Opera San Jose's Silent Night

Ricardo Rivera as Audebert, Brian James Myer as Ponchel.

All photos by Pat Kirk.

Opera San Jose

Puts and Campbell’s Silent Night

February 11, 2017

One hears the story of the Christmas truce of 1914 so often that it’s tempting to suspect a little mythologizing, perhaps wishful thinking. But no, the smallest bit of research reveals that not only did mortal enemies meet in No Man’s Land to exchange tidings and small gifts that winter, it happened at dozens of points along the front. Working from the 2005 French film Joyeux Noel, librettist Mark Campbell and and composer Kevin Puts did a masterful job of distilling those stories into three squadrons – Scots, French and German – and creating a moving, personal account of that astounding night. For their effort, they won a 2012 Pulitzer Prize.

After arranging for the composer to create a custom score for its 47-person pit, Opera San Jose has put on perhaps its most ambitious project ever. The opening battle scenes are at once visceral and chaotic, a sort of combat ballet by fight director Kit Wilder, made all the more jarring by the archival projections from set designer Steven Kemp. Puts’ swarming strings are like a Stravinskian film score, echoed later (in a lighter tone) in the cocktail-party chatter of the Christmas party.

Ricardo Rivera as Audebert, Matthew Hanscom as Lt. Gordon, Kyle

Albertson as Lt. Hortsmayer.

Post-battle, the opera’s ambition is to make things personal, and they start at a very primal place: sleep. Playing French lieutenant Audebert, baritone Ricardo Rivera displays a natural ability to project world-weariness, and a compassion for his men that is, at times, detrimental to his military assignments. He sings of a desire for a good night’s sleep, in a passage that teases at lyricism (modern-opera listeners are always a little thirsty for melody), then suddenly opens up to a lush chorus from every single man on the darkened battlefield. This attempt to sing themselves to sleep, along with their words (“Maybe when I wake, all will have changed”), provides a hint at the upcoming unity of enemies. (Chorus director Andrew Whitfield.)

The stories then turn personal. Baritone Brian James Myer brings a little light to the scene as an upbeat French barber, Ponchel, singing of his home, an hour’s walk from the battlefield, where he longs to go and have coffee with his mother. Tenor Mason Gates plays Jonathan, a Scots soldier whose brother’s death leads him into a downward spiral of denial and vengeance. His eventual insanity leaves him as the only “effective” soldier left. Bass-baritone Kyle Albertson plays German Lt. Horstmayer, driven to be fierce and flawless to make up for his unfortunate Jewishness.

Julie Adams as Anna Sorenson.

The moral driver is (conveniently enough), an opera singer. Kirk Dougherty plays divo-soldier Nikolaus Sprink, singing his spinto protests against a terrible, pointless war with the kind of artistic passion that drives military folks crazy (“Artists make bad soldiers,” says his lieutenant). Preparing for a command performance before the Kronprinz with his singing partner/lover Anna, he refers to “all these fat old men, swigging their champagne,” the true beneficiaries of the bloodshed. Anna manages to talk him into taking her to the front for Christmas eve, and thus are the seeds planted for a rebellious truce. The Germans have Christmas trees, the French have chocolate, the Scots have whiskey. And the tenor arrives with an actual angel.

Many of those dozens of Christmas truces were initiated through music, bits of carols and folks songs drifting across No Man’s Land. Puts begins with the bagpipes (played by Lettie Smith), duly matched by harmonica (Isaiah Musik-Ayala), German songs, and Latin hymns, as Ponchel provides a running commentary. Puts’ setting is fully natural, and allows the opening for Sprink to step bravely onto the battlefield and propose a Christmas peace.

The truce is everything you might imagine, a few tense, darkly humorous moments (Ponchel almost gunned down for drawing a chocolate bar from his pocket), and a great sense of relief at the removal of danger. Followed by a religious gathering (bass-baritone Colin Ramsey as the Scots’ Father Palmer) and a soprano benediction. Julie Adams, an Adler Fellow set to play Mimi in San Francisco Opera’s upcoming La Bohème, is quite the find, a dramatic soprano who can nonetheless play lyric, drawing heartbreaking pianissimos from the top of the range. Her Anna gives the production a female moral presence very much on everyone’s minds (given recent marches and such).

Mason Gates as Jonathan Dale.

This production also demonstrates OSJ’s ability to throw some impressive male firepower at a challenging project. One of the company’s most-acclaimed alums, tenor Christopher Bengochea, appears as the Kronprinz for fairly brief scenes, but lends the role a valuable authority. Baritone Matthew Hanscom as the garrulous Scot Lieutenant Gordon, bass Kirk Eichelberger as the German Officer, bass Nathan Stark as the fierce French General – all of them have played and will play leads in other productions.

To their credit, Puts and Campbell don’t leave it at that glorious Christmas. They proceed to the unsettling ramifications: the burying of the dead, the ludicrous thought of having to shoot at people they now know, angry superiors upbraiding underlings for treating enemy soldiers as if they were human beings. (Which brings up another recent topic: demonization.) A particularly moving scene leaves Father Palmer singing the hymn of Saint Francis as the impending return of violence plays beneath him in dissonant waves of strings. Nothing about this opera is easy, and that is wholly appropriate. It will leave you thinking a lot about the violence we do in the name of other-ness. And the pivotal role of The War to End All Wars in introducing the bloodiest century ever.

Kemp’s rollaway bunkers allow a filmic continuity, providing quick shifts from one faction to another. Joseph Marcheso forgot to bring his score to the podium (a good laugh for the audience), but proceeded to do a magnificent job of coordinating a small army of performers. (You could the same about stage director Michael Shell.) Some of the work’s success comes from modern opera’s supertitle culture, which provides an audience ready-made to take in a story sung in Italian, French, English, German and Latin. The presence of xylophone and piano in the first act give the sense of approaching magic (also the occasional snowfall). The horn passages on Christmas eve mornings are sumptuous. I also enjoyed the device of lining up several characters to deliver a fugue of information: soldiers’ concerns, leaders’ complaints, and especially soldiers reading descriptions of the magical truce from their letters.

Through February 26, California Theatre, 345 S. First Street, San Jose. operasj.org, 408/437-4450.

Operaville was recently named the eighth-best opera blog/website in the world by Feedspot.com. Michael J. Vaughn is a thirty-year opera critic and the author of 19 novels, including Operaville and Gabriella’s Voice. (Photo by Janine Watson.)

Feedspot.com

Renee Fleming, Pop Star

Photo by Andrew Eccles

As a jazz singer/rock drummer/opera critic, I have never liked the crossover attempts by opera superstars. The pop songs come out overblown and sappy (I'm talking to you, Domingo), and the jazz... well, let's just say that opera singers think of swing as that thing you sit on in the playground. I didn't expect much better when, scouring a clearance rack at a used CD store, I discovered a 2010 album, Dark Hope, by Renee Fleming.

Two tracks in, I had to check to see if there hadn't been some kind of switch. The sound I was hearing was not an opera singer at all, more of a troubador, singer/songwriter type, a little bit of Suzanne Vega, Natalie Merchant, Norah Jones. The range was alto, and the style was gorgeously understated. Also, the songs were amazingly cool. (You know, for an opera singer.)

From the liner notes, I learned that some folks at Universal Music thought it would be a fun idea to match up a classically trained voice with songs from indie rock bands. Switching from the unamplified projection of the opera stage to the uber-sensitive recording studio, Fleming decided to go to the "other side" entirely. "We quickly discovered that I should sing this music in the range I speak in," she wrote, "often two octaves lower than I generally sing, in order to allow for a more authentic sound."

The results are beautifully intimate, blessed with the surety and deft phrasing that come from decades of opera. Fleming finds her best results when she goes dark (appropriately enough), especially with The Mars Volta's "With Twilight as my Guide," backed with haunting, vinegar peals of electric guitar, and offering the chance for a little more dynamic range than the other tracks.  With Gary Jules' increasingly revered "Mad World," producer David Kahne ups the creepiness with whistling sounds, bits of accordion and sudden cuts and interjections. I also enjoyed "Soul Meets Body," if only for the geeky wonder of a world-class diva singing a song by Death Cab for Cutie. Kahne uses strings for many of the tracks, providing a sort of aural bridge between the genres.

The only misses came from a little bit too much reverence. Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" sounds as exact as a karaoke version. And despite its hallowed lyrics and gorgeous melody, Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" is highly repetitive, and needs a little more improvisational play than it gets here. But then again, think of the criticism I'm making there: an opera singer is undersinging.

I apologize to Ms. Fleming and all involved for missing this by a mere six years. Now I'm going back to that clearance rack and see if I can find that reggae album by Bryn Terfel.

Find Dark Hope on Amazon.com.

Michael J. Vaughn is a 30-year opera critic and the author of 19 novels, including Operaville and Gabriella's Voice. (Photo by Janine Watson.)

Feedspot.com

A Truly Bugsy Barber

Opera San Jose’s Barber of Seville

November 12, 2016

Kirk Dougherty as Almaviva, Colin Ramsey as Basilio, Brian James Myer as
Figaro and Renee Rapier as Rosina. All photos by Pat Kirk.

It would appear that the baby boomers who learned their opera from Bugs Bunny have finally taken over the opera house. When the silhouette of a carrot appeared on the curtain during the overture, the audience erupted in laughter, so much that an elderly patron complained it had “spoiled a perfectly beautiful piece of music.” The overture (if you weren’t aware) provided the soundtrack for Warner Brothers’ iconic 1950 Rossini tribute, “Rabbit of Seville.”

Brian James Myer as Figaro.

Carrots appeared in the production, as well, but that’s about as far as it went. Under the direction of Layna Chianakas, the performance offered that delicious Marx Brothers sense of barely controlled chaos, but somehow lacked a unifying vision. (Come to think of it, why not a Marx Brothers “Barber”? The Figaro-Groucho-Bugs lineage is not so far-fetched.)

Brian James Myer is a ridiculously talented Figaro, exhibiting notes both falsetto and basso profundo in his deft attack on the role. In his “Largo al factotum” (featured in the 1949 Bugs cartoon “Long-Haired Hare”), Myer extended the end of one line to the beginning of the next, serving to smooth out a piece that can easily fall into the herky-jerky. The general impression is of a guy on a corner, simply talking about his job, even when the patter is coming fast and furious. (And check out the wild wigs sculpted by Christina Martin.)

It could be that the odd sense of cast disunity came from the fact that no one was going to be anywhere near as smooth as Myer, although Kirk Dougherty gave it a solid run as Count Almaviva. Dougherty’s tenor was as lyric and smooth as ever, and he threw in a bonus by accompanying himself on guitar in the serenade “Se il mio nome.” He and Myer matched up well in the plot-making duet, “All’idea di quel metallo.” The two disguises he undertook to sneak into Rosina’s house were an even split: the nasal voice-teacher was hilarious, but the drunken-soldier routine fell a little flat.

Kirk Dougherty as Almaviva, Renee Rapier as Rosina.

Vocally, our Rosina, mezzo Renée Rapier, was a fascinating trip. The opening lines of the cavatina, “Una voce poco fa,” seemed a little dark and covered, but rising into the upper reaches her tone opened up gloriously, and in the ensemble numbers of the second act she exhibited moments of great power. In the area of acting, Rapier had that unsettling look of thinking about her next move. She didn’t necessarily harm the comic interplay, but a good Rosina will break the ingenue mold and actually add to the pot.

Bass-baritone Valerian Ruminski seemed willing to make any face and suffer any humiliation to make his Dr. Bartolo more pathetic. His jealous aria, “A un dottor della mia sorte,” was masterful, and his bad singing in the music lesson scene was hilarious. As Basilio, Colin Ramsey resembled a kind of Rocky Horror English professor, constantly entering from the bathroom after a toilet flush (nitpick: an anachronistic toilet flush). But even this level of silliness could not hide his lush tone, notably in the song of slander, “La calunnia è un venticello.” I also enjoyed the efforts of baritone Babatunde Akinboboye as Almaviva’s lieutenant, Fiorello, and mezzo Teressa Foss the cat-accumulating maid Berta, lamenting the foolishness of May-December romances in “Il vecchiotto cerca moglie.”

Valerian Ruminski as Bartolo.

Chorus master Andrew Whitfield took the podium to lead the orchestra in a suitably breezy reading (driving right through all that carrot-laughter). Kent Dorsey provided some effective Satanic underlighting for Basilio’s “La calunnia.” Matthew Antaky’s set design was fairly period-standard but meticulous, particularly the Tuscan look of the stairway walls. The lower room featured a portrait of late OSJ founder Irene Dalis, a touching addition. And it’s always fun to listen to the recitative interplay between Veronika Agronov-Dafoe’s harpsichord and the singers, which themselves seem like miniature conversations. I’m also happy that Figaro, after hours of pretend-eating, finally got to have a real bite of that carrot at the final curtain.

Through Nov. 27 at California Theatre, 345 S. First Street, San Jose. 408/437-4450, operasj.org. (Note: Matthew Hanscom will play Figaro on 11/27.)

Michael J. Vaughn is a thirty-year opera critic and author of the novels Gabriella’s Voice and Operaville. His best-selling novel The Popcorn Girl may be read for free at writerville.blogspot.com

San Francisco Opera's Don Pasquale

San Francisco Opera

Donizetti’s Don Pasquale

October 15, 2016

Maurizio Muraro as Don Pasquale. All photos by Cory Weaver.

SFO’s effervescent production featured rising superstar Lawrence Brownlee in the role of Ernesto, and it’s no wonder he inspires such a hubbub everywhere he goes. In a world of spinto after spinto, Brownlee’s lyric tenor is a wondrous, angelic creature, which rose to its greatest beauty in the Act 3 serenade, “Come’e gentil” and the following duet with Norina, “Tornami a dir che m’ami.” Brownlee also transmitted a radiant personality and some impressively athletic slapstick, performing an upside-down window-dangle that had “concussion” written all over it.

The only room for improvement, really, is in the area of dynamics; Brownlee could spend more energy shaping his phrases, and he had a couple of excellent role models right there on the War Memorial stage. Playing Norina, soprano Heidi Stober exhibited the deft bel canto tone San Franciscans have come to expect, but really struck lightning when Norina signed her marriage certificate and went into full bitch mode. Most notable among Stober’s weapons was a supremely powerful crescendo, used a handful of times to strike fear in her new victim/husband.

Heidi Stober as Norina.

But the evening truly belonged to our Pasquale, Maurizio Muraro. Scientifically speaking, the higher voices have a distinct advantage in cutting through the orchestra, but Muraro’s bass-baritone seems to be nuclear-powered. He played the dirty old man with dozens of nimble little gags (likely handed down from singer to singer over centuries), and captured all of Pasquale’s amusing dimensions: the delusional toupeed horndog, the flabbergasted, walking-wallet husband – even, after being slapped by his his new bride, a picture of poignancy (“All is over for Don Pasquale”). At one point, in a line that mentioned horses, he actually neighed the note! Brilliant.

Baritone Lucas Meacham did an excellent job as the instigator, Dr. Malatesta, duly savoring his machinations and achieving a rare mid-piece ovation after an electric run of patter with Muraro in “Cheti, cheti, immantinente.”

Lawrence Brownlee as Ernesto.

Stage director Laurent Pelly polished the gags to a shine, and even choreographed a series of small, quirky moves for the chorus’s Act 3 commentary, “Che interminabile andirivieni!” Chantal Tomas’s set is a wonder, a rotating interior set among 1950s tenements. The players routinely ignored the fourth wall (and the third wall) for comic effect, and created all kinds of havoc with the skewed doors. Post-nuptials, Pasquale’s life was literally turned upside-down, his beloved armchair hovering in the heavens as Norina cluttered his former ceiling with mod furniture. (Oddly, the time-shift didn’t really change much, except in matters of costume and setting.)

Duane Schuler’s precision lighting augmented the comedy admirably. Giuseppe Finzi led an energetic reading of the score; in the overture, the woodwinds were a particular pleasure.

Maurizio Muraro, Lucas Meacham (Dr. Malatesta) and Chantal Tomas's set.

This was the last performance of the run. SFO’s season continues with The Makropulos Case (Oct. 14-29), Aida (Nov. 5-Dec. 6) and Madame Butterfly (Nov. 6-Dec. 4). www.sfopera.com, 415/864-3330.

Opera San Jose's Lucia di Lammermoor

Opera San Jose

Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor

Sept. 10, 2016

Sylvia Lee as Lucia. Photos by Pat Kirk.

In the presence of a hundred musicians and three hours of gorgeous, sweeping music, the most gripping moments in this opera come from a single soprano and a single flute, performing passages not actually written by the composer. That is merely one of the wonders of Donizetti’s masterwork.

Lucia’s Mad Scene is such a powerful creation that a theater full of modern, highly distractable citizens will inch toward the edges of their seats for long minutes of tense, mesmerized silence as a Scottish girl disintegrates before them. The scene is punctuated by sudden flights and nerve-wracking pauses, until finally she collapses to the stage, reduced to an infant conversing with a crazy bird in her head.

The extended cadenza, created by soprano Fanny Tacchinardi-Persiani for the opera’s 1835 premiere, was accompanied on this night by OSJ’s sterling flautist Isabelle Chapuis. It also probably cemented Sylvia Lee’s performance as best introduction of a new resident soprano ever. With OSJ’s artist-resident approach, the patron-singer connection is deeper than most, and you could sense some first-date anxiety, particularly when you’re asking the new girl to tackle one of the toughest roles in the canon. When Lee reached the end of the fountain scene cabaletta, “Quando rapito in estasi,” the rousing applause was also a sigh of relief, that this was a voice they could listen to for years to come.

Lee’s instrument is not the most powerful, but her ease in the upper register is divine, her dips into the lower surprisingly strong. Given her lyric tone and small stature, she plays the Mad Scene in a logical manner, a young girl driven by immense pressure into a childlike state. She adds sudden, threatening movements with weaponry that maintain the tension and draw surprised gasps from the audience. (And a nervous, comic thought from the spectators: “Would you please get that knife away from her?”)

Kirk Dougherty as Edgardo, Matthew Hanscom as Enrico.

The development of the opera’s characters is often driven by its casting, and here the case is made for a classic testosterone sandwich. Exhibit A is Lucia’s brother/destroyer Enrico, played by baritone Matthew Hanscom with pure rage and power. Hanscom created confidence with the audience immediately, with his assured performance of the cabaletta “La pietade in suo favore.” The discerning listener may hear the attentiveness and energy of his approach in a single word, “dolor,” that finishes the preceding Larghetto. Hanscom lends this single word a dynamic shape, driving through to the end, and then finishes with a rolled R. These are small touches, but they are also signs of craft, the things that make a complete singer complete.

Our second macho man is Edgardo, Lucia’s love and Enrico’s nemesis, played by tenor Kirk Dougherty with passion and a forceful lirico spinto. It’s easy to anticipate the meeting of two such powerful entities, but what is more interesting is what happens on the way there. Rather than drowning out the gentler tones of their Lucia, each, in turn, backs off for beautifully blended duets: Dougherty in the lilting fountain-scene love duet “Verranno a te sull’auré,” Hanscom in the heavily conflicted Act 2 duet scene, in which Enrico tries to save his own neck by tricking his sister into a politically expedient marriage.

Kirk Dougherty as Edgardo.

This sublime sense of balance reaches its apogee in the famed Sextet, in which Donizetti pulls the trick of exploring six sets of character motivations simultaneously. The piece is genius enough on the page, but with six singers working so beautifully together, under the careful guidance of conductor Ming Luke, it’s a musical/dramatic paradise. This attentive construction allows Lee to soar over the top at the end, launching Lucia into her terrible fate.

Playing the chaplain, Raimondo, bass Colin Ramsey exhibits a delicious richness of timbre. He is well-equipped to handle one of the opera’s pivotal moments, the delivery of the horrendous marriage-night news to the guests (“Dalle stanza ove Lucia”). The scene is punctuated by one of stage director Benjamin Spierman’s provocative touches, having Raimondo absent-mindedly rub his hands over his face, forgetting that his hands are covered in blood. Spierman also sets up Lucia’s victim, Arturo (tenor Michael Mendelsohn) as an A-one jerk, treating his new brother-in-law as a servant as he ogles all the ladies at the wedding. I can’t decide if Dougherty’s distracting, herky-jerky movements were a directorial decision or just a natural quirk. A subtle but beautifully choreographed device has the huntsman Normanno (tenor Yungbae Yang) stashing Lucia’s murder-knife in his belt, where it is later stolen by Edgardo for his suicide.

Steven Kemp’s exterior sets feature bare winter trees with dagger-like branches and a striking background flat of a tilting, destroyed castle window. The Ravenswood interiors are less effective, rather bland wooden panels, but the wall-length display of weaponry make for apt ornaments. B. Modern’s costumes are deft and artful, especially Lucia’s gorgeous green gown in the second act. The chorus is particularly strong, and especially the men’s chorus, which sang the opening pursuit of Edgardo with vigor. Karen Theilen opened the second scene with Donizetti’s sublime harp interlude.

Through Sept. 25 at the California Theater, 345 S. First Street, San Jose. Tickets are $56-$176. 408/437-4450, www.operasj.org

Michael J. Vaughn is a 30-year opera critic and the author of 19 novels, including Gabriella’s Voice and the new Kindle edition of Frosted Glass.