Even
leaving out of account the possibility of
taking a short trip up the road to New York
to get their fix at the Met, Philadelphians
have opera coming at them from a variety of
sources. The principal one - aside from recordings - is
the Opera Company of Philadelphia, formed
in 1975 by way of a merger of the Philadelphia
Grand Opera Company and the Philadelphia Lyric
Opera, and led since 1991 by general director
Robert B. Driver. Then, among organizations
that work on a somewhat smaller scale, the
two that rank highest are the AVA Opera Theatre
and the Curtis Opera Theatre, performing wings
respectively of the Academy of Vocal Arts
and the Curtis Institute of Music.
All
three completed their 2003/04 production schedules
in the course of May, and a look back at some
of their achievements in recent months reveals
a generally encouraging picture. When Robert
Driver took over the helm at the Opera Company
from his predecessor Margaret Anne Everitt,
I was not at first impressed by the results.
During Ms. Everitt’s tenure, acknowledged
artistic achievements had been undercut by
administrative shortcomings in the company;
Mr. Driver seemed to present inverse qualities,
tightening organization while aiming rather
lower than his predecessor in the artistic
sphere. Gradually, however, the latter perception
has been to a large degree erased. Productions - some
of them staged by Driver himself - have improved
markedly in the last few years. Musical standards
have been maintained, and the April 2004 appointment
of Corrado Rovaris as the first music director
in the company’s history promises further
advances in that sphere too. Meanwhile, assisted
in the past two years by the Philadelphia
Orchestra’s move to new quarters in the neighboring
Kimmel Center, which has left the Opera Company
much greater freedom of scheduling in the
Academy of Music, attendance has improved
and the schedule increased this past season
to a roster of five productions, each performed
seven times.
The
operas we saw in 2003/04 were Verdi’s Il
trovatore and Don Carlo, Carlisle
Floyd’s Susannah, Bizet’s The Pearl
Fishers, and Offenbach’s The Grand
Duchess of Gerolstein. The productions
for the most part respected the works in hand
and brought them cogently and vividly to life.
Least satisfactory in dramatic terms was the
Trovatore staging, but a strong cast,
including Patricia Racette’s Leonora, Viktor
Afanasenko’s Manrico, Barbara Dever’s Azucena,
and the Count di Luna of Gregg Baker (a perennial
company favorite, and one of the finest American
baritones now before the public), made this
quintessential singers’ opera a success. Though
it was given in the truncated four-act form
that omits the crucial opening Fontainebleau
scene, Don Carlo was magnificently
staged, apart from an incomprehensible rush
of blood to the head that led director Patrick
Mailler to have the monk in the final scene
stab Carlo to death instead of rescuing him
from the King and the Grand Inquisitor. Here
again the leading roles, including Eduardo
Villa’s Carlo, Franco Vassallo’s Rodrigo,
Angela Brown’s Elisabetta, and Gustav Andreassen’s
Inquisitor, were in excellent hands. "Excellent"
would be an understatement to describe Vitalij
Kowaljow’s King Philip: the Ukrainian bass
revealed a voice of outstanding beauty and
power. The widely anticipated appearance of
Ewa PodleÑ, on the other hand, turned
out disappointing, both because she made an
uncomfortably stiff stage figure, and because
she is evidently ill at ease singing Italian.
Altogether, though, this was a Don Carlo
worthy to stand alongside the best versions
I have seen of what may well be Verdi’s greatest
opera.
Of the
other three works presented, the impact of
Susannah was decidedly mixed. The production,
both dramatically under Driver’s own hand
and musically under the baton of Stewart Robertson
(making his Opera Company debut), with contributions
from such fine singers as David Pittsinger
and Mary Mills, did everything it could to
cast the best light on Carlisle Floyd’s 1955
piece of Americana. But the actual music is
fatally flawed: phrase after phrase comes
to a complete stop, only for the sequence
of banalities to start afresh and then to
stop again - and it seems counterproductive
to craft a work that obviously aims at vivid,
folksong-like communication with a general
audience, and then not to offer a single tune
that stays in the listener’s mind when he
leaves the theater.
The
final French twosome in April and May of Bizet’s
romantic Pearl Fishers and Offenbach’s
delightfully irreverent Grand Duchess
were, on the other hand, total triumphs. Jacques
Lacombe, one of the best conductors to have
worked with the company in recent seasons,
drew all the sensuousness and grace from Bizet’s
score that it encompasses, and Kay Walker
Castaldo made me forget some of her questionable
earlier directorial efforts with an admirably
straightforward treatment of the story, enhanced
by Boyd Ostroff’s effective sets and lighting
and Richard St. Clair’s costumes. The latter
were, to tell the truth, more striking for
their relative exiguity than for any undue
sumptuousness, the two male leads both being
left bare-chested throughout. Fortunately,
both William Burden, as Nadir, and Nathan
Gunn, as Zurga, revealed physiques as impressive
as their voices; and the handling of Zurga’s
relationship with Leïla - the sweet-voiced
and dramatically intense Mary Dunleavy - was
an unusually assured and convincing stage
realization of the painful inner conflict
that tears this ambivalent character apart.
Offenbach’s
satirical yet joyful jeu d’esprit offered
a winning conclusion to a thoroughly enjoyable
season. Emmanuel Joel’s conducting and Dorothy
Danner’s inventive staging were just two of
many contributing factors. The piece was done
in English, and fitted out with some apt contemporary
and local references that added to the audience’s
mirth. Gordon Gietz’s Fritz and Kevin Glavin’s
irrepressibly energetic and humorous General
Boum were among the star solo turns. But the
last word on this particular production must
go to the Duchess of Stephanie Blythe - an assumption
of complete theatrical conviction, delicious
wit, and unfailing vocal splendor.
So far,
so admirable. I wish I could add that everything
in the Opera Company’s garden promises to
remain lovely. Unfortunately, recent financial
reverses have led to a substantial cut-back
in the plans previously announced for the
2004/05 season. The projected schedule of
five productions played seven times each has
been trimmed to four productions, each played
six times - and the saddest part of the reductions
has been to remove both Mozart’s rarely-seen
La clemenza di Tito and Tchaikovsky’s
Eugene Onegin from the bill. The surviving
roster of Gounod’s Faust, Donizetti’s
Don Pasquale, Verdi’s Aida,
and Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus
looks decidedly short of real artistic substance:
one serious masterpiece, two charming lightweight
comedies, and Gounod’s romantic warhorse hardly
constitute what one expects to experience
in the season of a major company. We can only
hope that the downturn can be reversed before
too long.
Running
concurrently with the performances outlined
above have been the less ambitious but often
artistically rewarding programs of the Academy
of Vocal Arts and Curtis. These offer what
are to some degree student productions, but
the student casts in both cases are usually
of a high standard, productions are professionally
directed and conducted, and the orchestral
element, provided in AVA’s case by the Chamber
Orchestra of Philadelphia and in Curtis’s
by that institution’s unsurpassed instrumental
resources, is always impressive. In the season
just concluded I saw (with the exception of
a musically resplendent Miss Julie, part
of the Ned Rorem 80th-birthday celebration,
which I reviewed last November
in these pages) only one Curtis production:
Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, presented
in the city’s Prince Music Theater, and expertly
conducted by David Hayes. Vanessa Gilbert’s
refreshingly direct and lyrical staging happily
expunged memories of the appalling production
of the same work that Curtis perpetrated a
few years ago, with soldiers in modern uniforms
brandishing pistols that often made nonsense
of the libretto. The updating, moreover, also
made nonsense of the "Christian"
framing of the plot, which is supposed to
provide justification and expiation for Lucretia’s
sufferings in the future, not centuries
before the story appears to be happening.
The
notion that Christian doctrine can justify
the sufferings of the innocent is present
both in Lucretia and in Britten’s Billy
Budd. As an agnostic, I have always found
this notion a deeply repellent one. But there
is a further weakness in Ronald Duncan’s Lucretia
libretto, and that is its omission of a plot
element that explains the heroine’s capitulation
to Tarquinius. In Shakespeare’s version of
the story, Tarquin tells Lucretia: "Yield
to my love; if not, enforced hate,/Instead
of love’s coy touch, shall rudely tear thee;/That
done, despitefully I mean to bear thee/Unto
the base bed of some rascal groom,/To be thy
partner in this shameful doom." In other
words, "even if you don’t give in, I
shall make sure that your husband thinks you
did." To leave this out is to undermine
our understanding of Lucretia’s fate. In this
production, there was a kind of curtain in
front of the stage carrying a Latin narration
of the story. It was a fine decorative idea.
It was also hard to read, because of the folds
in the curtain material. But that part of
the story was there. So the scenery knew more
about the mechanisms of the plot than the
libretto did - a curious irony, to be sure.
No such
complexities and moral ambiguities are to
be sought or found in Donizetti’s L’elisir
d’amore, which was the final production
of AVA’s season. Directed by Chuck Hudson,
and skillfully conducted, like all of AVA’s
productions, by Christofer Macatsoris, this
was an unmitigated delight from beginning
to end. On Peter Harrison’s simple but effective
sets, the equally simple but effective story
was presented without any attempt to transfer
it into a world alien to the one its creators
envisaged for it. Music and plot alike, in
consequence, came irresistibly into their
own. As is usual with AVA (and Curtis) productions,
casts changed from one performance to another.
The one I saw featured strong performances
from Stephen Costello as Nemorino, Eric T.
Dubin as Belcore, and Keith Miller as Dulcamara.
But the revelation of the evening was the
Adina of Ailyn Perez, a second-year student
at the Academy of Vocal Arts. This is a young
soprano of star potential and already of stunning
artistry. She looks good and moves well on
stage; she has a voice of rare charm and surprising
power; and she sang with a well-founded confidence
in her technical resources that had the many
taxing high notes and florid passages in her
role ringing out with awesome clarity and
not the slightness trace of harshness. I doubt
that it will be long before she finds herself
adorning the fully professional stages of
companies around the world - look out for her.
Bernard Jacobson
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