PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Francis Poulenc — DIALOGUES OF THE CARMELITES (S. M. Mihm, E. Wolber Scheuring, L. Swann, M. Callahan, R. Anthony, A. Goff, D. MacIntosh, N. Dankner, D. Jackenheimer; UNCG Opera Theatre, 7 April 2016)

FRANCIS POULENC (1899 – 1963): Dialogues of the Carmelites—Shelley Marie Mihm (Blanche de la Force), Emily Wolber Scheuring (Madame de Croissy), Lyndsey Swann (Madame Lidoine), Megan Callahan (Mother Marie of the Incarnation), Rachel Anthony (Sister Constance of St. Denis), Allyson Goff (Mother Jeanne of the Child Jesus), Dana MacIntosh (Sister Mathilde), Nicholas Dankner (The Marquis de la Force), Derek Jackenheimer (The Chevalier de la Force), Michaela Kelly (Mother Gerald), Emily Frye (Sister Claire), Grace McKinnon (Sister Antoine), Emily Armstrong (Sister Catherine), Ashley Buffa (Sister Felicity), Jessica Hannah (Sister Gertrude), Brittany Infranco (Sister Alice), Olivia Boddicker (Sister Valentine), Mary B. Safrit (Sister Anne of the Cross), Shelby Thiedeman (Sister Martha), Cassie Machamer (Sister St. Charles), Jesse Herndon (The Father Confessor), Benjamin Ramsey (First Commissaire, Second Officer), Baker Lawrimore (Second Commissaire, First Officer), James Scarantino (Jailer), Brent Byhre (Thierry, Monsieur Javelinot); UNCG School of Music, Theatre and Dance Opera Theatre Orchestra and Chorus; David Holley, Conductor, Stage Director, Producer, and Music Director [Donna Rendely, Chorus Master; Amanda Warriner, Scenic Designer; Deborah Bell, Costume Designer; Louis Costanzo, Lighting Designer; Shane Burgett, Technical Director; University of North Carolina at Greensboro School of Music, Theatre and Dance Opera Theatre, Aycock Auditorium, Greensboro, North Carolina; Thursday, 7 April 2016]

Opera in the Twenty-First Century is often compelled to make Herculean efforts to justify an anachronistic relevance that was never among the genre’s foremost objectives. From the time of the first performance of Jacopo Peri’s Dafne, likely in the 1598 Carnevale season, composers of opera have repeatedly reiterated in diaries, correspondence, conversations, and interviews that their goals in writing for the stage have been, as Händel reflected about the creation of his Messiah, to educate and enlighten audiences. That this requires relevance is a modern conceit that belittles composers’ achievements and audiences’ intelligence. Heroes and deities of Antiquity are no more relevant in any meaningful sense to Twenty-First-Century audiences than they were to observers in previous centuries, but the ways in which composers translated the all-too-human stories of these irrelevant figures of fable, myth, and distant history into music transcend modern notions of relevance. Composed between 1953 and 1956, during a tumultuous period in the composer’s life, Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites tells the story of the sixteen martyrs of Compiègne, Carmelites whose courageous refusal to denounce their faith and austere way of life led to their condemnation and execution by France’s Convention nationale in 1794. Though at odds with some aspects of Church doctrine, Poulenc embraced Catholicism whilst Dialogues of the Carmelites took shape, his spirituality perhaps arising from the uncertainty and recriminations that gripped France as the nation grappled with the fallout from Nazi collaboration, resistance, and the Holocaust. It was Poulenc’s explicit wish that the opera always be performed in the vernacular of the audience at hand: the world première at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala in 1957, five months before the French premième in Paris, was therefore sung in Italian, and the British and American premières were given in English. Furthering this tradition, UNCG Opera Theatre’s production employs the excellent English translation of Poulenc’s original libretto by Joseph Machlis*, removing any linguistic barriers between the opera and the audience. Returning Dialogues of the Carmelites to Greensboro after an absence of nearly two decades, this production serves as a powerful reminder of the awesome kinetic energy of opera. If two-and-a-half hours of music can break the heart with reminiscences of the dialogues of ladies whose voices were silenced more than two centuries ago, what need is there for concocted relevance?

With atmospheric, visually compelling scenic designs by Amanda Warriner and costume designs by Deborah Bell that both firmly established the drama’s provenance and emphasized the Carmelites’ isolation from the world in which their communal destiny was determined, UNCG Opera Theatre’s production succeeded more completely than many productions by well-funded professional opera companies at bringing the composer’s intentions to the stage with poignant immediacy. Imaginatively but clear-headedly illuminated by Louis Costanzo’s lighting designs and brought off with utter conviction under the guidance of Technical Director Shane Burgett, the blocking and stage action could virtually have been used to transcribe Poulenc’s stage directions verbatim. Regrettably, this observation might be misconstrued as having a negative connotation, the notion of following a composer’s instructions having become anathema in many operatically-inclined camps, but it is very gratifying to witness a production in which a pervasive respect of the composer’s specifications is the obvious core of the design team’s focus. In truth, Dialogues of the Carmelites is an opera that can withstand updating: relocate the ladies of Compiègne to occupied France during World War II or the modern Paris of François Hollande, and their story is no less harrowing than when they are allowed to dwell in 1790s France. How much more challenging it is to combine creative license with fidelity to the composer, however, and UNCG Opera Theatre’s production disclosed how sublime the results of such endeavors can be, providing the audience with a Dialogues of the Carmelites that complemented Poulenc’s music rather than distracting from it. Like the celebrated John Dexter production at The Metropolitan Opera, this Dialogues offered strikingly memorable tableaux of incredible beauty and emotional impact. With a production of this quality representing the nurturing of the next generation of guardians of opera, is the oft-expressed fear for the genre’s survival truly rational?

La foi dans les chaînes: a scene from UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, April 2016 [Photo by Rachel Anthony, © by rayphotographyco.com]

Poulenc scored Dialogues of the Carmelites for two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons (one doubling on contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, two harps, piano, timpani, percussion, and strings. Musically, the opera is a triumph of fundamental tonalism, the prevailing idiom of the vocal writing being, as Poulenc readily admitted, unapologetically rooted in late-Romantic tradition. Though Madame de Croissy’s death scene and the opera’s final minutes are gruesome, the music never abandons the rich lodes of melody and innovative but consistently tonal harmonies that Poulenc mines throughout the score. Under the baton of the production’s conductor, producer, Stage Director, and Music Director David Holley, the UNCG Opera Theatre Orchestra musicians executed their parts with extraordinary vigor, clearly inspired by Holley’s leadership. The score’s difficulties were mostly conquered with absolute confidence. Bringing to his guidance of this production experience with Dialogues of the Carmelites that began in graduate school and encompasses a presentation of the opera at Greensboro’s Our Lady of Grace Church in 1997, Holley divulged an abiding affection for this music that shone in his handling of every bar of the score. Conceived in twelve scenes with interconnecting orchestral interludes, the construction of Dialogues of the Carmelites is not unlike that of Britten’s Peter Grimes, and the operas share the central theme of an individual at odds with the wider community. As in Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, there is perhaps a link between Blanche’s predicament and an artist’s relationship with society, but this production approached Blanche and her companions in the Carmel de Compiègne not as archetypes or symbols of elements of universal social orders but as people, wondrously complex in their simplicity, whose lives intersected at a specific, tragic historical crossroads. Holley adopted tempi that highlighted the skill with which Poulenc wrote for voices and instruments, the conductor’s instinctive understanding of the composer’s exquisite vocal writing enabling the listener to fully experience the rousing breadth of Poulenc’s creation. A singer himself, Holley conducts in a manner that seemed to breathe with the singers, and his approach to Dialogues of the Carmelites balanced nuanced negotiations of the composer’s demands with close but not coddling support of singers and instrumentalists.

Student productions at even the most prestigious institutions can be compromised by unfinished, ‘green’ singing, but a particular strength of UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Dialogues of the Carmelites was the uniformly high standard of the singers’ work; a standard, set in the opera’s opening scene, from which the young, hearteningly capable cast never deviated. Each of the ladies portraying the martyrs of Compiègne—Dana MacIntosh as Sister Mathilde, Michaela Kelley as Mother Gérald, Emily Frye as Sister Claire, Grace McKinnon as Sister Antoine, Emily Armstrong as Sister Catherine, Ashley Buffa as Sister Félicité, Jessica Hannah as Sister Gertrude, Brittany Infranco as Sister Alice, Olivia Boddicker as Sister Valentine, Mary B. Safrit as Sister Anne of the Cross, Shelby Thiedeman as Sister Martha, and Cassie Machamer as Sister St. Charles—sang her part with integrity. Temporary weaknesses rapidly passed into insignificance, and both the ensemble of Carmelites and the excellent UNCG Opera Theatre Chorus, fastidiously prepared by Chorus Master Donna Rendely, substantially enhanced the professionalism of the performance, singing not only with musicality but with audible conviction.

Doubling as the First and Second Commissaires and the Officers, tenor Benjamin Ramsey and bass Baker Lawrimore brought firm tones and dramatic involvement to their performances. In the scene in Act Two in which the Carmelites are matter-of-factly informed of their impending expulsion from their cloister, the cold indifference of the text was reflected in the vocalism. Likewise, baritone James V. Scarantino was an imposing Jailer. Baritone Brent Byhre, the energetic Strephon in Greensboro Light Opera and Song’s 2015 production of Gilbert’s and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, sang handsomely as the valet Thierry and Monsieur Javelinot, the physician who tends to the Old Prioress during her final agony. As an industrious, concerned Chaplain, tenor Jesse Herndon sang ‘My faithful daughters, I know that some among you already have heard what I m about to say’ in Act Two with the concentration that the dramatic importance of the character’s words demands. Likewise, mezzo-soprano Allyson Goff met every demand of Poulenc’s music for Mother Jeanne of the Child Jesus, her voicing of ‘My sisters, our Reverent Mother is coming to say goodbye to you all, for she must go to Paris tonight’ in Act Two disclosing an insightful use of text allied with a focused voice of great potential.

Fils et père: Tenor Derek Jackenheimer as the Chevalier de la Force (left) and baritone James V. Scarantino as the Marquis de la Force (right; performing on 8 April) in UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, April 2016 [Photo by Rachel Anthony, © by rayphotographyco.com]

Tenor Derek Jackenheimer, unforgettable in UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Philip Glass’s Galileo Galilei, and baritone Nicholas Dankner were a musically and dramatically well-matched son and father as the Chevalier and Marquis de la Force. In the opening scene of Act One, father and brother conducted their discussion about the worryingly unconventional Blanche with appropriate gravity. Only Dankner’s youth undermined the credibility of his portrayal of the troubled Marquis, whose wig, incidentally, made him uncannily resemble Beethoven. In Act Two, Jackenheimer brought moving urgency to the Chevalier’s scene with Blanche at the cloister. Urging his willful sister to abandon the Carmelite community in order to seek refuge from the Terror among her family, he voiced ‘Blanche, why do you behave like this?’ with frustrated anger. The discord between brother and sister, only partially set right by their reconciliation at the scene’s end, set the tone for the balance of the opera, and Jackenheimer’s agitated presence contributed to comprehension of the foundations of Blanche’s complicated psychology. As used here, baritone and tenor possess voices destined for admirable careers.

Mother Marie of the Incarnation, the stern voice of dogmatic rigidity within the Carmelite community, was sung by mezzo-soprano Megan Callahan with ironclad assurance and a wide emotional spectrum that was evidence of what promises to develop into a noteworthy interpretive acuity. Reacting to the Old Prioress’s death throes in Act One, Callahan lent Mother Marie’s dire proclamations startling intensity, especially in her appalled objections to the sisters seeing the Old Prioress in her diminished state. A suggestion of humanity was infused by the singer into the Act Two scene in which Mother Marie confronts Blanche as she begins to leave the Old Prioress’s corpse unattended, and the voice rang out with even greater impact. Mother Marie’s greatest challenges come in Act Three, and Callahan delivered ‘My daughters, I propose that we take upon ourselves the vow of martyrdom, to give our lives for the glory of Carmel and the salvation of our land’ with a determination that conveyed the character’s formidable zealotry. Later entreating Blanche to return to the company of her Carmelite sisters, this Mother Marie was torn between maternal kindness and exasperation with her frightened, recalcitrant charge. Finally, learning from the Chaplain that the Carmelites have been condemned and will soon be executed, she lamented the dishonor of her broken vow, a crippling failure made devastatingly momentous in this performance. In many ways, Mother Marie is the most enigmatic of the opera’s characters and one of the most vividly drawn by Poulenc. Callahan portrayed her not as an unfeeling gorgon but as a woman whose harshness seemed to arise from vulnerability. There was no harshness in Callahan’s vocalism, however: her unforced vocalism and solidity of tone throughout the range were most welcome in music too often subjected to stridency.

Sœur et frère: Soprano Ashley Oliveira as Blanche de la Force (left; performing on 8 April) and tenor Derek Jackenheimer as the Chevalier de la Force (right) in UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites [Photo by Rachel Anthony, © by rayphotographyco.com]

Performing the rôle of the fanciful but touchingly sincere young Sister Constance of Saint-Denis, soprano—and gifted photographer, as her photographs of this production prove—Rachel Anthony shaped her lines with freshness and grace, her description of Constance’s memories of her brother’s nuptial festivities in her native village just before taking her vows sparkling with girlish joy. Telling Blanche in Act One of her premonition of their shared death, Anthony’s Constance exuded innocence and seemed genuinely hurt when Blanche scoffed at her vision. In the Act Two scene in which Constance and Blanche stand vigil before the Old Prioress’s corpse, Anthony sang ‘One would think when He have such a death to her, our good Lord made a great mistake; like in a cloakroom when you’re given someone else’s coat’ with telling lightness, conveying the purity of spirit that enables the character to discuss matters of such import with levity and humor. Then, the seriousness of Anthony’s voicing of ‘We die not for ourselves alone, but we die for each other, or probably even instead of each other’ was evidence of the depth of through of which Constance is capable. This unexpected profundity is continued in Act Three in the noble-hearted sister’s confession that she was the source of the sole vote against taking the vow of martyrdom. Constance is not a traditional operatic seconda donna or confidante in the tradition of Belinda in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas or, more closely related, Suor Genovieffa in Puccini’s Suor Angelica, and Anthony’s performance, centered on youthful, attractive singing and particular brightness in her secure, exhilarating upper register, reminiscent of the young Roberta Peters, confirmed the significance of the character’s stature in Poulenc’s thoughtfully-wrought drama.

The Old Prioress, Madame de Croissy, received from mezzo-soprano Emily Wolber Scheuring a reading of sonorous vocal force and histrionic specificity. Phrasing expansively and rising to the uppermost reaches of her music with undaunted strength, Scheuring was visually too young to be fully believable as the illness-ridden Old Prioress even with artful wig and makeup. From her first appearance in the second scene of Act One, though, she inhabited the rôle completely, impressively establishing the character’s pragmatism with her singing of ‘Do not believe this comfortable chair is a privilege of my position.’ There was tenderness in her statement of ‘My daughter, the outside world often questions the purpose of our Order’ to the uneasy Blanche, revealing the magnetism of the connection that she feels with the young postulant. Scheuring’s singing and acting in the Old Prioress’s death scene were riveting, her declamation of ‘God has become a shadow’ filling the auditorium with chilling sound. Her agonizing death fell like a pall upon the community that she safeguarded, but even the singer’s parlando last utterances were supremely musical. Only a few of the rôle’s lowest notes were of reduced brawn, partially owing to Scheuring’s careful negotiations of vocal registers, but her performance was gripping.

D'une génération à l'autre: Mezzo-soprano Natalie Rose Havens as Madame de Croissy (left) and soprano Ashley Oliveira as Blanche de la Force (right), both performing on 8 April, in UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, April 2016 [Photo by Rachel Anthony, © by rayphotographyco.com]

The rôle of Madame Lidoine, the Carmelite community’s new prioress, has one of the most prestigious and diverse sororities of first interpreters of any part in opera: Leyla Gencer in the Italian première, Régine Crespin in the French première, Dame Joan Sutherland in the British première, Hilde Zadek in the score’s first hearing in Austria, Leontyne Price in the San Francisco Opera production that introduced Poulenc’s intrepid nuns to America, and Shirley Verrett in the opera’s belated Metropolitan Opera première. In fact, these storied singers’ repertoires likely intersected in only two other rôles, Verdi’s Aida and Amelia in Un ballo in maschera. Astonishingly comfortable across the large compass of the New Prioress’s music, soprano Lyndsey Swann was even at this early juncture in her career by no means an inadequate successor to the great ladies of the stage from whom she inherited Madame Lidoine’s habit. Introducing herself to her new flock in Act Two, she phrased ‘My dear daughters, I don’t need to remind you of your terrible misfortune in losing your beloved Mother’ with the enthusiasm of a new leader eager to make a good impression. Responding to Constance’s lament for the state of the Church in Revolutionary France, Swann’s Madame Lidoine intoned ‘When there are no priests there’ll be martyrs in plenty, thus the balance of grace is very soon restored’ with unmistakable certainty of faith. She was resolute in correcting Mother Marie’s misunderstanding of the meaning of her comment about offering their lives for the survival of the Church, however, her voicing of ‘We are not allowed to decide if our humble names shall be inscribed among the martyrs’ lashing at her subordinate with stinging accuracy of intonation. In Act Three, the composed dignity with which ‘My daughters, we have almost come to the end of our first night in prison’ was sung to the desolate Carmelites was beautifully comforting, the singer’s voice enveloping her fellow nuns like a protecting embrace. The sadness that emanated from Swann’s singing of ‘My daughters, I wanted to save you, save you with all my heart’ completed Madame Lidoine’s transition from authority figure to fellow martyr, her heroism scaled to that of her companions. The amplitude of Swann’s voice suited Madame Lidoine’s music almost perfectly, and this compelling young artist unhesitatingly surrendered herself to Poulenc’s drama.

De cloître au martyre: a scene from UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, April 2016 [Photo by Rachel Anthony, © by rayphotographyco.com]

Blanche de la Force, the ostensible protagonist in an opera with a multitude of heroines, has a performance history no less distinguished than that of Madame Lidoine. Created at La Scala by Virginia Zeani, in Paris by Denise Duval, in London by Elsie Morison, and in San Francisco by Dorothy Kirsten, Blanche, too, makes incredible demands on the singer intrepid enough to don her drab attire. Minnesota-born soprano Shelley Marie Mihm met those demands unflinchingly, soaring above the stave with effortless control and sure pitch. Conversing with Blanche’s father and brother in the opening scene of Act One, she sang both ‘Little lambs do not often find themselves straying so far from the fold’ and ‘Dear father, there is no incident so small or unimportant that it is not written by the hand of God’ with musical and metaphysical muscle. As her cheerful victim observed, there was something ferocious in this Blanche’s query of ‘Are you not afraid that God will grow rather tired of your good humor?’ in her scene with Constance. The shame of having given in to fear and abandoned her watch over the Old Prioress’s remains was redoubled by Mother Marie’s insinuations, Swann’s voice quivering with emotion. Blanche’s scene with her brother, the Chevalier, brings to mind the famous encounter between Angelica and the implacable Zia principessa in Puccini’s Suor Angelica, and Swann matched wits with Jackenheimer viscerally, the soprano’s Blanche giving ‘I now am a daughter of God, who will suffer for you, and whom I ask you most sincerely to respect, from now on, as a companion in battle’ an eerie aura of reluctant triumph. The climax of the tense Act Three scene in the dead Marquis’s house, to which Mother Marie has come to coax Blanche back to her Carmelite sisters, was Mihm’s despondent cries of ‘What have they got against me? Have I done them any harm?’ That this Blanche would appear to assume her place among her sisters as they marched to the scaffold, in this production exiting through the house as the sound of the bloodthirsty blade’s repeated fall sliced through the orchestra, seemed inevitable. Mihm occasionally lost the battle to be heard when singing in the lower octave of her range, but the upper register was unfailingly resilient at any dynamic level. Never wholly sympathetic, Blanche demands concentration and expressive boldness and received both from Mihm. Like Swann, she continued the exalted lineage of notable interpreters of her part.

Musical criticism is and should be an embodiment of Abraham Lincoln’s sentiment in the Gettysburg Address that the words that describe an auspicious occasion will be quickly forgotten whilst the deeds that inspired them will be long remembered. Too often, though, the productions about which critics write are memorable primarily for these reactions rather than the actions to which they respond. The UNCG Opera Theatre production of Francis Poulenc’s harrowing and thought-provoking Dialogues of the Carmelites was an example of what opera in the Twenty-First Century can and should aspire to be. It is passion, not ‘relevance,’ that sustains opera, and this performance of Dialogues of the Carmelites passionately reaffirmed that, to again adapt the words of Lincoln, opera of, by, and for the people is no less viable and vital now than when the sixteen martyrs of Compiègne gave their lives for daring to live as their hearts dictated. This was a performance that will not be soon forgotten.

*There were in UNCG Opera Theatre’s performance some few very minor differences from the text of the Machlis translation as published at the time of the Covent Garden première. Efforts have been made to accurately reflect what was actually sung in Greensboro, but there are instances in which the texts referenced are those that appear in the published English libretto.

LABEL TAKING THE LEAD: Nimrod Borenstein’s SUSPENDED OPUS 69 and Franz Liszt's THE FRANCISCAN WORKS on Solaire Records (Solaire Records SOL1001 and SOL1002)

[1] NIMROD BORENSTEIN (born 1969): Suspended opus 69—das freie orchester Berlin; Laércio Diniz, conductor [Recorded in Jesus-Christus-Kirche, Berlin, Germany, 27 – 28 August 2015; Solaire Records SOL1001; 1 CD, 40:16; Available from Solaire Records and major music retailers]

[2] FRANZ LISZT (1811 – 1886): The Franciscan Works – Late Music for Piano—Sandro Ivo Bartoli, piano [Recorded in Reitstadel, Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz, Germany, 28 May 2015; Solaire Records SOL1002; 1 CD, 60:56; Available from Solaire Records and major music retailers]

A few years ago, a supporter of Voix des Arts resigned from his ‘stable’ job in global finance in order to launch a new career with a boutique record label dedicated to the preservation of vintage Classical recordings and the recording of contemporary Classical Music. This decision prompted a mutual friend to opine, ‘There is no future in that,’ a sentiment with which many casual observers and even some industry insiders would surely have been inclined to agree. In the intervening few years, that prophecy has proved inaccurate, however. The challenges faced by the recording industry in general are intensified in the Classical arena by the inherent specialization of the music itself: the audience for Classical recordings is smaller than that for releases from the latest sensations in popular music, is more discerning, and—in an Utopian environment, at least—has distinctly higher expectations. Likewise, the problems of digital media are both manifold and inherently ambiguous, with even the Classical industry increasingly falling victim to the shadowy download circuit that undermines the integrity and exclusivity of new releases. Gone, perhaps forever despite the resurgence of recordings on vinyl, are the days when enthusiasts queued up to purchase new recordings as soon as they become available, but the most frustrating aspect of the difficulties faced by Classical recording labels is that this enthusiasm is now more prevalent ever. It hardly seems possible in a world in which new technologies making music more accessible emerge almost on a daily basis that uniting interested listeners with interesting music could be a daunting task, but the decision makers at the helms of many labels large and small often fail to take advantage of the opportunities available to them. Indifferently-engineered recordings of tired repertory are no longer acceptable in an environment in which opinions are expressed in 140 or fewer characters and unsatisfactory recordings are deleted as easily as they are downloaded. The brainchild of visionary Tonmeister Dirk Fischer, Solaire Records is an enterprise that defies the currents of slickly-produced, artistically inert recordings. The label’s inaugural releases, masterfully-recorded and intelligently-presented recordings of works by composers who on the surface seem as dissimilar as Cavalli and Cage, usher in a long-overdue return by like-minded artists to the aesthetics espoused by legends of the recording studio like Walter Legge and John Culshaw. It is regrettable that labels like Solaire are so few, but platinum has ever been scarcer than lead.

Premièred at London’s Royal Opera House in conjunction with the 2015 International Mime Festival as the musical score for Gandini Juggling’s 4x4 Ephemeral Architectures, Nimrod Borenstein’s Suspended opus 69 is a work that deserved to be recorded. A singular talent with interests as broad as his education and experiences, Borenstein has here created music of enduring value that demands to be heard, and this Solaire release offers the listener an extraordinary opportunity to make the acquaintance of Suspended within a proper context, complementing the superbly-engineered recording with informative, insightful essays by Tobias Fischer and Gandini Juggling’s presiding genius, Sean Gandini. Borenstein’s music is the soul and raison d’être for this recording, however, and it is difficult to imagine a traversal of any score that would be more fulfilling for its composer. To hold in one’s hands a disc upon which one’s own music is played so affectionately must inspire indescribable sensations, but the impact of hearing this disc is no less astonishing for the listener with no personal involvement with the music. Of course, one cannot hear this recording without developing profoundly personal involvement with Suspended.

The eight movements of Suspended reveal a deep comprehension of compositional techniques extending from Renaissance polyphony to trends in Twenty-First-Century music. There are occasional accents that recall other composers, but Borenstein’s musical language is engagingly original, stimulating the listener to seek meaning in the context of the score rather than relying upon preconceptions and much-abused formulae. In the Mysterious opening of ‘The world of yesterday,’ sound aptly emerges from primordial silence with much the same effect that Wagner achieved in the opening bars of Das Rheingold. The implications of the drama that simmers in Suspended are stingingly intimate rather than coldly heroic, however: as the Mysterious introduction evolves into the Moderato conclusion of ‘The world of yesterday,’ Borenstein’s ingenious manipulation of motivic writing undermines the tranquility of the aural landscape, suggesting that the reflection of himself that the listener is asked to contemplate is unnervingly unpleasant. This is representative of the tremendous power of Suspended. Propelled by sparsely-textured but beautiful, often almost Baroque string writing, Borenstein’s music lures the listener into charmed recesses that gradually shed their finery to reveal the ugly foundations, all too readily ignored, upon which beauty is built. Mahler was the great master of this elusive ambiguity, but Borenstein rivals Mahler’s expressive complexity with far greater economy of means. The purposes of every note are multifarious.

The subsequent movements, ‘Suspended’ and ‘Stillness,’ are starkly appealing, Borenstein’s writing for strings again cloaking uncomfortable sentiments in plush tonal velvet. Brazilian conductor Laércio Diniz and the musicians of das freie orchester berlin scale their performance to the natural dimensions of the music, unleashing avalanches of sound in extroverted passages that ideally complement the score’s prevailing if deceptive serenity. The spirited but subdued ‘Tango’ is as much a dance of the soul as of the body, its rhythms tightly-wound but strangely uninhibiting, an impression enhanced by Diniz’s energetic negotiations of the composer’s tempi and dynamic markings. The genuine spirit of the tango is here more present than in many composers’ more literal uses of the dance.

The ethos that permeates ‘Annoyed’ perpetuates the ambivalence that Borenstein cultivates so tellingly in Suspended. Perhaps the anxiety that gurgles like a spring beneath the surface of the music is reassuring because Borenstein’s score presents it as a wholly normal, omnipresent element of humanity. To doubt, Suspended seems to say, is to feel. What is felt in ‘Annoyed’ is not so much an obvious perturbation as a mounting exasperation at calling out without being heard. Carefully managing the orchestral sound, Diniz heightens the emotional impact of the composer’s depiction of isolation even in the midst of a vibrant community.

The dichotomy at the heart of ‘Boys and girls’ is not a conventional gender paradigm but a far simpler evocation of the divisions that occur in society: female and male, gay and straight, rich and poor, educated and uneducated. In the dangerous soil of these fields, Borenstein cultivates a delicate, lusciously erotic pas de deux that at once sweetly cajoles and insinuates more sinister meanings. Diniz and the Berlin musicians shape their performance of ‘Boys and girls’ with great eloquence, creating an atmosphere in which it is apparent to the listener that Borenstein is no less successful than Tchaikovsky at conceiving music for dance in which far more of the drama’s psychology is heard in the orchestra than is seen upon the stage. The title of ‘Pizzicato serenade’ says much about the message and construction of the movement, and the Berlin musicians play it marvelously, the strings’ pizzicato playing as full-bodied and resonant as their bowing. Suspended’s final movememt, ‘Tomorrow’s waltz,’ is both a wistful farewell to the past and a profoundly optimistic anticipation of the future, both within the context of the score and in the broader sense of Borenstein’s path as an artist. Like all of the score’s movements, the striking waltz is played with compelling immediacy by das freie orchester berlin and conducted with skill and emotional involvement by Laércio Diniz. Musically, emotionally, and technologically, this is a disc of perception-altering, genre-redefining significance.

The Franciscan Works, Italian pianist Sandro Ivo Bartoli’s disc featuring under-appreciated music by Franz Liszt, is no less potent and revitalizing than Solaire’s recording of Suspended. Recorded in a single day in the kind of marathon, artistically taxing takes that are now virtually extinct in the realm of commercial recording, The Franciscan Works deviates from pianists’ usual paths through the barn-burning pieces upon which Liszt’s fame in the Twenty-First Century largely relies. Playing a clear-toned Steinway D #595313 prepared by Christian Niedermeyer, little troubled by the tinny sound at the extreme top of the compass that afflicts many Steinway instruments, Bartoli traverses Liszt’s music with a singularity of purpose that yields a reading of extraordinary cumulative impact. Like Suspended, The Franciscan Works benefits from liner notes by Tobias Fischer that instruct the listener on what to listen for but not what to hear in the music, as it were. Bartoli, too, focuses on providing the listener with a full realization of Liszt’s scores. His playing is stirringly alert, every dynamic marking observed to the utmost degree of its musical and expressive spirits, but even at its extremes his individual approach to the music is never excessive or distractingly idiosyncratic. This is music making as inspiring as it is inspired, the pianist inviting the listener into a very personal segment of the composer’s fascinating musical world.

The final two decades of Liszt’s life were marked by puzzling, poignant contrasts. One of the great piano virtuosi of the Nineteenth Century, the composer was as skilled a master of beguiling ladies’ hearts as he was of taming the piano’s keys, but a series of personal tragedies gradually turned his thoughts from the secular to the ecclesiastical. It would be inaccurate to suggest that the influence of religious faith on Liszt’s life is overlooked by modern observers, but the products of his piety among his works for piano are undoubtedly overshadowed by the well-known display pieces. This is unfortunate, particularly as Bartoli reminds with his performances on this disc that these musical acts of religious fervor make technical demands no less monumental than works like the operatic and symphonic transcriptions and the widely-appreciated Hungarian Rhapsodies. The Deux Légends (S.163) are exquisite works of soulful invention, and Bartoli plays them with unapologetic Romantic fervor. The first of the pair, Saint François d’Assise: La prédication aux oiseaux, receives from Bartoli a performance of gossamer beauty maintained by unbroken concentration. This persists in his playing of Saint François d’Assise: Marchant sur les flots, which is characterized by rhythmic vitality that enhances the rhapsodic nature of the music. The Preludio per il Cantico del Sol di San Francesco d’Assisi (S.498c) and Cantico di San Francesco (S.499) are as tightly constructed as any of Bach’s Preludes and Fugues, and Bartoli draws out the harmonies among the inner voices rather than over-emphasizing the obvious links between the pieces.

Bartoli possesses an unique ability to use music to create an atmosphere in which the sounds that he coaxes from the piano no longer seem to come from speakers or headphones: as he plays, his visceral connection with the music seems to arise from nature itself with the communicative power that Saint Francis discerned. Playing Liszt’s Alleluia et Ave Maria d’Arcadelt (S.183), the pianist summons the grandeur of a cathedral organ within the appropriate scale of the music, phrasing with the ambulatory lilt of a religious procession. The character of Les Jeux d’eaux à la Ville d’Este (S.163/4) could hardly be more different, but the vigor with which Bartoli plays the piece perpetuates the keen sensitivity that makes this disc so uplifting. Miserere d’après Palestrina is not only one of the finest pieces on The Franciscan Works but also a pinnacle in Liszt’s creative career. The sheer grace of Bartoli’s performance of the Miserere is arresting. Ave Maria: Die Glocken von Rom (S.182) wields the force of a sermon by Jonathan Edwards or Cotton Mather, but Liszt channeled this electricity into music of hypnotic brilliance. If there are two adjectives that more perceptively describe Bartoli’s pianism throughout the numbers on The Franciscan Works than any others, they are hypnotic and brilliant, but this artist does not hypnotize by blinding the listener with flashes of his technical brilliance: rather, he serves as a conduit via which the composer’s genius captivates the hearer.

Walter Legge once wrote that ‘democracy is fatal for the arts; it leads only to chaos or the achievement of new and lower common denominators of quality.’ Perhaps this was primarily a quip offered in justification of his tyranny in the control room, but Legge’s sentiment illuminates a critical truth of Art in general. An exchange of ideas benefits any enterprise, but the efficacious recording of Classical Music requires a firm integration of resolve among artists and technicians. With both of these discs, Dirk Fischer and Solaire Records strip away the artifice that has compromised the quality of many record labels’ output in recent years. These discs are precious examples of music played as it deserves to be played and recorded as the performances merit.

PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Gioachino Rossini — IL BARBIERE DI SIVIGLIA (T. Cook, C. Hall, A. Owens, A. Lau, T. Simpson, M. Ashley; North Carolina Opera, 1 April 2016)

GIOACHINO ROSSINI (1792 – 1868): Il barbiere di Siviglia, ossia L’inutile precauzione—Troy Cook (Figaro), Cecelia Hall (Rosina), Andrew Owens (Il Conte d’Almaviva), Adam Lau (Don Basilio), Tyler Simpson (Dottore Bartolo), Marie Ashley (Berta), Charles Hyland (Fiorello), Wade Henderson (Un ufficiale); North Carolina Opera Orchestra and Chorus; Timothy Myers, conductor [Stephanie Havey, Director; Scott MacLeod, Chorus Master; Jeff Harris, Lighting Designer; Sondra Nottingham, Wig and Makeup Designer; North Carolina Opera, Memorial Auditorium, Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh, North Carolina; Friday, 1 April 2016]

Whether in opera, theatre, literature, or any other artistic genre, one of the finest of the proverbial fine lines is that separating true comedy from the merely inane. Few evenings in the opera house are more excruciating than those on which audiences are exposed to scores or productions—or scores and productions—that aim at comedy but consistently miss the mark. On the other hand, those few occasions when composers’, librettists’, and performers’ efforts at comedy find their targets can produce unforgettable experiences. Directed with flair and a raucous sense of joy by Stephanie Havey, North Carolina Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia—a staging that originated at the Glimmerglass Festival and will be revived by Opera San Antonio in 2017—came tantalizingly close to stepping wholly over the line into genuine comedy that could be enjoyed without reservations; so close, in fact, that the performance’s few defects, none of which upset the equilibrium of the performance, quickly faded into insignificance. Perfection is admirable, but how often is it enjoyable on a level that prompts patrons to leave a theatre after a show, saying to one another, ‘That was really fun’?

When Il barbiere di Siviglia, ossia L’inutile precauzione, a setting of Cesare Sterbini’s adaptation of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s seminal 1775 play Le barbier de Séville, premièred at Rome’s Teatro Argentina on 20 February 1816, Rossini was a week away from his twenty-fourth birthday. Several of his most noteworthy and lucrative successes were already behind him, and his final opera, Guillaume Tell, lay only a dozen years in future. Despite the quality of many of his scores and the recent interest in them beyond the Rossini shrines of Pesaro and Bad Wildbad, Barbiere remains the opera upon the shoulders of which its composer’s fame is hoisted, and, no matter how many times an observer has seen the opera performed, a wholly satisfactory Barbiere justifies the score’s prominence in both the Rossini canon and the international repertory at large. With wonderfully colorful and occasionally slightly confusing costumes by Howard Tsvi Kaplan, originally designed for Sarasota Opera [Lindoro looked as though he strolled out of the pages of Pride and Prejudice, but the Conte was the epitome of Eighteenth-Century chic: were poor students more ‘fashion forward’ than aristocrats in Rossini’s Siviglia?], Sondra Nottingham’s typically effective wigs and makeup, and Jeff Harris’s intuitive lighting designs, North Carolina Opera’s Barbiere looked as lively as it sounded. The production’s mobile sets by the widely-admired John Conklin were essentially a character in the comedy but one whose part was not over-done, and strategically placing Rossini’s portrait above the rickety piano—no Bösendorfers or Broadwoods, chez Bartolo—for the Lesson Scene was a crafty touch. Best of all were the bicycles: Figaro ringing his bike’s bell in time to the orchestral introduction to his celebrated cavatina was fantastic. One shudders to think of the piles of money that are spent on far more elaborate productions that are far less successful than this picturesque but abidingly uncluttered Barbiere at conjuring the worlds depicted in composers’ scores.

Stationery storm: Bass-baritone Tyler Simpson as Dottor Bartolo (center) in North Carolina Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, 1 April 2016 [Photo by Curtis Brown, © by North Carolina Opera]

After witnessing his masterful conducting of Mozart, Timothy Myer’s confident, debonair handling of Rossini’s music was not unexpected, but it is always astonishing and gratifying to observe the manner in which this insightful musician wields his baton like a spotlight, focusing performers’ and listeners’ attention on details large and small that facilitate full appreciation of composers’ and librettists’ creations. In this performance of Il barbiere di Siviglia, Myers lit firecrackers in the orchestra that detonated hilariously, the playing of the North Carolina Opera Orchestra first-rate from the opening bars of the famous Overture—borrowed, of course, from Aureliano in Palmira and Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, both serious operas. Guided by Myers, whose ear for instrumental timbres rivals the late Sinopoli’s, the woodwinds had a particularly fine evening, their phrasing and intonation setting a high standard for their colleagues in the pit and on the stage. Even in the Temporale, its opening wind passages prefiguring the similar scene in Act Three of Verdi’s Rigoletto, the percussionists’ playing was restrained, allowing the palette of colors in the music to emerge with atypical clarity. In Myers’s handling of the score, complemented by Laurie Rogers’s inventive harpsichord continuo and red-blooded but always shapely singing by the gentlemen of Dr. Scott MacLeod’s impeccably-trained North Carolina Opera Chorus, it was unusually easy to imagine the central characters in Barbiere morphing into their older, more careworn selves in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. The enthusiastic ovations that Myers receives from Raleigh audiences are merited, not just for individual performances but, perhaps more significantly, for the continuing elevation of standards that his leadership has initiated, as well. With exuberant but logical tempi and management of ensembles that went awry commendably infrequently, Myers guided a performance of tremendous humor possible only through the work of a very serious musician.

A reliable aspect of recent North Carolina Opera productions has been excellent casting of secondary rôles, and this Barbiere di Siviglia furthered that trend in glorious fashion. Though not uttering a single word, Joseph Stephens’s Ambrogio enriched every scene in which he appeared, whether partially hiding under his laundry basket, suddenly taking a liking to swordplay, or rejoicing in the final scene at the return of a purloined equine figurine. The foremost regret inspired by tenor Wade Henderson’s singing as Melot in North Carolina Opera’s November 2014 concert performance of Act Two of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde was that he had so little to sing, and the same complaint must be made about his Ufficiale in Barbiere. Appearing in the Act One finale, Henderson was splendidly commanding as the voice of constabulary authority, the voice ringing like the clink of handcuffs. As the bandmaster-for-hire Fiorello, baritone Charles Hyland sang ‘Piano, pianissimo senza parlar’ at the opera’s start with handsome tone and acted his part to perfection. [The onstage musicians’ eager petitioning of the Conte for immediate and generous payment brought to mind the Duke of Plaza Toro’s assessment in the Gilbert and Sullivan gem The Gondoliers: ‘That’s so like a band!’] A member of the University of Mount Olive music faculty, mezzo-soprano Marie Ashley schooled the audience in the art of operatic comedic timing with her live-wire performance as Berta, Bartolo’s long-suffering housemaid. Ashley’s voice soared in the Act One finale, encountering no trouble with doubling Rosina’s line as it climbed above the stave, and she was the rare Berta whose Act Two arietta ‘Il vecchiotto cerca moglie’ was a delight. Rossini clearly intended that Berta should be entrusted to a singer no less capable than the lady cast as Rosina, and North Carolina Opera heeded this implicit instruction, Ashley proving as wonderful in the second finale as in the first. The character’s predicament notwithstanding, there is no reason why Berta must sound like a superannuated comprimaria: rather, she ought to sound as Ashley sang her in Raleigh.

The slandering music tutor, or Seiji Ozawa makes a cameo in Raleigh: (from left to right) Baritone Troy Cook as Figaro, bass Adam Lau as Don Basilio, and bass-baritone Tyler Simpson as Dottor Bartolo in North Carolina Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, 1 April 2016 [Photo by Curtis Brown, © by North Carolina Opera]

The casting of Adam Lau, the fantastic Leporello in North Carolina Opera’s 2015 production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, as Rossini’s Don Basilio was an instance of an ideal intersection of singer and rôle. A delectably conspiratorial—and kleptomaniacal!—presence in Act One, Lau delivered the aria ‘La calunnia è un venticello’ with amplitude that packed the punch of a ‘colpo di cannone,’ only the final bars slightly compromised by forcing. In the Act One finale, Lau voiced Basilio’s lines with sonorous aplomb. His collapse when ‘wounded’ by a flying pillow in the cleverly-staged ‘battle’ between rival factions was worthy of vintage Rick Flair. As the centerpiece of the Act Two Quintetto, Lau amusingly sang and acted Basilio’s befuddlement, willing both to suffer his sudden malady’s ill effects and to recover from them with equal rapidity depending upon which circumstance yielded the greater windfall. Vocally, Lau was as solid a Basilio as can be heard in any production of Barbiere today, a rival to the exalted legacies of Ezio Pinza and Cesare Siepi, and he was fabulously buffo without being a buffoon.

Bass-baritone Tyler Simpson proved to be one of the most elusive commodities in opera: a Bartolo who actually sang his music. Looking quite smart and engagingly smug in his emerald-green suit and polished-copper periwig, Simpson’s Bartolo stalked the stage with the nervous energy of an out-of-practice predator. Briefly sparring with Rosina before her window in Act One, his was paternal sternness not to be ignored, and bass-baritone and bass were particularly well-matched in Bartolo’s scene with Don Basilio, Simpson’s querulous ‘No’ when rejecting Basilio’s suggestion of eliminating the Conte as a rival for Rosina via well-timed slander enunciated with deadpan disposition. Simpson’s performance of the aria ‘A un dottor della mia sorte’ was marvelous (and, again, truly sung), the patter dispatched with brilliance and the full range of the music covered with ease. Simpson took command of the Act One finale with sly humor, throwing caution to the wind and thrillingly unleashing the full power of his voice—and brandishing a walking stick with the braggadocio of Douglas Fairbanks. In his scene at the beginning of Act Two, this Bartolo made something peculiarly touching of his statement of ‘Ma vedi il mio destino!’ Like the most insightful interpreters of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, Simpson allowed Bartolo’s heart to penetrate the brusqueness for a moment, giving his interpretation even greater immediacy. In the duet with the Conte, now disguised as Don Basilio’s supposed protégé Don Alonso, the bass-baritone’s vocalism radiated annoyance and suspicion. Unsurprisingly, his account of the arietta ‘Quando mi sei vicina amabile Rosina’ in response to Rosina’s singing lesson was music, not bluster. In the grand Quintetto and the opera’s final scene, Simpson gradually transformed Bartolo’s foolishness into graciousness: his gesture of kissing Rosina’s hand after realizing that he was outwitted was both conciliatory and affectionate. Vocally and histrionically, Simpson was a Bartolo in the now-endangered tradition of Sesto Bruscantini. Above all, his performance was a rousing confirmation of the oft-ignored wisdom of good singing being just as important in comedy as in tragedy.

The Doctor is in: Mezzo-soprano Cecelia Hall as Rosina (left) and bass-baritone Tyler Simpson as Dottor Bartolo (right) in North Carolina Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, 1 April 2016 [Photo by Curtis Brown, © by North Carolina Opera]

The rôle of the amorous young Conte d’Almaviva was first sung by Spanish tenor Manuel García, a legendary figure in the history of opera as both a singer and a pedagogue, and has subsequently been interpreted by a wide array of tenors, some of whom had as little business singing Rossini as García would have had singing Verdi’s—rather than Rossini’s—Otello. To the class of natural-born modern Conti d’Almaviva like Cesare Valletti, Ugo Benelli, Alfredo Kraus, Luigi Alva, Bruce Ford, and Juan Diego Flórez belongs Andrew Owens, whose singing in Raleigh combined technical brilliance with tonal beauty that served as a reminder that the clever aristocrat was also an early rôle for Giuseppe di Stefano. All being fair in love and war but emphatically not in opera, it is sometimes difficult to ascertain during performances of Il barbiere di Siviglia why the cultivated Rosina would prefer her earnest but supposedly penniless swain Lindoro—our quick-thinking Conte in disguise, of course—to the canny Figaro. Looking as though he just stepped off of a Hollywood studio lot, Owens scored a triumph for the ranks of less-glamorous Conti by leaving no doubt of why Rosina’s well-guarded heart palpitated for him and him alone. What counted most was that the sounds that he made were as attractive as the smile that he wielded like a starburst. Spreading his irrepressible elation over the stage like a sunrise, this Conte serenaded his beloved with plangent tones. Owens phrased the Act One cavatina ‘Ecco ridente in cielo spunta la bella aurora’ with effortless bel canto, rising to the tops As and B with aptly noble poise. He decorated his performance of the lovely serenade ‘Se il mio nome saper voi bramate, dal mio labbro il mio nome ascoltate’ with dashingly original ornaments. Rosina was surely not the only lady in the theatre inclined to open her window to take in such golden sounds. Owens made easy going of the punishing triplets in the passaggio in the duet with Figaro, and his singing of ‘Ehi di casa...buona gente’ as the inebriated soldier in the Act One finale was side-splitting. The Act Two duet with Bartolo drew from this natural comedian repetitions of ‘Pace e gioia sia con voi’ that grew steadily more insistent. Accompanying Rosina’s lesson, Owens’s mock-pianism would have caused Victor Borge to blush with admiration and envy. His voice fizzed with excitement in the spirited Terzetto with Rosina and Figaro. With such a capable Conte on hand, it was a pity that time constraints conspired to exclude the aria ‘Cessa di più resistere’ from the performance, but Owens was in every other way a winningly complete Almaviva who emitted many a phrase that brought the inimitable Tito Schipa to mind.

Alter egos: Bass Adam Lau as Don Basilio (left) and tenor Andrew Owens as ‘Don Alonso’ (né Conte d’Almaviva, right) in North Carolina Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, 1 April 2016 [Photo by Curtis Brown, © by North Carolina Opera]

Rossini is rarely cited as a master of deeply-considered characterizations, but Rosina is a deceptively difficult rôle, especially for younger singers. Being a Spanish lady with a piquant streak, Rosina too often falls victim to interpretations that make her a sort of coloratura Carmen. Underplay her vivacity, and she is apt to seem a pallid waif unlikely to attract as practiced a tomcat as the Conte: overplay her independence, and she can seem an equally undesirable shrew. North Carolina Opera’s Barbiere di Siviglia had in mezzo-soprano Cecelia Hall a Rosina of both style and substance, one who created a carefully-balanced, three-dimensional character without sacrificing any of the sheer fun—or the volleys of notes—of the part. Occasionally, she was slightly too subdued for her surroundings, though this admittedly deepened the contrast between this innocent young woman—she intended to bring along her doll, teddy bear, and favorite pillow when fleeing with the Conte, after all—and her boorish guardian. It was a most timid creature who appeared at the window during Lindoro’s serenading in Act One, but sparks flying in the recitatives with Bartolo and the Conte hinted at the fire that burned beneath the cool exterior. The newly-ignited conflagration melted the frost in Hall’s demeanor in the cavatina ‘Una voce poco fa,’ the singer spitting out the words in the Moderato section, ‘Io sono docile, son rispettosa,’ with well-controlled abandon. In the duet with Figaro, ‘Dunque io son...tu non m’inganni,’ her singing combined feminine charm and a wily grasp of sexual politicking. Hall’s awestruck articulation of the Andante ‘Freddo ed immobile come una statua fiato non restagli da respirar’ in the Act One finale was wonderful. In the Lesson Scene in Act Two, Rossini’s intended aria, ‘Contro un cor che accende amore,’ was preferred, and Hall reached its top As effortlessly. The Terzetto with the Conte and Figaro received especially dulcet treatment from the comely young lady, her unaffected pronouncement of ‘Ah! qual colpo inaspettato’ garnering a deserved burst of laughter from the audience. Her joy spilling over the footlights in the opera’s finale, Hall’s Rosina earned her happy ending. Aside from a few inaudible notes at the very bottom of the compass, likely the results of the singer’s judicious way with balancing head and chest registers, Hall’s comfort with both the range and the bravura requirements of Rosina’s music—including a respectable trill—was praiseworthy. Barbiere can function effectively enough with a merely serviceable Rosina, but how exhilarating this Barbiere was with an expert one!

Boredom is hard to bear: Mezzo-soprano Cecelia Hall as Rosina in North Carolina Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, 1 April 2016 [Photo by Curtis Brown, © by North Carolina Opera]

With a Rosina and Conte such as North Carolina Opera’s production supplied, it was difficult for a Figaro to dominate the opera, but baritone Troy Cook left no doubt about whose name—or professional identity, at any rate—is on the score’s title page. [The opera having been first performed with the title Almaviva was an act of deference to Giovanni Paisiello, composer of a then-still-fashionable earlier setting of Il barbiere di Siviglia, it should be remembered.] Entering on bicycle like a vision from Il postino, Cook sang Figaro’s Act One cavatina ‘Largo al factotum della città,’ one of opera’s most iconic numbers, with swaggering virility, the high tessitura and tongue-twisting patter manfully conquered. The prowess of this Figaro’s Dulcamara-esque matchmaking was indeed magical: the portrayers of the adorable sevillano couple that he brought together on the stage, Chandler Clarke and clarion-voiced chorister Jacob Kato, are betrothed off the stage, too. Bravissimo, Figaro! Joining with the Conte in their brainstorming duet, the glee in Cook’s voicing of ‘All’idea di quel metallo’ was infectious, and he and Owens exhibited finely-honed synchronicity in the difficult triplets. Similarly impressive was Cook’s reading of Figaro’s part in the duet with Rosina, ‘Dunque io son...tu non m’inganni.’ Unlike many singers, he resorted to no faking or simplification: he had the notes and the skill needed to project them into the auditorium. With his cherry-red top hat and feline suavity, Cook’s Figaro danced through the Act One finale like a benevolent Mefistofele. Bounding about the stage with growing anxiety in the Act Two Quintetto and, even more so, the Terzetto with Rosina and the Conte, Cook’s Figaro was clearly unnerved by feeling dominion over his situation slipping from his fingers, but the baritone’s vocalism never faltered. Even in the opera’s final scene, Cook’s voice shone among his colleagues’ high-wattage singing. Hearing the assurance with which he sauntered through Figaro’s roulades, it was remarkable to recall that Cook was also a wholly satisfying Marcello in North Carolina Opera’s 2014 production of Puccini’s La bohème. Who since the retirement of Robert Merrill has beguiled the public with top-quality performances of such very different rôles?

Man in demand: Baritone Troy Cook as Figaro (center) in North Carolina Opera’s production of Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, 1 April 2016 [Photo by Curtis Brown, © by North Carolina Opera]

What makes Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia genuinely funny is the nucleus of humanity that exerts an insurmountable force on the buzzing particles of the music, keeping even the orbits of the frothiest moments of comedy on course. What too many performers fail to realize or fully respect is that Rossini suffused his score with music that pulses with laughter of its own accord: Barbiere does not need singers’, conductors’, or directors’ assistance to be funny. No, what Barbiere needs is the integrity of a team of artists who approach the score not as a comic opera requiring special tinkering but simply as a musical work of art that deserves unbiased, unblemished interpretation and integrity, and this is what North Carolina Opera’s performance bestowed upon this still-precious gem of an opera.

CD REVIEW: F. Chopin, R. Schumann, & A. Eliasson — PERSONAE (Beth Levin, piano; Navona Records NV6016)

FRÉDÉRIC FRANÇOIS CHOPIN (1810 – 1849), ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810 – 1856), and ANDERS ELIASSON (1947 – 2013): Personae—Beth Levin, piano [Recorded at Peter Karl Studios, New York City, USA, on 27 July 2015; Navona Records NV6016; 1 CD, 67:32; Available from ClassicsOnline HD (Download | Streaming), Amazon (USA), iTunes, Presto Classical (UK), Spotify, and major music retailers]

One of the foremost keys necessary to discerning an important pianist from the teeming throngs of people who endeavor to make their living by playing the instrument is the manner in which that key’s significance alongside its eighty-seven siblings is examined, analyzed, and conveyed to the listener. If such an assertion seems to be an exercise in semantics, that is because, as Hamlet might have suggested, knowing not ‘seems,’ it is, but it is nevertheless a logical assessment. The world’s conservatories continue to flood concert stages and recital halls with highly-educated pianists with chrome-plated techniques who play as though they cannot distinguish a ground bass from a gruppetto. When such distinctions are also lost on many audiences, it is too easy to surmise and accept that artistic standards no longer matter. Thankfully, vitally, there are some few artists like Beth Levin and discs of the calibre of her Navona release Personae to remind everyone from the casual listener to the aspiring pianist that important art and artists inevitably distinguish themselves: observers need only have the good sense to surrender to their charms. In the performances of works by Chopin, Schumann, and Eliasson on this disc, engineered by Peter Karl with balance and clarity that replicate the warm acoustic of an intimate recital hall, one of today’s most poetic pianists crafts musical verses that proclaim, ‘The legacy of great pianism is far from dead when fingers such as these still the keyboard tread.’

It is sometimes suggested that aural evidence of Robert Schumann’s struggles with sanity is manifested in his music. Perhaps there is some validity in this assertion, but it is equally valid to argue that the very act of attempting to translate one’s thoughts into musical notation that can be followed by others is madness. Insanity, it has been said, is performing the same action repeatedly with an expectation of different results, but is this not a defining property of artistic endeavor? That Beth Levin’s playing of Schumann is different from other pianists’ is what makes her work unique and markedly elevates the intrinsic merit of Personae. Essentially dances in name only, Schumann’s Opus 6 Davidsbündlertänze—mature works despite the opus number—are vibrant pieces that soar to the euphoric highs and plunge to the despondent lows that characterized the composer’s courtship of his beloved Clara. In the first three of the ‘dances,’ I. Lebhaft, II. Innig, and III. Mit Humor, Levin immediately discloses her uncanny ability to simultaneously pinpoint the vast differences among the pieces and establish and maintain an extraordinary degree of continuity. The extent to which Levin conveys the essence of each individual piece is exceptional, but her ability to identify and perpetuate the parallels among them is a hallmark of an atypically perceptive musician. The next sequence—IV. Ungeduldig, V. Einfach, and VI. Sehr rasch—also reveals surprising breadth of kinship, complemented by the searching treatment that they receive from Levin. Her approach to VII. Nicht schnell is particularly successful, but she plays VIII. Frisch, IX. Lebhaft, and the ingenius X. Balladenmäßig - Sehr rasch with similar effectiveness, the irreproachable rhythmic consistency of her playing lending each number its own expressive microcosm and also links it to its brethren among the Davidsbündlertänze. Most significantly, Levin unaffectedly realizes Schumann’s goal of pacing Davidsbündlertänze as a metaphysical conversation between his much-discussed musical alter egos, Florestan and Eusebius. In XI. Einfach, XII. Mit Humor, XIII. Wild und lustig, and XIV. Zart und singend, the debate rages, points and counterpoints discharged by Levin’s wrists with electric intensity. The final four pieces—XV. Frisch, XVI. Mit gutem Humor, XVII. Wie aus der Ferne, and XVIII. Nicht schnell—are played as thoughtfully as they are powerfully, the pianist’s technique encompassing fingering that enables her to bring off marvels of phrasing that elucidate frequently-overlooked details of Schumann’s impressive musical architecture. Some pianists make the mistake of misinterpreting the title of Davidsbündlertänze and playing the score as though it were a miniature Swan Lake, thereby depriving the work of much of its special cogency. Levin’s performance is perfectly calibrated to the scale of the music, divulging both the inventiveness of Schumann’s music and her incredible skill for playing it.

Playing Frédéric Chopin’s Sonata No. 2 in B♭ minor (Opus 35), often called the Funeral March owing to its emblematic third movement and the prevailing sobriety of the Sonata as a whole, is a pianist’s equivalent of singing the Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde. The opening movement, Grave – Doppio movimento, demands the concentration of a prize fighter: if the pianist loses focus for a moment, Chopin’s music will leave her breathless and embarrassed on the mat. Levin’s playing of the movement combines the near-operatic phrasing of Ivan Moravec with the pragmatism of John Ogdon, but her reading is very much her own. Her handling of the Scherzo shudders with aggression masquerading as broad humor, and the rhythmic precision of her performance never jeopardizes the elasticity of her emotional response to the music. It is here especially difficult to believe that all of the music on Personae was recorded in a single day: few performances edited from material recorded in multiple sessions reach the levels of technical and sentimental mastery of the music that Levin exhibits. She plays the bel canto Marche funèbre: Lento with unexaggerated sincerity, finding Chopin’s tempo and dynamic markings liberating rather than confining. In the final movement, Finale: Presto, the pianist consistently places principal emphasis on the music itself rather than her playing of it, meeting Chopin’s requirements with unperturbed dignity. This is an account of the Sonata projected not to the last row of a recital hall but to each listener’s singular sensibilities, both engaging and empowering the hearer’s imagination. With her performance of the Sonata on Personae, this Brünnhilde of the keyboard earns her arms and armor.

Published in 1987 and first performed in Stockholm in 1988, Swedish composer Anders Eliasson’s Disegno 2 for piano solo is a mature but exploratory work, roughly contemporary with several of the larger-scaled pieces for which Eliasson is most known. The composer’s innovatively contrapuntal idiom is always apparent, but this is audibly the music of an artist still grappling with the collisions of centuries-old formulae with trends in late-Twentieth-Century avant-garde composition. It is a gift for pianists with the technical competency necessary to navigate its difficulties and interpretive insights sufficient to face its evocative nuances head on. Levin brings precisely these qualities to her playing of Disegno 2, her performance highlighting the cleverness of the piece’s construction. The ears are always lured to the primary subject as Eliasson surely intended, but none of the music’s inner voices can complain of being unheard. Perhaps most surprisingly, Levin’s execution of Disegno 2 causes Eliasson’s music to seem a wholly appropriate bridge between the works by Schumann and Chopin.

That Personae is a valuable release is evident from the first bars that issue from it. That it is a disc of rare interpretive insight and technical achievement becomes more evident with each subsequent bar. There are legions of pianists capable of accurately playing notes, but only true artists lift music from the page and give it life that becomes a part of the listener’s community of musical experiences. It seems counterintuitive to state that an artist should carve her own path within the landscape of traditions and methodologies because individuality is such an inalienable component of art, but the work of so many of today’s pianists suggests that they are taught that, like far too much of modern education, the interpretation of music is a conveniently finite, multiple-choice undertaking; not so Beth Levin’s profoundly personal playing on Personae. Emily Dickinson wrote that ‘Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne'er succeed.’ As this disc plays, the sounds of true artistry at the piano fall all the more sweetly upon ears so unused to encountering them.

CD REVIEW: Lennox Berkeley, Gavin Bryars, Herbert Howells, & John Jeffreys — BRITISH MUSIC FOR HARPSICHORD (Christopher D. Lewis, harpsichord; NAXOS 8.573668)

SIR LENNOX BERKELEY (1903 – 1989), GAVIN BRYARS (born 1943), HERBERT HOWELLS (1892 – 1983), and JOHN JEFFREYS (1927 – 2010): British Music for Harpsichord—Christopher D. Lewis, harpsichord [Recorded at Belvedere Estate, Belvedere, California, USA, 16 – 18 March 2015; NAXOS 8.573668; 1 CD, 71:17; Available from ClassicsOnlineHD (Download | Streaming), Amazon (USA), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Like many aspects of human culture, as well as life itself, music is in many ways inherently cyclical. Musical styles are continually evolving, but the courses of trends in both composition and performance are rarely linear. Perhaps the greatest marvel in music in the past century is the way in which musicians have simultaneously looked to the past and the future, the revival of interest in and study of music from the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries markedly influencing the creation of new music. Still, this is anything but an isolated reality. From the pioneering efforts of Wanda Landowska, now regarded by the outspoken Early Music community in nearly equal measures as pariah and prophetess, to the attention of an array of composers spanning the spectrum from Francis Poulenc to Gerald Busby, the harpsichord has benefited enormously from the unique rejuvenation of an unparalleled fusion of past and present. At the apogee of this juggernaut of reassessment and repurposing of an instrument still linked in the minds of many listeners solely with music composed before 1800 is Welsh harpsichordist Christopher D. Lewis. As much a musical adventurer as a well-trained virtuoso, Lewis takes the listener during the seventy-one minutes of this thoughtfully-planned and expertly-engineered NAXOS disc on a sometimes challenging, always captivating trek through under-explored compositions for the harpsichord by contemporary British composers. Like Poulenc’s Concert champêtre and Busby’s Court Dances, Parallel, and Camera, these works greatly enrich the harpsichord repertory. Hearing them played by Christopher D. Lewis with a delightfully sophisticated but still unsullied blend of youthful exuberance and artistic maturity substantially enriches appreciation of the capabilities of the harpsichord.

Born in Rhiwbina, Wales, Lewis has obviously been influenced virtually since infancy by his native land’s love of music. His pursuit of education and expansion of his cosmopolitan sensibilities having taken him throughout the world and brought him into contact with some of the foremost masters of the harpsichord, he is especially qualified to bring ‘new’ music for the instrument to the attention of today’s listeners. Sir Lennox Berkeley’s Mr. Pilkington’s Toye and For Vere are ideal showcases for Lewis’s abilities. Playing harpsichord music of any era naturally requires mastery of the technical constitution of the instrument’s mechanism, and this Lewis has of course attained and displays uninhibitedly, but engagingly performing music for an instrument that in many modern minds belongs in Baroque basso continuo consortiums and opera house orchestra pits demands interpretive skills of a particular order. It is apparent in his jocular, even impish playing of Berkeley’s Mr. Pilkington’s Toye that Lewis is the man for the job. Of a wholly different emotional fettle is For Vere, but the performance that it receives from Lewis is of complementary excellence, technique again sharing pride of place with expressive intuition. These pieces do not inhabit the progressive world of Berkeley’s Symphonies, the opera Ruth, and the Missa Brevis, but they possess a purity of invention that is tellingly highlighted by Lewis’s unaffected style of playing.

Herbert Howells was one of Britain’s most gifted composers of the Twentieth Century, but aside from his poignant motet Take him, earth, for cherishing, written to memorialize President John F. Kennedy and imbued with the composer’s mourning for the death of his own son, his work is little known and far too infrequently performed beyond Britain’s borders. The excerpts from Howell’s Clavichord presented here by Lewis provide opportunities to examine facets of Howell’s ingenuity that are astonishingly unlike the melancholically atmospheric choral works upon which his reputation is mostly—and not unjustly—founded. The pieces on this disc afford a glimpse of a lighter-hearted Howells, his talent for musical portraiture making the sequence of works played by Lewis a study in the art of tuneful characterization akin to Elgar’s Enigma Variations. The identities of the ‘visitors’ in each of the pieces are not difficult to discern, but the voice that emerges most resonantly from the chorus is Howells’s. The lovely ‘Goff’s Fireside’ is offered in performances on the 1997 Flemish double harpsichord after the Ruckers school by San Francisco-based maker Kevin Fryer employed for the balance of the Howells pieces and a 1982 Australian replica of a 1604 muselar, the peculiar northern European, right-oriented virginal, both responding dulcetly to Lewis’s touch. [Other selections on the disc are played on a Pleyel harpsichord dating from the 1930s, an instrument of the type espoused by Wanda Landowska and in this case originally purchased by Toronto’s historic Eaton Auditorium.] The Arcadian lilt of ‘Patrick’s Siciliano,’ enchantingly phrased by Lewis, is followed by the explosive ‘Jacob’s Brawl,’ in which the young harpsichordist’s nimble fingers deliver jabs and hooks that never miss their marks. Then, the deceptive flow of ‘Dart’s Sarabande’ is transformed by Lewis into a radiant, almost operatic account of ‘Andrew’s Air,’ the musician’s technical and interpretive dexterities finding compelling outlets in Howells’s music. An early champion of restoring to Baroque repertory some measure of authentic, period-appropriate performance practices, Sir Adrian would be thrilled by Lewis’s crisp, rhythmically dazzling playing of ‘Boult’s Brangill.’ ‘Dyson’s Delight’ is, as played here, just that: a delight. ‘Ralph’s Pavane and Galliard’ are unconventionally symmetrical, and the intelligence with which they are dispatched by Lewis gives them elements that bond as naturally as hydrogen and oxygen. The title of ‘Finzi’s Rest’ might at first glance be deemed a misnomer, but the quietude at its core, enhanced by Lewis’s finely-judged approach, confirms the sagacity of Howells’s insight. There is indeed a visionary epic lurking beneath the simple façade of ‘Malcolm’s Vision,’ and Lewis is careful to spotlight but not exaggerate it and succeeds by interpreting the piece succinctly. His performance of ‘Julian’s Dream,’ one of the finest of these pieces, is aptly ethereal without descending into saccharine over-emoting. Any listener whose view of Howells is of a humorless wretch composing in order to excise his demons should hear Lewis’s performance of ‘Walton’s Toye’ if only to realize how unfair it is to thus dismiss this wonderfully multi-dimensional composer. Lewis has performed a great service to Howells with this recording.

Played by Lewis with precisely the right balance of free-spiritedness and seriousness, Gavin Bryars’s After Handel’s “Vesper” is a work of considerable charm and artistic merit, an affectionate homage that wields the cutting edge of typically British parody. There is nothing explicitly satirical in Bryars’s music, per se, but the nod to the great tunesmith of Brook Street is at least as good-naturedly humorous as it is artistically reverential. The same can be said of Lewis’s playing of the piece: in short, his performance is tremendous fun but never farcical. One hears Händel like a voice from another room—a mighty, strongly-accented voice, natürlich, but not an overbearing one. The amiable conversation that Bryars shared with Händel is gleefully shared by Lewis with the listener.

Among the composers whose works are featured on this disc, John Jeffreys will perhaps be the least-familiar to listeners without in-depth knowledge of British music in the second half of the Twentieth Century. Lacking the widespread recognition allotted to Britten and Tippett, Jeffreys was no less a dedicated artist than his more famous countrymen, and in certain respects, not the least of which is its unapologetic melodic appeal, his music is more accessible than his colleagues’ frequently-played scores. His Four Little English Dances in the Georgian manner are vibrant pieces, their broadly-styled structures reminding the listener that, from a strictly historical perspective, the ‘Georgian manner’ encompasses virtually all of the Eighteenth Century and a sliver of the Nineteenth, too. The Poco allegro dance transports the hearer to the stately sitting rooms of Bath, where one might have a turn about the floor with the denizens of Henry Fielding’s novels. There is as much of Sir Arthur Sullivan in Jeffreys’s idiom as there is of Thomas Arne and William Boyce, and Lewis plays the music with sonorous, mercurial charm. He phrases the Andantino with a delicacy that seems more Victorian than Georgian, disclosing a lightness in the music that hints at strict-mannered aloofness. Likewise, the subtle but uncomplicated strains of the Poco andantino might just as accurately be described as being in the Edwardian manner, there being a vein of restraint coursing through the music. Ever a communicative artist, Lewis here divulges that his gift for subtlety is as commendable as his flair for boldness. The vivacious Allegro ma non troppo dance is a boisterous British stag party in musical form: Lewis’s playing earns him—and the composer—a hearty pint.

For many otherwise well-informed advocates of Classical Music, the harpsichord is perceived as an instrument that, in its natural habitats of sorts, tinkled unobtrusively as fat castrati shouted hours of tedious recitative at one another and as bewigged ladies, corseted within a millimeter of asphyxiation, chatted about nothing; and that it is now a living relic, a quaint musical dinosaur encountered without great interest except when entrusted to the hands of virtuosi who play the immortal masterworks of Bach, Händel, Rameau, the Couperins, and the Scarlattis. In music, though, anything of extraordinary merit is unlikely to go unnoticed indefinitely, and it is to their credit that Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century composers have embraced the harpsichord as a thriving, thrilling vehicle for their creative impulses. Neither this fascinating instrument nor the contemporary composers who write for it could hope for representation on disc by a more persuasive musical proselytizer than Christopher D. Lewis.

Old instrument, young master: Welsh harpsichordist Christopher D. Lewis [Photo © by Christopher D. Lewis]