Your 2016 Summer Opera Fix

The idyllic grounds at the Caramoor Center for the Arts

As the Met just closed its 2015/2016 season with a bang with the explosive Elektra, we’re gearing up to make the most of the extremely busy and varied summer opera scene in NYC (and surroundings). If there is still someone out there ranting that opera is a dying art form, we invite him/her to think again and go enjoy any or all of the below. We know we will!

Ines de Castro, inspiration for Malvina di Scozia

A handful of companies will unveil rarely performed works, which is a guarantee of exciting discoveries. The indie jewel-box Vertical Player Repertory led by Judith Barnes is producing a concert version of Giovanni Pacini’s Malvina di Scozia. A long lost opera that is rumored to be enchantingly beautiful but has not been performed in over 150 years. So, it will be like hearing a completely new opera from 1851, plus it’s based on a notorious Portuguese scandal involving the royally sanctioned murder of a prince’s lover. May 11 and 13, at the Christ and Saint Stephen’s Church 120 W 69th Street. 

Known for its “immersive” approach, Onsite Opera will stage a site-specific production of Marcos Portugal’s The Marriage of Figaro in the wonderfully eclectic venue 632 on Hudson in the West Village. Written for Carnival season of 1800 at the Teatro San Benedetto – just 13 years after Mozart’s Figaro, this will be a rare opportunity to hear Portugal’s vibrant music in a fado-inspired re-orchestration. This show is so hot that tickets seem to be sold out, but there is a waiting list, so there may be hope. June 14-17 at 632 on Hudson. 

 

The rooftop terrace at 632 on Hudson

Performances of baroque opera are sadly always a rarity, thank goodness for Jennifer Peterson’s Operamission that will bring us a concert version of Handel’s Rinaldo - Handel’s first London opera, based on Torquato Tasso’s epic chivalric poem La Gerusalemme Liberata. June 14-16 at the Merkin Concert Hall. 

Contemporary opera, too, is far from being commonly performed. The recently resuscitated NYC Opera will take care of that by staging Daniel Catán’s Florencia en el Amazonas. Inspired by the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez and the first Spanish-language opera ever commissioned by a major American opera company, will be performed here in an original production of Nashville Opera. June 22 – 26 at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Theater.

For productions of more familiar repertoire, Brooklyn’s Sunset Park always prolific and solid Regina Opera will stage Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. May 14-15, 21, 22 at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Academy of Brooklyn.

If you’re in the mood for more Puccini, Chelsea Opera brings us a production of the one-act opera Suor Angelica, very aptly set in an Upper West Side church. June 16-17 at the Christ and Saint Stephen’s Church 120 W 69th Street. 

Moving to Verdi, Amore Opera will produce the classic heart-wrenching drama Rigoletto. This is one is particularly promising as it would seem that tenor Paolo Buffagni and soprano Sarah Moulton-Faux will play the Duke and Gilda, respectively. We discovered these two singers in these same roles a couple of years ago with Regina Opera and were literally blown away by their sheer intensity and bravura. May 20-29 at the Sheen Center. 

On a lighter note, the hip and trendy undisputed queen of indie opera companies LoftOpera will stage Rossini’s Comte d’Ory at the circus school The Muse in deep Bushwick. Yes, it’s a trek to get out there but, in classic LoftOpera fashion, singers and musicians will be top notch, the show will feel like the most cool and sexy event in the city, and there will be free beer. So, the schlep out there will be well worth it. June 2, 4,7,9, 11 at The Muse, 350 Moffat Street, Brooklyn. 

For another feel good comedy, the prolific Utopia Opera will stage Massenet’s Cendrillon (Cinderella).  This indie company defines itself as a “talented group of friends (and sometimes strangers) who join together to create spirited representations of operatic works for the masses. We provide entertainment you didn't even know you were missing.” Who would want to miss that? June 3-11 at Lang Recital Hall, Hunter College (East 69th St between Park/Lex). 

The Swing (Fragonard)

Summer opera in NYC brings also a couple of training programs for up and coming young singers and are particularly exciting as they display fresh and eager talent that is always a pleasure to discover. Martina Arroyo’s Prelude to Performance program this year will produce Puccini’s Boheme and Strauss’ Die Fledermaus. July 7-10, at The Kaye Playhouse @ Hunter College, E. 68th st. between Lexington and Park Avenue. 

The excellent Dell’Arte Opera Ensemble led by fearless maestro Christopher Fecteau will produce a festival titled “Violetta and her sisters”, with performances of Verdi’s Traviata and Massenet’s Manon. Also, a program of  "Scenes from the demimonde", featuring excerpts from Puccini's La Rondine and Leoncavallo's La Boheme and "Chansons de Baudelaire",  featuring song settings of Baudelaire by Debussy, Duparc, Fauré, Vierne, d'Indy, Loeffler, Judith Zaimont and others.  August 13-28 at the Baruch Performing Arts Center 55 Lexington Ave. 

Last but not least, classic summer festivals! As always, we’ll look forward to driving up to Katonah for a picnic on Caramoor’s idyllic grounds and their bel canto program, this year showcasing Rossini’s  Aureliano in Palmira - July 16 at The Caramoor Center for the Arts. 

Nearby, Bard SummerScape will focus on verismo, with the rarely performed Iris by Pietro Mascagni. Debuted in Rome in 1898, ushering in a wave of fin-de-siècle exotic opera, Mascagni’s dreamlike score provides the backdrop for a tragic story of Iris, an innocent young girl tricked into abandoning her elderly blind father and lured to a brothel in Tokyo’s notorious red-light district. Pretty exciting stuff! In addition, this festival will present a series of events ranging from panel discussions, to recitals to movies, all somehow related to Puccini and the opera world after him.  July and August dates at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. 

 

A bit further upstate, Francesca Zambello’s Glimmerglass Opera Festival this year will produce Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra, Ward’s The Crucible, Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and Puccini’s La Boheme. Who does not want to get away from the city through a bucolic drive, chill by the lovely Ostego lake and enjoy excellent quality full productions in an opera house that looks like a barn? Various dates in July and August at the Alice Busch Opera Theater in Cooperstown. 

Ostego Lake

Back in the city, the classic Mostly Mozart Festival celebrates its 50th anniversary this summer. Of particular interest, The Illuminated Heart (July 25-26), with British director and video artist Netia Jones stages an evening of Mozart’s most beloved opera arias and ensembles, featuring superstar singers like Peter Mattei (aka one of the most swoon-inducing lyric baritones out there), Matthew Polenzani, Christine Goerke, Ana Maria Martinez and Nadine Sierra. The festival will also feature staged concerts of Cosi’ Fan Tutte (August 15) and Idomeneo (August 18). Last but not least, Wolfie’s C-minor Mass and Requiem (August 19-20). 

Happy operatic summer to all!

- Lei & Lui

Modern Words, Modern Music

Written on Skin (U.S. Stage Premiere)

Music by George Benjamin

Text by Martin Crimp

August 13, 2015

Mostly Mozart Festival, Lincoln Center

Forbidden love.
Photo credit: Pascal Victor/Artcomart

The critically acclaimed contemporary composer George Benjamin’s Written on Skin received its stage premiere at this year’s Mostly Mozart Festival to great fanfare. Benjamin’s stab at modern opera has a lot going for it. The singing is largely very beautiful and the orchestra, conducted with tact and nuance by Alan Gilbert, chimes in throughout with dramatic color that ranges from the sublime to the haunting. The score was rarely intentionally strange for the sake of being strange the way so much modern music can be, though it constantly walks the line.

The Protector and his little lamb.
Photo credit: Pascal Victor/Artcomart

Unfortunately, I remain ambivalent about operatic singing in English. Martin Crimp’s highly poetic and rather unconventional libretto did little to assuage my ambivalence. There are certain things that simply do not need to be sung, like, for instance, compound Latinate words such as “international airport” (as in “cancel all the flights”) or expressions like “erase the Saturday car-park.” It just doesn’t work. I know it’s meant to be jarring and to emphasize the modern/medieval time contrast but it doesn’t lend compelling musicality to the whole. And what is with having them sing meta-narrative descriptors, like “He said” and “She said”? At one point Agnés sings a baffling description of a minor detail of her character’s experience. She sings: “What is it she feels between her bare feet and the wood floor? Grit.” How’s that for a non-sequitur? On the one hand it’s vaguely sensual, but on the other it’s just weird.

Bare feet, wood floor, grit.
Photo credit: Pascal Victor/Artcomart

Crimp and Benjamin are obviously pushing boundaries by having singers sing things that otherwise would neither be sung, nor spoken on your average stage. If Wagner dismantled the traditional aria, depriving his operas of heightened moments of musical narrative climax and emotional outpouring, Benjamin and his librettist give us meta-narrative descriptive details that, though surreal, hardly fit into narrative music, let alone into any other traditional storytelling mode. Crimp’s characters sing the unsingable. They are made to put to music the unnecessary, the superfluous.

The Protector unleashes his wrath.
Photo credit: Pascal Victor/Artcomart

While there are moments in which ordinary phrases enter the musical texture of the piece, more often than not big non-colloquial lines are pronounced. The Protector, sung by an imposing Christopher Purves, often talks in the abstract of big vague and apparently unrelated concepts like “purity and violence.” When asked about how his wife is doing he answers: “Sweet and clean.” Is this not the strangest answer to this simple throwaway everyday query you’ve ever heard? Later he will say straightforward things like, “Make him cry blood,” but also more convoluted thing like, “Expel him from joy / with a lacerating whip,” that sounds more awkward than a schoolboy’s mechanical rendering of an ablative absolute in his homework for Latin class. Crimp certainly has a knack for the uncanny turn of phrase.

Girl meets scribe who writes on skin.
Photo credit: Pascal Victor/Artcomart

At the same time, the composer also layers many musical conceits and colors onto the absurdly poetic libretto. Some of which come straight out of the classic book of compositional techniques that continue to work. When Agnés, sung by soprano Barbara Hannigan, and the Boy, sung by the angelic voiced countertenor Tim Mead, sing the line “Too close” together in amorous rapture their voices intertwine and trill like love birds.

Slow motion up the stairs.
Photo credit: Pascal Victor/Artcomart

There were many unique elements to this piece and its staged premiere performance. Like the ending with its slow motion chase across the stage and up the stairs. The production values were high and the set design was intricately ornate for such a short run. The compartmentalized way the stage was broken up vertically into a series of rooms as in a dollhouse contained under the same roof: a two story sort of modern backstage dressing room and design studio stand adjacent to the stark Medieval space of the Protector’s home in which a grove of trees has grown. This staging effectively and cleverly collapsed indoor and outdoor space, the contemporary with the antique. It’s rare to get such an elaborate set at the Met these days and it was a pleasure to look at and try to dissect its sense.

I want to have my faith in contemporary opera restored, and I still have high hopes for the art form. So much of it depends on the right synergy between music and text. Benjamin and Crimp are not entirely off the mark. By the end, I was clapping because at just an hour and forty minutes, I felt like the composer let us off the hook very judiciously and I wanted to thank him for that.

– Lui & Lei

Medieval meets modern in the compartmentalized stage.
Photo credit: Pascal Victor/Artcomart

A woman alone.
Photo credit: Pascal Victor/Artcomart

Opera Ain't Dying in NYC this Summer

The NYC and surroundings summer opera scene has so much going on this year that we can barely keep up. So far in the next three months we counted twenty-five different full operas (and some exciting recitals). That’s pretty much the same number of works that the Met offers over its eight-month season. Is someone out there still saying opera is a dying art form?

Met Summer Recital Series in Brooklyn Bridge Park

Chelsea Opera is staging a concert version of Puccini’s Tosca in a church, which is very site-specific of them (at least for Act I).Thursday June 4 at 7:00pm and Saturday June 6 at 4:00pm - St. Peter's Church in Chelsea 346 W 20th St (Btwn 8th/9th Ave).

Speaking of site-specific, OnSite Opera (that has a mission statement to produce operas in non-traditional venues) will kick off its 3-year “Figaro Project” of  lesser-known operatic adaptations of French playwright Pierre Beaumarchais. First up is Paisiello’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia in the garden and courtyard of the charming UES Fabbri Mansion. June 9, 11, 12 and 13, 2015 07:30pm - Fabbri Mansion (House of the Redeemer) 7 East 95th Street. 

OnSite Opera's Barbiere at Fabbri Mansion
Photo credit: Rebecca Fay

Pierre Beaumarchais

Beaumarchais must be hot this summer as the always musically and theatrically excellent Dell’Arte Opera Ensemble is also offering a full Beaumarchais festival, including staged performances of Paisiello’s Barbiere (1792), Mozart’s Nozze (1786) and  Hiram Titus’ Rosina (1980), as well as a concert featuring excerpts of other settings of the Rosina/Figaro trilogy, including music of Rossini, Massenet, Milhaud, Corigliano, Wikstrom and Pecou. We are particularly looking forward to this festival as Dell’Arte’s artistic director Christopher Fecteau has a proven track record of doing wonders with rising young singers and bringing opera back to the intimacy of a chamber setting. All Performances in August 2015.  7:30 evening performances and 2 p.m. matinees - The Rose Nagelberg Theater in the Baruch Performing Arts Center Entrance and Box Office on E. 25th St. bet. Lexington and 3rd Aves. 

Martina Arroyo as Butterfly

Another program that has a focus on promising young performers is Martina Arroyo’s Prelude to Performance, this year producing fully staged versions of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (July 9 and 11) and Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment (July 10 and 12) - Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College which is on 68th St. between Lexington & Park Avenues. 

Just one block away, the indie and hyper-productive Utopia Opera led by William Remmers is performing Strauss’ comic opera “about comedy and opera” Ariadne auf Naxos. June 5, 6, 12 and 13 Lang Recital Hall, Hunter College (East 69th St between Park/Lex).

Opera Company of Brooklyn’s BYOB Opera Series (operas performed in an Inwood private residence with drinks on the side)  this summer offers Rossini’s Barbiere (June 6), Strauss’ Salome (June 20), Verdi’s Trovatore (July 11) and Traviata (August 22), Donizetti’s Elisir (July 25) and Mozart’s Nozze (August 8).  OperaRox Presents, recently founded by young singers Kimberly Feltkamp and Jaimie Appleton, will produce its first full length opera, Mozart’s Nozze, on August 21 and 23 at Opera America. 

And for something a little bit outside the canon, Morningside Opera, Harlem Opera Theater, and The Harlem Chamber Players join forces to present a semi-staged concert production of the Harlem Renaissance opera VOODOO by Harry Lawrence Freeman, that will be performed for the first time since its 1928 premiere. Friday, June 26th & Saturday, June 27th, 2015 - Miller Theatre/Columbia University-  2950 Broadway @ 116 St. 

Caramoor gardens

Now, for more institutional (but no less exciting) summer festivals... the Caramoor Music Festival this summer offers two operas on the collision of church and state: Donizetti’s La Favorite (July 11) and Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmelites (July 25) - who does not want to drive up to Katonah, have a picnic in idyllic gardens and enjoy a performance masterfully lead by Will Crutchfield in an open air Venetian theater?  

Also in bucolic settings, right by the Ostego Lake in upstate New York, the Glimmerglass Festival celebrates its 40 years with new productions of Verdi’s Macbeth, Mozart’s Magic Flute, Gershwin’s Candide and Vivaldi’s Catone in Utica. We are particularly excited about this last one as it’s so rarely performed and it has Operalia’s superstar countertenor John Holiday in it. Various dates in July and August. 

Ostego Lake

Back in Manhattan, the Lincoln Center Festival will host the Cleveland Orchestra for a concert performance of Strauss’ Daphne. July 15 and 18 - Avery Fisher Hall. And the Mostly Mozart Festival offers the much-anticipated U.S. stage premiere of George Benjamin’s Written on Skin, hailed as “erotic and visceral”, telling the tale of a woman bound by a cruel marriage and consumed by an illicit passion. In case one needs further incentive, Alan Gilbert will be conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. August 11, 13 and 15 - David H. Koch Theater. 

Apollo and Daphne

Benjamin's Written on Skin
Photo Credit: Festival d'Aix-en-Provence

LoftOpera’s Lucrezia Borgia was one of the most electrifying shows of the year, so we’re highly intrigued by this hip company’s announcement of a “Summer Series at Industry City”. While no details on dates or programming have been provided yet, the fact that LoftOpera is behind this (whatever it is), is sufficient for us to save the dates (whichever they will be). Also, the Industry City venue (a beautifully restored warehouse structure on the waterfront of Sunset Park in Brooklyn) does not hurt. Dates TBA - Industry City, 31st St, Brooklyn

Industry City

And last but not least, the Metropolitan Opera Summer Recital Series around New York City’s parks are always a good bet - just bring your picnic blanket and a bottle of rose’, the City’s lights at dusk will take care of the rest. June 15, 17, 24, 26, 28 and 30 (note June 15 and 17 Isabel Leonard and Nathan Gunn will perform) - various locations around NYC. 

- Lei & Lui

A Very Operatic NYC Summer

The Met 13/14 season just ended, but that does not mean that we will have to be opera-deprived for three months. Here's our overview of what looks enticing in New York this summer:

Image Credit: Gotham Chamber Opera

Gotham Chamber Opera will close its own 13/14 season with The Raven, a monodrama by Toshio Hosokawa, based on Poe’s classic narrative poem of love forever lost. We're intrigued by the combination of opera and ballet, as mezzo-soprano Fredrika Brillembourg will perform together with La Scala’s prima ballerina assoluta Alessandra Ferri. May 28 - 31, 2014 at Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College.

One can never get enough Donizetti, particularly if bel canto queen Mariella Devia plays her majesty Elizabeth I in Roberto Devereux, with Stephen Costello in the lead tenor role. Brought to us in concert by The Opera Orchestra of New York. June 5 at Carnegie Hall.

Mariella Devia as Elisabetta I in Roberto Devereux
Image credit: Michele Balistreri

We love site-specific operas, even more so if baroque and ripe with Ovid literary references. On Site Opera’s performance of Rameau’s Pygmalion about a sculptor falling in love with his creation promises to deliver all of that with a gala performance set in Madame Tussauds’ wax museum and two additional shows at the Lifestyle-Trimco Showroom. June 17, 20 and 21.

Image Credit: On Site Opera

The feisty Opera Feroce will perform their exhilarating baroque pasticcio Arminio in Armenia we were lucky to catch last January and cannot recommend enough. June 22 at the St. Stephens and St. Martins Church in Brooklyn; June 25, 27, 28 at the Blue Building in Manhattan.

Image Credit: Park Avenue Armory

Park Avenue Armory is such an amazingly unique performance space that it’s hard to resist to pretty much anything they show. Their co-presentation with Lincoln Center Festival of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s holocaust opera The Passenger will take audiences on a voyage from the stylish deck of a luxury liner to the squalor of a Nazi death camp. The opera was banned by Soviet authorities upon its completion in 1968, resurfacing for its first full staging some 40 years later and only now making its New York premiere. July 10-13 at Park Avenue Armory.

The Lincoln Center Festival will also showcase Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tsar's Bride, performed by the Bolshoi Opera, no less! Not to be missed if, like us, one got under Russian opera spell cast by the Met earlier this year (with the new productions of Eugene Onegin and Prince Igor). July 12-13 at Avery Fisher Hall. 

Lovely Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts
Photo Credit: Caramoor

Who does not want to drive one hour through the Hudson River Valley to catch some top notch singing performed in a gorgeous Venetian garden theater?!? Caramoor’s rich summer opera program includes semi-staged productions of Lucrezia Borgia and Rigoletto, an “Intimate Donizetti” concert of chamber music and vocal ensembles, a “Bel Canto Showcase” and a myriad of panel discussions, concerts and other operatic goodies. If you need further incentive: Angela Meade (who bewitched everybody with her Norma at the Met last fall) will play Lucrezia Borgia. The Intimate Donizetti: Chamber Music and Vocal Ensembles - June 26; Lucrezia Borgia - July 12 and 18; Bel Canto Showcase: Daniel Mobbs - July 17; Rigoletto - July 19 -- at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts. 

Angela Meade in the Venetian Theater
Photo credit: Caramoor

We discovered Dell'Arte Opera Ensemble last summer and were overwhelmed by the extraordinary results of their mission of coaching young opera singers into fresh and energetic (but also seriously solid) performances. This summer they propose an ambitious Shakespeare Repertoire Project, comprised of staged productions of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, Salieri’s Falstaff and Verdi’s Macbeth, as well as a concert of arias and duets based on Shakespeare sonnets and plays. August 7-24 at the East 13 Street Theater.

Mostly Mozart festival will be offering two Handel baroque gems by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra: Teseo (in concert setting – August 17) and Acis and Galatea (an exciting combination of opera and dance, showcasing the collaboration between choreographer Mark Morris and early-music specialist Nicholas McGegan – August 7-9).

The Mark Morris Dance Group
Photo credit: Mostly Mozart

Finally, for some al fresco operatic pleasure, we’ll look forward the Met Opera Summer Recital Series and its six performances in the parks of all five boroughs (June 23-July 10*). Few things are more blissful than listening to great opera arias while sipping chilled rosé wine on a picnic blanket at dusk - with NYC lights gradually turning on around you…

Lei & Lui

Opera and Manhattan Skyline
Photo credit: The Metropolitan Opera

* Superstar mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton will perform on June 23 and 25