Populous cities please us then.

Next year Opera Lafayette will celebrate its fifteenth season, with concerts that include Charpentier's Les Florissants (October 19, Kennedy Center Terrace Theater), Gluck's Armide (February 1, 2010, for the company's debut in the KC Concert Hall), and Philidor's Sancho Panza (May 24, 2010, Terrace Theater) in its American debut.