PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Henry Desmarest — CIRCÉ (K. Gauvin, A. Sheehan, T. Wakim, J. Blumberg, A. Forsythe, D. Williams; Boston Early Music Festival, 4 June 2023)

HENRY DESMAREST (1661 – 1741): Circé — Karina Gauvin (Circé), Aaron Sheehan (Ulisse), Teresa Wakim (Astérie), Jesse Blumberg (Elphénor), Amanda Forsythe (Éolie), Douglas Williams (Polite), Hannah De Priest (L’Amour), Nola Richardson (Une nymphe, Une prêtresse, Une néréide), Mindy Ella Chu (Une prêtresse), Mireille Lebel (Minerve), Brian Giebler (Un amant fortuné, Une euménide), Jason McStoots (Phantase, Une euménide), James Reese (Un amant fortuné, Mercure), Kyle Stegall (Une songe, Aquilon), Daniel Fridley (Une euménide), Michael Galvin (Phaebétor), Jonathan Woody (La grand prêtre du temple de l’Amour), Ashley Mulcahy (ensemble), David Evans (ensemble); BEMF Dance Company; BEMF Orchestra; Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs, musical directors [Gilbert Blin, stage director and set designer; Robert Mealy, orchestra director; Melinda Sullivan, dance director; Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière and Pierre-François Dollé, choreographers; Jérôme Kaplan, costume designer; Kelly Martin, lighting director; Kathleen Fay, executive producer; Boston Early Music Festival, Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, Boston, Massachusetts, USA; Sunday, 4 June 2023]

The source of many stories that have been told upon the lyric stage, Ovid could have populated a vast tome with tales of the metamorphoses that have transformed opera since its inception in the final decades of the Sixteenth Century. From the recitative-driven model espoused by opera’s earliest exponents to Twenty-First-Century scores, in which sounds are participants in opera in their own right, the genre has evolved in some way with the creation of each new work. Repeatedly rejuvenated and reimagined via the initiatives of musical innovators including Jacopo Peri, Claudio Monteverdi, Luigi Rossi, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Jacques Offenbach, and Matthew Aucoin, a story like that of the mythological tunesmith Orpheus illustrates the capacity of opera to continually transform not only its own conventions but also the expectations and experiences of its audiences. The finest performances and productions affirm that opera is a strange and sublime realm in which reevaluation is often the most effective catalyst for creativity.

A peer of Ovid as an inspiration to opera composers and librettists, Homer provided in his Iliad and Odyssey comprehensive studies of the superstitions and social mores of ancient Greece, masterfully paralleling the actions of ordinary men and women in his accounts of the feats of legendary figures. Unsurprisingly, the denizens of his epics have often assumed operatic guises, their exploits enacted upon the stage both as exciting entertainment and as symbolic representations of diverse social and political situations. Louise-Geneviève Villot de Saintonge’s libretto for Henry Desmarest’s 1694 opera Circé, a tragédie en musique of the type popularized in France during the latter half of the Seventeebth Century by the Italian-born Jean-Baptiste Lully, with whom Desmarest likely studied in the 1670s, translated episodes from Homer’s accounts of the tribulations of Odysseus into the operatic dialect cultivated at the court of Louis XIV. Adhering to the custom of the era by launching their Circé with a prologue designed to flatter the opera’s royal audience, Desmarest and de Saintonge crafted a theatrical work in which, propelled by music of charm and variety, the gender paradigms of the age were examined and excoriated with perspicacity akin to that with which Jane Austen scrutinized the gender biases of Regency Britain

Though the product of Desmarest’s and de Saintonge’s collaboration undeniably exemplifies elements of the dramatic convolution typical of operas of its vintage, Circé also contains characterizations of near-Shakespearean depth. None of Circé’s principal characters is uniformly virtuous or maleficent in any conventional sense: each actor in the drama is motivated by disparate agendas, the clashes amongst which—in some instances in a single individual—intensify the opera’s histrionic discord. Providing the nucleus of the 2023 Festival’s celebration of women’s rôles as inspirations, subjects, creators, and practitioners, Boston Early Music Festival’s production of Circé glorified the proto-feminism of Desmarest’s and de Saintonge’s depictions of Circe, Ulysses, and their companions. In this staging, their woes, borrowed from the pages of Homer, were fascinatingly timely, vouchsafing that the monsters of myth lurk within the miscommunications and misunderstandings of the digital age.

Monstres d’Antiquité: the company of Boston Early Music Festival’s 2023 production of Henry Desmarest’s Circé, with dancer and choreographer Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière as La Fureur (center)
[Photograph by Kathy Wittman, © by Boston Early Music Festival]

Grandiose spectacle was often as integral a component of Lullian tragédie en musique as it was of the Nineteenth-Century grand opéra of Auber, Halévy, and Meyerbeer, and contemporary documentation of the production team assembled for the première staging of Circé at the Académie Royale de Musique in November 1694 indicates that bountiful resources were lavished upon the opera’s inaugural showing. Under the guidance of the Festival’s Executive Director Kathleen Fay, BEMF transformed the Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre into a hypnotic realization of Circé’s enchanted island in which the characters’ tempestuous inner and outward emotions intrigued and engaged the performers and their audience. Precepts of Seventeenth-Century stage deportment as modern scholarship interprets them were honored throughout the production, but Gilbert Blin’s stage direction and evocative set designs grounded even the most fanciful scenes in lavish but gritty realism. Their exalted ranks and supernatural abilities notwithstanding, the figures in Blin’s vivid tableaux behaved not as pantomime archetypes do but like living, feeling people.

Dazzlingly opulent, tastefully erotic, and strikingly phantasmagorical, Jérôme Kaplan’s costume designs lent visual appeal and lucidity to the opera’s narrative without impeding movement by singers and dancers. The latter, their ranks directed by Melinda Sullivan and including the production’s choreographers, Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière and Pierre-François Dollé, executed thoughtfully-conceived dance sequences with urbanity and athleticism, their gestures often undulating in tandem with the cadences of the text in the glowing ambience of Kelly Martin’s lighting. Unlike many of today’s productions of standard-repertory works, BEMF’s Circé exulted in the piece’s eccentricities rather than seeking to disguise them with incongruous stage business. Blin and BEMF’s team of artists and artisans demonstrated that Circé is a work that needs rejuvenation, not rehabilitation.

Their work in much-praised productions of operas by Lully and Marc-Antoine Charpentier ideally prepared BEMF’s Music Directors Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs for successfully reawakening and energizing Desmarest’s episodic score. Guiding the continuo with the attention to detail for which they are renowned, the pair achieved commendable cohesion and consistent momentum, maintaining dramatic tension but avoiding anachronistic excesses. Led by violinist Robert Mealy, whose instinctual, almost linguistic phrasing engendered near-ideal support for the singers, BEMF’s orchestra met the challenges of Desmarest’s score with the virtuosity that frequent BEMF patrons might take for granted. Desmarest’s orchestral writing is predictably similar to Lully’s and Charpentier’s, but the playing of BEMF’s musicians illuminated Circé’s originality, particularly in abundant finely-wrought passages for winds. Sonically complementing the production’s visual splendor, O’Dette and Stubbs crafted a sumptuous instrumental gallery in which the kaleidoscopic hues of the cast’s character portraits shone.

Une voix d’un autre monde: tenor Jason McStoots as une Phantase in Boston Early Music Festival’s 2023 production of Henry Desmarest’s Circé
[Photograph by Kathy Wittman, © by Boston Early Music Festival]

Embodying the Festival’s homage to powerful women, the rôle of L’Amour was depicted not as a male figure as in traditional mythology but as an unapologetically ebullient feminine presence, animated by the effervescent performance of soprano Hannah De Priest, whose sparkling voicing of ‘Je reçois vôtre hommage, il est tendre et sincère’ in the eighth scene of Act Two epitomized the mellifluous benevolence of her characterization throughout the show. Heard as a Nymphe, a Prêtresse, and a Néréide, soprano Nola Richardson also sang refulgently, and mezzo-soprano Mindy Ella Chu enunciated the portentous words of a Prêtresse with vocal poise. In the second scene of Act Three, mezzo-soprano Mireille Lebel voiced Minerve’s ‘Il n’est pas temps de paraitre’ arrestingly, and the goddess’s wise authority was powerfully conveyed in every scene in which she appeared. Enriching ensembles, the voices of mezzo-soprano Ashley Mulcahy and tenor David Evans blended euphoniously with thoss of their colleagues foretelling future success in larger assignments.

A quartet of uniformly capable tenors inspirited an array of secondary rôles with vocal elegance and incisive articulation of texts. As un Amant fortuné in the fourth scene of Act One and une Euménide in Act Four, Brian Giebler sang with impeccable control and tonal allure, imparting the dramatic significance of each word that he uttered. Jason McStoots effortlessly scaled the vocal heights of Desmarest’s writing for Phantase in Act Three and an Euménide in Acr Four, and, first appearing as un Amant fortuné in Act One, James Reese voiced Mercure’s ‘Fuis loin d’ici, troupe odieuse’ in Act Four with apt authority. Kyle Stegall’s ethereal timbre shimmered in the writing for une Songe in Act Three and as Aquilon in the fifth scene of Act Five, his refined singing of ‘De la fille d’Éole, il faut combler les vœux’ heightening the consequence of the words.

Extending the superlative caliber of the vocalism into the lower compass, bass Daniel Fridley sang une Euménide’s music in the fourth scene of Act Four with imperturbable assurance. In Act Three, bass Michael Galvin intoned Phæbétor’s ‘Ulisse, il faut quitter ces funestes climats’ with urgency, the voice viscerally evincing the import of the words. Both in the music for le Grand Prêtre du Temple de l’Amour in Act Two, ‘Approchez-vous, heureux mortels’ voiced with stirring sobriety and stylistic acumen, and in ensembles, bass-baritone Jonathan Woody’s voice reverberated rousingly in the auditorium’s acoustic, his descents to the depths of his range reliably audible.

Le compagnon dévoué: bass-baritone Douglas Williams as Polite in Boston Early Music Festival’s 2023 production of Henry Desmarest’s Circé
[Photograph by Kathy Wittman, © by Boston Early Music Festival]

BEMF’s loyalty to artists whose work advances the Festival’s ideal of reintroducing neglected scores with a fusion of uninhibited imagination and fidelity to historical accuracy often begets fortuitous casting, and this production of Circé was distinguished by superb singing from artists who are much admired by Boston audiences. Returning to BEMF, where he will be heard in 2024 as Nero in Reinhard Keiser’s Die römische Unruhe, oder Die edelmütige Octavia, bass-baritone Douglas Williams portrayed the Greek prince Polite, a companion on Ulisse’s journeys who has fallen in love with Circé’s confidante Astrie, with characteristic suavity. Credible as both a rugged warrior and a tender lover, his Polite wooed with sultriness and warned with immediacy, voicing ‘Enfin, nous n’avons plus de témoins que l’Amour’ in Act Two with solemnity and electrifying vocal cogency.

Dueting with Astérie, Williams sang ‘Amour, que tes plaisirs sont doux!’ seductively, his phrasing limning the character’s emotional engagement and the singer’s command of verbal inflection. In the Act Five scene with Astérie, he again mastered the vocal and expressive ranges of Polite’s music, delivering ‘Ce héros m’a sauvé plus d’une fois la vie’ confidently. Uniting his voice with Astérie’s, his pronouncement of ‘Que ma joie est extrême!’ rightly ecstatic. Williams portrayed Polite with subtlety and depth greater than the character’s rôle in the opera’s action suggests that he possesses, but every choice was justified by score and libretto.

La fille du vent: soprano Amanda Forsythe as Éolie in Boston Early Music Festival’s 2023 production of Henry Desmarest’s Circé
[Photograph by Kathy Wittman, © by Boston Early Music Festival]

Rather than Penelope, the wife whose much-tested constancy is extolled by Homer and in operatic incarnations including Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and Gabriel Fauré’s Pénélopé, Ulisse’s paramour in Desmarest’s and de Saintonge’s Circé is Éolie, a daughter of the queen of Ligari who has no counterpart in Homer. Regardless of the lady’s questionable literary provenance, she indisputably received an exquisite portrayal in BEMF’s Circé from soprano Amanda Forsythe. The diaphonous brilliance of Éolie’s first appearance in Act Three introduced a characterization distinguished by beguiling tonal beauty, verbal acuity, and artful ornamentation. The first words of ‘Désirs, transports, cruelle impatience’ revealed Forsythe’s Éolie to be a woman abused but by no means defeated by fate. No Ulisse could have been immune to the magnetism that emanated from Éolie in their first scene together, in which the soprano’s voice glistened throughout its compass. In the Act Four scene with Circé, in which the princess courageously faced her ferocious rival for Ulisse’s love, Forsythe intoned ‘J’ignore les détours de ce bois solitaire’ and ‘Moments où je dois voir l’objet de ma tendresse’ with contrasting distress and determination, ingenuously differentiated with shifting vocal colors.

Éolie’s daring mission to free Ulisse from Circé’s clutches coming to fruition in Act Five, Forsythe’s vocalism radiated the assertiveness of a noble spirit still enduring agonies but certain of the integrity of her goal. In her scene with Ulisse, ‘J’ai crû vôtre perte certaine’ communicated resolve that surged in Forsythe’s singing of ‘Ne nous quittons jamais, payons-nous des douceurs.’ Intuitively sculpting phrases with complete comprehension of the felicities of the composer’s settings of the librettist’s words but never over-accentuating a note or syllable, she garnered empathy for the unflappable lover she depicted. In lesser company, Forsythe might easily have dominated the performance: in this performance, she was a resplendent supernova in a gleaming constellation of fellow stars.

L’amant éconduit: baritone Jesse Blumberg as Elphénor in Boston Early Music Festival’s 2023 production of Henry Desmarest’s Circé
[Photograph by Kathy Wittman, © by Boston Early Music Festival]

If Circé can be said to have a villain in a conventional sense, he is Elphénor, a Greek prince and fellow traveler of Ulisse and Polite whose amorous ambitions supplant his allegiance to his comrades, yet his actions are spurred not by iniquity but by desire  The character’s torturous duplicity was the cornerstone of baritone Jesse Blumberg’s portrayal. From Elphénor’s entrance in Act One, Blumberg lent burgeoning tension to each of the prince’s exchanges with Astérie, the object of his romantic obsession, singing ‘L’Inhumaine me fuit, rien ne peut l’attendrir’ in their scene together with a rejected lover’s ardor and frustration. A different facet of Elphénor’s persona emerged in his Act Two scene with Ulisse, in which Blumberg’s forceful voicing of ‘Quand le bruit de votre naufrage’ prefaced an incendiary, conspiratorial account of ‘Quand on aime tendrement.’

Elphénor’s plight reaches its zenith in Act Three, and Blumberg responded with skilled vocal acting, words insightfully shaped into piercing declarations of feeling as in his tormented singing of ‘Je lui suis suspect, l’infidèle.’ Cornered by the suspicious Circé, the baritone’s intimidated Elphénor sang ‘Quand on a tant d’amour avec tant de beauté’ with audible trepidation. The subsequent discourse with Astérie, disgusted by the prince’s unwelcome protestations of love, drew from Blumberg his most affecting singing of the afternoon, the slight hardness at the top of the range conveying the emotional toll of Astérie’s scorn. Declaiming ‘C’en est trop, barbare inhumaine’ wrenchingly, Blumberg intimated the gravitas of Elphénor’s despair, the fervor of his singing making the forlorn man’s suicide genuinely moving. Especially when he returned as a spirit summoned from Hades in Act Four, defying Circé’s command to betray Ulisse and Éolie by divulging their liaison, Elphénor’s vocal line intermittently descended beyond the lower extremity of the strongest portion of Blumberg’s range, but every note of the part was sung with conviction and musicality.

L’objet de deux amours: soprano Teresa Wakim as Astérie in Boston Early Music Festival’s 2023 production of Henry Desmarest’s Circé
[Photograph by Kathy Wittman, © by Boston Early Music Festival]

Although the proud woman’s disdain inadvertently precipitates Elphénor’s demise, Circé’s confidante Astérie was in soprano Teresa Wakim’s performance both pensive and fiery. At her entrance in Act One, innate conviviality resounded in her voicing of ‘Vous serez toujours jeune et belle,’ but, joined by Circé, ‘Pour les amants les plus heureux’ disclosed increasing uncertainty, evoked by the soprano’s tonal shading. A steely edge glinted in Wakim’s timbre in the scene with Elphénor, exasperation giving way to ire as the lovelorn prince pressed his suit. Building from her anguished ‘Ah! c’est trop retenir mes pleurs’ to a febrile performance of ‘L’inhumaine Circé, par un enchantement,’ the progression of Astérie’s disillusionment in Act One was realized with gripping directness. In the scenes with Ulisse and Polite that followed, Wakim deployed motivic vocal emphases to enliven each emotion, serenading her true love Polite with a caressing ‘Amour, que tes plaisirs sont doux!’ of unaffected zeal.

Wakim’s singing in the fateful scene with Elphénor in Act Three, Astérie’s contemptuous dismissal of his affection ultimately impelling him to take his life, coruscated with indignation and impetuosity, the clarity of her diction wielded like a dagger but lacking the savagery of true hatred. In the Act Five scene with Polite, the iron core of the soprano’s voice gave her reading of ‘Ah! vous allez périr sans délivrer Ulisse’ galvanizing potency, and she sang ‘Dieux! le cruel m’abandonne’ with insurmountable focus. Finally extricated from the strife of amorous entanglements and restored to her beloved, Wakim’s Astérie voiced ‘Que ma joie est extrême!’ with triumphant vigor. Instances of intonational occlusion in Wakim’s performance were laudably few, the technical accomplishment of her singing fostering a characterization that, while wholly authentic in style, heightened the surprising modernity of Astérie’s complex psychological development.

Le grec enchanté: tenor Aaron Sheehan as Ulisse in Boston Early Music Festival’s 2023 production of Henry Desmarest’s Circé
[Photograph by Kathy Wittman, © by Boston Early Music Festival]

Among Circé’s ambiguous players, the legendary hero Ulisse is given an especially equivocal ethical constitution: neither faithful nor faithless, he pursues a course that is at once opportunistic and inexorable. The journeyer’s inherent restlessness was omnipresent in tenor Aaron Sheehan’s entrancing performance of the rôle, in which unerring musicality was fused with sophisticated theatrical savvy. Singing ‘Quel reproche cruel pour mon cœur amoureux!’ in Act One with exceptional musical accuracy and dramatic involvement, he extracted the idealized figure of legend from de Saintonge’s distillation of Homer’s epic and, with the aid of Desmarest’s writing, molded him into a man of joltingly current sensibilities. In his scene with Astérie in Act Two, Sheehan’s poetic but pointed vocalism evidenced the confounding contradictions of Ulisse’s predicament. Suffusing his proclamation of ‘La conquête de votre cœur’ in the scene with Circé with caution, Ulisse’s loathing for Circé’s infatuation seethed in ‘Désir de se venger, inutile fureur.’

The expressive vitality of Sheehan’s singing fashioned a performance of ‘Faudra-t-il toujours me contraindre?’ in which the spectrum of Ulisse’s reactions to his circumstances could be discerned in the tenor’s understated gradations of tone, yet even in his fraught meeting with Elphénor the voice was lustrously attractive. Dashingly projecting ‘O Ciel! ô juste Ciel! j’implore ton secours’ in the scene with Éolie, he lavished a stream of mesmerizingly lovely tone on ‘Quand on aime tendrement.’ Sparring with the increasingly volatile Circé in Act Four, Sheehan’s Ulisse unleashed a deluge of disillusionment in a galvanizing voicing of ‘Dieux! quelle injustice effroyable!’ The Act Five scene with Éolie allowed Sheehan to shift from fierceness to finesse, and the effervescence of his singing of ‘Que ne vous dois-je pas, adorable Éolie?’ persisted in an ebullient account of ‘Ne nous quittons jamais, payons-nous des douceurs.’ Rather than depicting Ulisse as a caricatured protagonist, marginalizing his unsavory traits, Sheehan embraced all of the character’s dimensions, his fleet, fetching vocalism rendering the negative as enthralling as the positive.

La reine du rejet: soprano Karina Gauvin as Circé in Boston Early Music Festival’s 2023 production of Henry Desmarest’s Circé
[Photograph by Kathy Wittman, © by Boston Early Music Festival]

Separating the opera proper from its allegorical prologue, BEMF’s production accentuated the dramatic verisimilitude and musical equilibrium with which Desmarest and de Saintonge structured their depiction of Circé, qualities that were hallmarks of Québecoise soprano Karina Gauvin’s portrayal of the rôle. Although Circé’s tessitura is centered in some passages lower than the range in which Gauvin’s voice is most voluptuous, she characterized the protean sorceress as a sensitive, unapologetically sexual woman who maintained regal dignity in rage and repose. With her dulcet cry of ‘Ah! Que l’Amour aurait de charmes,’ Gauvin established her Circé as a woman unafraid of baring her vulnerabilities, but the doubt that undermined her joy in ‘Une secrète jalousie’ offered a glimpse of the severity of which she was capable.

Sharing her concerns with Astérie, ‘Pour les amants les plus heureux’ was sung with restraint, Circé seeming to distrust her own wisdom. Her statement of ‘Prince, vous connaissez jusqu’où va ma tendresse’ to Ulisse was as vehement in its way as her asseveration of ‘Votre amitié s’intéresse’ to his fellow Greeks was portentous. Gauvin sang ‘Changez-vous tristes lieux’ lustily, remorselessly bewitching Ulisse’s companions. Circé’s disquiet grew more pervasive in her Act Two scene with Ulisse, the simmering consternation in her ‘Quoi? vous n’avez rien à me dire?’ detonating in ‘Désir de se venger, inutile fureur.’ The scene with Elphénor in Act Three also bristled with incredulity, the soprano’s voicing of ‘Prince, je ne saurais vous cacher ma tristesse’ charged with vexation. The anger of Circé’s assertion of ‘Ulisse est inconstant’ to Astérie was tinged with sorrow, as was her poignant ‘Enfin il est donc vrai qu’Elphénor ne vit plus’ in the Act Four contest with Ulisse. Commanding Elphénor’s shade to rise from Hades and name her rival, ‘Dieu ténébreux du vaste empire’ was chanted with irrefutable authority, but, the name withheld, her desolation erupted into vitriol in the scene with Éolie, ‘Qu’ai-je entendu? c’est ma rivale, o Dieux!’ sung with abrasive bitterness. In Gauvin’s performance, Circé’s ‘Venez, Démons, empruntez les attraits’ was worthy of comparison with the frenzied outbursts of Cherubini’s Médée and Verdi’s Lady Macbeth.

The emotional gauntlet to which Circé is subjected in Act Five recalls the final afflictions suffered by the heroines of Lully’s Armide and Charpentier’s Médée. Acted without prudence and circumspection, Circé’s final scenes could educe parody instead of pathos, but it was in these scenes that Gauvin’s performance was most touchingly human. Deprived of her power to conquer by deceit, she was at last not a sovereign or a sorceress but only, fully a woman. Her exclamation of ‘O rage! ô douleur mortelle!’ was not shrieked but voiced with pained beauty. The venomous yearning for retribution that coursed through Gauvin’s singing of ‘Ah! quelle rigueur extrême!’ was terrifying, but it was Circé’s heartbreak that billowed most memorably from the singer’s vocal cords. For Gauvin’s Circé, the subjugation of her sorcery liberated her feminity, a declaration of independence as momentous in 2023 as it was in 1694.

PERFORMANCE REVIEW: François Couperin, Tomás Luis de Victoria, & Thomas Tallis — LAMENTATIONS OF JEREMIAH – TENEBRÆ FOR TUESDAY OF HOLY WEEK (C. Humphries, Red Letter Consort; St. John’s Church, Richmond, Virginia; 4 April 2023)

FRANÇOIS COUPERIN (1668 – 1733), TOMÁS LUIS DE VICTORIA (circa 1548 – 1611), and THOMAS TALLIS (circa 1505 – 1585) – : Lamentations of Jeremiah – Tenebræ for Tuesday of Holy Week — Charles Humphries, countertenor and director; Red Letter Consort; Charles Lindsey, organ [St. John’s Church, Richmond, Virginia, USA; Tuesday, 4 April 2023]

It is impossible to know from precisely which origins and stimuli human music first developed. Perhaps it was a desire to mimick birdcalls and other sounds of nature that inspired song, or the failure of speech to adequately communicate certain emotions may have engendered the development of melody as an interpretive intermediary. Throughout its evolution, music has unquestionably assumed a consequential rôle in celebration and commemoration of humankind’s milestones, a rôle confirmed by the forced isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic to gain meaning from unifying diverse listeners in shared experiences of heightened expression. The effectiveness of music as a therapeutic medium for reconnecting with individuals with cognitive and memory deficiencies demonstrates that music engages listeners and performers in ways that are still only partially understood, somehow transcending even the most basic tenets of consciousness and cognizance.

At least since the Middle Ages, when the development of tablature and standard notation facilitated the preservation of music in printed form, music has been an integral component of commemorations of Christian events, not least those of Holy Week that honor Christ’s persecution, death, and resurrection. Encompassing virtually all genres, music for Holy Week constitutes a substantial segment of the Western choral canon, liturgical remembrances of Christ’s Passion and responses thereto having inspired composers for centuries. Imparted in works for both solo voice and choir, the spirit of awed reflection that permeates much music for Holy Week filled the space in which Red Letter Consort performed music that splendidly showcased the ensemble’s innate musicality, preparedness, and commitment to conveying the joy of singing even when voicing music of tremendous gravitas.

The setting for the 1775 Second Virginia Convention, the meeting of delegates convened in Richmond to explore paths to freedom from Britain during which Patrick Henry uttered his famed ‘Give me liberty, or give me death!’ address, St. John’s Church is an apt home, historically and acoustically, for performances by Red Letter Consort, founded and directed by renowned countertenor Charles Humphries. Serving in the Consort’s performance of music for Holy Week as both soloist and choir leader, Humphries curated a compelling sequence of settings of dolorous texts steeped in the humanistic pathos of Old Testament accounts of the sacking of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. Both accentuating the parallels in these texts with the sorrows of Christ’s Passion, as composers have done for centuries, and finding in words and music poignant bonds with present adversities, Humphries and Red Letter Consort liberated the music from specific liturgical contexts, fomenting in St. John’s a pervasive spirit of communal renewal.

Composed for celebration of Holy Week at Abbaye royale de Longchamp in 1714, François Couperin’s three Leçons de ténèbres pour mercredi saint enliven the biblical texts with masterfully-wrought aural colorations. The stylistic ingenuity found in Couperin’s keyboard music also permeates the Leçons de ténèbres, in which the musical language of the great French and Flemish masters of Renaissance choral music is distilled into vocal lines that are at once touchingly lucid and rich with detail. Beautifully accompanied by organist Charles Lindsey, Humphries’s singing of the first and second Leçons—those written for a single voice—exhibited unwavering focus on psychological nuances of the texts, each emotional transition, affectingly realized by Couperin, animated with sincerity and subtlety.

The intimacy of the performance’s setting heightened perception of the music’s challenges and appreciation of the commitment with which Humphries approached them. Notably, his articulations of repeated words and phrases were managed with great imagination, the word ‘Jerusalem’ uttered with contrasting ecstasy, pain, and resignation as the narrative progressed. The singer’s carefully-honed breath control revealed Couperin to be a precursor of Vincenzo Bellini as a composer of expansive, delicately-ornamented, bel canto-esque melodic lines. The technical assurance of Humphries’s vocalism was apparent in the infrequency of intonational fluctuations and stylistic inconsistencies, none of which detracted—or distracted—from the pensiveness and pulchritude of these traversals of the Leçons.

Offering their second concert to the Richmond public, the Red Letter Consort singers—sopranos Antonia Vassar and Kaitlyn Townsend, contralto Heather Jones, tenor Evan Heiter, and basses John Tyndall and Will Conn—began their portion of the performance with soaring accounts of three of the eighteen Tenebræ responsory motets published in Rome in 1585 by Spanish composer Tomás Luis de Victoria. One of a handful of Renaissance masters whose life and career are extensively documented, Victoria benefited from the patronage of some of the most powerful figures of his age, including Spain’s King Philip II, whose support enabled Victoria to study and work in Rome. A contemporary of one of his native region’s most revered citizens, Saint Teresa of Ávila, Victoria was an ordained priest whose vocation dominated his compositional output. Unmistakably influenced by the music of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, with whom he may have studied in the 1560s, Victoria’s Tenebræ responsories share with Couperin’s Leçons a profoundly personal atmosphere of rumination, invigorated in this performance by Red Letter Consort’s singing.

From the opening bars of ‘Amicus meus osculi me traddit signo,’ it was apparent that Humphries’s leadership yielded ensemble singing that honored the storied English traditions that shaped his musical constitution. Reminiscences of Coventry and Salisbury resounded in Red Letter Consort’s singing, but their delivery of Victoria’s music was distinguished by singular expressive intensity. The voices intertwined captivatingly in ‘Tamquam ad latronem,’ emphasizing the ingenuity of the composer’s part writing without distorting the piece’s meticulously-crafted polyphonic architecture. Foretokens of Passion music by Buxtehude and Bach emerged in the Consort’s phrasing of ‘Sepulto Domino, signatum est monumentum,’ in which the singers’ individual sounds were melded into a resilient thread by which the words were bound with evocative simplicity, the cathartic power of Victoria’s tone painting vividly projected to the listeners.

Unlike his Spanish colleague Victoria, the English composer Thomas Tallis is a towering figure in Renaissance music without a substantial biographical foundation. A defining presence in English liturgical composition throughout the reigns of the last four Tudor monarchs, Tallis gave England a body of work to rival the legacies of Continental composers, artfully tailoring his musical language first to the Catholic conservatism of Mary I and then to the Protestant progressivism of Elizabeth I without compromising the integrity of his work. Under Elizabeth’s aegis, Tallis and his pupil William Byrd were awarded exclusive rights to publish their works, an arrangement with few precedents that secured the survival of much of Tallis’s music. Whereas undisputed historical evidence creates a comprehensive portrait of Victoria, vestiges of Tallis’s character and experiences are primarily found in his music, in which a fascinating, sometimes melancholic, and often astonishingly modern voice is heard.

Red Letter Consort chose as the final selection for their Holy Week concert the first part of Tallis’s setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet. Dating from the 1560s, during Elizabeth I’s first decade on the throne, the work utilizes the same text employed in Couperin’s Leçons. Tallis’s manner of writing for the voices engenders sonic textures that are at once stark and lavish, each part requiring stamina, sensitivity, and security across a broad range. Guided by Humphries’s intuitive pacing, Red Letter Consort’s voices excelled at meeting Tallis’s demands, enunciating each line of Jeremiah’s elegiac text with stirring immediacy.

Despite the Consort’s relative newness, cooperation among the singers was faultless, the thoroughness of their preparation audible in each phrase of their singing. Fleeting moments of imperfect balance in the Victoria motets were largely absent from the Tallis. In this music, the Consort achieved an ethos that was appropriately solemn but movingly hopeful. Euphoniously limning the essence of Holy Week’s message of salvation through sacrifice with singing in which diligent rehearsal actuated expressive spontaneity, Humphries and Red Letter Consort reawakened in the hallowed space of St. John’s the quest for spiritual enlightenment that effected the church’s prominence in the annals of American history. Patrick Henry’s voice roused a revolution: the voices of Red Letter Consort roused music of centuries past with revolutionary eloquence.

PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Christoph Willibald Gluck — ORFEO ED EURIDICE (M. Moore, S. Stewart, M. Quinn; The Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle, 25 March 2023)

CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD VON GLUCK (1714 – 1787): Orfeo ed Euridice [1762 Vienna version] — Megan Moore (Orfeo), Susannah Stewart (Euridice), Molly Quinn (Amore); Carolina Choir, The Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle; Lorenzo Muti, conductor [Niccoló Muti, Stage Director; Lauren Carmen, Costume Designer; The Carolina Theatre, Durham, North Carolina, USA; Saturday, 25 March 2023]

Opera is a celebration of excesses, one of which is a tendency among the art form’s most fervent admirers to assess works, performers, and performances with absolutes, proclaiming superlatives when discussing virtues and vices would be more productive. Justified though recognition of his genius emphatically is, citing Mozart as the defining musical innovator of the second half of the Eighteenth Century both belittles the work of other noteworthy composers and denies Mozart’s achievements the context required in order to properly appreciate them. In evaluations of the evolution of opera between Händel’s final contributions to the genre and the sublime scores of Mozart’s maturity, several of Christoph Willibald von Gluck’s operas are rightly esteemed as catalysts in the transition from Baroque to Classicism and early Romanticism. To suggest that Gluck’s ‘reform operas’ are without contemporary peers as groundbreaking works is an affront to Gluck and composers like Tommaso Traetta and Antonio Sacchini, but, even to Twenty-First-Century ears acquainted with operatic styles and innovations spanning six centuries, the operas that inspired Gluck’s reputation as a trailblazer still inhabit unique soundworlds more than two centuries after their composer’s death, shaped by music in which the tragédies en musique of Lully, Charpentier, and Rameau collide with the Romantic operas of Beethoven, Weber, and Berlioz.

Despite the persisting temptation to exaggerate the event’s significance at the expense of undervaluing the importance of similar works including Carl Heinrich Graun’s 1752 Orfeo and Ferdinando Bertoni’s 1776 setting of the same libretto by Ranieri de’ Calzabigi utilized by Gluck, the première of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice at Vienna’s Burgtheater on 5 October 1762, was unquestionably a momentous occasion, the Habsburg dynasty having bern represented on that first night by as illustrious an opera lover as the Empress herself, Maria Theresa. Casting renowned castrato Gaetano Guadagni, whose notoriety in London in the 1740s and ’50s encompassed both work with Händel and salacious libidinous escapades, as Orfeo, Gluck retained a vital component of the Baroque tradition, perhaps making his efforts at returning opera seria to the kinship with Greek drama envisioned by early exponents of the genre more palatable to the Viennese audience. Gluck’s later revisions to the score, the most drastic being the 1774 version for Paris in which the hero’s music was reassigned from alto castrato to high tenor, reflect both that his quest to liberate opera from Baroque excesses metamorphosed as it progressed and that even a committed reformer bowed to the necessity of conforming to prevailing tastes, at least in part.

From Jacopo Peri’s and Giulio Caccini’s Euridice (1600) [in addition to collaborating with Peri, Caccini penned his own Euridice, first performed in 1602] and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607) to Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice, staged to considerable acclaim in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2021 – 2022 Season, Orphic subjects have been popular with composers and audiences, mythology’s tale of a musician using his lyre to open paths that were previously closed to him transformed into an ode to music’s capacities to heal individuals and communities. [Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice returns to the Metropolitan Opera in the 2023 – 2024 Season, with Durham-born countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo as Orfeo.] In both subject and the score’s musical dimensions, the 1762 version of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice was an ideal work for The Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle’s inaugural foray into performing opera. Staging the performance in Durham’s historic Carolina Theatre was largely successful but also fitfully exasperating. The theatre’s warm, natural acoustic was fortuitous, especially with the orchestra on stage and the principals either on the floor or directly in front of the instrumentalists, but the building’s multi-purpose functionality presented challenges, the most disheartening of which was the first half-hour of the performance being marred by persistent lobby noise. Moreover, whilst concessions sales are undoubtedly an important source of revenue and are appropriate for the attached cinema, the constant crunching of patrons enjoying popcorn was distracting and an unfortunate disservice to the performers. These caveats notwithstanding, the performance was an impressive first effort that inspired the hope that opera will be included in future COT seasons.

COT’s performance of Orfeo ed Euridice was a near-miraculous celebration of all that can be achieved by teams of musicians dedicating the best of their artistry to a common goal. Brought to the stage in only five days, without benefit of an in-depth Sitzprobe and extensive technical rehearsals, the performance was directed with imaginative use of space and the auditorium’s architecture, the latter employed by COT’s Executive Director and Principal Conductor Niccoló Muti to position a contingent of the chorus in the tier of boxes near the stage. Lauren Carmen’s simple but evocative costume designs would likely have been more effective had the lighting been brighter, but the flowing lines and contrasting colors and textures lent modernity and Classical poise to Muti’s storytelling. Reconfiguring Gluck’s three acts into two, the production made Orfeo’s descent into Hades a tempestuous voyage. Muti’s direction imposed nothing upon the drama that was not supported by score and libretto, fashioning a staging that exuded sincerity that is sometimes not found in more intricate productions.

COT’s Artistic Director Lorenzo Muti conducted Gluck’s score with discernible understanding of the style, avoiding the mistakes of approaching Orfeo ed Euridice as though it were late Händel or early Mozart. Aptly, the style of Mondonville was recalled far more frequently than that of Mozart in Muti’s pacing, which relied upon moderate tempi and unexaggerated cadences. COT’s musicians played Gluck’s music superbly, their intonation laudably accurate throughout the performance. Their aural balance benefited the strings more than the winds, the flutes intermittently practically inaudible, but the ensemble’s sound bloomed in the auditorium. The absence of harpsichord continuo was regrettable in passages of recitative, the lack of linking music among the plodding chords causing the extended scene for Orfeo and Euridice at the beginning of Act Three to seem interminable. Nonetheless, Muti ensured that the performance’s pace maintained momentum but afforded passages of repose like Orfeo’s exquisite ‘Che puro ciel’ time in which to reveal their allures. The opera’s vivid Sinfonia and the familiar Dance of the Blessed Spirits, played as a de facto entr’acte, were beautifully done, and the music for the furies brayed with infernal intensity. Interpretive subtleties are born of long acquaintance, but weeks of rehearsals could not have yielded a more musical account of Orfeo ed Euridice than Muti and the COT accomplished in this performance.

Comprised of students from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Carolina Choir sang Gluck’s music for chorus with impeccable musicality, professionalism, and preparedness. Whether depicting Thracian peasants mourning Euridice’s death, menacing Furies, or disembodied souls, their sounds demonstrated the excellence of Susan Klebanow’s training. ‘Ah! se intorno a quest’urna funesta’ in Act One movingly imparted the despair felt by Euridice’s companions, and the choral responses to Orfeo’s outpourings of grief were voiced with feeling and finesse. Compelling throughout the opera, Gluck’s writing for the chorus is uniquely powerful in Act Two, and Carolina Choir’s elocution elucidated every syllable and sentiment of the progression of choruses from ‘Chi mai dell’Erebo’ to ‘Vieni a’ regni del riposo.’ Their singing of ‘Torna, o bella, al tuo consorte’ was enthralling, and the choir’s work in Act Three was as dramatically impactful as it was musically entrancing. The sopranos and contraltos outnumbering their lower-voiced counterparts in the choir’s ranks occasionally caused the ensemble to be slightly top-heavy, but the tenors met the challenges of their music in Act Three intrepidly.

Amore, the opera’s deus ex machina and this performance’s beacon in the darkness, was depicted not as the male Cupid of mythology but as an unmistakably feminine figure, animated with delightful brio by soprano Molly Quinn. In her first appearance in Act One, this was an Amore whose cheeky vivacity was little affected by Euridice’s tragic demise and Orfeo’s mourning. Her opening pronouncements to the despondent Orfeo were comforting and cheering, and Quinn sang the aria ‘Gli sguardi trattieni’ effervescently, her timbre and vibrato reminiscent of Toti dal Monte. She returned in Act Three to reward Orfeo’s persistence by reuniting him with the errant Euridice, voicing each line of recitative with clarity of diction and purpose. Quinn sang Amore’s part in the final trio with boundless joy and a sly suggestion of self-satisfaction, the voice shimmering in the musical glow of the opera’s lieto fine.

Surviving the unenviable task of motionlessly portraying Euridice’s corpse in Act One, soprano Susannah Stewart subsequently emerged unscathed as a disenchanted denizen of the underworld. Finally heard in Act Three, Stewart articulated Euridice’s discourse with Orfeo insightfully, the character’s growing confusion, frustration, and fear credibly evinced. Her performance of the impassioned aria ‘Che fiero momento’ was one of the evening’s musical pinnacles, the soprano’s technique and temperament viscerally communicating the piece’s volatile emotions. Affection permeated Stewart’s phrasing of ‘Grande, o Numi è il dono vostro!’ in the duet with Orfeo, the tone gleaming, and each word in the final trio was sung with palpable exultation.

There are pages in Orfeo ed Euridice in which the opera is virtually a solo cantata for Orfeo. To an even greater extent than in Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, the protagonist’s sorrow and determination to defy fate are participants in the drama as consequential as Orfeo and Euridice themselves. Depicting Orfeo not as an archetypal artist battling adversity but as a deeply sensitive youth devastated by the loss of his beloved, mezzo-soprano Megan Moore sang Gluck’s music with stylistic authority and tonal beauty. The recitatives at the beginning of Act One were uttered with emotional specificity, ‘Amici, qual lamento aggrava il mio dolor’ dejected and ‘Lasciatemi!’ anguished. The sequence of brief arias—’Chiamo il mio ben così,’ ‘Cerco il mio ben così,’ and ‘Piango il mio ben così’—persuasively manifested the stages of Orfeo’s grieving and anger, only one false entry betraying the performance’s hurried preparation. ‘Deh! placatevi con me’ with chorus and the arias ‘Mille pene, ombre moleste’and ‘Men tiranne, ah! voi sareste’ in Act Two further projected Orfeo’s resilience and reliance upon music as a source of solace.

Moore’s dulcet singing of the arioso ‘Che puro ciel! che chiaro sol!’ limned the sense of wonder that gripped Orfeo, visually stimulated in this performance by whimsical, Julie Taymor-esque puppetry. In Act Three, the recitative ‘Vieni, segui i miei passi’ benefited from the unaffected directness of Moore’s delivery, a quality that also permeated the singer’s voicing of Orfeo’s charged words in the duet with Euridice. The famed aria ‘Che farò senza Euridice?’ was sung with beguiling simplicity, Moore preferring purity of line to ornamentation. Hesitant to trust in the permanence of Amore’s intervention, this Orfeo at last experienced—and expressed—happiness in the final trio. Like her colleagues in this performance, Moore brought an aura of catharsis to the opera’s final scene, Orfeo’s devotion to the power of music rewarded. The Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle’s faith in the viability of opera was rewarded, too, this performance of Orfeo ed Euridice affirming that the success of a performance is measured by its soul, not its scale.

PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Gaetano Donizetti — DON PASQUALE (B. Smoak, M. Redding, C. Carrico, K. Alston, J. Ray; Piedmont Opera, 19 March 2023)

GAETANO DONIZETTI (1797 – 1848): Don Pasquale — Brad Smoak (Don Pasquale), Michael Redding (Dottore Malatesta), Cree Carrico (Norina), Kameron Alston (Ernesto), Jackson Ray (Carlino); Piedmont Opera Chorus, Winston-Salem Symphony Orchestra, John McKeever, conductor [James Allbritten, Stage Director; John Pascoe, Scenic Designer; Norman Coates, Lighting Designer; Ann M. Bruskiewitz, Costume Designer; Destinee Steele, Wig and Makeup Designer; Elizabeth Fowle, Choreographer Piedmont Opera, Stevens Center of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA; Sunday, 19 March 2023]

The composer’s surviving correspondence intimates that the final decade of Gaetano Donizetti’s life were troubled by artistic frustration, progressing illness, and mental decline. Censorial impediments to staging new works in the forms in which they were conceived and other bureaucratic interference having soured his long-standing partnership with Naples’s Teatro di San Carlo, the house that witnessed the first performances of Lucia di Lammermoor, Roberto Devereux, and a number of his less-remembered operas, Donizetti turned his attention to Paris. Following the examples of both Rossini and Bellini, who created new works for the French capital, Donizetti sought to replicate the successful Paris première of his opera Parisina d’Este at the Théâtre-Italien by devising a wholly-new piece for the company. Working with librettist Giovanni Ruffini, he adapted Angelo Anelli’s text for Stefano Pavesi’s 1810 opera Ser Marcantonio into a delectable comedic confection that abounds with the finest ingredients of his artistry.

Contemporary accounts of the world première of Don Pasquale at the Théâtre-Italien on 3 January 1843, document the Parisian public’s immediate recognition of the extraordinary quality of Donizetti’s score. The opera’s farcical story of a pompous man of a certain age disinheriting his lovelorn nephew in order to take a young wife for himself stoked the composer’s imagination, yielding music that, despite its Rossinian elements, simmers with originality. Previous Piedmont Opera productions of L’elisir d’amore and Maria Stuarda masterfully realized the theatrical potency of both comic and serious Donizetti, meticulous handling of the scores’ musical demands engendering performances in which the aspects of his craft that differentiated Donizetti from Rossini, Bellini, the young Verdi, and other contemporaries were uncommonly discernible. Sharing its predecessors’ emphasis on maintaining high musical standards, the company’s Don Pasquale recaptured the wit and bel canto grace that captivated Parisians 180 years ago, making both the opera’s long-loved comedy and Donizetti’s oft-performed score seem wholly new.

Trading the podium for the director’s chair for this production, Piedmont Opera Artistic Director James Allbritten achieved in his staging of Don Pasquale the irreproachable musicality that distinguishes his work in the orchestra pit. Allied with Elizabeth Fowle’s suave choreography, delightfully executed by the singers, Allbritten’s direction avoided the pitfalls of comic opera, eschewing manic slapstick and physical comedy that distracts singers and audiences from the music in favor of stage action that was genuinely funny but also conducive to proper singing.

Recalling the recreations of Edwardian England in Merchant-Ivory films, Ann M. Bruskiewitz’s costume designs and Destinee Steele’s wigs and makeup complemented the aesthetics of Allbritten’s concept, enhancing the visual comedy without hindering movement or vocal production. With bel canto credentials encompassing many noteworthy productions, among the most significant of which is the 1989 Detroit Norma in which Dame Joan Sutherland sang her final performances of Bellini’s titular druidess, scenic designer John Pascoe devised a physical setting for Don Pasquale that manifested the eponymous curmudgeon’s past-his-prime pomposity. Artfully illuminated by lighting designer Norman Coates, Piedmont Opera’s staging provided vibrant tableaux in which the kaleidoscopic colors of Donizetti’s music danced alongside the cast.

Un notaio in famiglia: tenor Jackson Ray as Carlino in Piedmont Opera’s March 2023 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale
[Photograph © by Piedmont Opera]

Returning to the company he ably served as Assistant Conductor for several seasons, John McKeever led this performance of Don Pasquale idiomatically, shaping scenes with confident handling of tempi and dynamics. Ensembles crackled with propulsive energy under McKeever’s baton, the comedy moving at a rapid pace without leaving any of the principals gasping for breath, and the score’s lyrical passages were allowed ample time in which to cast their spells. The Winston-Salem Symphony musicians responded to the conductor’s effervescent leadership with a rollicking performance of the opera’s spirited Sinfonia and fine playing throughout the afternoon.

Ken Wilmot’s splendid realization of the hauntingly beautiful trumpet obbligato in Ernesto’s scene in Act Two was undermined by only a very brief intonational falter, and the unerring rhythmic precision of percussionist Isaac Pyatt’s work excitingly reinforced the momentum of McKeever’s pacing. Piedmont Opera’s choristers sang rousingly, their performance of the servants’ chorus—an episode that is sometimes more to be endured than enjoyed—exhilarating and amusing. Only the opera’s final scene, shortened by cutting the repeat of Norina’s rondò and the characters’ reactions to the end of their game in the finale’s stretta, lacked continuity, the resolution of the comical entanglements feeling forced rather than organic. Nevertheless, the integrity of McKeever’s reading of the score was inviolable.

Appearing only in the final scene of Act Two, in which he plays the part of the notary engaged to prepare the marriage contract for Pasquale and the feigned Sofronia, Dottor Malatesta’s cousin Carlino was portrayed with faultless intonation, well-honed comedic timing, and an expert ‘et cetera’ by tenor Jackson Ray. Carlino’s few words were sung with brio, giving the momentary participant in the nuptial charade a distinct personality.

Ecco il nipote: tenor Kameron Alston as Ernesto in Piedmont Opera’s March 2023 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale
[Photograph © by Piedmont Opera]

In the rôle of Pasquale’s nephew Ernesto, whose love for the beguiling widow Norina is thwarted by his uncle’s grumbling disapproval, tenor Kameron Alston sang with theatrical conviction, convincing as both an ardent lover and a player in Malatesta’s stratagem to open Pasquale’s eyes to his own absurdity. Musically, the pliancy of his vocalism and his satin-textured timbre were reminiscent of the Ernesto of Cesare Valletti. His voicing of ‘Ci volea questa mania’ in the Act One duetto with Pasquale persuasively imparted the young man’s vexation at the ridiculousness of his uncle’s actions and arguments.

In the scene at the start of Act Two, Alston declaimed ‘Povero Ernesto!’ with heartfelt sincerity and lustrous tone, the young man’s despair touchingly conveyed. [The audience’s laughter reaffirmed that projected translations are sometimes the enemy of the intended sentiments of music and text.] The larghetto aria ‘Cercherò lontana terra’ was deftly sung, the tenor’s phrasing eloquently sculpting the line and effortlessly conquering the daunting tessitura, and his performance of the cabaletta, ‘E se fia che ad altro oggetto,’ ended with a courageous interpolated top D♭, was electrifying.

Each of Ernesto’s lines in the quartetto was enunciated with clarity and directness, and his singing in the brief scene with Malatesta in Act Three, in which Ernesto was apprised of his part in the final ruse, was unaffectedly ebullient. Quickly righting an early entry, Alston voiced the tuneful serenata ‘Com’è gentil a notte a mezzo april’ mesmerizingly and joined with Norina in a rapturous performance of the notturno, ‘Tornami a dir che m’ami.’ Ernesto finally obtaining Pasquale’s blessing of his relationship with Norina, the ecstatic lover’s joy emanated from Alston’s charismatic singing and acting.

La suora laica: soprano Cree Carrico as Norina in Piedmont Opera’s March 2023 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale
[Photograph © by Piedmont Opera]

Piedmont Opera equaled an exceptionally strong ensemble of male principals by casting scene-stealing soprano Cree Carrico as Norina, the clever widow who masquerades as the fresh-from-the-convent ingenue Sofronia in order to dupe Don Pasquale. From the start of her cavatina in Act One, ‘So anch’io la virtù magica,’ this Norina was a dynamo, each of her words articulated with dramatic intention that required no translations her trill and top C deployed with technical acumen and bewitching insouciance. The cabaletta ‘Ho testa bizzarra’ was charmingly sung, bringing the playful lady’s character into focus before she sparred dazzlingly with Malatesta in their duetto.

Largely avoiding soubrettish shrillness, Carrico was a Norina who weaponized her upper register, especially in Acts Two and Three: notes above the stave were fired like rockets, never missing their targets. Her utterance of ‘Come? Un uomo! Oh, me meschina’ in the terzetto with Malatesta and Pasquale was marvelously coy, and each phrase in the quartetto was delivered with panache. The voice scintillated in ‘A star cheto e non far scene’ in the Act Three duetto with Pasquale, and Carrico elucidated the wave of regret and empathy that swept over Norina after she slapped Pasquale. Her vocalism in the notturno with Ernesto was arrestingly lovely, and ‘La morale in tutto questo,’ the opera’s rondò finale, was sung with valedictory brilliance. Carrico’s Sofronia was aptly shrewish, but her Norina’s sunny nature always shone in voice and gesture.

Il medico scaltro: baritone Michael Redding as Dottor Malatesta in Piedmont Opera’s March 2023 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale
[Photograph © by Piedmont Opera]

Michael Redding’s vivacious portrayal of the cunning Dottor Malatesta splendidly validated the baritone’s popularity with Piedmont Opera audiences. In the Dottor’s opening scene with Pasquale in Act One, Redding sang boldly, communicating Malatesta’s pleasure in his own shrewdness, and his ardent performance of the larghetto cantabile paean to Sofronia’s virtues, ‘Bella sicome un angelo,’ convinced Pasquale and the audience of the girl’s exquisite qualities. Briefing Norina on her rôle in his plan to deflate Pasquale’s ego, this Malatesta relished every word, machinating with irrepressible glee. Putting his plan into action in Act Two, Redding voiced ‘Fresca uscita di convento’ in the terzetto with Norina and Pasquale with perfect comedic suggestiveness, and his galvanizing singing of ‘Non oseris, son certo’ and Malatesta’s part in the quartetto exuded conspiratorial exuberance.

After apprising Ernesto of the final phase of Pasquale’s disgracing in their scene in Act Three, Redding’s Malatesta united with Pasquale in an uproarious traversal of their celebrated duetto, the baritone voicing ‘Noi due soli andiam sul loco’ forcefully and adroitly dispatching the daunting patter, meriting the traditional encore of the piece’s unison conclusion. In the final scene, too, Malatesta’s lines were sung with unmistakable and infectious joy. A couple of Redding’s highest notes sounded raspy (it was a windy afternoon in the hyper-pollenated South, after all), but the voice was as striking as the characterization, making his Malatesta an endearing prankster and an obvious ancestor of Ford in Verdi’s Falstaff.

Lo scapolo idoneo: bass-baritone Brad Smoak in the title rôle of Piedmont Opera’s March 2023 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale
[Photograph © by Piedmont Opera]

The scornful snobbery towards ‘regional companies’ by some opera aficionados was incontrovertibly defied by Piedmont Opera’s engagement of a Don Pasquale who possessed every quality demanded by the part, from a two-octave range without weakness to a bonafide trill. Luigi Lablache, the bass who created the title rôle, marked his forty-eighth birthday a month before the first performance of Don Pasquale—more dotardly by Nineteenth-Century standards than by today’s but hardly a musical Methuselah. Bass-baritone Brad Smoak was wholly credible as a man of advancing years, but hearing a voice on peak form in Pasquale’s music was incredibly gratifying. From his first appearance in Act One, Smoak’s Pasquale was unquestionably a crotchety codger but also proved to be one who sang ‘Son nov’ore’ and ‘Non, c’è ma, correte’ with absolute security and unflagging imagination. The duetto with Ernesto asked nothing of Smoak that he could not supply in spades, his voicing of ‘Scherzo un corno’ earning the audience’s mirth.

Smoak sang ‘Quando avrete introdotto’ in the Act Two terzetto with Norina and Malatesta incisively, Pasquale’s disbelief at the good fortune of finding a wife as attractive and accommodating as Sofronia zealously evinced. His singing in the quartetto was no less diverting, each word sounded with intelligence. ‘Per poco che la duri in questo modo’ at the beginning of Act Three was delivered with exasperation, and ‘È finita, Don Pasquale, hai bel romperti la testa!’ in the duetto with Norina was at once droll and affecting. In the famous duetto with Malatesta, ‘Cheti, cheti, immantinente,’ Smoak’s vocalism dazzled, the patter sung with bravado and unflappable accuracy. Palpably relieved to be parted from Sofronia, this Pasquale accepted defeat graciously. The character may have undergone a well-deserved humbling, but Smoak’s performance awed. Even a lackluster production of Don Pasquale with a protagonist like Smoak’s too-debonair-to-be-decrepit Don at its core would have moments of success, but there was no moment in Piedmont Opera’s Don Pasquale that failed to enchant.

PERSONAL PERSPECTIVES: raising my Voix des Arts — an origin story

A room with a view: the set of Sir Jonathan Miller’s production of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, reviewed at The Metropolitan Opera in June 2022
[Photograph by the author; stage décor © by The Metropolitan Opera]

In Autumn 2007, New York’s Lincoln Center hosted a much-lauded Les Arts Florissants touring production of Stefano Landi’s pioneering opera Il sant’Alessio. Featuring an ensemble of acclaimed countertenors including Philippe Jaroussky, Max Emanuel Cenčić, Xavier Sabata, and José Lemos, the production offered an extraordinary opportunity to hear a neglected work, performed by singers who were then rarely heard in North America.

I had the good fortune to attend the performance of Il sant’Alessio in Frederick P. Rose Hall on 29 October 2007. In the days thereafter, as I perused reviews of the production, I grew increasingly frustrated by what I read. Despite the existence of a studio recording by the same forces by whom Il sant’Alessio was performed in New York—Les Arts Florissants and William Christie—and the wide circulation of a Salzburger Festspiele broadcast with as noteworthy a singer as Edita Gruberová among the cast, a lack of familiarity with Landi’s music was expected, but the prevailing indifference to details of historically-informed performance practices evident in many critical assessments was maddening. His career has been primarily centered in Europe, but Christie is American, after all. Could his countrymen not spare the time required to assess his work with depth? Did so thoroughly prepared a production merit only generalities?

Contemplating these questions, I recalled the advice of an esteemed professor, academic advisor, and mentor, Dr. Charles Tisdale. ‘Joey,’ he once told me, ‘when you do not find scholarship of the quality that you expect, it is your responsibility to provide it.’ Dr. Tisdale was speaking of literary analysis of thematic links among Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, which would become the subject of my thesis, but the logic seemed no less applicable to music criticism. If my own musical training and sensibilities impelled the belief that performers deserve more informed analysis than they often receive in the mainstream press and from writers with wide followings but limited musical credentials, is it not my duty to add my voice to the critiquing chorus?

From this experience Voix des Arts was born. At the inception of my journey in writing criticism, I established as my foremost goal maintaining inviolable respect for artists and their endeavors. Artists make sacrifices of which audiences never know, often missing family occasions and milestones. Even in their weakest moments on stage, artists give of themselves in ways that those who have never performed before the public can only partially understand but which must always be valued and extolled.

As a writer, I perceive my most profound responsibility to be serving as an unwavering advocate for composers and librettists. Expressing whether I like or dislike a staging, a tempo, or a timbre is secondary to explicating performances’ fidelity to scores. Productions’ sights and sounds are subjective: tableaux and voices that enchant my eyes and ears repulses other observers. The principal questions that my reviews should answer therefore concern not the aesthetics of a performance, vital as they are, but the caliber of execution of music and words.

In my view, praising the positive aspects of a performance rather than reveling in condemning its deficiencies is not bias, as has sometimes been alleged, but celebration of music’s capacity to transcend adversity. Negativity pervades modern society but should not be welcomed in the Arts as a conduit for fleeting notoriety. There are absolutes, of course: a singer either emits the composer’s specified pitches or substitutes other tones, either by design or by mistake. This is relevant. All the same, singers are feeling, evolving beings. Perfection is an imperfect goal for even the most gifted singers. My goal is to evaluate the intentions behind the blemishes, encouraging artistic initiative whilst honestly documenting missteps.

I want singers to come to Voix des Arts with the expectation of reading earnest considerations of their work, knowing that every review is a safe haven in which their integrity is preserved. I want readers of all levels of musical knowledge to come to Voix des Arts with the expectation of reading reviews that recreate the visual, aural, and emotional experiences of performances without burdens of personal opinions, prejudices, and gossip. I unquestionably fail to achieve these aims more frequently than I would care to admit, but every error is committed with admiration.

Your support via GoFundMe, CashApp, or PayPal is crucial to ensuring the continuing viability of Voix des Arts. I absorb seventy-five percent of the ever-increasing costs of traveling to review performances (fuel, tolls, parking, et cetera), but I rely upon the assistance of my readers to close the gaps. I remain committed to keeping Voix des Arts open for access by all, without paywalls or subscriptions, and free from advertising. Sponsorships are welcome, however.
Please note that Voix des Arts is not a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit entity.

Please do not hesitate to contact me with your questions and/or suggestions.
Thank you for reading, sharing, and supporting Voix des Arts.