Final Thoughts on WNO 'Magic Flute'

Eri Nakamura (Pamina) and Anna Siminska (Queen of the Night) in The Magic Flute, Washington National Opera (photo by Scott Suchman)

The Washington National Opera's production of Mozart's Magic Flute has almost reached the end of its run. I have written about the production and the singers heard at the first performance and added some thoughts on some of the cast's alternate singers heard at the second performance. Thursday night's performance offered the chance to hear the last two singers in the cast.

Polish soprano Anna Siminska was indisposed at the second performance, when she was to have taken over the Queen of the Night from Kathryn Lewek. She went on on Thursday night and gave an accomplished if not immaculate rendition of the role's two dastardly arias, her dramatic stage presence enhanced by an accented pronunciation of the English words. The top notes were a little unreliable in both cases, although one had to admire her composure after she took a tumble to the floor in the middle of Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen, after appearing to trip on the hem of her costume. With a helping hand from her Pamina, Eri Nakamura (who went on for an indisposed Maureen McKay), she stood back up without missing a beat and finished the aria.

The odd alteration schedule was in the role of Sarastro, with four early performances given to Soloman Howard and the rest to another American bass, Jordan Bisch, in his WNO debut. He was less stiff in the role, although not as solid vocally as Howard, taking some time for his voice to settle and not as resonant overall. First and second impressions of the rest of the cast remained largely the same, with the pleasing exception of the three ladies, who seemed to have improved their ensemble balance, with the lower two voices sounding a little more contained, thus stretching the first soprano into less strain. In the orchestra, the many fine solos by the flute stood out for praise, too. The video design and costumes did not become less distracting, and the English adaptation grated more on my ear. If you want to remind yourself of what the text is really like, as I did, here is the German text and a literal English translation.

Two performances of this production remain, tonight and tomorrow, in the Kennedy Center Opera House.

Jeanine de Bique @ NMWA

A. Previn, Honey and Rue, K. Battle, Orchestra of St. Luke's, A. Previn (DG, 1996)

Charles T. Downey, Soprano Jeanine De Bique shows range, refinement in song program (Washington Post, May 16, 2014)

Jeanine De Bique’s voice has grown in refinement and range since her local debut in 2009, judging by the mixed review she received then in these pages. The young soprano from Trinidad shone Wednesday night, in spite of reportedly being under the weather, in a program of American songs and lieder by Richard Strauss and Hugo Wolf in the intimate auditorium of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Strauss’s “Ophelia-Lieder” highlighted De Bique’s dramatic stage presence... [Continue reading]

Jeanine de Bique, soprano
Shenson Chamber Music Concerts
National Museum of Women in the Arts

Lawrence Brownlee @ Vocal Arts

Virtuoso Rossini Arias, L. Brownlee, Kaunas City Symphony Orchestra, C. Orbelian (Delos, 2014) Spiritual Sketches, L. Brownlee, D. Sneed (2013)

It is always good when Lawrence Brownlee is back in town. The American tenor has been featured in these pages many times before, at Wolf Trap, where he got his start, Washington National Opera, Vocal Arts Society, Washington Concert Opera (and in 2006), and as winner of the Marian Anderson Award. Since we first started writing about him, he has become an international star, most deservedly, just closing out the Metropolitan Opera season, for example, in I Puritani. In accordance with that prominence, perhaps, Vocal Arts D.C. presented Brownlee at Lisner Auditorium on Tuesday night, without seeming to sell many more tickets than would have filled their usual venue, the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. In terms of acoustic and average vantage point, the latter is a superior place to hear this kind of recital, although Brownlee had no trouble filling the larger hall with his consistently lovely voice.

As noted before, in terms of being a song recitalist, Brownlee is not to the manner born. In his first half, problems with pronunciation in sets of songs by Verdi, Poulenc, and Joseph Marx impeded the impact of Brownlee's otherwise fine performance. He was most comfortable when the song gave him a character to play with, like the chimney sweep yelling in the street in Verdi's Lo spazzacamino. Where the music required more of a focus on recitation of poetry and melodic line, he was hampered, but the sweet legato of his sound came across in the slower songs, if without the pyrotechnics of bel canto opera, his specialty, his voice did not have as much occasion to shine. The high point of the first half was a set of delectable songs by Joseph Marx, a composer who deserves a full-fledged resurrection from obscurity. Here and in the Poulenc songs, pianist Kevin Murphy tamed the daring keyboard accompaniments, like the mischievous prancing of Marx's charming Die Elfe, with panache and sensitivity, support that allowed Brownlee to open up vocally, as in the gorgeous Hat dich die Liebe berührt.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Lawrence Brownlee offers arc of self-revelation in Vocal Arts DC recital (Washington Post, May 15)

Alberto Ginastera's Cinco canciones popolares argentias provided a more experimental flavor, with crunchy dissonance in a spare, even barren setting of simple folk poems. Spanish seemed like a language that Brownlee has studied more carefully, so the easier sense of diction helped the performance. The same was true in the concluding American sets, beginning with Ben Moore's Broadway-style songs on poetry by Yeats and Joyce. The concert reached its high point with a set of five spirituals, in arrangements made for Brownlee by Damien Sneed, drawn from their recent recording together. Most classical singers who attempt to sing spirituals have not grown up in that tradition, with predictably stilted results.

Brownlee, like the luscious soprano Krysty Swann, heard a couple years ago, cut his musical teeth on this music. Sneed, who hails from Georgia and has a similar dual background in Gospel and classical music, has made attractive, moving adaptations of lesser-known tunes, which set in the sweet spot of Brownlee's voice were devastatingly effective. Certainly, not a dry eye was left in the house when Brownlee dedicated All night, all day, with its angelic falsetto vocalises, to his son, Caleb, who is on the autistic spectrum. (Hear it for yourself as recorded for an NPR Tiny Desk Concert.) The ovations earned three encores, Schubert’s Der Jüngling an der Quelle, the sentimental Be My Love, and -- finally -- an opera aria, Il mio tesoro from Mozart's Don Giovanni.

The 2014-15 season from Vocal Arts D.C. will feature recitals by Matthew Rose, Pretty Yende, John Brancy, Matthew Polenzani, Karine Deshayes, Karen Cargill, and the New York Festival of Song (featuring soprano Corinne Winters and tenor Theo Lebow).

Briefly Noted: Helmchen and d'Indy

V. d'Indy, Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français (inter alia), M. Helmchen, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, M. Janowski (PentaTone, 2011)

All too often, soloists play the same concertos over and over again. Every time that a performer makes a recording of a forgotten full-length work with orchestra, an angel gets its wings. Not coincidentally, these performers tend to rank high in my estimation for other reasons, too, like Bertrand Chamayou, who brought César Franck's Les Djinns to my attention a couple years ago. It comes as no surprise that Martin Helmchen, whose debut recital last week was one of the highlights of my year so far, has done the same thing. When I finally got around to listening to the German pianist's recording of Vincent d'Indy's Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français, a fine bit of listening, if not a masterpiece by any stretch of the definition, was waiting for me. (Not that it has never been recorded before: Aldo Ciccolini, Robert Casadesus, and even Jean-Yves Thibaudet have done it.) The "French mountain song" in question is a real one, collected by the composer in the Cévennes mountain range in the Massif Central, where d'Indy's family hailed from (although he was born in Paris), and it is given first to the English horn. Andrew Deruchie, in his recent book The French Symphony at the Fin de Siècle: Style, Culture, and the Symphonic Tradition, cites Berlioz's Harold en Italie as the most important model for d'Indy in this work, "replacing the exotic Abruzzi with his native Cévennes." Rather than thinking of the choice of the melody as a nationalistic gesture, Deruchie situates it as a parallel to peasant imagery in paintings by realists like Millet, Pissarro, and Van Gogh. Although he dedicated the piece to his first piano soloist, d'Indy took pains to maintain that the work should be thought of as a symphony, not as a piano concerto. Helmchen and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande embrace the piece's Romantic qualities, both delicate and over the top. Marek Janowski throws in two other lesser-known works of the same period, Saint-Saëns's second symphony and Chausson's Soir de fête.

Mendelssohn Piano Trio, Understated Beethoven

Charles T. Downey, Mendelssohn Piano Trio studies Beethoven
Washington Post, May 13, 2014

Beethoven, Piano Trios, opp. 70/2, 97, I. Faust, J.-G. Queyras, A. Melnikov (Harmonia Mundi, 2014)

The Mendelssohn Piano Trio plans to perform all of Beethoven’s piano trios during the next three years, a journey that began Sunday afternoon at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Steinway Series. Each of these concerts promised to include a work from the composer’s early, middle and late periods. This could offer insight into Beethoven’s lifelong interest in the piano trio, but although the group’s performance was competent, this was a curiously somnolent concert.

Much of this seemed to come down to the reticent playing style of cellist Fiona Thompson, who was often so self-effacing that she could barely be heard. This was less of a problem in the earlier pieces, where the cello part is often doubled by the pianist’s left hand... [Continue reading]

Mendelssohn Piano Trio
Music of Beethoven
Steinway Series
Smithsonian American Art Museum

Hats off for Martin Helmchen

Martin Helmchen, winner of the Clara Haskil Competition in 2001, when he was not yet 20 years old, has come in for a lot of praise in these pages, in Schubert, Shostakovich, and more Schubert. It is a thrill to have one's expectations for a performer, on the basis of his recordings (he signed with PentaTone in 2007), be exceeded on hearing him live. This is what happened at Helmchen's Washington debut recital, presented by Washington Performing Arts on Saturday afternoon in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, where he leaped to or at least near the top of my estimation among performers of every composer whose music he played. Since WPAS President Jenny Bilfield was not in the audience, undoubtedly preparing for the WPAS Gala later that evening, let me say that if Helmchen is willing to come back to Washington every other year, WPAS should host him regularly. (Perhaps a duo recital with his wife, cellist Marie-Elisabeth Hecker, too.)

First, there was Bach, the fourth partita (D major, BWV 828), which showcased many sides of Helmchen's playing, starting with a big, brassy touch in the Overture, the dotted section powered by velvety runs and with a crank-up of energy on the repeat, leading to fun embellishments. In the fugal section, he layered the contrapuntal voices with different kinds of articulations, his foot light on the sustaining pedal. The Allemande had a completely different, scaled-down feel, like an intimate dance in which Helmchen caressed each unusual harmonic area and curl of melody. The Courante was back to a bigger sound, but without the jagged tune cutting the ears, and in the Aria, Helmchen took all sorts of rhythmic liberties, like a singer taking care with the words, full of verve. No one can play this partita without coming up with a solution to the little solo right-hand flight of fancy in the Sarabande: Helmchen did not add any pedal, just allowed it to twist off into its own quirky thoughts, letting it hang there, glimmering. The addition of some notes inégales to the Menuett showed a familiarity with Baroque harpsichord specialists, and the Gigue left no doubts as to Helmchen's technical prowess.

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In Brief: Call Your Mom Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to online audio, online video, and other good things in Blogville and Beyond. (After clicking to an audio or video stream, press the "Play" button to start the broadcast.) Some of these streams become unavailable after a few days.

• Watch Kristjan Järvi conduct the MDR Sinfonieorchester Leipzig and MDR Rundfunkchor Leipzig in music of Steve Reich, with the composer in attendance at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. [Medici.tv]


• Watch the performance of Doctor Atomic by John Adams, with Patrick Davin conducting the Opéra National du Rhin. [Medici.tv]


• Listen to a performance of Francesco Cavalli's opera Elena, recorded last month at the Opéra de Lille. [France Musique]


• From Carnegie Hall, the Seattle Symphony performs BecomeOcean, by John Luther Adams, winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize for New Composition. [WQXR]


• The New York Philharmonic performs Christopher Rouse's Requiem at Carnegie Hall. [WQXR]


• From the Wiener Staatsoper, listen to a performance of Verdi's Nabucco, starring Placido Domingo and Anna Smirnova. [ORF]


• Listen to the broadcast of Rossini's La Cenerentola from the Metropolitan Opera, starring Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Florez. [RTBF]


• Riccardo Muti leads the Vienna Philharmonic in Berlioz's Messe Solenelle and Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony, recorded at the Wiener Festwochen. [ORF]


• A rare performance of Gioseffo Zamponi's Ulisse all’isola di Circe, featuring the Cappella Mediterranea. [RTBF]

Read more »

In Focus: Tarik O'Regan

Charles T. Downey, Washington Chorus performs work of British composer Tarik O’Regan to admirable effect
Washington Post, May 10, 2014

T. O'Regan, Scattered Rhymes (inter alia), Orlando Consort, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, P. Hillier (Harmonia Mundi, 2008)

When Julian Wachner took over the Washington Chorus, he introduced more contemporary music into the ensemble’s often staid repertoire. This included establishing a series called “New Music for a New Age,” a portrait of a living choral composer in both performance and conversation. The latest of these concerts, on Thursday night at the Church of the Epiphany, was devoted to the music of Tarik O’Regan.

The British composer’s champions include big names in the choral world, like The Sixteen, Conspirare, and choirs led by Paul Hillier, who have all made recordings available from Harmonia Mundi and other labels. What I have heard, including in this concert, has much to justify recommending it... [Continue reading]

New Music for a New Age: Tarik O'Regan
The Washington Chorus
Novus NY String Quartet
Church of the Epiphany

SEE ALSO:
Patrick McCoy, An interview with British composer Tarik O'Regan (Washington Examiner, May 7)

Charles T. Downey, Briefly Noted: Tarik O'Regan (Ionarts, May 9)