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

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

A Monk, His King and Their Mistress

Gaetano Donizetti’s La Favorite

Bel Canto at Caramoor

July 11, 2015

The monk and the object of his affection.
Photo credit: Gabe Palacio

Bel Canto at Caramoor is truly one of the great operatic summer pleasures. We discovered this festival last year with an electrifying Lucrezia Borgia and have been huge fans since. Beyond the charm of the overall pre-show experience (picnic on the villa’s idyllic grounds, stimulating afternoon recitals by young artists, interesting topical talks), the quality of the evening’s pièce de résistance – the actual opera – is incredibly high across the board. Caramoor is all about the music. The orchestra and singers are so successful in creating a vivid bel canto world that one almost forgets that the opera is not staged. This summer was no exception with the rarely performed La Favorite, Donizetti’s take on Parisian “grand opera.” While this work fits the strict form requirements of this French genre (historical subject, grand scenes, ballet piece, showcase arias), it is also unmistakably Donizetti big dramatic bel canto. Beautiful singing is front and center here and the plot is full of juicy (and irreverent) twists and turns.

The young monks pines.
Photo credit: Gabe Palacio

Our romantic yet clueless hero is a monk who falls for a mysterious, angelically beautiful young lady. It turns out that the angelic lady is the king’s favorite mistress, who manages to keep this detail a secret from the pining monk and to pull some strings to make him a war hero dear to the king. The king meanwhile is sick of his wife and pressures the Pope to concede him a divorce so that he can marry his mistress. The Vatican responds with a big “no,” topped with a thundering curse on the adulteress mistress. At the same time, the king discovers that said mistress has betrayed him with the monk-turned-war-hero and takes his revenge by allowing the two to marry. Once the ex-monk learns that his angelic new wife is really a Vatican-cursed courtesan he loses it, dumps her, goes back to his monastery and retakes his vows. The ex-favorite mistress shows up at the monastery very sick and begs the monk to forgive her, he of course welcomes her back into his heart with open arms and reaffirms his ardent love for her, but it’s too late and she dies in his arms. All monks pray. Curtain.

The Vatican emissary holds forth.
Photo credit: Gabe Palacio

The various dramatic tensions here were masterfully delivered by a great cast. Argentine tenor Santiago Ballerini as the monk-in-love, Fernand, was the revelation of the night. This young singer (not yet thirty years old) embodied the romantic hero with soaring outbursts of pure ardent love, his singing was lyrical and fluid and displayed a sincere passionate beauty and agility that was utterly moving and exciting. In his first arias the power of his convictions to leave his calling at the monastery to pursue his feelings for the mysterious woman shined through brilliantly as his voice soared into the upper reaches of the tent at Caramoor and up into the night sky. He carried his chest with the haughty pride of someone with convictions, certain in his love, and made a convincing war hero too. Manly and agile. I definitely look forward to hearing more from him.

The favorite of king.
Photo credit: Gabe Palacio

The title role of La Favorite was successfully portrayed by French mezzo Clémentine Margaine. Hers is a complex and tormented character: she may initially come across as distant and double faced (all lovey dovey with the monk while sleeping with the king!) but when the drama explodes her emotional core comes out as she fights for one last glimpse of happiness with her loving monk. Ms. Margaine has a clear, clean-edged purity to her sound and was particularly convincing in the heart-wrenching finale and in her raging duets with the king, played by baritone Stephen Powell who exuded an arrogant, manly power.

Bass-baritone Daniel Mobbs as Balthazar (prior of Fernand’s monastery and Vatican emissary) delivered the night’s most chilling and terrifying highlight when he denounced the king’s adulteress and leveled a curse on her with all the wrath of the lord behind his booming voice – or is he really the devil? The ferocious intensity he unleashed against her was nothing short of diabolical and Mr. Mobbs was nothing short of memorable.

Maestro Crutchfield in action.
Photo credit: Gabe Palacio

Under the baton of maestro Will Crutchfield, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s gave an inspired performance. Particularly impressive was their rendition of the ballet music during which the first violin in particular was given ample room to shine. I don’t know what Crutchfield’s secret is, but he always manages to bring the best out of his performers. We’re definitely looking forward to whatever he has in store for next summer.  

– Lei & Lui

Where all the magic happens.
Photo credit: Caramoor