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?

 

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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.

SINGER SPOTLIGHT: Soprano Jodi Burns continues her reign as the Triad’s bel canto queen in the title rôle of Piedmont Opera’s production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda

Ecco la regina: Soprano Jodi Burns, interpreter of the title rôle in Piedmont Opera’s October 2019 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda
[Photograph © by Jodi Burns]

From biblical heroines to Ancient Egypt’s God’s Wives of Amun, Boudicca to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, history has been shaped by powerful women. As mothers, they have nurtured all of mankind, but the notion of woman’s rôles in humanity’s collective story being confined to serving as mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters of influential men is as risible as it is insulting. Since its beginnings in Sixteenth-Century Italy, opera has also been populated with remarkable women whose stories have mirrored and in some instances transcended gender politics. Monteverdi‘s Penelope, Poppea, and Ottavia, Händel’s Alcina, Cleopatra, and Rodelinda, and Mozart’s Elettra, Donna Elvira, and Fiordiligi advanced woman’s operatic presence from its start with the victimized Dafne and Euridice to the take-no-prisoners bel canto protagonists of Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini.

So momentous are the depictions of a pair of history-making women in Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda that the singers portraying them in rehearsals for the opera’s inaugural production became so immersed in the drama that their rendering of the fateful meeting of Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor in Act Two—an encounter that originated in Friedrich von Schiller’s 1800 play Maria Stuart, upon which the seventeen-year-old Giuseppe Barbari’s libretto for Maria Stuarda was based, rather than in history—resulted in a physical altercation. The scandal fomented by this incident and objection to Donizetti’s portrayals of the Scottish and English queens by the King of Naples, whose consort had ancestral ties to the Stuart dynasty, subjected Maria Stuarda to censorial meddling. It was therefore the story of a hastily-substituted character borrowed from Dante, not that of Mary Stuart, that was told in the unsuccessful Neapolitan première of the piece on 18 October 1834, for which occasion the opera was rechristened as Buondelmonte. It was not until the opera reached the stage of Milan’s Teatro alla Scala fourteen months later that the maligned Queen of Scots regained her crown.

Born at Linlithgow Palace on 8 December 1542, Mary Stuart was the literal and figurative nexus of empires. The death of her father, James V, when she was only five days old elevated her to the Scottish throne and subjected Scotland to the regency of her mother, Marie de Guise, a scion of a powerful French aristocratic family who, after being widowed at the age of twenty-one, received a proposal of marriage from Henry VIII. Betrothed at the age of five and married before her sixteenth birthday, Mary became queen consort of France in 1559, supplanting her mother-in-law, the domineering Catherine de’ Medici. In the twenty-eight years between her ascension to the French throne and her execution at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire on 8 February 1587, Mary was subjected to intrigue and imprisonment, grave affronts to the honor of a woman of her station. Vilified by the Protestant English but revered on the Continent as a paragon of Catholic resistance to heretical barbarism, Mary remains a divisive figure. In other words, she is a near-perfect operatic subject, a condition treated by Donizetti with generous doses of exhilaratingly affecting music.

The singer who approaches a rôle in which Leyla Gencer, Montserrat Caballé, Beverly Sills, Dame Joan Sutherland, and Mariella Devia excelled without a sense of awe is unlikely to prove worthy of the legacy of her esteemed predecessors. Her poised but playful Adina in Piedmont Opera’s March 2019 production of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore [reviewed here] established soprano Jodi Burns as an insightful interpreter of Donizetti’s music whose singing exudes engaging imagination and commendable cognizance of tradition. Returning to Winston-Salem’s Stevens Center to portray the doomed Queen of Scots in Piedmont Opera’s staging of Maria Stuarda, this gifted singer adds to her repertoire a portrait of a proud woman whose vitality increases her vulnerability. More than four hundred years separate today’s listeners from the life of the historical Mary Stuart, but Burns is confident that Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda will be stirringly familiar to Piedmont Opera’s audience.

Musically and dramatically, Adina and Maria are very different ladies, but they are both intelligent, intuitive women who wield authority in male-dominated societies—and they of course share the bounties of Donizetti’s theatrical savvy. A shrewd artist whose approach to rôles is guided by study of the characters’ musical and historical contexts, Burns exhibits refreshing candor when describing her transition from L’elisir d’amore to Maria Stuarda. ‘Many [singers] portray Adina as a flippant, capricious little thing, but that’s never seemed right to me. She’s a land-owning businesswoman, for God’s sake!’ Burns shared. ‘She’s quite smart and conscientious. And a noblewoman. So I can see some similarities [with Maria].’

Further contemplating the similarities between Adina and Maria, Burns added, ‘They also share a certain joie de vivre.’ Burns quickly conceded that Adina’s and Maria’s life experiences yield very different characters, however. ‘Mary’s life has a great deal of heaviness upon it,’ she said. ‘When we meet her in this opera, she has been imprisoned for about eighteen years. But she did enjoy the idyllic upbringing of a queen. She enjoys nature and beauty and laughter but has also ruled and seen a tumult of heart-shattering losses.’ This heaviness permeates Donizetti’s score, Burns asserted. ‘Mary feels a great deal weightier than Adina, but I’m quite sure that, if they met at a party, they’d have a great time together!’

Nevertheless, acquaintance with Mary’s Donizettian incarnation has not distorted Burns’s perception of the woman who emerges from the pages of history. ‘I don’t think Donizetti’s view changes my interpretation of who the real historical Mary was,’ the soprano confided, ‘but he certainly has given me the opportunity to study her in depth.’ Understanding of attitudes towards Mary in Schiller’s and Donizetti’s cultural milieux is critical, Burns believes. ‘Donizetti depicts quite a sympathetic view of Mary. This is likely due to the political leanings of the Roman Catholic Church and the fact that Schiller’s play may have been the only historical interpretation available to him,’ she offered.

Burns perceives Donizetti’s empathy for Mary in the rôle’s musical evolution. ‘In her first entrance, she bursts onto the stage with youthful energy as the vibrant and beautiful Mary, singing her lilting aria with a wistful but burdened spirit. [Donizetti] allows her here to be a young beautiful woman rather than a rueful, betrayed, dark-eyed queen, winding down her days in the dreary, cool rooms of house arrest.’ Gradually, as Maria becomes ever more mired in political maneuvering, Donizetti’s musical portraiture takes on darker hues. ‘We see some fire from her in the cabaletta, when she hears hunters announce that “La Regina,” the queen, is near,’ Burns observed, ‘but this is no more fire than any passionate queen would exhibit upon finding that her rival has planned a surprise visit.’

Like many opera lovers, Burns identifies the pivotal scene in which England’s Virgin Queen visits her confined counterpart at Fotheringhay as the point of no return in Mary’s journey from misfortune to tragedy. ‘When she is coerced into meeting with Queen Elizabeth I in the famous confrontation scene, it is Elizabeth’s taunting that pushes her to the mad words of rage that seem at first to escape her lips,’ Piedmont Opera’s Maria mused. ‘Here, she is a tortured victim as Elizabeth slings brutal insults and burns her with images of her most desperate moments until she can no longer hold her tongue.’ Had the two queens met in life as in opera, the outcome of their exchange might have been very different, Burns theorizes. ‘As we know, this confrontation never happened: had it, the conversation would have been a great deal more complex, with no clear heroes or villains.’

Though an invention adapted from Schiller, the confrontation scene in Maria Stuarda is, in Burns’s estimation, a pinnacle not only of Donizetti’s work but of operatic writing in general. ‘This scene is pure opera magic,’ she said. ‘Deafening silences, mad screams: it’s an incredible moment.’ Asked whether there are other battles of ego that might prove equally suitable for the operatic stage, she paused for a moment before exclaiming, ‘The stage of a political debate would make a great opera! Or a town hall meeting! Interruptions, rise and fall of pitches in voice, hand gestures, commercial breaks...It writes itself!’

The interview between Maria and Elisabetta is not the sole historical inaccuracy to markedly alter the dramatic narrative of Maria Stuarda. Burns intimated that ‘the addition of the fictional love triangle among Elizabeth, Mary, and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, adds fuel to the confrontation scene fire.’ The conflagration, while precipitating Maria’s grisly demise, also enables the beleaguered monarch to defy protocol and express her truest feelings. ‘Life for Mary has always been out of her own control,’ Burns noted. ‘Here, in our story, as she stands tall against Elizabeth, she takes hold of her own fate, perhaps for the first time. In the [Act Two] finale, she sings, “now guide me to death,” for she has finally spoken freely. Her next scene offers her the opportunity for confession and atonement, and she ultimately ascends the stairs to be beheaded with a clear conscience; and, in her mind, on the path to sainthood.’ The opera’s tragedy is made all the more poignant by the fact that Maria owes these glimpses of self-reliance, freedom, and divine reward to Donizetti. ‘Donizetti gives her this path the victory,’ Burns opined. ‘The grace and goodness and peace she could never have in life, she will achieve in death.’

Chauvinism and misogyny are unfortunate but undeniable aspects of opera’s social constitution, regrettably prevalent both on and off stage, and reconciling the sometimes antiquated attitudes towards gender rôles encountered in opera with current sensibilities can be a difficult task for singers of any gender identity. ‘As a Twenty-First-Century woman, it is always challenging to look upon women’s rôles in Western History without a heavy smudge of disbelief weighing upon one’s brow,’ Burns mused, ‘but I have to say, in this opera, the two queens are presented as being self-possessed and also as bearing quite different demeanors and temperaments. They are not entirely one-dimensional female characters, and most of this information about them is to be found in the music.’

This process of developing a character through mastery of the nuances of her music is an integral component of Burns’s artistry. ‘One of the great joys and challenges of bel canto repertoire is just this,’ she declared. ‘Mary’s music is long lines, often with seemingly stream-of-thought storytelling. She is impulsive and emotional, proud and loyal. Elizabeth’s music is often more angular, and her thought processes occur with a different musical and emotional language.’ Still, as a modern woman, Burns is sensitive to the dated viewpoints on femininity in Maria Stuarda. Examining the opera’s depictions of Mary and Elizabeth, she reflected, ‘Is either of them a “woke” representation of a powerful woman? No—largely due to the added love story.’

The failures of the past engender opportunities for today’s artists, not to make amends but to create new, better-informed trends, and Burns sees in the characterizations of the title rôle in Maria Stuarda and other bel canto heroines unique possibilities for reevaluating these ladies without patriarchal prejudices. ‘We do our best to wade through their depths and bring forth the most human representations we can find through the music written on the page,’ the soprano imparted. ‘Bel canto is cool like that. There are a myriad of interpretations one could choose to engage, based on whether the notes rise or fall, the rhythms are jaunty or smooth. A large chord played by the full orchestra could be surprise or anger or a large physical gesture. We just have to hope to use the right paintbrushes at the right times to make these women multi-dimensional.’

From the point of view of a modern singer devising her own interpretations of well-known rôles, Burns feels a particular responsibility to portray Donizetti’s Maria as a woman whom the historical Queen of Scots would recognize. ‘I have to work hard to analyze each choice she makes from what would have been her perspective,’ she said, but a conscientious artist like Burns never neglects the joy of singing music as gratifying as Donizetti’s. ‘This is Italian opera, baby! It’s larger than life, even at its most quiet moments. To discover the rôle of Maria, all of its intricacies, and still make it read all the way to the back row, that’s a big challenge. But I accept it with gratitude and honor and hope to paint her with as many colors as I can.’

 

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To learn more about Jodi Burns, please visit her official website.

Piedmont Opera’s production of Maria Stuarda opens at the UNCSA Stevens Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, at 8:00 PM EDT on Friday, 18 October 2019. Additional performances are at 2:00 PM on Sunday, 20 October, and 7:30 PM on Tuesday, 22 October. To obtain more information or to purchase tickets, please visit Piedmont Opera’s website or phone 336.725.7101.

Jodi Burns will be joined in the Maria Stuarda cast by Yulia Lysenko as Elisabetta, Kirk Dougherty as Leicester, Jonathan Hays as Talbot, Dan Boye as Cecil, and Brennan Martinez as Anna. Steven LaCosse directs, and James Allbritten conducts.

Sincerest thanks to Ms. Burns for taking time from her grueling rehearsal schedule for this interview.

September 2019 RECORDING OF THE MONTH: Ludwig van Beethoven — A BEETHOVEN ODYSSEY, Volume Six (James Brawn, piano; MSR Classics MS 1470)

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770 – 1827): A Beethoven Odyssey, Volume Six – Piano Sonatas Nos. 4 in E♭ major (Opus 7), 11 in B♭ major (Opus 22), and 12 in A♭ major (Opus 26) — James Brawn, piano [Recorded in Potton Hall, Suffolk, UK, 16 – 18 December 2018; MSR Classics MS 1470; 1 CD, 73:43; Available from MSR Classics and major music retailers]

The world has changed immeasurably in the 192 years since Ludwig van Beethoven died on 26 March 1827. Were he walking along the streets of Vienna today, he would encounter familiar landmarks, some of them scarred by war, but the spaces and societies that have evolved beyond their façades would little resemble the imperial city that he knew. Only in the Wienerwald, where, like many residents of the Hapsburg capital, he sought refuge from the city’s tumult and found inspiration in unspoiled nature, would Beethoven now rediscover the sights and sounds that so indelibly impacted his work. The vistas of the musical metropolis from Kahlenberg’s summit are much different in 2019 from when Beethoven last viewed them, but, having persevered through nearly two centuries of alternating decadence and deprivation, Vienna retains much of the inimitable essence celebrated by artists as diverse as the city itself.

A similar phenomenon of familiar unfamiliarity can be observed in studying, performing, and recording Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas. Their genesis spanning nearly three decades, writing his thirty-two Piano Sonatas occupied Beethoven during a substantial portion of his compositional career, engendering a broad stylistic progress from Classicism learned from Haydn, Salieri, and Mozart to Romanticism prefiguring Schumann and Brahms. Attentive pianists and listeners can perceive in the early Sonatas fundamental modes of expression that Beethoven reworked and refined in his last efforts in the genre, in which a lifetime of challenging boundaries of form and technique begat formidable virtuosity. The stylistic innovations wrought by the composer in the Sonatas, more celebrated in the late scores but sometimes more conspicuous in earlier works, rival the most momentous advancements in Western culture, but, as pianist James Brawn’s Beethoven Odyssey on MSR Classics avers, recognition of the marvels of the individual Sonatas is enhanced when they are assessed cumulatively, via the work of a musician who fully comprehends and conveys each Sonata’s rightful place among its brethren.

In the Twenty-First Century, when commercial considerations rightly or wrongly seem more prominent than artistic merit in many deliberations concerning the recording of Classical Music, it is exceptionally rare for a pianist to have an opportunity to record a complete traversal of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas—and still rarer for a pianist to genuinely deserve such an opportunity. Laments for the demise of the Classical recording industry having thankfully proved to have been premature, the new millennium has yielded a profusion of recordings, an unfortunate portion of which document performances that in years past would likely have been deemed unworthy of preservation. It is not without justification that some listeners whose acquaintances with Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas were fostered by revered recordings by pianists like Artur Schnabel and Wilhelm Kempff complain of a dearth of more recent performances that offer original, legitimate interpretive insights to supplement those exhibited by pianists of the past.

The Beethoven discography suffers from no shortage of idiosyncratic performances of the Piano Sonatas, but, like Schnabel, Kempff, and especially Emil Gilels, whose untimely death regrettably prevented completion of his masterful Beethoven cycle for Deutsche Grammophon, Brawn plays Beethoven Sonatas with imagination and individuality that never diminish the composer’s singular presence in the music. His previous recordings of Beethoven Sonatas evinced the efficacy of Brawn’s unmistakably intimate but commendably unaffected relationship with the music. Like Brawn’s playing of each Sonata, the present disc is both an extraordinary achievement in its own right and an aptly evocative, searching continuation of the pianist’s Beethoven Odyssey.

The sixth volume of A Beethoven Odyssey begins with a performance of Sonata No. 4 in E♭ major (Opus 7) in which both the exuberant youthfulness and the contrasting maturity of the music are intelligently accentuated. Written in November 1796 during a visit to Keglevičov palács in Bratislava, where he taught the dedicatee of Piano Sonata No. 7 and the contemporaneous Piano Concerto No. 1, Ana Luiza Barbara Keglević, the Opus 7 Sonata shares its key with some of Beethoven’s most overtly grandiose music, notably the Third Symphony and the Fifth Piano Concerto.

The composer himself christened Opus 7 as the ‘Grande Sonate’ upon its first publication in October 1797, and the expansive, unapologetically symphonic scale of the the opening Allegro molto e con brio movement here receives deft handling that fully meets the bravura and expressive demands of the music. Nevertheless, not even the most opulent passages draw from Brawn playing that overwhelms the music. In his performances of the three Sonatas on this disc, he never joins the ranks of pianists who succumb to the temptation to over-Romanticize these pieces. Instead, he demonstrates that, though Weber and Wagner are close on the horizon, not only Haydn and Mozart but also Bach and Händel meaningfully influenced the young Beethoven.

Unfailingly faithful to the composer’s instructions, Brawn responds to the ‘con gran espressione’ character of Opus 7’s Largo movement with poignant eloquence. His sapient phrasing, engagingly rhapsodic but allied with rhythmic tautness of almost mathematical precision, facilitates an organic focus on melody that lends his performance an engaging bel canto sensibility. The energetic Allegro is played with galvanizing momentum that transitions coherently to the Poco allegretto e grazioso pace of the closing Rondo. There is a suggestion in the Sonata’s final pages of the ambivalent playfulness found in Mahler’s music. Simultaneously conjuring the spirits of Prospero and Puck, Brawn effectuates an ideal balance between sun and shade—and, vitally, between past and future.

Dedicated to Fürst Lichnowsky, Kammerherr to the imperial court of Franz II, Sonata No. 12 in A♭ major (Opus 26) dates from the turn of the Nineteenth Century, when Beethoven was also completing his First Symphony. Stylistically ambitious, not least in each of the four movements being centered in the home key of A♭ major, the Opus 26 Sonata follows the example of Mozart’s K. 331 Sonata by abandoning an introduction in a fast tempo in favor of a slower movement with variations. In the performance on this disc, Brawn navigates each transformation of the principal subject in Beethoven’s ingeniously-crafted Andante con variazioni with cognizance of the way in which it propels the music’s emotional narrative.

The Sonata’s Allegro molto Scherzo and Trio are played with an appealing lightness, the difficulties of the writing conquered with palpable joy. Beethoven gave Opus 26’s third movement the title ‘Marcia funebre sulla morte d’un Eroe’ and created music that communicates feelings of tragic loss that are at once resoundingly universal and devastatingly personal. By allowing the listener to experience details of Beethoven’s writing rather than a pianist’s egotistical executions thereof, the restraint of Brawn’s performance heightens appreciation of the composer’s true intentions. In the Allegro, too, Brawn serves no master other than Beethoven. His delivery of fleet passagework is brilliant, but accurate playing of notes at a brisk speed is only a small part of his artistry. It may seem nonsensical to state that Brawn plays music, not notes, but listeners who have endured pedestrian performances by score-bound pianists can discern the difference.

When preparing his four-movement ‘Grand’ Sonatas for initial publication and when later contemplating his artistic legacy, Beethoven cited Sonata No. 11 in B♭ major (Opus 22) as his favorite among the early Sonatas. Hearing Brawn’s performance of the Sonata would likely have solidified his opinion. The unflinching boldness of the pianist’s approach to the daunting Allegro con brio emphasizes the depths of Beethoven’s exegesis of sonata form. The composer’s inquisitive dismantling, experimenting, and reassembling the sonata according to his own design pervades the movement’s exposition, and Brawn ensures that every bar of the music inhabits its proper place.

Bach, Händel, Mozart, Brahms, and Mahler wielded affinities for writing music that seems to halt the passage of time and dissect the beating hearts of human emotions, but Beethoven possessed a singular ability to imbue strikingly simple, sometimes banal melodies with tremendous expressive potency. That skill was deployed sublimely in the composition of Opus 22’s Adagio con molto espressione movement. A sibling of the slow movements in the Violin Concerto, the Fifth Piano Concerto, and the Ninth Symphony and the ‘Agnus Dei’ in the Missa solemnis, this music beguiles even in an indifferent performance. Brawn’s performance of it is a peer of Maria Callas’s singing of Amina’s ‘Ah! non credea mirarti’ in Bellini’s La sonnambula.

The ethos of the Minuetto and Minore of Opus 22 is nearer to that of a Mahler symphonic scherzo than to the formal minuets found in Haydn’s symphonies and chamber music, but, like his Bohemian contemporary Jan Václav Dusík, Beethoven integrated precepts gleaned from the work of his predecessors into his own ideas, producing music that anticipates the Nineteenth Century and recalls the Eighteenth but is unmistakably Beethoven’s work. The Sonata’s Allegretto Rondo also exemplifies the composer’s uncanny faculty for adapting the musical language of the past into his own unique dialect. Brawn’s fluency in the idiom affords uncommon clarity, his playing infusing rejuvenating transparency into music that is often muddled in overzealous performances. Fashioning his performance as a dialogue among the voices of the music’s subjects and countersubjects, Brawn presents Opus 22 not as an esoteric treatise but as a thriving musical organism.

In the first nineteen years of the Twenty-First Century, some musicians, musicologists, and music lovers have posited that the quality and importance of Beethoven’s music have been exaggerated. Admittedly, there have been performances of Beethoven’s music that support this assertion. In the course of James Brawn’s Beethoven Odyssey to date, the pianist’s astounding technical acumen has accomplished many wonders, one of the most exciting of which is the spontaneity that he imparts in impeccably-rehearsed performances. This is the crucial attribute that too many performances of Beethoven’s music lack. It is possible that the significance of Beethoven’s work has been unnecessarily aggrandized, but the value of A Beethoven Odyssey cannot be overstated. This sixth volume reminds the listener that, 192 years after Beethoven’s death, his music still surprises, stimulates, and satisfies, particularly when played as it is on this disc.

ARTS IN ACTION: Luck be a Lady - noteworthy rôle début to crown Opera Carolina’s November 2019 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth

Lady of the hour: soprano Othalie Graham, Lady Macbeth in Opera Carolina’s November 2019 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth
[Photograph © by the artist]

Io vorrei in Lady una voce aspa, soffocata, cupa...la voce di Lady vorrei che avesse del diabolico. | I want for the Lady a harsh, throttled, somber voice...I want Lady’s voice to embody the diabolical.

It was with these words, written in a letter to librettist Salvadore Cammarano on 23 November 1848, that Giuseppe Verdi described the qualities that he wanted the voice of the eponymous thane’s consort in his ambitious operatic treatment of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth to embody. Rarely in the history of opera can a composer be found to have complained of a singer’s voice being too beautiful and angelic to sing a rôle effectively, but this was the foundation of Verdi’s dissatisfaction with Eugenia Tadolini, the soprano who earned Gaetano Donizetti’s admiration with her creations and, in the cases of first Giovanna Seymour and later the title rôle in Anna Bolena, recreations of leading ladies in his operas and was engaged by Teatro San Carlo to sing Lady Macbeth in the Neapolitan première of Verdi’s Macbeth.

When Macbeth was introduced to the public at Florence’s Teatro della Pergola on 14 March 1847, Lady Macbeth was sung by Florentine soprano Marianna Barbieri-Nini, a renowned exponent of dramatic bel canto who had already created the part of Lucrezia Contarini in I due Foscari for Verdi in 1844 and would later be the first Gulnara in Il corsaro. Eighteen years after the opera’s Italian première, Verdi substantially revised Macbeth for a Paris production. His second incarnation of Lady Macbeth was first sung by Amélie Rey-Balla, a soprano whose career is sparsely documented aside from accounts of her acclaimed portrayal of Sélika in Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine. Prodigiously documented are the formidable demands of Lady Macbeth’s music, before and after the composer’s revisions: rivaling the ferocity of the vocal writing for Abigaille in Nabucco, Verdi’s musical portrait of Lady Macbeth is one of opera’s most intimidating sings.

Indicative of the work’s many difficulties is the fact that, though Il trovatore, Rigoletto, and La traviata were performed in the company’s inaugural 1883 – 1884 Season, Macbeth was not staged by New York’s Metropolitan Opera until the 1958 – 1959 Season, when a production by Carl Ebert served as the vehicle for the house début of soprano Leonie Rysanek. Already celebrated for her portrayals of Wagner and Strauss heroines (and, at the time of her MET début, already heard in New York as Lady Macbeth, courtesy of a 1958 Carnegie Hall concert performance by The Little Orchestra Society), Rysanek shouldered the unenviable task of singing the rôle originally intended for Maria Callas, whose supremacy as Lady Macbeth was established by five performances at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala in December 1952—her only performances of the part. In subsequent seasons, Macbeth has been performed slightly more than one hundred times at the MET, whereas La traviata has amassed more than a thousand MET performances since 1883.

Veritable armies of singers have performed rôles like Bizet’s Carmen and Mimì in Puccini’s La bohème at the MET, but the company’s roster of Ladies Macbeth is considerably shorter, its relatively meager ranks including Americans Irene Dalis (the first mezzo-soprano to essay the rôle under the MET’s auspices), Elinor Ross, and Olivia Stapp [regrettably, the exhilarating Lady Macbeth of another American soprano, Marisa Galvany, never graced the MET stage]; the Swede Birgit Nilsson; the Ukrainian Maria Guleghina; and Russia’s Anna Netrebko, who is scheduled to reprise the rôle in the MET’s 2019 – 2020 Season. Also significant is the fact that the MET’s sole Italian Lady Macbeth to date is the inimitable Renata Scotto.

Following a much-anticipated début in the rôle with Toledo Opera in October 2019, Ontario-born soprano Othalie Graham returns to Charlotte for three further performances as Lady Macbeth with Opera Carolina. Previously heard in Charlotte as Verdi’s Aida and Puccini’s Turandot [reviewed here], Graham is an uncommon singer with a voice that is at once attractive, powerful, and flexible. Her depiction of Turandot, potentially one of opera’s most unidimensional characters, in Opera Carolina’s 2015 production confirmed that she is also a shrewdly intelligent actress who instinctively discerns the touchstones of a characterization in the rôle’s music. She is a performer whose sincerity forms the nucleus of her approach to any rôle. In an instance of felicitous casting, Graham will be partnered in Opera Carolina’s new production of Macbeth by another distinguished singing actor and bona fide Verdian, baritone Mark Rucker. It should not be unusual in 2019 for the leading couple in a Verdi opera to be portrayed by artists of color, but opera companies’ rosters still do not reliably mirror the increasing diversity of opera’s audiences.

La luce langue: mezzo-soprano Grace Bumbry as Lady Macbeth in Los Angeles Music Center Opera’s 1987 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth
[Photograph © by Los Angeles Music Center Opera; image from the Detroit Public Library collection]

Racial bias in the casting of rôles in Verdi’s operas has been prevalent since the works’ first performances, especially in the name parts in Aida and Otello. Russell Thomas’s 2017 début in the rôle in concert performances with the Atlanta Symphony welcomed an exceptionally rare Otello of color, but, regardless of the suitability of their individual voices for the character’s music, Black sopranos from Leonora Lafayette and Gloria Davy to Jessye Norman and Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez have been encouraged to sing Aida. It is narrow-minded to suggest that casting singers of color as Aida has often been based primarily upon race, but scrutiny of performance annals discloses a worrying—and continuing—pattern. Alzira has been performed too infrequently to engender casting trends, but how often have singers whose appearances reflected the character’s Andean heritage been engaged to sing Alvaro in La forza del destino? Unlike most of her sisters in the Verdi canon, however, Lady Macbeth, unquestionably a Caucasian character, has benefited extensively from the dramatic prowess of singers of color.

Defying prejudice with a triumphant depiction of Lady Macbeth opposite Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s Macbeth at the 1964 Salzburger Festspiele, St. Louis-born mezzo-soprano Grace Bumbry became the first artist of color to don the Lady’s crown for the Metropolitan Opera when she sang the rôle in a concert performance by MET forces in Newport, Rhode Island, on 17 August 1967. Ultimately, six of Bumbry’s seven MET Ladies were sung in tour performances: only her final MET performance of the rôle, on 4 June 1973, was sung at Lincoln Center. Praised in The Saturday Review for ‘the manner in which she conceives the character’s [in the context of Irving Kolodin’s review, Eboli in Verdi’s Don Carlo] place in the drama,’ Bumbry exhibited dramatic sensibilities with much in common with Othalie Graham’s artistry.

Also assuming Lady Macbeth’s mantle at the MET in 1973 was one of America’s most gifted Verdians, native New Yorker Martina Arroyo. The vitriolic psychology of the power-hungry Lady could hardly be more different from the good-humored soprano’s natural temperament, but her mastery of the music imparted the necessary duplicity. In nearly three decades with the MET, Arroyo built a repertoire that encompassed parts as diverse as Donna Anna in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, virtually all of the Verdi heroines then before the public, rôles in Wagner’s Lohengrin and Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Puccini’s Cio-Cio San, bringing to her interpretations welcome emotional directness. Possessing a voice capable both of delivering florid music credibly and of voicing dramatic rôles like Turandot with the requisite aural impact, Graham perpetuates Arroyo’s legacy.

Remarkably, the Lady Macbeth of Shirley Verrett (1931 - 2010), justifiably cited by many aficionados as one of the preeminent operatic portrayals of the Twentieth Century and documented on disc and film, was heard only once at the MET (15 February 1988). Like Bumbry, Verrett was a mezzo-soprano who possessed vocal range and dramatic versatility that enabled her to diversify her repertoire by singing soprano rôles. Though her MET tenure as Lady Macbeth was unfortunately limited to a single performance, her depiction still casts a long, intimidating shadow. A critic’s description of Verrett’s Leonora in a MET traversal of Donizetti’s La favorita as ‘stupendous in vocalism and amazingly believable in action’ also accurately recounts the essence of her Lady Macbeth.

Fatal mia donna: mezzo-soprano Shirley Verrett as Lady Macbeth (left) and baritone Ryan Edwards as Macbeth (right) in Boston Opera Company’s 1976 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth
[Photograph © by Boston Opera Company]

In the context of her depiction of Lady Macbeth garnering appreciation in her homeland, soprano Margaret Tynes, who was educated in and has many ties to North Carolina, was even less fortunate than Verrett. Tynes’s MET tenure consists of only three performances, all of them of the title rôle in Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa in 1974, in which her Laca and Kostelnička were Jon Vickers and Astrid Varnay, who was also an accomplished Lady Macbeth. A pirated recording of a 1972 performance of Macbeth from the Teatro Petruzzelli in Bari affirms that Tynes was an imposing, atypically sympathetic Lady Macbeth. Like Verrett, Tynes was an adventurous singer whose solid technical footing enabled her to impress in parts as different as Amaltea in Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto and Strauss’s Salome. Again, the parallel with Othalie Graham is unmistakable.

Latina artists have also excelled as Lady Macbeth, both in and beyond North America. Though none of them enjoyed opportunities to sing the part at the MET, sopranos Nora López, Gilda Cruz-Romo, and Áurea Gomes (1942 - 2018) wielded unique traits in their performances of the rôle. Now primarily familiar only to aficionados, the Chilean López sang Lady Macbeth in a memorable 1961 Rai Torino broadcast performance, sparring excitingly with the Macbeth of Mario Sereni. In nearly fifteen years on the MET roster, her Mexican colleague Cruz-Romo refined her Verdian credentials with interpretations of Violetta in La traviata, Leonora in Il trovatore and La forza del destino, Amelia in Un ballo in maschera, Elisabetta in Don Carlo, Aida, and Desdemona in Otello, in addition to a stunning turn as Odabella in Attila with Lyric Opera of Chicago. As Lady Macbeth, Cruz-Romo was simultaneously vituperative and vulnerable. Rightly lauded with fervor in her native Brazil, Gomes was an impassioned Lady Macbeth, one whose tale was indeed ‘full of sound and fury.’

It is maddening that in 2019, when the indignities endured by people of color on every continent are more visible—and more rectifiable—than ever before, occasional productions of Porgy and Bess are still fêted as increased diversity in opera. Porgy and Bess deserves a place in the standard operatic repertory, but George and Ira Gershwin would surely have agreed that staging their work more frequently should be but a small component of the initiative to make opera more demographically inclusive. As artistic representatives of a wonderfully diverse city, Opera Carolina productions have often featured artists of color in prominent rôles, including the cast of Richard Danielpour’s and Toni Morrison’s Margaret Garner (2006); Lisa Daltirus as Leonora and Denyce Graves as Azucena in Il trovatore (2011); Gordon Hawkins in the title rôle of Nabucco (2014); and Kevin Thompson as Zemfira’s father in Rachmaninov’s Aleko (2016). Casting Mark Rucker and Othalie Graham as the sinister spouses in Macbeth perpetuates the company’s commitment to obliterating prejudices and stereotypes in the Performing Arts. Moreover, Graham’s rôle début as Lady Macbeth—a milestone for the artist, Opera Carolina, and Macbeth—honors a storied past in which ladies of several ethnicities have proclaimed that the only colors that are important in opera are those projected by the voice.

Graham and Rucker are joined in Opera Carolina’s production of Macbeth by Zaikuan Song as Banco, Valentino Buzza as Macduff, and Jonathan Kaufman as Malcolm. Opera Carolina’s Artistic Director James Meena will conduct.

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Click here to read a Voix des Arts profile of Othalie Graham.

For more information about Othalie Graham’s career and future engagements, please click here to visit her official website.

Opera Carolina’s production of Verdi’s Macbeth opens in Belk Theater at Charlotte’s Blumenthal Performing Arts Center on Thursday, 7 November 2019. Additional performances are scheduled for 9 and 10 November. Click here to learn more about and to purchase tickets for the production.

RECORDING REVIEW: Mason Bates — MASS TRANSMISSION (Cappella SF; Delos DE 3573)

MASON BATES (born 1977): Mass Transmission – Choral Works by Mason Bates — Cappella SF; Ragnar Bohlin, Artistic Director [Recorded at St. Ignatius Church and Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, California, USA, in January and March 2018; Delos DE 3573; 1 CD, 54:24; Available from Delos, Naxos Direct, Amazon (USA), jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

Whether the music being performed is a marvel of polyphony by a Renaissance master, a Bach Passion, a Händel oratorio, a crowd scene from an opera by Verdi or Wagner, or a Mahler symphony, choral singing wields a communicative power that no other mode of musical expression can duplicate. To hear a good performance of a motet by Josquin des Prez, the prisoners’ chorus in Act One of Beethoven’s Fidelio, or Hindemith’s When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d is to participate, even when listening to a recording, in a communal celebration of music’s capacity to transform sounds into emotional conduits that transcend ordinary modes of interpersonal connection.

Were their texts wordless, the choral works by American composer Mason Bates on the captivating Delos release Mass Transmission would impart engagingly provocative messages, but, like choral music itself, this tunesmith’s music divulges a notable gift for crafting music that not only conveys, complements, and heightens the meanings of words but also facilitates the listener’s comprehension of subtleties that read and spoken words can at best only partially disclose. So spiritually resonant are the pieces on Mass Transmission—and so eloquent are these performances of them—that it almost seems as though this is not music at all. Rather, Bates has made the essence of humanity audible.

Planning, polishing, and performing works in an array of genres have taken Bates from his native Richmond, Virginia, to many of the world’s most prestigious concert venues, where he has collaborated with celebrated artists and ensembles. His relationship with the Chicago Symphony has proved to be particularly fruitful, not least on disc, and the recording of the Santa Fe production his opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs—the most successful production of a new work in Santa Fe Opera’s history—garnered the 2019 GRAMMY® award for Best Opera Recording.

Also much in demand on the nightclub circuit as DJ Masonic, Bates has cultivated a rare and eclectic expertise in the mixing of sonic timbres and textures. This talent for creating musical mosaics that depict the magnificent simplicity of the complexities of life, represented by disparate aural components, permeates the works on Mass Transmission, as well as his Children of Adam, commissioned by the Richmond Symphony in celebration of the orchestra’s sixtieth anniversary and forthcoming on compact disc via a Reference Recordings release. The most daunting task faced by an insightful composer is surely that of giving life to relevant narratives with sounds that are at once original, challenging, and convincing. In the music on Mass Transmission, Bates accomplishes that task with grit and grace.

Completed in 2009, Sirens is performed here in the composer’s version for twelve-part a cappella chorus. A tremendously demanding meditation on the physical, psychological, and philosophical consequences of resistance and surrender to internal and external seductions, the piece is performed by Cappella SF with the kind of hypnotic immediacy that a choir merely singing for studio microphones cannot project. Artistic Director Ragnar Bohlin brings clear-sighted pragmatism to his conducting of this music, and the choir’s singing of the intertwining parts echoes the lucidity of his approach. It is unlikely that the San Francisco-based choristers have native speakers’ familiarity with the Greek text from Homer’s Odyssey that shapes the first segment of Sirens, but, guided by the cadences of the music, they enunciate the words as though their second home is an Athenian amphitheater.

One of the best-known literary incarnations of a cornerstone motif of German Romanticism, Heinrich Heine’s ‘Die Lorelei,’ becomes in Bates’s treatment an unsettlingly personal interlude, and the singing lures the listener into the mesmerizing intricacies of the vocal writing. The words of Pietro Arentino’s ‘Stelle, vostra mercè l’eccelse sfere’ drew from Bates’s imagination music of absorbing individuality, the inventiveness of which is appealingly accentuated by Bohlin and the singers. The text of ‘Sirinu nuqa rikunia’ is a beautiful passage in the indigenous language of the Quechua peoples of South America, a wrenchingly timely allusion in this season during which swaths of the Amazonian rain forest are burning. Quechua civilizations largely inhabited mountainous regions of their continent, but their words, evocatively set by Bates and exquisitely sung by Cappella SF, are an apt ambassador for South America’s environmental and cultural crises. ‘Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee’ from the biblical Book of Matthew is similarly current, the evangelist’s imagery receiving from the composer’s music increased, sometimes astonishing modernity. The return of words from Homer’s Odyssey in the last of Sirens’ songs precipitates a cathartic surge of emotional growth and self-awareness. Hearing this music is not a passive undertaking: this is a performance that an attentive listener will feel.

The disc’s eponymous work, Mass Transmission, was commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony as a headlining work for the 2012 Mavericks Festival. Fascinatingly, its poignant texts were taken from sources as unlikely as a document published by the government of the Netherlands and the diary of a Dutch citizen residing in Indonesia. In its sequence of movements, Mass Transmission examines the ramifications of separation from the perspective of a mother and her daughter, the former in Holland and the latter a continent away on the island of Java. With his music, Bates elucidates every unexpected expressive nuance of the impersonal bureaucratic language in ‘The Dutch Telegraph Office.’ The tone of the writer’s words in ‘Java’ is sporadically reminiscent of the fragile but fiercely unflappable spirit that emerges from Anne Frank’s diary. ‘Wireless Connections’ is a modern motet of the sort that Claudio Monteverdi might have written were he living in an age of interminable profusions of words without substance or significance. Bates’s music is ever on the cusp of cacophony. In Mass Transmission, he takes sounds and words to the precipice of atonality, not as a means of forging a dull alloy of musical modernity but as a way of renewing the timeless oracle of choral music.

Vocally and interpretively, soprano Cara Gabrielson and mezzo-soprano Silvie Jensen partner their Cappella SF colleagues excellently, their artistry lending the words the honesty of genuine conversation. Though the musical idioms are very different, the playing of organist Isabelle Demers recalls Marie-Claire Alain’s performances of the music of her brother Jehan, who perished in the Second World War. Her commitment to the music is no less than the composer’s, who here provides the music’s electronica elements. Soloists, choristers, organist, composer, and conductor devote themselves to serving the words and the stories that they tell. These artists are no pantomime players: they are sensitive, sonorous surrogates in whose performances the sentiments that they express become their own.

The emotional potency of Mass Transmission is a testament to Bates’s genius in composing pieces that meaningfully realize the ‘e pluribus unum’ potential of choral music, uniting many individual voices in a single stream of sound, sometimes a deafening deluge and sometimes barely a trickle, that overcomes obstacles of difference and division. A critically important voice in the chorus of artists whose contributions fostered the success of Mass Transmission is that of recording engineer David v.R. Bowles.

A skilled engineer’s goal is to manufacture an aural atmosphere in which his work is imperceptible, eliminating the tangible and intangible distances that isolate listeners from performers. True to his reputation, Bowles achieves this spectacularly on Mass Transmission, but his work on this disc is not merely the science of turning dials and manipulating channels. His is the artistry of a creator, in addition to that of a craftsman, akin to the efforts of a master translator whose translations have their own literary merit. On this disc, Bowles’s expertise yields a recorded ambiance in which Bates’s music seems as organic a part of existence as birdsong, roaring thunder, and whispered words of love and comfort.

The ‘bonus’ inclusion of a wonderful performance of the three-and-a-half-minute jewel ‘Rag of Ragnar’ to conclude Mass Transmission begets a parable about this disc and the composer whose music it showcases. Drinking from the spring that nourished the great creators of choral music of the past, a composer might understandably hoard the refreshment gathered from those waters. He might collect and closely guard ideas with justifiable concern for the advancement of his career. There is no question that a composer’s reputation benefits from a recording of the quality of Mass Transmission, but this is not a disc that ostentatiously seeks to impress. Rather, Mass Transmission earnestly seeks to inspire. Mason Bates does not drink his fill from the fountain of inspiration and then turn away. With his music, he fills a chalice and invites every listener to savor the undiluted elixir of choral song.