PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Giuseppe Verdi — MACBETH (M. Rucker, O. Graham, S. Zaikuan, G. Sciarpelletti, J. Kaufman, N. Unser, R. Harrelson; Opera Carolina, 7 November 2019)

GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813 – 1901): Macbeth — Mark Rucker (Macbeth), Othalie Graham (Lady Macbeth), Song Zaikuan (Banco), Gianluca Sciarpelletti (Macduff), Jonathan Kaufman (Malcolm), Nancy Unser (Una dama di Lady Macbeth), Robert Harrelson (Un domestico di Macbeth, Un sicario, Un medico), David Clark (Prima apparizione), Ashley West-David (Seconda apparizione), Margaret Tyler (Terza apparizione), Bryson Woodey (Fleance); Opera Carolina Chorus and Orchestra; James Meena, conductor [Ivan Stefanutti, Director and Designer; Atelier Nicolao, Costumes; Michael Baumgarten, Lighting Designer; Opera Carolina, Belk Theater, Blumenthal Performing Arts, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA; 7 November 2019]

It is not solely four centuries’ accumulation of thespians’ superstitions that haunts the pages of ‘the Scottish play,’ William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. Published for the first time in the 1623 folio of Shakespeare’s works and based upon the fanciful account of Scottish history contained in the 1587 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, Macbeth dramatizes events from the reign of Eleventh-Century King of Alba Mac Bethad mac Findlaích and his wife Gruoch ingen Boite, virtually all accounts of whose lives cannot be corroborated. What can be verified is that, despite its relative brevity in comparison with its Shakespearean brethren, Macbeth has long been problematic for theatrical troupes. Inexplicable staging mishaps, physical injuries, fires, and financial calamities are all part of Macbeth’s lore, but the play’s foremost danger to actors is perhaps a deceptive sense that performing one of the Western canon’s most iconic dramas guarantees success. Plentiful amongst Macbeth’s victims are acclaimed actors whose skills proved to be inferior to the play’s demands.

Apart from a spectator’s startling suicide during an interval in a 1988 performance at the Metropolitan Opera, mayhem is less prominent in the performance history of Giuseppe Verdi’s operatic setting of Macbeth than in that of the play that inspired it, but neither the opera’s creation nor its subsequent revision was without complications. After receiving a carte-blanche commission from Florence’s Teatro della Pergola, Verdi was reminded by the availability of eminent baritone Felice Varesi, who would later create the title rôle in Rigoletto and Giorgio Germont in La traviata, of poet Andrea Maffei’s suggestion of Macbeth as a suitable operatic subject. Maffei was already adapting Friedrich von Schiller’s play Die Räuber for Verdi as I masnadieri, the first performance of which was given in London four months after Macbeth premièred in Florence. The libretto of Macbeth, modeled on Carlo Rusconi’s 1838 Italian translation of the play, was ultimately written by Francesco Maria Piave, who authored texts for ten of Verdi’s operas. The composer fell ill in the summer of 1846, delaying his work on Macbeth, but the extended gestation engendered a score in which aspects of Verdi’s genius that were only glimpsed in his nine previous operas sprang into view.

Disordini in Scozia: the cast of Opera Carolina’s November 2019 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth
[Photograph © by Bob Grand Lubell & Opera Carolina]

Eighteen years after its première at Teatro della Pergola, Verdi extensively revised Macbeth for a Paris production, making significant modifications to the music for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and tailoring the piece to better suit the Parisian tastes influenced by Auber, Halévy, and Meyerbeer. Macbeth was not as successful in Paris in 1865 as it had been in Florence in 1847, but Verdi’s reworkings for the French production introduced new music that tightened the opera’s dramatic structure, bringing its narrative nearer to Shakespeare’s play. Though it was only after Maria Callas sang Lady Macbeth at Teatro alla Scala in December 1952 that the opera reclaimed a place in the international repertoire, a hybridization of components of the 1847 and 1865 versions of the enabled audiences to appreciate both the radical inventiveness of Macbeth’s earlier incarnation and the heightened psychological probity of Verdi’s maturity. Utilizing an edition that, aside from omitting the ballet music and including Macbeth’s ‘Mal per me’ in the final scene, largely adhered to the composite score published by Ricordi in the 1880s [a critical edition of Macbeth was not available until 2005, when David Lawton’s complete editions of the 1847 and 1865 versions were published], Opera Carolina recreated Macbeth’s Scotland in Charlotte with a decidedly modern approach to tradition.

In recent seasons, Opera Carolina productions have demonstrated how effectively projections can be used to minimize the costs of set construction and rentals without imperiling performances’ theatrical potential. The company’s 2011 and 2014 productions of Il trovatore and Nabucco affirmed the viability of scenic projections in Verdi repertoire, and Michael Baumgarten’s lighting designs combined with the projections, devised by Baumgarten and director Ivan Stefanutti, to create visual effects that evolved in tandem with the drama. Not all of the imagery was wholly successful: in particular, the gargantuan specters that appeared on the screen drew the viewer’s attention away from the apparitions who sang on the stage. Scotland’s stunning landscapes clearly inspired many of the tableaux, but, like their paranormal counterparts, depictions of tempest-tossed seas and an undulating forest sometimes overwhelmed the stage action. The opera’s penultimate and closing scenes transpired before an evocative solar eclipse that gave way to a blazing sun, limning Scotland’s delivery from Macbeth’s tyranny. Avoiding blatant anachronisms [there are sometimes objections to use of Scotland’s emblematic rampant lion in productions of Macbeth, but the Royal Banner is known to have been a symbol of the Kingdom of Alba as early as 1222 and may already have been familiar during the historical Macbeth’s life], the production provided a dazzlingly atmospheric backdrop for the opera’s engrossing drama.

Scenically, Stefanutti’s opulent costume designs, masterfully realized by Stefano Nicolao and Atelier Nicolao, were this production’s foremost triumph. Singers of all body types were flatteringly attired in garments that, though indubitably more cumbersome than street clothes, impeded neither movement nor singing. The earth tones donned by Macbeth and his courtiers contrasted tellingly with the gleaming white worn by Lady Macbeth, intimating that the queen was unmistakably a woman at odds with her subjects. Trailing beards and illuminated, antennae-like appendages gave the witches’ bizarre appearance a subtle hint of humor that was inappropriate to neither Shakespeare nor Verdi, Stefanutti’s concept having much in common with the sketches of the inaugural 1847 Florence production of Macbeth now found in the Ricordi archives. So unobtrusive was Martha Ruskai’s typically thoughtful management of wigs and makeup that a pair of patrons were overheard at the interval discussing how artfully the principals’ natural hair was arranged. The absence of reliable primary sources inhibits scholars’ efforts to determine precisely how the denizens of Macbeth’s Scotland adorned and carried themselves, but Opera Carolina’s Macbeth proposed plausible solutions for the opera’s scenic enigmas.

Il caudore e la sua regina: baritone Mark Rucker as Macbeth (left) and soprano Othalie Graham as Lady Macbeth (right) in Opera Carolina’s November 2019 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth
[Photograph by Mitchell Kearney, © by Opera Carolina]

The visual appeal of this Macbeth complemented an unfailingly musical and unapologetically Italianate reading of the score by Opera Carolina’s Artistic Director, James Meena. An accomplished interpreter of an extensive repertoire, Meena has often displayed exceptional affinity for conducting Verdi’s operas, and his pacing of Macbeth was febrile but never frantic. The statement in the Preludio of the theme later heard in Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene was phrased with cognizance of its bel canto origins, and tempi were chosen with care throughout the performance. Meena followed Verdi’s lead in progressing organically to rousing climaxes. The tension kindled by the sextet in Act One was palpable, as was the discharge of the accumulated electricity in the act’s finale. There were more mistakes in the Opera Carolina Orchestra’s playing of Macbeth than in previous Verdi performances by the company, the most noticeable of which was the unsettled resolution of the cor anglais’s final trill in the introduction to the sleepwalking scene, but the musicians’ concentration and preparedness yielded many passages of first-rate playing. Most importantly, Meena and the orchestra supported the singers with flexibility and finesse, fostering the creation of an environment in which the principals, certain that their endeavors were bolstered by the work of their colleagues in the pit, could immerse themselves in their rôles.

As has often been true of Opera Carolina productions, the singing of the company’s chorus in this Macbeth was a testament to the wealth of talent in the Charlotte metropolitan opera. As the coven of witches in the opening scene of Act One, the ladies of the chorus intoned ‘Che faceste? Dite su!’ eerily but without resorting to the silly, ‘witchy’ sounds sometimes deployed—often embarrassingly—in this music. Portraying Macbeth’s band of hired assassins in Act Two, the male choristers sang ‘Chi v’impose unirvi a noi?’ sinisterly. Called upon to continue their prophesying in Act Three, Opera Carolina’s ‘weird sisters’ chillingly imparted auguries of Scotland’s future and conjured spirit messengers with unexaggerated singing of ‘Ondine e silfidi, dall’ali candide.’ The sublime andante sostenuto chorus that launches Act Four, ‘Patria oppressa,’ equals the patriotic fervor and pathos of the famous ‘Va, pensiero’ in Nabucco and is perhaps even finer musically. The affecting performance that the piece received from Opera Carolina’s chorus was an ideal foil for the exuberant proclamation of victory with which the opera ended. It was indeed a victorious evening for the choristers.

Il trionfo di male: baritone Mark Rucker as Macbeth (left) and soprano Othalie Graham as Lady Macbeth (right) in Opera Carolina’s November 2019 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth
[Photograph by Mitchell Kearney, © by Opera Carolina]

Without exception, Opera Carolina’s cast upheld and enhanced the production’s high musical and dramatic values. The mute rôle of Banco’s young son Fleance was expertly acted by Bryson Woodey, whose beyond-his-years stagecraft shone in his execution of Dale Girard’s choreography of his desperate, violent flight after Banco’s offstage murder. The ominous tidings of the three apparitions who confront Macbeth in Act Three were unnervingly but attractively delivered by David Clark, Ashley West-Davis, and Margaret Tyler. In many performances of Macbeth, it is easy to overlook the fact that Verdi asks Lady Macbeth’s lady-in-waiting to double her mistress’s fearsome top notes in ensembles, but, despite serving a powerhouse Lady, soprano Nancy Unser was an uncommonly vivid, always audible ‘dama,’ the character’s alarm and bewilderment in the sleepwalking scene insightfully communicated. She was partnered in that scene by the firm-voiced doctor of bass-baritone Robert Harrelson, whose confidently-projected tones and intrepid stage presence were equally advantageous in his portrayals of Macbeth’s servant and the assassin who slayed Banco.

In the proverbial operatic Utopia that today’s productions rarely visit, the rôle of Malcolm, the rightful heir to Duncan’s throne, should be assigned to a singer whose performance of his character’s music leaves the impression that he might also have proved to be an effective, capably-sung Macduff. Twenty-First-Century audiences are likely to encounter barely-adequate Malcolms sung by character tenors, but, continuing the trend of the Metropolitan Opera’s current revival, in which Macduff is sung by the renowned tenor Giuseppe Filianoti, Opera Carolina had in Jonathan Kaufman a Malcolm who was anything but a conventional secondo uomo. Kaufman’s lustrous timbre gave Malcolm’s lines in the Act One sextet and finale welcome muscle, and his vocalism in the scene with Macduff in Act Four was fittingly heroic. Ascents above the stave were handled with assurance that echoed the character’s rightful authority. Regaining the power usurped by Macbeth, Kaufman was a Malcolm whose singing was worthy of the crown won by his valor.

L’erede legittimo: tenor Jonathan Kaufman as Malcolm (center) in Opera Carolina’s November 2019 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth
[Photograph © by Bob Grand Lubell & Opera Carolina]

Italian tenor Gianluca Sciarpelletti portrayed Macduff, the Thane of Fife, first as a flinty, fecund warrior and later as a man broken by Macbeth’s merciless slaughter of his family. Discovering the corpse of the slain Duncan in Act One, Macduff’s shock, horror, and grief resounded in Sciarpelletti’s singing in the sextet and finale, in which his navigation of the difficult tessitura of his music betrayed few signs of effort. Lamenting both the deaths of his children and his own feelings of helplessness and failure in his moving scene in Act Four, this Macduff declaimed the recitative ‘O figli, o figli miei!’ with wrenching emotion. The aria ‘Ah, la paterna mano’ is one of Verdi’s loveliest pieces for the tenor voice and the impetus for several famous singers who never sang Macduff on stage having recorded the rôle in studio. Sciarpelletti’s performance of the aria lacked bel canto eloquence, but his emphatic top A♭s and B♭♭ forcefully conveyed the despondent father’s anguish. In the battle scene, the tenor’s impassioned voicing of ‘Via le fronde, e mano all’armi!’ propelled Macduff’s quest for vengeance to its inexorable conclusion. Sciarpelletti’s singing was often reminiscent of that of Carlo Cossutta, who retained Macduff in his repertoire for four decades.

Historians conjecture that the character Banquo, Macbeth’s lieutenant and fellow recipient of fateful prognostications from the witches, is either a conflation of historical figures or an invention of Holinshed’s Chronicles who was reimagined by Shakespeare as a moral counterbalance for Macbeth. In duration, the music for Verdi’s Banco is not substantial, but the rôle is musically and dramatically substantive, a distinction that was accentuated by Chinese bass Song Zaikuan’s thunderous singing in Opera Carolina’s Macbeth. In the Act One duet with Macbeth that follows the witches’ declaration that his own sons will succeed Macbeth on Scotland’s throne, Song articulated Banco’s words with acuity, enabling the listener to differentiate Banco’s and Macbeth’s sentiments with unusual clarity. Like Kaufman and Sciarpelletti, Song ensured that his character’s lines in the sextet and Act One finale were not obscured. The bass sang his aria in Act Two, ‘Come dal ciel precipita,’ with evenly-produced, superbly-projected, and truly beautiful tone. In Shakespeare’s time, it was erroneously believed that the Scottish king James VI, who ascended to the English throne upon the death of Elizabeth I as James I, was descended from Banquo. History notwithstanding, Song’s innately noble Banco was a thoroughly convincing ancestor of kings.

Vittoria dei giusti: tenor Jonathan Kaufman as Malcolm (left), baritone Mark Rucker as Macbeth (center), and tenor Gianluca Sciapelletti as Macduff (right) in Opera Carolina’s November 2019 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth
[Photograph by Mitchell Kearney, © by Opera Carolina]

Returning to Charlotte, where she has previously sung the demanding title rôles in Verdi’s Aida and Puccini’s Turandot, to portray Lady Macbeth, soprano Othalie Graham first assayed the part in the present production’s October 2019 première at Toledo Opera. This auspicious rôle début inducted her into the very exclusive sorority of singers who have sung Lady Macbeth, Aida, and Turandot. Arguably, the most renowned members of this illustrious society are Maria Callas, Birgit Nilsson, and Leonie Rysanek, but other gifted ladies including Amy Shuard, Pauline Tinsley, Dame Gwyneth Jones, Rita Hunter, Martina Arroyo, Marisa Galvany, and Ghena Dimitrova contributed to the legacy that Graham continued. The vehemence of Graham’s calculating Lady recalled Callas’s standard-setting interpretation, and the incredible might of her singing rivaled Jones’s legendary vocal amplitude. Graham relied upon her own theatrical instincts and vocal resources in forming her characterization, however, thereby restoring to the rôle the Shakespearean grandeur that has been missing from too many recent performances of Macbeth.

Bella regina: soprano Othalie Graham as Lady Macbeth in Opera Carolina’s November 2019 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth
[Photograph © by Opera Carolina & Toledo Opera]

Lady Macbeth makes her initial entrance in Act One whilst reading a momentous letter from her husband, a spoken introduction that a number of Ladies have uttered with overwrought enunciation—and, in some cases, wretched Italian. In Graham’s performance, Lady seemed to actually be pondering a private communiqué rather than broadcasting a proclamation to the masses and did so with commendable diction. When she launched the recitative ‘Ambizioso spirto tu sei, Macbetto,’ the soprano began a journey that led the proud Lady from domestic discontent to treachery and destruction. The recitative’s top C was unruly, but the singer’s vocal control prevailed. The trills and bravura passages in the andantino cavatina ‘Vieni! t’affretta!’ and cabaletta ‘Or tutti sorgete’ are rarely comfortable for voices of the size of Graham’s, the former often ignored altogether by dramatic sopranos, but here, too, Graham’s dedication to fidelity to the score conquered the music’s difficulties. Her vocalism in the duet with Macbeth seethed with deadly cunning, her singing of ‘Regna il sonno su tutti’ at once cajoling and contemptuous. Feigning surprise, she credibly played the part of the unsuspecting beneficiary of misfortunate in the sextet and finale, though perceptive onlookers might have recognized her fortissimo top C♭ as an exultant celebration of the success of her scheming. Graham ended Act One with a magnificent D♭₆ that might have leveled Birnam Wood.

In Lady Macbeth’s scene at the start of Act Two, Graham traversed the two-octave range of the allegro moderato aria ‘La luce langue’ with abandon, unafraid of roaring as the leonine aspects of Lady Macbeth’s character pounced into action. The false jollity of the Brindisi, ‘Si coimi il calice di vino eletto,’ drew from Graham singing in which Lady’s unrelenting resolve was audible, and, as in her aria and cabaletta in Act One, no trill was neglected. The Act Three duet with Macbeth found Graham at the height of her powers as a singing actress, her depiction of Lady’s ferocity exemplified by her Herculean top C. Not surprisingly, there was no shortage of vocal strength in Graham’s traversal of the sleepwalking scene in Act Four, but the expressivity of her singing was no less prodigious. The scene’s kinship with Bellini’s and Donizetti’s mad scenes was apparent, but the disintegration of this Lady’s faculties was evinced not by manic actions but by an engrossing singularity of purpose devoted to ridding her hands of the ‘damnèd spot’ that only she could see. That such a large voice reached the written top D♭ quietly, as Verdi intended, was astonishing, but the ethereal beauty of Graham’s tone was captivating. Though undeniably unscrupulous and motivated by an unquenchable lust for power, Graham’s Lady Macbeth was no one-dimensional termagant: beyond the venom and vitriol, a vulnerable woman fighting to find lasting security in a hostile world could be discerned.

Teste incoronate: baritone Mark Rucker as Macbeth (left) and soprano Othalie Graham as Lady Macbeth (right) in Opera Carolina’s November 2019 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth
[Photograph © by Opera Carolina & Toledo Opera]

In an acclaimed career that includes memorable performances of Rigoletto, Amonasro in Aida, and Don Carlo in La forza del destino at the Metropolitan Opera, Mark Rucker has garnered a position of honor among the preeminent Verdi baritones of his generation. With his performance in the title rôle in Opera Carolina’s Macbeth, he was a peer of Tito Gobbi and Giuseppe Taddei as an interpreter of Verdi’s music for the Thane of Cawdor. In his first scene, this Macbeth was noticeably amazed by the witches’ foretelling of his regal destiny, and the elation of his anticipated elevation in rank was tinged by uncertainty in his duet with Banco. It was a man who needed only a mild prodding to definitive action who sang ‘A me precorri’ in the duet with Lady Macbeth. Nevertheless, Rucker touchingly divulged the doubt and guilt that plagued Macbeth after Duncan’s assassination.

Some Macbeths make little of the brief scene with Lady Macbeth that opens Act Two, but Rucker deepened his psychological portrait of the tormented thane by singing with attention to Macbeth’s words and how they interact with those of his consort. There are many parallels between Macbeth’s agonized responses to the materialization of Banco’s spirit in the banquet scene and the ravings of the eponymous monarch in the latter half of Nabucco. Rucker voiced ‘Prenda ciascun l’orrevole’ with burgeoning dread, and he projected ‘Tu di sangue hai brutto il volto’ with terrifying vocal steel. His ‘Va! Spirto d’abisso’ was a command that not even the most audacious phantom could disobey. The baritone’s stalwart but unquestionably sincere voicing of ‘Oh! lieto augurio!’ in the gran scena delle apparizioni in Act Three effectuated an element of frailty in his portrayal. In the duet with Lady Macbeth, Rucker further refined his characterization, revealing the passivity at the core of Macbeth’s constitution that feeds his wife’s appetite for dominance.

Sensing the increasing feebleness of his grasp on the crown in Act Four, Macbeth contemplates his mortality in one of Verdi’s great baritone arias, ‘Pietà, rispetto, amore,’ sung by Rucker in this performance with the secure tone, aristocratic phrasing, and expressive elegance that are the hallmarks of important Verdi singing. Rightly rewarded with an enthusiastic ovation, this account of the aria bared Macbeth’s tortured heart to the audience. Including the final choral paean to Macbeth’s defeat and death after Rucker’s profoundly plaintive voicing of ‘Mal per me’ seemed cruel, Macbeth having earned pity with an acceptance of death that he had come to regard as retribution for his crimes. Every note of the rôle in the voice and a myriad of the complicated man’s emotions present in his introspective character study, Rucker offered the Charlotte audience a Macbeth of a caliber widely believed to no longer exist in opera. This is the essence of what Opera Carolina productions assert: opera endures in many of America’s great cities, but, with performances like this Macbeth, it thrives in Charlotte.

BEST CONCERTO RECORDING of 2019: Antonín Dvořák & Aram Khachaturian — VIOLIN CONCERTI (Rachel Barton Pine, violin; Royal Scottish National Orchestra; Teddy Abrams, conductor; Avie Records AV2411)

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841 – 1904): Violin Concerto in A minor, Opus 53 and ARAM KHACHATURIAN (1903 – 1978): Violin Concerto in D minor – Rachel Barton Pine, violin; Royal Scottish National Orchestra; Teddy Abrams, conductor [Recorded at RSNO Centre, Glasgow, Scotland, UK, 21 – 22 August 2018; Avie Records AV2411; 1 CD, 73:11; Available from Avie Records, Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Chronicles of recording Classical Music and opera brim with laments for missed opportunities and celebrations of serendipitous happenstances. Regret that Jussi Björling did not sing the rôle of Riccardo on the earlier of Sir Georg Solti’s two studio recordings of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera for Decca is mitigated by appreciation of the superb performance of the part by Carlo Bergonzi of which the set ultimately boasted. In a similar vein, there is the opera-worthy tale of American soprano Eleanor Steber, like Björling an elegant artist with an unfortunate penchant for overindulgent imbibing, arriving at a studio session at which she was scheduled to record Mozart arias, declaring that her mood was incompatible with Mozart, substituting the heroine’s aria ‘Depuis le jour’ from Gustave Charpentier’s Louise, and extemporaneously recording what many listeners continue to regard as the definitive account of the aria on disc. In the whirlwind, competitive world of Classical Music, collisions of the plethora of measurable and intangible effects of personalities and logistics are inevitable. It is rare that unforeseen circumstances yield results of the quality of Bergonzi’s Decca Riccardo and Steber’s ‘Depuis le jour,’ but occurrences such as these are rightly coveted by music lovers.

The fortuitous scheduling conflict that engendered this noteworthy Avie Records recording of Violin Concerti by Antonín Dvořák and Aram Khachaturian provides another compelling reason for gratitude to whichever cosmic forces govern such phenomena. Initially scheduled to record other works with a different conductor, violinist Rachel Barton Pine seized the opportunity presented by an eleventh-hour problem with the intended conductor’s availability to revisit music with which she has been acquainted since the dawn of her career. In her scholarly but engagingly personal essay accompanying this release, Barton Pine reminisces about learning the Dvořák and Khachaturian Concerti at the age of fifteen.

It is not difficult to imagine Mozart or Mendelssohn undertaking the study of such demanding music in adolescence, but this degree of conscientiousness is at odds with perceptions of modern youth. Barton Pine defies many of today’s trends in approaching a career as a violin soloist, however, honoring the legacies of violinists like Nathan Milstein and Arthur Grumiaux by allying comprehensive knowledge of the most popular concerti with explorations of a vast array of chamber music, lesser-known concert works, and new pieces. With an artist of Barton Pine’s adventurousness, the near-spontaneous decision to record the Dvořák and Khachaturian Concerti is perhaps a critical component of the immediacy of her playing of this music.

Recorded in a natural, resonant acoustic in which not even the violin’s highest tones are distorted, the 1742 Guarneri ‘del Gesù’ violin, Dominique Pecatte bow, and Thomastik-Infeld Vision Titanium Solo strings employed by Barton Pine are conduits for uncommon, often revelatory interpretive acuity. [Recently hearing her performance of music by Johann Sebastian Bach at the National Gallery of Art, where the program included a majestic but mesmerizingly intimate traversal of the fourth of Bach’s Partitas for solo violin alongside Sonatas partnering her with harpsichordist Jory Vinikour, confirmed that the violinist’s artistic perspicacity is limited by neither repertoire nor the instrument at her disposal, the Bach pieces having been played on a Nicolò Gagliano violin dating from 1770.] The expressivity of her playing is accentuated by the sympathetic conducting of Teddy Abrams, who receives from the Royal Scottish National Orchestra playing characterized by undeviating technical mastery, rhythmic precision, and well-blended ensemble.

His 2014 appointment as Music Director of The Louisville Orchestra making him America’s youngest principal conductor of a prominent symphonic ensemble, Abrams conducts these works by Dvořák and Khachaturian with convention-flouting pragmatism that complements Barton Pine’s genre-bending aesthetic. The latent Romanticism of Dvořák’s music and the idiosyncratic accents of Khachaturian’s artistic language are omnipresent in the orchestra’s playing, but these are not performances in which choices of tempo, dynamic contrasts, and subtleties of phrasing unimaginatively adhere to traditions.

Abrams’s decisions are commendably faithful to the composers’ scores, indicating an atypical trust in the music’s capacity to advance the best answers to interpretive questions. The rapport among conductor, soloist, and orchestra audible in their recorded efforts is evidence of a shared dedication neither to recreating established interpretations of these pieces nor to consciously creating new ones but to rediscovering the authentic, sometimes ignored or marginalized voices of the composers. It is regrettable that there is novelty in fidelity to the composers’ instructions in this repertoire, but these performances assert how strikingly original faithful service to the music can sound.

Composed in 1879, following an encounter with the celebrated violinist Joseph Joachim, who never performed the piece, and premièred in Prague in 1883 by František Ondřiček, a successful composer in his own right, Dvořák’s Opus 53 Violin Concerto had by the turn of the Twentieth Century claimed a permanent, prominent place in the violin concerto repertoire. Though the writing for the soloist recalls aspects of Brahms’s and Tchaikovsky’s violin concerti, both of which were completed in 1878, the music for the orchestra in the opening Allegro ma non troppo movement of the Dvořák Concerto discloses a stylistic pedigree with close ties to Beethoven’s Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Symphonies. Virtuosity is demanded of and here achieved by the orchestra, not least in the movement’s most rhapsodic passages, but it is the deceptively extemporaneous character of Barton Pine’s playing that lifts the music off of the page. In her performances of both of the Concerti on this disc, the violinist’s execution of double stops is superb, her intonation accurate and the paired notes impeccably balanced.

Emerging without pause from an unexpected modification of the first movement’s thematic recapitulation, the central Adagio ma non troppo movement of the Dvořák Concerto evokes the rustic elegance of the Czech folk music that the composer so loved and endeavored to preserve. Her judicious use of vibrato fostering tonal production that emphasizes the warmth of the music and that of the timbre of the Guarneri ‘del Gesú’ violin, Barton Pine draws from the instrument sounds that impart Dvořák’s great affection for the humor and humility of the Czech people. A hallmark of the soloist’s part in the Concerto’s Allegro gracioso ma non troppo finale is the use of repetitive figurations that anticipate the prominence of ostinati in Twentieth-Century music. In Dvořák’s handling, this device functions much like a ground bass in Baroque music, providing the movement’s bustling momentum. Abrams and the RSNO respond to the vigor of Barton Pine’s playing with their own verve. This is an exuberant reading of the Concerto, but the bleaker moods that lurk within the music are not neglected. Above all, this is a superlatively-played performance that illuminates the composer’s ingenuity rather than the performers’ egos.

The Armenian-born Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto was a product of an idyllic sylvan retreat during which the composer’s creative impulses were fueled by the inspiration of nature. Written for and premièred in 1940 by famed violinist David Oistrakh, whose cadenza in the first movement Barton Pine plays—dazzlingly—in this performance [Khachaturian preferred it to his own cadenza, as well], the Concerto was honored in its own time but tainted in short-sighted Twenty-First-Century assessments by being awarded a Stalin Prize by the Soviet Union. Like Dvořák, Khachaturian was inevitably affected by the politics of his time, but he, too, felt profound love for the folk music of his homeland. The innovative rhythms and pungent harmonies that distinguish Khachaturian’s works from those of his contemporaries are integral components of his Violin Concerto, but, perhaps because of the tranquil surroundings of its genesis, this music also possesses episodes of spellbinding emotional sincerity.

In her introductory notes, Barton Pine relates that her fondness for the Khachaturian Concerto began with her recognition of the kinship between Khachaturian’s assertive style and the heavy metal music that she enjoys. Had Steppenwolf or Iron Maiden commissioned a concerto for metal band, they might have turned to Khachaturian, and the Allegro con fermezza movement of his Violin Concerto could have been adapted to accommodate guitar riffs and cacophonous percussion. Barton Pine imposes nothing upon the music, her playing revealing only what she finds in the score, but it is unlikely that any other violinist’s performance of the movement has ‘rocked’ as exhilaratingly as hers. This is overtly elaborate music, tailored to Oistrakh’s abilities, but the playing of Barton Pine and her colleagues is never ostentatious.

Listeners whose familiarity with Khachaturian’s music is limited to frequently-heard pieces like excerpts from his 1942 ballet score Gayane may be surprised by the sentimentality of the Violin Concerto’s Andante sostenuto movement. Abrams’s cogent pacing and the orchestra’s thoughtful playing heighten the impact of Barton Pine’s unpretentious lyricism. This violinist understands that saccharine over-emoting is contrary to the spirit and structure of Khachaturian’s music and phrases accordingly. Building upon this welcome restraint, she holds nothing back in her performance of the Concerto’s Allegro vivace conclusion. Undertaking a performance or recording of this music without certainty of one’s capacity to play it properly is unimaginable, but the exceptional caliber of Barton Pine’s technique is no less astounding for being expected. Fantastic merely as a performance of a fascinating piece, her traversal of the Khachaturian Concerto is invaluable as a delivery of the score from the confines of stodgy concepts of how and by whom ‘serious music’ should be composed, performed, and enjoyed.

For all of its much-promoted claims of increased diversity and accessibility, Classical Music is more exclusive now than ever before in its storied history. There are more performances of more works in more places, and the careers of composers and musicians are no longer sustained by aristocratic patronage. There is hunger for the comfort and unity that music can foster, but there are self-proclaimed guardians of the temple of art who would rather starve those who seek fulfillment rather than relinquish their fiercely-defended grip on standards that in some instances are no longer tenable.

Like Benny Goodman, Rachel Barton Pine is an artist for whom distinctions of musical genres are not insurmountable boundaries but points of departure for journeys that connect people in spite of the differences that divide them. The performances of Violin Concerti by Antonín Dvořák and Aram Khachaturian on this disc are invitations to listeners, whether they are most comfortable in concert halls or mosh pits, to experience music on their own terms. By any standard, Barton Pine here enriches the discography with perceptive, pulse-quickening performances of two of the great concerti for her instrument. Moreover, these are performances that dispel the myths that greatness expired with artists of the past and that the recognition of greatness among today’s artists somehow lessens that of their forebears.

PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Johann Strauss II — DIE FLEDERMAUS (T. Beliy, C. Griffin, S. Toso, M. Friedrich, B. Lail, S. Caplin, L. Sparks, M. Xie, G. Chambers, R. A. Garcia, R. Wells; UNCG Opera Theatre, 24 October 2019)

JOHANN STRAUSS II (1825 – 1899): Die Fledermaus [sung in English translation by Ruth and Thomas Martin] — Tamara Beliy (Rosalinde), Claire Griffin (Adele), Sean Toso (Alfred), Michael Friedrich (Gabriel von Eisenstein), Bailey Lail (Prinz Orlovsky), Sophie Caplin (Doktor Blind), Lorenze Sparks (Doktor Falke), Mujun Xie (Ida), Guy Chambers (Frank), Rafael Alejandro Garcia (Ivan), Robert Wells (Frosch); UNCG Opera Theatre Fledermaus Ensemble and Orchestra; David Holley, conductor, stage director, and producer [Pingyi Song, chorus master; UNCG Opera Theatre, UNCG Auditorium, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA; Thursday, 24 October 2019]

Some clichés get it right. Music is indeed a universal language, and, in the treatment of music-receptive ailments, laughter is a highly-effective medicine. This is no less true in America in 2019 than it was in Europe in the 1870s, when the continent was already experiencing the conflicts between nationalism and imperialism that would eventually erupt into the First World War. Encompassing the native lands of diverse peoples in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire was the epicenter of ethnic clashes: it was Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, that precipitated the start of the Great War. It was into this volatile environment that Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus first spread its wings, only seven years after the adoption of the new constitution that hastened the end of the House of Habsburg’s power.

First performed on 5 April 1874, in Vienna’s famed Theater an der Wien, where not only several of Strauss’s operettas but also Beethoven’s Leonore—the earliest incarnation of Fidelio—and Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe received their premières, Die Fledermaus was immediately acclaimed by audiences as a masterpiece of the Viennese operetta genre. By the time that Die Fledermaus reached the stage, the forty-eight-year-old Strauss had been celebrated as a composer for three decades. Continuing his short-lived father’s espousal of the waltz, Strauss had by 1874 come to represent the musical life of Vienna, both in Austria-Hungary and throughout the world. All of Europe danced to his polkas and waltzes, but the success of Die Fledermaus contributed markedly to Strauss’s global fame. Within months of its première, Die Fledermaus had been heard in a host of European cities and had even crossed the Atlantic, receiving its first performance in the United States in New York City on 21 November 1874.

With an uproarious plot drawn from Das Gefängnis, an 1851 comedy by the little-remembered playwright Julius Roderich Benedix that also inspired a once-popular comédie en vaudeville by Jacques Offenbach’s frequent librettists Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac, Die Fledermaus is a riotous romp through timeless themes, all of which ultimately involve affairs of the heart. With marital infidelity, mistaken identities, prison sentences, and grand theft timepiece transpiring in champagne-soaked three-quarter time, what could possibly go wrong? Showcasing the tremendous wealth of talent in the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Die Fledermaus confirmed that, in musical comedy, anything that can go wrong must go wrong—and when things go wrong as brilliantly as in this performance, how right it is!

Falling down on the job: baritone Robert Wells as Frosch in UNCG Opera Theatre’s October 2019 production of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus
[Photograph © by Amber-Rose Romero, Tamara Beliy, & UNCG Opera Theatre]

With UNCG’s Director of Opera David Holley at the helm, this production of Die Fledermaus was destined to be a show of which cast, crew, university, and community could be proud. Both in his rôle at UNCG and as Artistic Director of Greensboro Opera, Holley brings steadfast integrity to his work, but his staging of Die Fledermaus revealed anew that a vital component of his artistry is not taking himself too seriously. Supervising an entrancingly simple staging in which the action took place in front of the closed curtain, Holley genuinely participated in the performance, not merely as a conductor on the podium but also as an actor with perfect comedic timing. The production’s small scale lent this Fledermaus an intimacy that the score possesses but many stagings lack. Big budgets can buy lavish sets, extravagant costumes, and aggressively-promoted singers, but these expenditures do not guarantee success. The enthusiasm that Holley instilled in this Fledermaus, epitomized by unwavering musicality and clever humor, cannot be bought.

Under Holley’s baton, the excellent orchestra—pianists Anja Arko (Ouvertüre and Act One) and Xiaoxiong Chen (Acts Two and Three), flautist Janet Phillips, oboist Thomas Turanchik, clarinetist Darkson Magrinelli, double bassist Rebecca Marland, and percussionist Erik Schmidt—interacted with the drama rather than merely accompanying it. Fledermaus is a richly-orchestrated score, but not even in the famous Ouvertüre did the playing of UNCG Opera Theatre’s small instrumental ensemble disappoint. In fact, their numbers were perfectly matched with the dimensions of the production, transporting the audience to a chic Viennese café. A few suspect pitches and missed entrances notwithstanding, the musicians’ work was an integral part of the evening’s fun. Similarly, the choristers, drilled by the aptly-named Pingyi Song, sang with gusto—and with English diction that could be understood! Holley’s leadership ensured that every musical detail of the performance was as clear as the chiming of Einsenstein’s troublesome watch.

Warbling warden: baritone Guy Chambers as Frank in UNCG Opera Theatre’s October 2019 production of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus
[Photograph © by Amber-Rose Romero, Tamara Beliy, & UNCG Opera Theatre]

The rôle of Ivan, Prinz Orlovsky’s majordomo, is barely noticed in many productions, but he heightened the hilarity of Act Two in this Fledermaus in a wonderfully droll performance by bass Rafael Alejandro Garcia. Catering to the whims of the Prinz’s snobbish guests clearly inconvenienced this servant, a fact that Garcia communicated with rolled eyes and stony expressions of contempt and annoyance. It is a pity that a solo number was not invented for him, perhaps using music from another Strauss score and a purpose-written text: like Leporello in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, what stories he might tell! The master not to be outdone by a student, eminent baritone and UNCG faculty member Robert Wells’s much-lauded experience in the Gilbert and Sullivan Savoy operas was apparent in his scene-stealing turn as the chronically-inebriated jailer Frosch. This bumbling keeper of the keys was unquestionably an ancestor of Barney Fife: thankfully, his boss did not trust him with a pistol and a bullet. With an offstage assist from Alfred, Wells’s Frosch pantomimed Nemorino’s ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ from Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore better than some tenors sing it.

Partners in wine: baritone Guy Chambers as Frank (left) and tenor Sean Toso as Alfred (right) in UNCG Opera Theatre’s October 2019 production of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus
[Photograph © by Amber-Rose Romero, Tamara Beliy, & UNCG Opera Theatre]

Looking stunning in a sapphire-hued gown, Beijing-born soprano Mujun Xie sparkled, musically and dramatically, as Adele’s worldly sister Ida. Though she occasionally seemed uncomfortable with the English dialogue, her comfort with the music was conspicuous. Likewise, soprano Sophie Caplin coped handily with an awkward assignment. There is an established tradition of casting a tenor rather than a mezzo-soprano—or, in recent years, a countertenor—as Orlovsky, but it is far rarer to encounter a female singer as Eisenstein’s blissfully inept solicitor, Doktor Blind. Caplin made the most of Blind’s patter in the Act One trio with Rosalinde and Eistenstein, and she displayed expert comic acting in the put-upon attorney’s appearance in Act Three.

In his guises as the prison warden and his party-going alter ego Chevalier Chagrin, Frank received from baritone Guy Chambers a vibrant, vividly-sung characterization. Launching the trio in the Act One finale, when Frank arrives to convey Eisenstein to prison but, unbeknownst to himself and the absent Eisenstein, finds Rosalinde in the company of her would-be paramour, Chambers sang attractively. Fantastic as the not-quite-French Chevalier Chagrin in Act Two, the baritone managed to avoid being upstaged in Act Three, first with a bit of boisterous stage business involving the predictably incendiary results of falling asleep with a lit cigar and a newspaper and then with a touching suggestion of humility when his real identity as the plebeian warden was revealed to Adele and Ida. Chambers’s vivacious personality and his lovely, evenly-produced voice made Frank’s every moment on stage a delight.

The prince and the prankster: baritone Lorenze Sparks as Doktor Falke (left) and mezzo-soprano Bailey Lail as Prinz Orlovsky (right) in UNCG Opera Theatre’s October 2019 production of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus
[Photograph © by Amber-Rose Romero, Tamara Beliy, & UNCG Opera Theatre]

The aristocratic boost to her emergence as an actress that Adele sought from the fraudulent Chevalier was ultimately pledged with self-congratulatory magnanimity by the glamorously androgynous Prinz Orlovsky of mezzo-soprano Bailey Lail. Act Two is Orlovsky’s realm, and Lail crowned her portrayal of the petulant, avowedly hedonistic nobleman with a rousing account of the couplets in which the Priz articulates his anything-goes credo, ‘Chacun à son goût.’ Strauss’s writing for Orlovsky is often unwieldy, especially for modern singers with higher centers of vocal gravity than their Nineteenth-Century counterparts likely had, necessitating difficult changes of register. [The voice of the first Orlovsky, Irma Nittinger, was sufficiently unique that, when she fell ill, scheduled performances of Die Fledermaus at the Theater an der Wien in late Spring 1874 were postponed until she recovered in the autumn.] Lail navigated the rôle’s challenges with aplomb and verbal acuity, though the mandated Russian accent, here sounding as though the Prinz arrived in Vienna via Warsaw, distracted more than it entertained. To distort a conceit often repeated by this production’s Prinz, hearing one Orlovsky in no way equates with having heard all interpreters of the part, but Lail was an Orlovsky whose performance was a joy to hear.

Euphoniously opening Act One with a serenade of melting lyricism, tenor Sean Toso deployed an arsenal of hysterical Italian tenor mannerisms in his portrayal of Rosalinde’s ‘special friend’ Alfred, an obvious randy relation of the great Enrico Caruso. Eisenstein’s well-timed departure facilitating an impromptu assignation with his beloved, this Alfred eagerly began his pursuit of his amorous quarry. In the Act One finale, Toso voiced the Trinklied with the zeal of a man used to playing the lover on and off the stage. In addition to the sputtering ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ commandeered by Frosch, Toso’s Alfred enlivened his time in prison with a few bars from the Duca di Mantova’s ‘La donna è mobile,’ the Brindisi from La traviata, and Radamès’s ‘Celeste Aida,’ and seizing Rosalinde’s hand after her arrival at the jail offered an irresistible chance to sing the first phrase of Rodolfo’s ‘Che gelida manina.’ Toso sang all of these excerpts appealingly, but it was in his singing in the trio with Rosalinde and Eisenstein, the latter posing as Blind in an attempt to elicit a confession of wrongdoing from his wife and her lover, that the tenor’s affinity for musical comedy was most evident. The fervor of his Alfred’s wooing of Rosalinde and his impressive sampling of music from other scores whetted the appetite for hearing Toso in Romantic—and romantic—rôles.

No time for tidying: soprano Claire Griffin as Adele in UNCG Opera Theatre’s October 2019 production of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus
[Photograph © by Amber-Rose Romero, Tamara Beliy, & UNCG Opera Theatre]

Should anyone hear her cheerful banter and beguilingly ebullient music and think that the rôle of Rosalinde’s stagestruck maid Adele is an easy sing, considering the fact that the first note of the part is a top B should initiate a return to reality. Nevertheless, soprano Claire Griffin electrified UNCG Opera Theatre’s Fledermaus with an Adele so captivating that singing her demanding music seemed to be as natural as breathing. From her first entrance, reading the letter purportedly containing her sister’s exhortation to use the excuse of a sick aunt to procure an evening off in order to attend Orlovsky’s ball, this Adele had a solution for every problem. In the scene with Rosalinde and the subsequent trio with the chambermaid’s mistress and master, Griffin sang splendidly and animated the rôle with uninhibited antics that included exasperatedly perching herself on clarinetist Magrinelli’s knee whilst Rosalinde and Eisenstein exaggerated their sorrow at facing an eight-day separation. Adele’s couplets in the finale were dispatched with comedic flair worthy of Lucille Ball.

Orlovsky may be the most lascivious host in Vienna, but Griffin’s Adele was irrefutably the belle of the ball in Act Two. Initially the proverbial fish out of water, she quickly perceived that, whether their ranks and titles were real or fictitious, the people around her were inherently fake. Adele’s laughing song is one of the score’s best-loved numbers and on this evening fully earned that distinction. In Griffin’s performance, Adele’s couplets in Act Three were nothing short of a tour de force. Appropriating Holley’s baton, she literally became the director of her own show. Frank and Orlovsky were convinced of the viability of her theatrical abilities, and who could doubt the discernment of a warden and a prince? That Griffin accomplished such a dynamic characterization without even marginally sacrificing musical values exclaimed that she was born for a life upon the wicked stage—the operatic stage, that is.

Boys will be boys: tenor Michael Friedrich as Gabriel von Eisenstein (left) and baritone Lorenze Sparks as Doktor Falke (right) in UNCG Opera Theatre’s October 2019 production of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus
[Photograph © by Amber-Rose Romero, Tamara Beliy, & UNCG Opera Theatre]

Settling a score with Eisenstein, who abandoned him in the wee hours after a masquerade ball and left him in a public place to be discovered in a bat costume, it is Doktor Falke who organizes the events that propel the plot of Die Fledermaus, but the voices to which the part is entrusted sometimes fail to embody Falke’s importance in the operetta. This is a shortcoming of which UNCG Opera Theatre’s production cannot be accused, Falke having been brilliantly sung and acted in Greensboro by Lorenze Sparks. Falke is a rôle in which one of the foremost masters of Viennese operetta, Austrian bass-baritone Erich Kunz, was greatly acclaimed [he also recorded both Frank and Frosch], and the fact that Sparks’s performance often brought the wit of Kunz’s Falke to mind is indicative of the caliber of the young singer’s efforts.

His range hugging the divide between baritone and tenor, Sparks exhibited vocal assurance throughout the compass of Falke’s music, making his Act One duet with Eisenstein as effective musically as it was comedically. Sparks’s Falke was literally and figuratively the life of the party in Act Two, conspiring with Prinz Orlovsky to bring off his plans in memorable fashion and initiating the ‘Brüderlein und Schwesterlein’ canon with burnished vocalism. Claiming victory in the final act, this Falke rejoiced without overwrought gloating. Vocally and histrionically, Sparks’s performance wielded the complexities of an Austrian Sachertorte: decadent, layered, and filled with a concoction of contrasting sweetness and tartness, it was unforgettably delectable.

Keeping watch: soprano Tamara Beliy as Rosalinde (left) and baritone Michael Friedrich as Gabriel von Eisenstein (right) in UNCG Opera Theatre’s October 2019 production of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus
[Photograph © by Amber-Rose Romero, Tamara Beliy, & UNCG Opera Theatre]

Despite an extensive history of the music being sung honorably on stage and in recording studios by baritones, Strauss intended the rôle of Gabriel von Eisenstein, the butt of Doktor Falke’s retributory jest, for a tenor. In many instances, a tenor voice blends more pleasingly with his colleagues in ensembles, and a higher, brighter voice can give the errant husband a more youthful demeanor. Michael Friedrich’s performance in this Fledermaus was an example of a tenor Eisenstein who validated the composer’s choice of vocal range. Devilishly handsome, debonair, and as lithe as a Monty Python trouper, Friedrich’s impersonation of Eisenstein combined the slapstick shenanigans of the young Charlie Chaplin with the vocal elegance of Heddle Nash. Bemoaning the ineptitude of his counselor of record with the temper of a man sentenced to the gallows, he simultaneously sweet-talked Rosalinde and abused Doktor Blind in their Act One trio.

Prospects of champagne baths and frolicking ballerinas galvanized Friedrich’s singing in the duet with Falke, and he could not take his leave of his distracted wife and her meddling maid quickly enough. Like Chambers’s Chevalier Chagrin, Friedrich’s Marquis Renard was a ripping parody of a pretentious grand seigneur. Ensnared by his wife’s cunning, this Eisenstein reacted to the loss of his lady-baiting watch with comical tantrums and pouting. Reporting to serve his jail sentence only to find his cell occupied by a substitute Eisenstein, he was quick to recognize Alfred as a rival and to hypocritically denounce Rosalinde’s inconstancy. Mirroring Falke’s good-natured enjoyment of his revenge, Eisenstein accepted defeat and admitted his own culpability without bitterness. Never pushed beyond its natural lyricism, Friedrich’s voice was as seductive as his smile.

Lady of the house: soprano Tamara Beliy as Rosalinde in UNCG Opera Theatre’s October 2019 production of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus
[Photograph © by Amber-Rose Romero, Tamara Beliy, & UNCG Opera Theatre]

An imaginatively capricious Meg Page in UNCG Opera Theatre’s ambitious April 2019 production of Verdi’s Falstaff [reviewed here], soprano Tamara Beliy sang Rosalinde in Die Fledermaus with the same intelligence, forthrightness, and musical resourcefulness that characterized her portrayal of the merry wife of Windsor. In the scene with Adele in Act One, Beliy’s Rosalinde was the personification of domestic malaise, so lost in her own thoughts that Adele’s pleading for an evening’s holiday went unheard. The top Bs in the trio with Eisenstein and Doktor Blind rang out imposingly. Here and in the trio with Adele and Eisenstein, there was no confusion about whose will was dominant, chez von Eisenstein. Beautiful of visage, figure, and, most importantly, voice, Beliy gave Rosalinde an aura of cinematic enchantment.

Shocked to meet her husband at Orlovsky’s ball when he is supposed to be serving his jail sentence, this Rosalinde’s composure was only momentarily upset, but Beliy’s vocal control was never compromised. Toying with Eisenstein as she contrived to secure evidence of his duplicity by depriving him of his watch, Rosalinde’s trills and top Bs were sung with the supremacy of a woman who knows that she has the upper hand. Beliy voiced the familiar Csárdás, in which Holley proved to be the rare conductor who did not reduce his Rosalinde to gasping and panicking with an impossibly quick tempo for the Frischka, with panache and persuasively-feigned patriotism, and her top D at the piece’s conclusion was considerably more substantial than the shrieks typically heard. The explosions of indignation in the Act Three trio with Alfred and Eisenstein were handled without resorting to vocal harshness. In some singers’ performances, Rosalinde’s better qualities are hidden behind a minxish façade, but Beliy’s Rosalinde was as sympathetic in anger as in jubilation. In this young soprano’s graceful, expressive singing, Rosalinde’s benevolent spirit was always discernible.

That Die Fledermaus was one of the first scores to be taken into a studio in the early years of sound recording reflects the special affection that audiences have long had for the piece. That 1907 recording omitted the Ouvertüre and much of the dialogue and imposed cuts on the vocal numbers, but these and its technological limitations do not lessen its value as a glimpse into the performance history of a cherished work then only thirty-three years past its world première. With decidedly modern theatrical sensibilities that suited the staging’s ethos, UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Die Fledermaus wrote its own chapter in the operetta’s history, replacing decades’ worth of accumulated artifice with earnest exuberance. Amidst the disconcerting events of the Twenty-First Century, laughter of the operatic variety is truly one of the best medicines.

 

♪     ♪     ♪     ♪     ♪

The second performance of UNCG Opera Theatre’s production of Die Fledermaus featured Lilla Keith as Rosalinde, Amber-Rose Romero as Adele, Angela Farlow-Rumball as Doktor Blind, Jenna Fife as Ida, Abigail Coy as Prinz Orlovsky, and Forrest Bunter as Frank. Other rôles were performed by the artists who appeared in the 24 October performance. Regrettably, I was unable to attend Saturday’s performance.

October 2019 RECORDING OF THE MONTH: Gregory Spears — PAUL’S CASE (J. Blalock, K. Phares, M. Wimbish, E. Sanzero, A. Crider, M. Slattery, J. Shaffran; National Sawdust Tracks NS-027)

GREGORY SPEARS (born 1977): Paul’s Case — Jonathan Blalock (Paul), Keith Phares (Father), Melissa Wimbish (History Teacher, Opera Singer 1, Maid 1), Erin Sanzero (Drawing Teacher, Opera Singer 2, Maid 2), Amanda Crider (English Teacher, Maid 3), Michael Slattery (Yale Boy), James Shaffran (Principal, Bellboy); American Modern Ensemble; Robert Wood, conductor [Recorded in Performing Arts Center Recital Hall, Purchase College, State University of New York, Purchase, New York, USA, 6 – 8 August 2018; National Sawdust Tracks NS-027; 2 CDs, 82:10; Available from National Sawdust Tracks]

When eminent novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicler of life on the Nebraska prairie Willa Cather died on 24 April 1947, the America of which she wrote in the iconic works O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia was a nation at a crossroads. The optimism of the new century and the Roaring Twenties obliterated by two cataclysmic World Wars and the Great Depression, America in 1947 was a nation in search of renewed identity and purpose, the wounds of past generations still aching beneath new layers of discord and discrimination. Even before the wrath of war and economic collapse upended Cather’s worldview, there were glimpses of darker horizons in her work, their ominous, disquieting hues likely drawn from the recesses of her own temperament. Cather portrayed America as a confederation of microcosms in which the actions of individuals are manifestations of the nation’s spirit.

First published in McClure’s Magazine and subsequently included in the collection entitled The Troll Garden, Cather’s 1905 short story ‘Paul’s Case’ is to a certain extent a thematic anomaly in her output. Examining the tragic consequences of an imaginative young man’s disenfranchisement with the social and fiscal restraints imposed by the reality of his mundane life, the story inhabits a philosophical world that is very different from the Great Plains pragmatism of the works upon which her reputation is based. From a literary perspective, this deviation from the subject matter with which she was most familiar makes ‘Paul’s Case’ one of Cather’s most significant works.

In this story, the suspicion of the industrialization and urbanization of America typical of her work is turned on its head: rather than a rural outsider gazing into the strange world of the emerging bourgeoisie of manufacturing centers, Paul is a denizen of that world who seeks fulfillment beyond the perceived shortcomings of his own environment. The story’s title suggests a deliberate ambiguity that permeates the story. Scientist and specimen, Paul’s social experiments perhaps reveal more about his own psyche than about the community he spurns. Much of Cather’s writing possesses overtly operatic qualities, but Paul is no conventional operatic protagonist. Morally, socially, and sexually ambivalent, Paul is, as Cather subtitled his ‘case,’ ‘a study in temperament.’

Four years before the triumphant world première of Fellow Travelers, his operatic rumination on same-sex relationships in the hostile milieu of Joseph McCarthy’s America, his quest for inspiring texts led American composer Gregory Spears to ‘Paul’s Case.’ Collaborating with eminent writer Kathryn Walat, author of the critically-acclaimed plays Creation and Bleeding Kansas, he transformed the story’s narrative into a work for the stage in which the nuances of Cather’s subtexts are allied with skillfully-managed motivic writing. Shaped by the rhythms of the words, Spears’s musical language creates an aural atmosphere that, like an anthem that to some hearers celebrates freedom but to other ears symbolizes oppression, is at once both claustrophobic and liberating. There are passages in the score that are reminiscent of the melodic expressivity of Finzi, the stylistic sophistication of Britten, and the harmonic complexity of Tippett, but it is Spears’s singular, unmistakable idiom that creates the piece’s hypnotic sound world. Allied with Walat’s masterful wordsmithing, Spears gives the complicated, in some ways repulsive youth of Cather’s story his own irrepressibly alluring voice.

The advocacy of noted champion of contemporary music Robert Wood contributed indelibly to the success of the 2013 première of Paul’s Case by UrbanArias at Artisphere in Arlington, Virginia, and his acquaintance with the score continues to yield tremendous energy and eloquence in this recorded performance. Like vocal works by Philip Glass and Michael Nyman, Paul’s Case needs a conductor capable of facilitating an equilibrium between rhythmic precision and emotive flexibility. The music must be allowed to breathe, simmer, and evolve, but singers’ collective ability to execute their parts with the requisite musical accuracy relies upon a clear, consistent beat. Wood, who also produced the recording, conducts this performance of Paul’s Case with the authority of an artistic steward who has known the score since the ink was still wet. Under his direction, the orchestral forces of American Modern Ensemble rise to the score’s every challenge, playing each note with comprehension of its individual rôle in the opera’s cumulative narrative. The musical foundation of Paul’s Case is a series of understated emotional responses that illustrate the isolation at the opera’s core, intensifying like static electricity until the energy is discharged in climaxes that stun both the characters and the listener. Wood and the American Modern Ensemble musicians handle the opera’s invigorating currents with extraordinary skill and perceptiveness.

It may seem foolish to state that the vocal writing in Paul’s Case is uncommonly singable, but there are far too many instances in which glancing at a few bars of a modern composer’s score reveals ignorance of the science of singing. The voice is a mechanism, but neither a voice nor the singer who operates it is a machine. Physics and physiology govern the production and projection of sound, but the psyche is responsible for giving sounds emotional depth. In this performance of Paul’s Case, tenor Michael Slattery brings an ideal sound to the rôle of the San Francisco-born Yale student who travels to New York City in search of diversion. Spears’s intuitive writing for the part creates a coddled, pied-piper persona that is alternately loathsome and irresistible, and Slattery sings appealingly, every syllable of the text clearly enunciated with the whiff of arrogance expected of an Ivy League man. He perfectly portrays the type of spoiled university student more likely to be found at a fraternity party than in a lecture hall; the type destined to hide his debauched urges and assume his societally-appointed places in a corner office, a smart house in the right part of town, and a seat on a front pew in a smugly respectable church.

As the Principal of the school at which Paul struggles, caught between the miseries of peers who do not understand or accept him and teachers who, prejudiced by their own experiences, perhaps understand him too well, baritone James Shaffran personifies the proverbial bureaucratic despot, mundane and inexplicably menacing. Vocally, the part recalls the low-voiced denizens of mythological realms of death and despondency in Seventeenth-Century Italian opera: Shaffran’s Principal articulates Paul’s offenses with the same bemused repugnance with which the Demonio goads the godly hero of Stefano Landi’s Il Sant’Alessio. With his statement of ‘I’m somewhat sympathetic,’ the Principal succinctly asserts the establishment’s noncommittal credo. Duty demands an attempt at compassion, but conventionality prevents any true connection. Shaffran’s vocalism is reliably steady and sonorous, his well-honed technique enabling him to descend to the part’s lowest notes without faking or forcing. Verbally, as the Principal and the hotel bellboy, the baritone’s diction exhibits a clinical coldness that echoes the characters’ disdain and disinterest.

It is not only assigning multiple rôles to several of the singers that makes Paul’s Case an ensemble piece. The various identities assumed by the three female singers are direct descendants of Dante’s Erinyes and the Drei Damen of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. Portraying Paul’s teachers, opera singers, and maids at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where Paul indulges in temporary luxury after fleeing Pittsburgh with the proceeds of his theft, sopranos Erin Sanzero and Melissa Wimbish and mezzo-soprano Amanda Crider sing incisively and, despite the apathy of many of the words that they utter, with palpable involvement in the drama. Sanzero’s performance imparts an unmistakable sense of ennui, the ladies she voices having become indifferent to the social order that mutes their identities. Wimbish wields sensational security in voicing music akin to Jonathan Dove’s writing for the Controller in Flight and the stratospheric lines for Ariel in Thomas Adès’s The Tempest. Crider is vocally and dramatically effective in each of the parts she plays, but her singing of the English teacher’s ‘Years ago I walked down the aisle with a wayward boy,’ distinguished by the simplicity of absolute sincerity, is truly touching.

Whilst rehearsing for the still-controversial 1946 NBC broadcast performance of Verdi’s La traviata, Arturo Toscanini, who had first conducted the score six decades earlier, counseled the young Robert Merrill on the integral rôle played by fatherhood in an effective depiction of the impetuous Alfredo’s father Giorgio Germont. The eminent conductor’s meaning was of course more figurative than literal, but baritone Keith Phares’s performance as Paul’s father in this account of Paul’s Case rekindles the spirit of Toscanini’s observation. His father is the symbolic figurehead of the forces that oppress Paul, but Phares portrays him not as an archetype but as an ordinary man. The strain of attempting to parent an intractable son unnerves Paul’s father, a stereotypical American man of his time for whom nonconformity is not just inconvenient but genuinely dangerous, but Phares discloses the tenderness that prompts the father’s terse treatment of his son. Society alleges that a failed child is also a parent’s failure, and the parent in this performance is acutely cognizant of his own inability to bond with his son. Phares’s vocalism is unfailingly handsome and sagaciously shaded to suit every mood of the text.

Like Monteverdi’s Nerone, Wagner’s Parsifal, Puccini’s Giorgetta, and virtually all of Britten’s operatic protagonists, the title character in Paul’s Case is troubled by a pervasive sense of discomfort with the society in which circumstance places him. He is a dreamer with a hunger for decadence that his blue-collar existence cannot feed. Spears’s and Walat’s characterization of Paul is Freudian in scope, but the music via which the spirited young man makes his ‘case’ necessitates no marvels of penetrating psychological analysis. As sung by tenor Jonathan Blalock, Paul’s music enables the listener to feel the boy’s loneliness, the pain of rejection, and the disappointment and desperation that saturate his flippant words. There is in Paul’s exaggerated politeness a self-delusion that is not unlike Cio-Cio-San’s impassioned insistence that Pinkerton will return to her in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Blalock’s sweet-toned but iron-willed singing intimates that Paul’s pretentious chivalry is an act of self-preservation.

Often facing dauntingly high tessitura, the tenor voices Paul’s preternaturally poised music with astounding assurance, glorying in the bel canto essence of Spears’s writing. The interaction between Paul and the Yale student is no typical operatic love duet, but, as Paul’s sole grasp at carnal pleasure, albeit superficial, Blalock approaches the music with an awestruck lover’s ardor. Like the denouement of a Greek tragedy, Paul’s suicide is inevitable. In nature, a thing that cannot survive in its environment is cast out, and Paul’s taste of life, however fleeting, makes returning to a living death impossible. The serene beauty of his singing in the opera’s final minutes is the pinnacle of Blalock’s performance. There are agony and despair in the voice, but the prevailing feeling is one of fulfillment. Death is a culmination, and his gruesome means of achieving it is a neglected boy’s quest for notoriety. Spears and Walat gave Paul a voice: Blalock gives Paul’s voice expressive profundity as moving as that of any character in opera.

In the tradition of Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and all successful critics of societal injustice and hypocrisy, Willa Cather humanized the communities about which she wrote by populating them with characters who earn readers’ affection and empathy. In ‘Paul’s Case,’ Cather asked readers to embrace an irascible, ill-adjusted boy trapped in his own fantasies. In a sense, opera is a fantastical escape from reality, and Cather’s Paul finds in Gregory Spears’s and Kathryn Walat’s Paul’s Case a refuge from an artless world of tattered textbooks, accounting ledgers, and dead-end jobs. With this marvelous National Sawdust Tracks recording, Paul’s Case finds a home amongst the finest recorded opera performances of the Twenty-First Century.

PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Gaetano Donizetti — MARIA STUARDA (J. Burns, Y. Lysenko, K. Dougherty, J. Hays, D. Boye, B. Martinez; Piedmont Opera, 18 October 2019)

GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1848): Maria Stuarda — Jodi Burns (Maria Stuarda), Yulia Lysenko (Elisabetta I), Kirk Dougherty (Roberto, Conte di Leicester), Jonathan Hays (Sir Giorgio Talbot), Dan Boye (Lord Guglielmo Cecil), Brennan Martinez (Anna Kennedy); Piedmont Opera Chorus, Winston-Salem Symphony Orchestra; James Allbritten, conductor [Steven LaCosse, Stage Director; Howard C. Jones, Designer; Piedmont Opera, The Stevens Center of the UNCSA, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA; Friday, 18 October 2019]

Insensitive as it may seem, tales of prominent people meeting tragic ends make for great opera. From Dafne’s arboreal metamorphosis and Euridice’s fatal encounter with a serpent to Seneca’s mandated suicide and Sant’Alessio’s martyrdom, opera’s early development relied upon tragic subjects both to inspire composers and to engage audiences. Its emphasis on stories involving deities and royal personages is sometimes cited as evidence of opera’s inherent snobbishness, but the reality is far more practical. Before the modern age ushered in instantaneous global communication, celebrity was an extraordinarily rare commodity. A miller in Tudor England and a blacksmith in Stuart Scotland are unlikely to have possessed any awareness of one another, but both of them may have known of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. Its nobler aspirations notwithstanding, opera is entertainment, and is a miller in England more likely to purchase a ticket to be entertained by the story of a Scottish blacksmith who is no more real to him than a mythological beast or the pageantry and passions of queens whose visages grace the coins in his pockets?

When Friedrich von Schiller’s play Maria Stuart was first performed in 1800, 213 years after its subject was beheaded at the behest of Elizabeth I, Mary Stuart retained the admiration and sympathy of much of Catholic Europe, where she was remembered as a proud woman who suffered the indignities of being deprived of her rightful throne, accused of conspiring to usurp the throne occupied by the illegitimate progeny of a heretical king, and executed by a rival with no jurisdiction over her. Like his dramatizations of the lives of Jeanne d’Arc and the Spanish Infante Carlos, both of which received operatic settings from Giuseppe Verdi, Schiller’s account of Mary Stuart’s conflict with Elizabeth I was markedly romanticized, supplementing history with scenes that heighten the story’s theatricality.

Compagni in periglio: tenor Kirk Dougherty as Leicester (left) and soprano Jodi Burns as Maria Stuarda (right) in Piedmont Opera’s October 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda
[Photograph © by André Peele & Piedmont Opera]

When rehearsals for the first production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda began in Naples in 1834, the visceral sentiments of Donizetti’s and his seventeen-year-old librettist Giuseppe Bardari’s setting of Schiller’s imagined meeting between Mary and Elizabeth proved to be too personal for the production’s leading ladies. The queens’ vitriol infected the singers, who abandoned musical skirmishing in favor of physical pugilism. Scandal ensued, the queen of Naples, herself a descendant of the Stuarts, objected to the depiction of an ancestor who uttered words like ‘vil bastarda,’ and the censors banished Mary from her own opera. With a new scenario drawn from Dante’s Divina Commedia, the piece was disguised as Buondelmonte, given seven poorly-received performances, and quickly forgotten. On 30 December 1835, Mary regained her crown when Maria Stuarda was first performed in its proper form at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala. Still admired on the Continent as a paragon of Catholic virtue, Mary thereafter rapidly expanded her domain to include many of Italy’s opera houses.

Maria Stuarda’s performance history in the past century suggests that the New World does not share Europe’s fascination with the eponymous Queen of Scots. [Exacerbated by too-literal supertitle translations, the frequent laughter in Winston-Salem suggested that Twenty-First-Century audiences also have little sympathy for Mary’s plight.] In the decades since the acclaimed 1967 American Opera Society concert performance in New York’s Carnegie Hall with Montserrat Caballé as Maria and Shirley Verrett as Elisabetta, the work has been performed with varying degrees of success in Chicago, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and elsewhere, but the widespread popularity of L’elisir d’amore, Lucia di Lammermoor, and, in recent years, Don Pasquale and La fille du régiment has eluded Maria Stuarda, which was not heard at the Metropolitan Opera until 2012. Arguably, the most memorable post-World War Two production of Maria Stuarda in the United States was New York City Opera’s 1972 staging, in which Beverly Sills’s Maria sparred with the formidable Elisabette of Pauline Tinsley and Marisa Galvany. Despite a lauded reprise with Sills in 1974, a 2001 Opera Orchestra of New York concert performance with Ruth Ann Swenson and Lauren Flanigan, and a revival in the MET’s current season, Maria Stuarda continues to be an infrequent visitor to America’s opera houses.

Una vera amica: mezzo-soprano Brennan Martinez as Anna Kennedy in Piedmont Opera’s October 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda
[Photograph © by André Peele & Piedmont Opera]

Staging Maria Stuarda is an ambitious endeavor, the work’s musical and scenic complexities making considerable—and costly—demands on an opera company’s resources. The superb quality of Piedmont Opera’s production was therefore both a triumph for regional opera and a vindication of the company’s decision to present this daunting work. Fashionable film and television depictions of Sixteenth-Century England have given many modern observers generalized notions of how life in that era looked and sounded, some of which are of dubious historicity. A high degree of historical accuracy was neither Schiller’s nor Donizetti’s aim, but the collective efforts of costume designer Kathy Grillo, wig and makeup designer Martha Ruskai, scenic designer Howard C. Jones, lighting designer Liz Stewart, and accomplished director Steven LaCosse brought a credible recreation of Elizabeth’s England to the Stevens Center. Costumes were suitably opulent without being so fantastical as to unduly impede movement or vocal production. Likewise, the scenic designs provided visually pleasing environs in which the drama transpired without the distractions of unnecessary scenic minutiae. LaCosse’s direction largely relied upon conventional operatic prancing and posing, but physical motion was an extension of the drama’s emotional currents, forceful but never forced.

It was apparent in his pacing of the company’s March 2019 production of L’elisir d’amore [reviewed here] that Piedmont Opera’s General and Artistic Director James Allbritten is a peer of the world’s finest conductors of bel canto repertoire. Stylistic versatility is a critical component of an opera conductor’s artistry, but the work of few of Allbritten’s colleagues exhibits similar fluency in an array of musical languages. Despite moments of untidy ensemble, the playing of the Winston-Salem Symphony demonstrated clarity and immediacy, the delivery of melodic lines by the woodwinds exemplifying the art of bel canto. Piedmont Opera’s chorus also augmented the aesthetic cultivated by the conductor. Opening Act One with a performance of ‘Qui si attenda, ell’è vicina’ that established an aptly anticipatory atmosphere and singing the Inno della morte in Act Three plaintively, the choristers persuasively imparted all of the points of view assigned to them by Donizetti. Indeed, persuasiveness was the foremost hallmark of this Maria Stuarda: complementing the production team’s achievements, Allbritten paced a performance of compelling bel canto authenticity.

Ministro della morte: bass-baritone Dan Boye as Guglielmo Cecil in Piedmont Opera’s October 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda
[Photograph © by André Peele & Piedmont Opera]

As Maria’s companion and confidante Anna Kennedy, mezzo-soprano Brennan Martinez sang incisively, her musicality, dramatic sincerity, and youthful tone making a strong impression despite the brevity of her part. Compared with Anna, the implacable Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Guglielmo Cecil, offers his interpreter more opportunities to display his prowess as a singing actor. Especially in the Act Three duet in which Cecil entreats Elisabetta to sign Maria’s death warrant and the scene in which he callously informs Maria of her condemnation and imminent execution, bass-baritone Dan Boye sang boldly, hurling out Cecil’s hateful words with histrionic power that was only marginally lessened by unmistakably non-native Italian diction. Nonetheless, the maleficence of his characterization overcame occasional weaknesses in his vocalism, revealing Cecil as the true author of Maria’s fate.

Conte fedele: baritone Jonathan Hays as Giorgio Talbot in Piedmont Opera’s October 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda
[Photograph © by André Peele & Piedmont Opera]

Baritone Jonathan Hays’s portrayal of Giorgio Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury, evinced pervasive empathy for Maria. He voiced ‘Questa imago, questo foglio’ in the Act One duet with Leicester with suavity, his virile, flinty timbre lending his utterances a paternal sincerity. Even finer was his command of legato in the Act Three confession scene with Maria, contrasting meaningfully with his emphatic singing of conversational passages. Humbled by his recognition of Maria’s innocence and the dignity with which she accepts her impending death, Hays’s Talbot touchingly prefaced the doomed queen’s prayer with a heartfelt blessing of her final hours on earth. Throughout the performance, Hays conveyed the frustration of a benevolent man who finds himself on the edge of a precipice and unable to prevent those for whom he cares from plunging into the abyss.

Difensore della virtù: tenor Kirk Dougherty as Leicester in Piedmont Opera’s October 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda
[Photograph © by André Peele & Piedmont Opera]

Adaptability to a broad assortment of musical styles is as important to a modern singer’s success as to that of a conductor, and tenor Kirk Dougherty excels in repertoire ranging from bel canto to Pinkerton in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Nikolaus Sprink in Kevin Puts’s Silent Night, the last of which he sang to acclaim in Piedmont Opera’s 2017 production. Returning to Winston-Salem as Roberto Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, in Maria Stuarda, Dougherty infused the performance with febrile romantic ardor. Attempting to assuage Elisabetta’s antipathy towards Maria in his first scene in Act One, this Leicester pleaded without whining, Dougherty’s vocalism firm and focused. His impassioned account of ‘Ah! rimiro il bel sembiante’ disclosed the depth of Leicester’s affection for Maria, and his fervent singing in the subsequent duet with Talbot, ended with a splendid top C, reiterated the Earl’s commitment to shielding Maria from Elisabetta’s ire. Dougherty mellifluously caressed the melodic line of ‘Era d’amor l’immagine’ in the duet with Elisabetta, but his resonant top B was a reminder of his dogged determination.

The tenor’s singing in Act Two was no less galvanizing, not least in the duet with Maria and the superb sextet, nearly the equal of its better-known counterpart in Lucia di Lammermoor, but it was in the Act Three terzetto with Elisabetta and Cecil that Dougherty was at his best, articulating ‘Ah, deh! per pietà sospendi’ with irrepressible despair. There and in the opera’s final scene, as Leicester grappled with his inability to alter the course of Maria’s destiny, Dougherty’s singing was shaded by moving morbidezza. Unfortunately, his voice did not project into the auditorium with ideal freedom and was sometimes covered by the orchestra, but he consistently sang well and believably portrayed a man who loves one queen and is loved by another.

Regina della crudeltà: soprano Yulia Lysenko as Elisabetta I in Piedmont Opera’s October 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda
[Photograph © by André Peele & Piedmont Opera]

With the casting of soprano Yulia Lysenko, previously heard in Winston-Salem as Mimì in Puccini’s La bohème, as Elisabetta, Piedmont Opera strengthened Maria Stuarda’s dramatic thrust with a fierce antagonist who was more dangerous because her ferocity masked vulnerability. At her entrance in Act One, this Elisabetta’s demeanor betrayed none of the uncertainty that plagued the monarch throughout her reign. Lysenko’s performances of the cavatina ‘Ah! quando all’ara scorgemi’ and cabaletta ‘Ah! dal cielo discenda un raggio’ radiated regal—and vocal—confidence, epitomized by the soprano’s resplendent top B. Her singing in the duet with Leicester divulged Elisabetta’s jealousy and pettiness but also declared the breadth of her unrequited love for the Earl.

In Act Two, Lysenko launched the sextet electrifyingly and unleashed a cyclone of fury in the confrontation scene. Her enunciation of ‘Quella vita me funesta io troncar’ in the Act Three duet with Cecil asserted that this Elisabetta was keenly aware of the Chancellor’s unyielding manipulation. Lysenko’s voice soared in the terzetto with Leicester and Cecil. The soprano’s unaffected execution of Elisabetta’s hesitant, pained exit after signing Maria’s death warrant was unexpectedly gripping and received an ovation from the audience. Lysenko avoided employing chest resonance in virtually all of her music, depriving the lowest notes of the part of requisite muscle, but the brilliance of her upper register, the vigor of her singing of bravura passages, and the acuity of her acting offered ample compensation.

Bontà incoronata: soprano Jodi Burns in the title rôle in Piedmont Opera’s October 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda
[Photograph © by André Peele & Piedmont Opera]

First heard in Act Two [the latter half of Act One in Piedmont Opera’s production], Maria makes her entrance with a scene in which, in the only period of relative tranquility that she enjoys in the opera, she muses on her far-from-idyllic but happy youth in France. From the first bars of her traversal of the cavatina ‘O nube! che lieve per l’aria ti aggiri,’ Jodi Burns was a Maria in the class of the most gifted interpreters of the rôle, her performance recalling Leyla Gencer’s fearlessness, Montserrat Caballé’s glorious pianissimi, Beverly Sills’s purity of line, and Sondra Radvanovsky’s absolute immersion in the drama. The ebullience of Burns’s singing of the cabaletta ‘Nella pace del mesto riposo’ fostered a mood of guarded optimism.

Maria’s elation at Leicester’s arrival was destroyed by his news that Elisabetta was close at hand, having come at his urging to meet Mary in the flesh. In the duet with Leicester, Burns first sang ‘Da tutti abbandonata’ with wrenching simplicity, her Maria genuinely lamenting her situation rather than indulging in self-pity, and then declaimed ‘Ah! Se il mio cor tremò giammai’ with renewed resolve. Her lines in the sextet were always audible and engendered a righteous aloofness that set Maria apart from the vengeful Elisabetta. The celebrated ‘dialogo delle due regine’ spurred Burns to singing of incredible energy and dramatic potency. She exclaimed the stinging ‘figlia impura di Bolena’ and ’vil bastarda’ with startling spontaneity, warranting the look of shocked vexation that flashed across Elisabetta’s face. As the English queen haughtily left the stage, Burns brought the curtain down with a magnificently defiant and cathartic top D.

Whether designated as Act Two, as in Piedmont Opera’s production, or as Act Three, the concluding scenes of Maria Stuarda constitute one of the most remarkable sequences in Italian opera. Burns’s Maria received Cecil‘s proclamation of her sentence with stoicism, but a spark of umbrage ignited her response to his spiteful suggestion that she meet with a Protestant minister in order to be reconciled with God. Exercising her faith on her own terms in the eloquent ‘duetto della confessione’ with Talbot, this Maria voiced ‘Quando di luce rosea’ ravishingly. In Burns’s performance, wonderfully supported by the chorus, the preghiera ‘Deh! tu di un umile preghiera il suono’ was exquisite. Her voicing of the ‘aria del supplizio,’ ‘D’un cor che muore reca il perdono,’ was phrased with innate understanding of bel canto.

After performing the repeats of the foregoing cabalette, omitting the repeat of ‘Ah! se un giorno da queste ritorte’ was regrettable, especially as Burns’s ornamentation of her music was unfailingly tasteful, but excising the repeat undeniably produced a more abrupt conclusion that significantly increased the emotional tension of the final scene. Apart from a pair of very brief instances in which high pianissimi threatened to crack, Burns’s vocal control was impeccable, and the tonal beauty that she brought to Maria’s music was profoundly satisfying. The essence of bel canto is beauty of expression, however, and Burns brought one of the most difficult rôles in the soprano repertoire to life with the kind of unfeigned expressivity and pathos of which only true artists are capable.

There is a pertinent scene in Miloš Forman’s cinematic adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus in which Mozart, at work on an opera about a servant and his fiancée, and representatives of the imperial musical establishment debate the importance of operatic subject matter. Does an audience’s ability to relate on some psychological level with the characters on stage determine an opera’s theatrical viability or intrinsic artistic value? More than four centuries after the death of its heroine, can an Italian composer’s operatic setting of a German playwright’s dramatization of the enmity between an English queen and her Scottish contemporary possibly hold any significance for American audiences in the Twenty-First Century? Piedmont Opera’s Maria Stuarda avowed that opera’s vitality is defined not by the characters who populate it but by the feelings that they portray and inspire. It is unlikely that anyone who experiences Piedmont Opera’s Maria Stuarda can relate to a queen’s tribulations, but, whether wearing priceless diamonds or dime-store pearls, who cannot relate to feelings of love, loss, fear, and freedom?

 

♫      ♫      ♫      ♫      ♫

Additional performances of Piedmont Opera’s production of Maria Stuarda are at 2:00 PM on Sunday, 20 October 2019, and at 7:30 PM on Tuesday, 22 October.