Apotheosis in Bushwick

Vivaldi & Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater

LoftOpera

The Muse

June 24, 2017

A mother emotes over the profoundest loss
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

It was a night unlike any other out at the Muse with LoftOpera. It was the company’s first excursion into the baroque and for the occasion they put together a mash up all their own. In a break with the past party vibe one has come to expect from an evening at LoftOpera, the general tone of the evening was somber, and rightly so. There was a seat for everybody and all the seats were full, which made it feel like a more civil outing than the usual sprint for a spot and people squeezing in anywhere they can, including on the floor.

Husband and wife suffer alone, together
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

The evening we went was well attended but fortunately the venue wasn’t bursting at the seams. In fact, the vibe was mellower, which perfectly suited the music. And everybody around us was in rapture with it.

It was plaintive and reflective, beautifully executed by the orchestra, breathtakingly sung. The whole product was extremely high quality with what would even seem to be luxury casting. The cast of two singers, soprano Heather Buck and countertenor Randall Scotting, were truly excellent and the orchestra was as tight as it has ever been at Loft.

At first impact, the production also came across as a rather elaborate outing for the company. An elevated catwalk crossed the space in a “V” with stage-like platform along one of the long walls framed by tall scaffolding and a row of projection screens.

Experiencing this music live in such an intimate and informal context moved me in ineffable ways. It brought me back to the days of writing my dissertation when I listened to this plaintive and reflective sub-genre of baroque music on heavy rotation. My eyes teared up from the first bars with emotion and the power of recognition.

 Brian Gilling at the helm of the orchestra
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

When the orchestra eased into the opening piece by Vivaldi (Sonata à 4 al Santo Sepolcro in E flat major) the projections began to show a series of highly mannerist video recordings of the male and female leads in close up grieving to extremes and played back in slow motion. They really helped to set the scene and made it clear that the evening was really going to be all about tone.

Emotionally raw at every turn
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Director John de los Santos abstracted out of the story of the death of Jesus on the cross a drama of a husband and wife suffering from the loss of a child, potentially not necessarily the Messiah himself, although the text was sung in the original Latin and even the supertitles remained faithful to what was actually being sung to the letter, including all its references to mortem Christi and the Lord and the rest.

Slow motion, highly mannerist projections set the tone
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

The concept made me think of Lars Von Trier’s Anti-Christ and the torment that couple inflicts on themselves and each other in a similar situation. Need I say more? 

Consolation is never enough
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

They attempt to console one another. They go through the motions of their daily life together as a couple and, heightened by the extreme beauty of the music, it is so very poignant. They sit down to dinner, for example at one point, but they only manage to pour themselves a glass of wine. Thus, they remain lodged in their own personal suffering. When confronted with such pain, each of us remains an island. The grieving process is seen to be just that insular. But they take us there, unflinchingly, and don’t let us down, no matter how hard it is to watch.

In fact, the whole thing climaxes with a moment of in extremis exaltation. After all that the couple has been through on their own but also together, the mother in one way or another is able to sublimate her grief and as the orchestra lurches into the final bars we watch breathlessly as she climbs up onto the scaffolding and experiences a kind of resurrection or apotheosis, or are we to understand this as the assumption of Mary in more explicitly theological terms? In any case, it was unspeakably beautiful. The final image emblazoned in your mind is that of the mother of Christ crucified in her own right, with her arms outspread and her head hung low from exhaustion in her grief.

The auteur vision played the music and text straight (thank goodness!)
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

It is yet another sign that the hipster scene in the city has grown up. I can’t help but think that this was truly an adult night out in the kind of place that one might have caught a alt-rock band or a DJ night even just a few years ago. Filling it with a group of young people eager to ponder the depths of their souls to baroque music makes me so very happy.

– Lui

A mother ascends
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

An ascension, another crucifixion, an apotheosis
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Another great show from LoftOpera, another angel gets her wings
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Foreign Correspondent: Baroque in Paris

Vivica Genaux Recital

Salle Gaveau, Paris

February 2, 2016

The stunning Vivica Genaux.
Photo credit: Christian Steiner

Let me introduce myself. Well, maybe later, music first. Not surprisingly, Paris has an incredibly intense opera scene, which goes well beyond the world famous Opéra. Less internationally-known theaters or independent opera companies often offer high-quality productions of less popular operas in more intimate settings (which makes these productions a must for opera lovers). Upcoming not-to-be-missed shows include Mitridate Re di Ponto at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées (under superstar director Emmanuelle Haïm, which delivered one of this season’s personal favorites, Francesco Cavalli’s Xerse at the Opéra de Lille), and DivinOpera’s production of Offenbach’s La Périchole.

Genaux captivates the Salle Gaveau.
Photo credit: L'Altro

The equally intense concert scene this week offered a superb performance of Vivica Genaux at the Salle Gaveau. The program included Baroque arias expressly written for Farinelli, the most famous castrato of all time. We all know how demanding these arias are, and that very few singers today can actually match the score challenges. Well, no doubt Genaux is one of these singers.

Genaux’s voice is not incredibly big, and her register is fairly limited. But she is a true master of the art of coloratura and has always done a great job in choosing a repertoire that perfectly fits her voice. The concert program included both arie di bravura and lamenti. Genaux literally nailed all of them, especially in the second half of the show, when her voice warmed up and the audience was totally at her feet. Genaux’s coloratura is always extremely fast and precise, and she is able to deliver the most difficult arias (apparently) without any effort. Genaux strikes a stunningly elegant figure and has a huge stage presence, which made the public almost forget that we were listening to a concert (as opposite to a full-staged performance).

I was particularly impressed by Porpora’s Come nave in ria tempesta, while my charming companion was more deeply moved by slower arias such as Porpora’s Alto Giove. It is always a pleasure to see friends who are not used to going to the opera so deeply touched and enthusiastic about a performance. This should be the goal of all performances, and Genaux perfectly reached the goal on Tuesday night!

The spirit of Farinelli was invoked throughout the evening.
Photo credit: L'Altro

At the end of the concert’s program, Genaux delivered two additional virtuoso arias. The first one was a recently re-discovered aria that Giacomelli composed for Farinelli. I was so excited when I heard how the aria had been neglected for centuries that I forgot to note down its name (please forgive me).

The second aria was one of Genaux’s signature tracks, Vivaldi’s Agitata da due venti. Once again, Genaux’s fireworks and pyrotechnics were impeccable (especially in the second aria, which Genaux masters like very few other singers in the world). A true musical orgasm. As soon as the orchestra stopped playing, the audience tore down the house, with an enthusiasm that I have rarely heard in a solo-concert (this was even more surprising considering the relatively-advanced average age of the audience).

Right after the show, an ever-smiling Genaux joined the super enthusiastic audience in the foyer, to take pictures with the fans and sign copies of her bestselling albums. (I have to admit that I re-bought her stunning Arias for Farinelli just to have it signed.) I like her even more for her non-diva and smiley attitude. Quite surprisingly, a good number of superb mezzos specialized in the baroque repertoire (including personal favorites Joyce DiDonato and Ann Hallenberg) have the same positive and friendly approach to their public.

Genaux was superbly accompanied by Les Musiciens du Louvre, an ensemble that commands the baroque repertoire like few other orchestras in Europe (and, likely, the world). I do not know how many times Genaux and the orchestra actually rehearsed, but they definitely gave the impression of having worked together for years, being in perfect synchronization piece after piece. Les Musiciens du Louvre also gave moving performances of Vivaldi’s Concerto for 2 Violins and Cello in G minor, RV 578A and Hasses’ Fuga e Grave in G minor.

I almost forgot to introduce myself. I am a close friends with Lui and Lei, with whom I share a deep passion for bel canto. Musically trained in La Scala’s unforgiving Loggione, I spent the last two years around the Met and New York’s hipster independent opera companies. Currently based in Paris, I am always looking for great performances all across Europe. Ad maiora!

– L’Altro

Vivica on tour with Les Musiciens du Louvre.
Photo credit: Laurent Barbotin

Caesar's Clarion Call

Vivaldi’s Catone in Utica

Libretto by Metastasio

August 1, 2015

Glimmerglass Festival

Caesar in love.
Photo credit: Karli Cadel

We were initially not so sure we wanted to hit the Glimmerglass Festival as the over four-hour drive upstate scared us a bit. But, three words won us over: Vivaldi and John Holiday. We can never get enough of Vivaldi’s operas, so rarely performed, and we were bewitched by the Operalia-winning countertenor when we discovered him at the Spoleto festival earlier this year. And so we rented a car, booked a B&B and embarked on the most wonderful weekend trip through pristine farmlands and charming lakes, all blissfully off the cell grid. I was surprised by how much the Glimmerglass Opera house perfectly blends with its surroundings, as it really looks like a big barn tucked away by a pond. There was nothing rural about the performance though, and we definitely did not regret the trip upstate to catch it.

Caesar shows us what he's made of.
Photo credit: Karli Cadel

Though singing not the title role but that of an impetuous young Cesar in love, countertenor John Holiday dominated Vivaldi’s Catone in Utica. He had it all: control, power, musical ability, agile expressivity and a fullness of sound so rarely found in even the best of today’s countertenors. Holiday completely transcends questions of gender when he sings. You don’t think: “Ah, this is a man singing like a woman,” or “Why is Caesar being sung like an effete man?” Holiday is just so transfixing and almost superhuman that it only makes sense for someone with his voice to play the most powerful character of this opera. The angelic sound of his instrument and his virtuosic handling of it carries you away and leaves you wanting for more, without knowing exactly what hit you. Like never before by listening to Holiday I understood why castrati (the closest sound to today’s countertenors) were the rockstars of their time and why they got the best roles.

Catone maneuvers for relevance.
Photo credit: Karli Cadel

While Holiday’s Caesar stole the show, the evening’s tragic trajectory belonged to Cato, at least on paper. However, the particular setting of the opera performed here with its highly abbreviated first act, the original of which is not extant, actually configures the story in large part around the betrothal and courtship of the hand of Marzia, Catone’s beautiful daughter. Her father has in mind a politically expedient union with Arbace, chief of the North African Numidian tribe that has sided with him in his treacherous affront to Caesar’s rise. But, ironically enough, Marzia is already in love with none other than her father’s sworn enemy, the great Julius Caesar himself.

Arbace's marriage of political expediency.
Photo credit: Karli Cadel

Vivaldi’s Catone is the perfect example of the baroque propensity for casting countertenors as young men in love. Both Arbace and Caesar are the two contenders for the hand of the lovely Marzia, despite the waning political influence of her father. The central love triangle of the story is crisscrossed by another pair of lovers – Fulvio, Ceasar’s lieutenant, falls for Pompey’s widow, the stunning and vengeful Emilia (here played by the excellent mezzo Sarah Mesko). Then of course, there is the overarching plotline of the political intrigue between the stoic Cato (the last stubborn bulwark of the republic) and the rising emperor.

Early in Act I we get parallel peacocking seduction arias. Arbace, sung by countertenor Eric Jurenas, is the first to woo his “betrothed.” He pushes himself on his reluctant prey as he sings S’andrà senza pastore. The Numidian prince – whose Mad Max-inspired garb fits his desert lifestyle, it’s post-apocalyptic chic! – is a bit too overbearing and brusque with the object of his affections. Marzia shuns and spurns him and plays hard to get while he chases her around the stage like a wild animal on the hunt, or like a shepherd trying to catch a wayward member of his flock.

Arbace woos his reluctant betrothed.
Photo credit: Karli Cadel

Caesar’s introductory aria, on the other hand, his parallel song of seduction, was genuinely moving. In Se mai senti spirarti sul volto lieve, he busts out with some major male grandstanding, which forces his beloved Marzia to admire him in all his splendor, rather than force himself on her. She comes to him and he doesn’t have to make the effort to even so much as lean in toward her. In fact, in his vocal preening, posing and posturing, he is so taken with his own perfections that he almost seems to be more in love with himself than with her. And the aria in Holiday’s hands is mellifluous magic, pulling the attention of the house into his orbit, melting everyone around. She fawns over him and is just as taken as we are with his talents and gifts as a singer. This is what the power of song is about. Holiday shows us what a great operatic moment can do. The seduction of the music imbues the narrative with its Orphic power but yet also transcends the narrative. It is like coloring so vividly inside the lines that its force radiates out from it.

Caesar puts on his game face.
Photo credit: Karli Cadel

In a change of tone, Caesar’s second big aria, shortly thereafter, is precipitated after a confrontation with Catone who taunts him with threats of war. Guerra mi piace (“I like war”), says a headstrong Catone. E guerra avrai (“and war you’ll have”), retorts the emperor in his fury. A sudden flood of red light washed over the scene, intimating the bloodshed of war. Caesar is seeing blood and so are we. The quip provokes him to launch into his great yelps of war aria, Se in campo armato. He doesn’t sound girly or effeminate at all. Instead, he comes off counter-intuitively as powerful and manly. His voice has an agile power and a dynamic expressivity. Pacing the stage slowly and deliberately, Holiday seemed more regal than boyish. The full bodied way his voice dropped as he prepared each time to launch into his barrage of little yelps, as he moved from a chesty countertenor to his head voice, were unforgettable. They came off as little conniption fits that gave you whiplash of the ear. That night at Glimmerglass we heard the clarion call of Caesar’s imperial revolution.

Catone barks orders at his minions.
Photo credit: Karli Cadel

When we signed up for Vivaldi at Glimmerglass this is precisely the kind of musical experience we were looking for: fiery Venetian baroque operatic fireworks. The fact that the bill included John Holiday, one of the big winners at this year’s Operalia competition, was the icing on the cake. He and most of the rest of the cast that featured an exciting mix of young artists (mezzos Megan Samarin as Marzia and Allegra De Vita as Fulvio) and seasoned veterans (tenor Thomas Michael Allen in the title role and mezzo Sarah Mesko as Emilia) pushed Vivaldi’s vocal score to its expressive limit in many key moments. After Holiday, the most impressive singer on stage was Ms. Mesko, who attacked Emilia’s vengeful arias with a fury and passion worth of Vivaldi. 

Emilia and her game face.
Photo credit: Karli Cadel

I wish I could say the same for the orchestra. While the singers were fleshing out the ends of their lines with bright full colors and emitting fiery vocal effects into the intimate theater from the stage, there were fewer sparks to be heard from the orchestra pit. What I love about a good Vivaldi score are ferocious strings, especially the violins that demand to be passionately attacked with a Mediterranean animality. Here there were very few Vivaldi fiery Italian flourishes. The orchestra under Ryan Brown’s direction just didn’t seem to rise to the level of the singing. They were tight though slightly academic sounding, more restrained, and more English in disposition than uncontainably Southern European.

I found Tasewell Thompson’s production to be extremely effective in its sophisticated simplicity. The staging presented a brief introduction of each of the characters during the overture. The stage was visible through a translucent scrim and each of the singers in full classical garb strutted out onto the stage one at a time. Their character’s name and a brief description of what they represent was projected onto the scrim to ease us into this world. The costumes were grandiose. The setting was the North African desert in Numidia where Cato has fled. Over the course of the evening an ominous big full moon was alternatively projected on the backdrop along with a portentously setting sun. Gold-encrusted “Roman ruins” (or ruins of the declining Roman republic?) were strewn about in heaps around the stage. An arc du triomphe framed much of the action, as if to signify that the ineluctable march toward empire is under way.

A brighter day is promised in the imperial silhouette.
Photo credit: Karli Cadel

Another brighter day is promised in the form of a series of incisive projections featured at the rear of John Conklin’s set design. Silhouettes of architectural elements appear against the solemn sunset of the backdrop: a Corinthian column, the outline of the Coliseum as it stands today. The gloaming of the dusky sky is offset by a brighter world. Ironically though, some of the silhouettes are rather ominous, portents of later decline, like the that of the Coliseum already in the ruins as it appears today, which I suppose is a proleptic fast forwarding to the eventual fall of Roman imperial glory altogether. Civilizations rise, and even the greatest fall. Here is the story of one man’s convictions and his attempt to get out of the way of the inexorable storm and surge of the locomotive of Caesar’s imperial project, to whose ineluctable rise even the senate back in Rome has already succumbed.

A daughter grieves.
Photo credit: Karli Cadel

And, of course, succumb even Cato does. I was eager to see how Vivaldi or at the very least how this production would treat Cato’s final definitive gesture. Attitudes toward tyranny are at stake in how Cato’s clinging to the moral high road is staged. His is the ultimate study in conviction. Thompson’s production again gives us an abbreviated finale. Foregoing the grand finale choral passage featured in at least one version of the score, Thompson leaves us with what is perhaps the most memorable image of the evening. The lights go up on the final scene to reveal a Cato slumped over in his throne with his back to the audience. His arms hang lifeless and red streamers run from his wrists like streams of crimson blood across the stage on either side. Rather than a final flourish of vocal fireworks, the orchestra gives us a majestic oboe solo that is both haunting and incredibly moving at the same time. Simply magnificent.

– Lui & Lei

Marzia ponders her personal political predicament.

Photo credit: Karli Cadel

The Glimmerglass Opera House.
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco