Operatic Threesome, Damrau Glitters in 'Ory'

This article was first published at The Classical Review on June 19, 2012.

Rossini, Le Comte Ory, J. D. Flórez, D. Damrau, J. DiDonato, Metropolitan Opera (production by Bartlett Sher), M. Benini (released on April 3, 2012) Virgin 0709599 3 | 153' Libretto (.PDF) Score

Rossini’s penultimate opera, Le Comte Ory, is the comic counterpart to his tragic masterpiece Guillaume Tell -- both were premiered within a year of each other, in 1828 and 1829, after which Rossini did not complete another opera for the remaining 40 years of his life.

He created Ory for the Académie Royale de Musique -- that is, the Opéra de Paris rather than the Opéra Comique -- but in spite of being very serious comedy, it has fallen into near-obscurity. The Metropolitan Opera, for example, had never performed the work until last year, in this production directed by Bartlett Sher, captured on video for the company’s HD simulcast to movie theaters and for transmission on PBS’s Great Performances series.

The slender libretto by Eugène Scribe and Charles-Gaspard Delestre-Poirson was based on their own play, a send-up of medieval farce, from a decade earlier, itself based on a collection of medieval ballads made by Pierre-Antoine de la Place in the 18th century, including a melody quoted by Rossini in the opera. Rossini reused a good portion of his score for Il Viaggio a Reims, an occasional piece created for the coronation of Charles X and never published after a few performances in Paris. The music that Rossini added, however, is some of his most charming, leading Liszt, who sponsored a production in Weimar in 1850, to call it “the champagne opera.”

It is the music one remembers, like the Act I finale, an unaccompanied ensemble for 14 voices, described by scholar Richard Osborne as “music in the Italian church style -- using an a cappella church ensemble to celebrate not some Christian rite but rather the unfrocking of an imposter priest is rather a nice joke.”

The story opposes two seducers, a libertine count and his amorous page -- a replay of the Count and Cherubino from Le nozze di Figaro -- both of whom are in love with a countess who has sworn not to take a lover. The Count disguises himself, first as a holy hermit and then as a woman on pilgrimage (not actually a nun, in spite of the way it is staged here), to worm his way into the locked Castle of Formoutiers and its bevy of beautiful women, all waiting faithfully for their husbands to return from the Crusades. The page, Isolier (a trouser role), helps Ory’s tutor, who has been searching for his wayward charge, find him and foil his plan, but not before Ory finds his way into the countess’s bed, only to find a surprise there in the form of his own page who has preceded him (the splendid trio ‘A la faveur de cette nuit obscure’) – a man dressed as a woman seducing a woman in bed with a man played by a woman, if you are keeping score.

The principal attraction of this staging is what the French call a distribution d’enfer, with three knockout singers in the three leads, the sort of combination one usually finds only at celebrity gala concerts. The cast is led without a doubt by soprano Diana Damrau, who gives a blockbuster performance as La Comtesse Adèle, with flawless coloratura technique in the showstopping ‘En proie à la tristesse’ in Act I, ending on a blistering high E flat. Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato is boyish and charming as Isolier, with equally fine fioriture and some fiery high notes of her own.

Few tenors working today are as accomplished in the Rossini operas as Juan Diego Flórez, and he plays Ory with a devilish wink, a striking ease and agility in difficult melismatic passages, and ringing high notes – the role has a number of high Cs and Ds. That he made it onto the stage at all that day was something of a miracle: as it was widely reported, he was with his wife, who was giving birth to their first child at their apartment only a little over a half-hour before curtain up.

Shortcomings are due mostly to the staging by Bartlett Sher, which tries a little too hard, setting the action in a 19th-century theater rather than in the Middle Ages. Looking for an intimacy hard to achieve in the cavernous theater of the Metropolitan Opera, the sets (designed by Michael Yeargan) reduce the stage space, putting the playing space on a little platform, with many old-school effects viewed in the ‘off stage’ space and interfering with the action.

The theatrical mise en abyme technique -- a performance within the performance -- is now so common in operatic productions that it is becoming a little tired. The effect is made worse by the manner of the Met HD simulcasts, which invade the backstage and, while showing an often unseen side of how an opera is staged also puncture the aura of mystery, because they present opera in a way it is not meant to be seen.

The cinematic close-up makes sense in film and even theater, when the main form of emotional communication is through subtlety of facial expression, but not in opera, where it is supposed to be about singing and music seen and heard from a distance. The Met camera (video directed by Gary Halvorson) focuses in far too much on individuals, and often the wrong ones.

For example, we get glimpses of a supernumerary character, a sort of stage manager for the little show within a show, whom we see manipulating little bird puppets around the singers and, at times, mugging directly at the viewer through the camera. For a Flórez high note in the Count’s opening cavatina, the camera pans upward awkwardly to catch the same servant wagging the birds above the singer’s head, which utterly deflates the excitement of hearing the note sung. The camera also catches members of the chorus mugging, looking vacant, darting a glimpse at the conductor – all things one is not meant to see, and almost certainly would not see from a seat in the house.

Perhaps unfortunately, the DVD keeps some of the feel and format of the HD broadcasts, opening with the introduction by host Renée Fleming, while most of the intermission interviews are kept for a bonus section on the second DVD. The interview features, where the host catches one or more of the singers right after the last note of the finale, are often uncomfortable. The best outcome is to spoil the musical effect, when you just want to be with your memory of the last notes and not have the illusion burst by seeing the singer rather than the character. The worst is embarrassment for the singe.

Other elements are out of place, too. In the supporting cast, Suzanne Resmark’s tone was a little off-color and under pitch as the Comtesse’s servant, Ragonde; Michele Pertusi rushed through some of the fast passages as the Gouverneur; but Stéphane Degout had a patter-quick turn as the count’s servant, Raimbaud. At the podium, Maurizio Benini was far from stellar, too matter of fact, and the performance suffered from some of the coordination issues that Anne Midgette and other critics noted on opening night, still there two weeks into the run.

The switch of focus one can discern at the Met, away from musical concerns to visual ones, is evident not only in the way the production was realized and filmed but in the choice of score: as Alex Ross pointed out, the performance did not take advantage of the new critical edition of this opera, which restores some of the portions of the two finales cut for later revivals. Then again, neither does this DVD’s main competition, a DVD from Glyndebourne, from a performance in 1997 with Annick Massis, Marc Laho, and Diana Montague.

SEE ALSO:
Glyndebourne production

Alex Ross, Le Comte Ory; or, missed opportunities (The Rest Is Noise, March 26, 2011)

Anne Midgette, Fizzy “Ory” at Met Opera charms its public (The Classical Beat, March 26, 2011)

Richard K. Fitzgerald, Frolics and Frippery: A Roll in the Hay with Rossini (Ionarts, July 22, 2006)

Anthony Tommasini, With Rossini’s Mix of This and That, the Met Finds an Excuse for a Romp (New York Times, March 25, 2011)

Peter Gelb, Theatrical Nuance on a Grand Scale (New York Times, March 25, 2011) -- an "advertorial" as Anne Midgette put in, run by the paper on the same day as its own review of the production

À mon chevet: 'Bel-Ami'

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

Suddenly, the Swiss guard struck the pavement three times with the wooden part of his halberd. All those assembled turned with a long swish of skirts and a scraping of chairs. The young woman appeared, on her father's arm, in the bright light of the opened portal. She still looked like a child's doll, a white toy with orange flowers in her hair. She stayed for a few moments at the entrance, and then when she took her first step into the nave, the great organ pushed forth a powerful cry, announcing the entrance of the bride with its great metal voice. [...] All the while, the great organ was singing, pushing through the enormous edifice the purring rhythmic accents of its shining throats, crying out to heaven the joy and the pain of mankind. [...]

The bishop ended his oration. A priest clothed in a golden stole climbed to the high altar, and the great organ began again to celebrate the glory of the newlyweds. Soon it was shooting forth a prolonged clamor, enormous, swelling like waves, so sonorous and so powerful that it seemed it must be raising up the vault and making it jump to expand into the blue sky. Its vibrant noise filled the entire church, made flesh and soul shiver. Then all of a sudden it calmed; fine notes, alert, ran through the air, tickling the ear like soft breaths; these were little, gracious songs, tiny, bouncing, that fluttered like birds; and suddenly, this coquettish music broadened anew, again becoming terrifying in strength and breadth, as if a grain of sand was being transformed into a whole world.

Then human voices rose up, passing over their bowed heads. Vauri and Landeck, from the Opéra, were singing. Incense spread a fine odor of benzoin, and on the altar the divine sacrifice was accomplished; the God-Man, at the call of his priest, came down to earth to consecrate the triumph of the Baron Georges du Roy. Bel-Ami, on his knees next to Suzanne, had lowered his head. He felt at that moment almost like a believer, almost religious, full of thanks for the divinity that had thus favored him, that had treated him with such respect. And without knowing exactly whom he was addressing, he thanked it for his success.

-- Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami, pp. 565, 567, 570-71 / (my translation)

These passages come from Georges Du Roy's final wedding, which takes place in the Église de la Madeleine in Paris. At the time when this wedding was taking place, the grand organ in that church was rather new, completed by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll in 1846. Although it does not quite fit with the time frame of the story, it seems likely that Maupassant, in describing the music at this most magnificent wedding, had in mind the playing of none other than Camille Saint-Saëns, who was organist at La Madeleine from 1857 to 1877. What the characters are hearing, in fact, sounds like one of Saint-Saëns' epic improvisations, which were the talk of Paris. Liszt, who enjoyed a life-long friendship of mutual admiration with Saint-Saëns, wrote to him, "You use the organ as an orchestra in an incredible way. The most proficient organists in all countries have only to take their hats off to you." When Maupassant moved to Paris as a young man, working as an impoverished clerk (much as Georges Duroy first appears in Bel-Ami), it was at the tail end of Saint-Saëns' tenure at La Madeleine.

Briefly Noted: Marlis Petersen Eternally Feminine

Das Ewig-Weibliche (Goethe-Lieder), M. Petersen, J. Springer (released on March 13, 2012) HMC 902904 | 58'52"

About the time that this disc was released in the United States, I listened to a live recital by the artists, soprano Marlis Petersen and pianist Jendrik Springer, from the Mozart-Saal of the Wiener Konzerthaus, through the Web site of Austrian radio (Österreichischer Rundfunk). Countless composers have set Goethe's words to song, and Petersen and Springer get top marks here for not selecting any of the expected choices, the songs that get performed all the time. This is true even for some of the most familiar poetry: Gretchen's spinning song is presented in the setting of Richard Wagner, and Mignon's Kennst du das Land in that of Alphons Diepenbrock (1862-1921). Six settings of the poem Wandrers Nachtlied II ("Ein Gleiches") -- which Goethe wrote on the wall of a Thuringian hunting-lodge near Ilmenau on a visit to the Kickelhahn -- punctuate the recital, and apart from the first, by Robert Schumann, none is particularly familiar.

Beyond those few obvious choices, the texts are hardly familiar either, words spoken by or about several Goethe characters: in addition to Gretchen and Mignon, Stella from the 1775 play Stella, Klärchen from Egmont, Suleika from Marianne von Millemer, Philine (also from Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre), and Helena in Faust. The composers represented include, besides the expected ones like Robert Schumann, Hugo Wolf, Franz Schubert, and Franz Liszt, names like Ernst Krenek, Walter Braunfels, Wilhelm Kempff, Hans Sommer, Charles Ives, Nicolay Medtner, and Manfred Trojahn. Petersen came onto many American listeners' radar when she served as a whirlwind replacement for Natalie Dessay as Ophélie in Hamlet at the Metropolitan Opera in 2010, but she deserves your attention on her own artistic merits. It is not a voice of infinite warmth and largesse, noteworthy more for its clarity and piercing qualities than being the sort of voice you just want to wrap yourself up in, paired here with the sensitive accompanying of Jendrik Springer.

A faultless sense of intonation and a certain adventurousness make her a natural fit for the challenging music of Manfred Trojahn, which Petersen has championed a number of times. His substantial monologue on the Helen of Troy texts from Faust, composed in 2008 and recorded here for the first time, is a fine contribution to this body of music. It makes a good pairing with the Stella monologue by Krenek that opens the disc, also receiving its first recording along with the Braunfels song Der Trommel gerühret and two of the Wandrers Nachtlied songs. Marlis Petersen will give a version of this recital at Carnegie Hall on October 26, an event unfortunately not being replicated by Vocal Arts D.C. At least not yet.

Briefly Noted: 'Silfra'

Silfra, H. Hahn, Hauschka (released on May 22, 2012) DG B0016798-02 | 52'02"

The PR on this new disc has been in full force, so you have surely heard of it by now. The fruit of a collaboration between the violinist Hilary Hahn and the prepared piano player Hauschka (AKA Volker Bertelmann), it is a set of tracks improvised in Iceland. The music was inspired by a place named Silfra, in the Þingvallavatn Lake, where the rift between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates is located. The style of music hovers between rock drive and New Age meditation, with both players creating some unexpected and generally attractive sounds on their instruments. Readers in Washington already know that we have recommended the duo's performance tonight, at The Birchmere in Alexandria (June 18, 7:30 pm), part of a national tour to promote the album.

So, this is obviously an important release, and it marks a departure of sorts for Hilary Hahn, who has many accomplishments but is not generally thought of as an improviser. In fact, as Anne Midgette has written in a fine piece for the Washington Post, improvisation is an area that most classical musicians avoid -- with notable exceptions among historically informed performance musicians and organists. In fact, if you are looking to hear what a top-notch classically trained musician can do as an improviser, the first thing to do would be to attend a service at certain churches -- Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, for one, and the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the National Cathedral, and St. Patrick's in the City to name just a few local examples. The problem is that Hahn is a dabbler, even though this project was not her first foray into improvisation, and that is evident in the recording. Improvisation is actually something that requires a lot of work (this from someone who has only dabbled in it, and the hours of transcribing other people's improvisations, so that I could play them note for note, were excruciating), at least to make it more than just a sort of parlor trick, to be able to make music that is not only pleasing, that hits the chord changes and generally makes musical sense, but that also holds one's interest beyond just the moment.

Silfra, for me at least, does not do that. Over several listenings, it became less and less interesting each time. It has some lovely, atmospheric moments -- the cold, still air of the opening track, the crackling energy of Bounce Bounce and Sink, the sort of underwater world of Rift -- with musical ideas that evoke cracking ice, whale calls, volcanic bubbling, dripping water, and a whole moonscape of otherworldly sounds. It has been no secret at least as far back as Henry Cowell and John Cage's first experiments with the prepared piano that the instrument can be forced to make all sorts of unusual sounds. Hauschka pulls out a whole bag of tricks in this department that provide most of the musical interest in the collaboration. As much as it tickles the ear the first couple times around, the disc just left me cold, but it will still be interesting to find out what impression this odd couple makes in live performance.

Will Robin has much more in-depth thoughts on this disc at his blog, Seated Ovation.

SVILUPPO:
Anne Midgette, Hahn and Hauschka at Birchmere (Washington Post, June 20)

In Brief: At the Lake Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to online audio, online video, and other good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• From London's Royal Festival Hall, Marin Alsop conducts pianist Stephen Hough and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, in music by Martinů, Liszt, and Dvořák. [France Musique]


• From the Wiener Festwochen, Rudolf Buchbinder joins Concentus Musicus Wien and Nikolaus Harnoncourt for music of Mozart. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Listen to violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann join the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra for a program of music by Wagner, Dvořák, and Mendelssohn. [France Musique]


• Hear Kalevi Aho's recent concerto for timpani trombone and orchestra, part of a concert by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• From the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon, a recital by pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, with music by Haydn and Debussy. [France Musique]


• A recording of Mozart's Idomeneo, made at Glyndebourne in 1964, with Luciano Pavarotti, among others. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• From the Göttingen International Handel Festival, a concert by soprano Eugénie Warnier and Les Talens Lyriques, with music by Couperin, Montéclair, Handel, Lambert, and more. [France Musique]


• Gleb Ivanov plays a recital of music by Liszt and Schubert, in the Auditorium du Louvre. [France Musique]


• The Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, under conductor Jean Deroyer, celebrate the 60th birthday of composer Philippe Manoury, plus the world premiere of Yann Robin's Inferno, a new work for orchestra and electronics based on Dante. [France Musique]


• The Quatuor Zemlinsky and pianist Varduhi Yeritsyan perform chamber music by Beethoven, Webern, and Dvořák at the Dominican Church of Guebwiller as part of the festival "Les Musicales de Colmar." [France Musique]


• Also from Colmar, soprano Kiera Duffy, Marc Coppey, and seven other cellists perform a concert of music by Villa-Lobos, Bruno Mantovani, Pierre Boulez, and Jean-Louis Florentz. [France Musique]


• Lang Lang performs a concert, with friends, to celebrate his 30th birthday. [ARTE Live Web]

À mon chevet: 'Bel-Ami'

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

The inspiration and true editors of La Vie Française were a half-dozen deputies interested in all the speculations that moved or sustained the director. In the newsroom they were called "Walter's Band," and they were envied because they were supposed to earn money with him and through him. Forestier, the political editor, was only the straw man of these business men, the one who executed the plans suggested by them. They whispered important articles to him, that he was going to write on his own to be at peace, he used to say. But, in order to give the newspaper a literary and Parisian sheen, they had attached to it two famous writers in different genres: Jacques Rival, a chronicler of news, and Norbert de Varenne, a poet and fantastical writer, or rather story-teller, following the new school. Then they had acquired, at bargain prices, critics of art, painting, music, theater, a crime editor, and a horse-racing editor, among the mercenary gang of do-everything writers. Two worldly women, "Pink Domino" and "White Paw," sent in worldly bits, on questions of fashion, elegant living, etiquette, savoir-vivre, and put to paper indiscretions about great ladies. And La Vie Française "navigated on the deep and even deeper," guided by all these different hands. [emphasis mine]

-- Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami, pp. 154-55 (my translation)

Has so much really changed about how a newspaper is run since the time of Guy de Maupassant? The recent film adaptation of this excellent novel, reviewed last week, left out far too much of Maupassant's narrative, including the vivid monologue by Norbert de Varenne, spoken to Duroy as they walk to his home from a dinner party, about the agony of old age, no longer ascending the mountain as young men but passing the summit and descending the other side toward death, as well as a vivid portrayal of a somewhat ridiculous but terrifying duel that Duroy fights with a journalist from another newspaper who has accused him of lying. The film may not have been that good, but I thank those who made it for getting me started on a Maupassant kick this summer.

Avi Avital and the Miraculous Mandolin

Charles T. Downey, Mandolinist Avi Avital
Washington Post, June 15, 2012

J. S. Bach, Concertos (arr.), Avi Avital (mandolin), Kammerakademie Potsdam

The mandolin is an odd instrument on which to build a solo performing career as a classical musician, but Avi Avital seems poised to do just that. Born in Israel and trained there and in Italy, he has experimented with crossover ventures, but his first solo album with Deutsche Grammophon, released this week, is devoted to transcriptions of Bach concertos.

As revealed at a concert Wednesday at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society, Avital is an accomplished musician but will probably remain a specialty act. The mandolin’s sound had considerable charm, helped along by discreet but still slightly canned amplification, but it has limitations in holding the ear’s attention over a sustained period. It worked best in music closest to the instrument’s home repertoire, a revelatory performance of Bartok’s “Seven Romanian Dances.” Composed on the piano and later arranged for orchestra, these folk miniatures became hypnotic when arranged for the mandolin, the little dissonant inflections seeming to make perfect sense. [Continue reading]

Avi Avital, mandolin
Washington Performing Arts Society
Sixth and I Historic Synagogue

June Chamber Festival II

This review is an Ionarts exclusive.

The annual June Chamber Festival at the Kreeger Museum comes to its conclusion this week. We managed to get there for the second of the three concerts, on Tuesday evening, and while the results from the American Chamber Players have improved from last year, the impression remains that the main draw of these concerts is the unusual repertoire and the beauty of the venue. Cellist Stephen Balderston had to withdraw from this year's concerts, following a shoulder surgery, but he was replaced quite ably by Israeli-born cellist Inbal Segev.

The evening opened with Mozart's Duo in G Major for violin and viola, K. 423, a piece recently noted in a disc of duo sonatas by Rachel Podger and Jane Rogers. It is a pleasing piece under most circumstances, only solo passages did reveal some infelicities in both soloists. It was paired with even less substantial fare, Kuhlau's Trio in G Major, op. 119, a piece interesting to hear if less interesting to hear again. The problem in this performance came from the fact that the work was created for two flutes and piano, requiring Segev to curtail her sound quite severely in this arrangement for flute, cello, and piano (by Nicholas Louis, as it turns out), so as not to overwhelm the generally fine playing of flutist Sara Stern. It worked in most places, but in others the two instruments were unbalanced. Pianist Anna Stoytcheva continued to be the most musical player in the group, with just one minor slip, expertly recovered, in the Kuhlau.

Other Reviews: Stephen Brookes, American Chamber Players’ soothing program comes with a punch (Washington Post, June 11, 2012) Charles T. Downey, June Chamber Festival at the Kreeger Museum (Washington Post, June 12, 2011)

The second half yielded far greater interest, beginning with an unusual trio for flute, viola, and cello by Albert Roussel (op. 40). The unexpected combination of instruments is outpaced by the work's musical eccentricities, with moods ranging from happy-go-lucky (the sunny first theme) to sultry (the sensuous second movement) and obsessive, with some truly odd passages, like the squeaky harmonics in the last movement. The evening concluded with Bedřich Smetana's Piano Trio in G Minor, op. 15, composed in response to the death of his eldest daughter, Bedřiška, in 1855. (It was a decade of tragedy for the composer, as he lost two younger daughters and eventually his wife in the same period.) The first movement had considerable heft, with themes steeped in tragic sadness, airy sweetness (Smetana once remarked that the ethereal second theme was related to a tune beloved of his daughter), and heroic resolution, while neither of the other two movement seems quite able to decide if it is a slow movement or something else. After many interesting formal diversions, however, the work comes to a somewhat unsatisfying conclusion, with a heavy-handed funeral march and a surprise major resolution.

The June Chamber Festival at the Kreeger Museum concludes this Friday (June 15, 7:30 pm), when the American Chamber Players are joined by harpist Elizabeth Hainen, for music by Dvořák, Debussy, Donizetti, and Dohnányi.