SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Mozart: Pacific Opera Victoria, Garrick Ohlsson and Yoko Nozaki, Seattle Symphony & Opera, 25.04-3.05.2009 (BJ)

Die Zauberflöte  Pacific Opera Victoria, soloists, cond. Timothy Vernon, dir. Glynis Leyshon, sets and costumes by John Ferguson, lighting designer Gerald King, chorus dir. Michael Drislane, Royal Theatre, Victoria, British Columbia, 25.4.2009

Mozart Dances  Garrick Ohlsson and Yoko Nozaki, pianos, Stefan Asbury, cond., Mark Morris, choreographer, Howard Hodgkin, set designer, Martin Pakledinaz, costume designer, James F. Ingalls, lighting designer, Seattle Symphony, Mark Morris Dance Group, Paramount Theatre, Seattle, 1.5.2009

Le nozze di Figaro  Seattle Opera, soloists, cond. Dean Williamson, dir. Peter Kazaras, set designer Susan Benson, costume designer Deborah Trout, lighting designer Connie Yun, choreographer Wade Madsen, hair and makeup designer Joyce Degenfelder, Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, Seattle, 2 & 3.5.2009

Think of it: two of Mozart’s greatest operas, as well as a dance program founded on three of his works for piano, all in the space of just over a week. It’s a tough life, this music-criticism lark, but someone has to do it.

The pleasures began in Victoria. I confess to having had my apprehensions in advance, for Die Zauberflöte was to be directed by the same Glynis Leyshon whose travesty of Rigoletto in Vancouver back in March I had found so offensive.But this time Ms. Leyshon did herself–and Mozart’s great spiritual fairy-tale–proud. Her staging scored high on the entertainment scale, with many enjoyable touches of humor and much charm, while doing justice also to the more profound aspects of the work.

In the latter regard, I particularly enjoyed the attention she paid to the search for wisdom that is rarely demonstrated in the behavior of Sarastro’s acolytes. In this production, they were all busily engaged in studies, reading books, peering through telescopes, and so on, presided over by their chief in the role of a benign headmaster. Admittedly, Sarastro’s Act-1 appearance, clad in a plain business suit, made him look more like the chairman of your everyday big-city Rotary Club, but the addition of some robes for the solemnities of Act 2 righted the picture. Apart from the absence of any body armor for the two Armed Men, John Ferguson’s handsomely hieratic sets and unfussy costumes worked superbly, and the identification of Sarastro’s realm with the Masonic world of Secession-period Vienna was no more than just. Gerald King’s lighting was unfailingly effective, and Michael Drislane’s excellent chorus responded to Papageno’s disarming chimes with an irresistibly hilarious little dance.

Both musically (under Timothy Vernon’s crisply vital leadership) and dramatically, the large cast performed for the most part splendidly. Colin Ainsworth’s Tamino perfectly realized the character of a hero who is much like Siegfried in his total lack of understanding, but who unlike Siegfried is capable of absorbing the lessons of revelation; this is a clearly talented young tenor (who will be even better when he cures the habit of letting the last notes of a phrase disappear), and his casting as Tom Rakewell for Victoria’s Rake’s Progress next season makes an enticing prospect. Shannon Mercer was an intensely sympathetic Pamina, and she has a lovely voice, but there is a certain want of line in her use of it–“Ach, ich fühl’s” sounded pretty but tended to fall into unconnected morsels of tone. As her mother, the Queen of the Night, Aline Kutan made a commanding figure; she was unusually precise in the testing upper-range coloratura, and this would have been a triumphant assumption of the role if it had not been for some very approximate intonation in the lower register. In vocal terms, I thought the adorable Papageno, Hugh Russell, possessed the most complete combination of tone and technique in the cast, and Uwe Dambruch brought a most impressive bass to the role of Sarastro, even if his singing was a shade one-dimensional in dynamics. The Three Ladies–Lucia Cesaroni, Leticia Brewer, and Erin Lawson–sang well, though I felt the director made rather too much of their amorous antics, and Bruce Kelly as the Speaker, Alexandre Sylvestre and Joseph Schnurr doubling as the First and Second Priests and the Two Armed Men, Michel Corbeil as Monostatos, and Marilyn Arsenault as Papagena all did well. As for the Three Boys, drawn from the Victoria Children’s Choir–well, they looked good and played their parts enthusiastically, but the voices need to develop quite a bit if they are to pull their weight in a big theater.

Recurring for a moment to my reservations about the staging, I’m not sure what I think about a white Monostatos–a touch of Political Correctness that I suppose is forgivable (“Heaven forbid we should present a character who is both black and bad!”). I could have done without the images projected on the curtain before it went up, but at least we weren’t subjected to people on stage distracting us from the overture. Phrasing super-titles as rhyming couplets is a mistake–the point of such things is to tell the audience what is being sung, not to try and match its poetic content–and as usual I found dialogue in English in the context of a production sung in German another miscalculation, for inevitably a good deal of detail gets lost.

But the most serious sin I have to charge Ms. Leyshon with concerns her version of the dialogue in Act 2, where she emasculated a crucial exchange between the Speaker and Sarastro. Asking whether Tamino will be up to the trials he faces, the Speaker points out, “He is a prince.” “More than that,” Sarastro replies: “He is a man!” These are surely two of the most important and indeed most seditious lines in all of Schikaneder’s libretto, and their omission is incomprehensible.

Leaving that aside, I’m happy to say that this was a Zauberflöte whose pleasurable aspects will remain in the memory after its relatively minor flaws have been forgotten. On the following weekend, Seattle Opera’s new Figaro scored an even more resounding success.

Of course, when an opera is your favorite work in the whole world of music, or indeed of human achievement, the task of those charged with performing it takes on formidable pressure. Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s Le nozze di Figaro (properly translated Figaro’s Wedding, rather than the traditional but unidiomatic The Marriage of Figaro) is that opera for me. And Peter Kazaras’ new production happily rises to the challenge, with a musical beauty, a brilliance of wit, and a depth of directorial understanding that worthily match the genius of the piece itself.

Not that there were no ideas in the staging to raise a quibble in this critic’s mind. Having Figaro measure Susanna instead of their future bedroom was an understandable response to a scene that always taxes baritones’ ingenuity, but it didn’t quite make sense. I suppose you could say that the Freudian antics with an outsized quill pen (read “pen” here as an abbreviation), underlining Susanna’s pretended acquiescence with the Count’s importunings, was out of style–though Mozart, with his notoriously scatological sense of humor, would probably have loved the touch. Kazaras, moreover, seems to have an obsession with chairs–the characters were forever standing on them, turning them round, or moving them from one place on the stage to another. Still, I could forgive much more striking oddities than that in gratitude for having been allowed to listen to the overture without distraction before a plain curtain.

All such minutiae are in any case inconsequential beside the inventiveness, charm, warmth, and sheer nobility that shone out of this marvelous production, enhanced by tigerishly lively orchestral playing under Dean Williamson’s baton–ensemble between pit and stage was a tad shaky on opening night, but came into better focus in time for the next day’s matinee–and nuanced work from Beth Kirchhoff’s chorus. Wade Madsen deserves a cheer for his masterly choreography of the fandango, and I liked Deborah Trout’s costumes and Susan Benson’s elegant sets, originally designed for the Banff Centre in Canada. (The notion of eliding each pair of acts together without a curtain worked better in the second half of the opera than in the first, when all the prop-shifting seriously undermined the effect of Figaro’s act-ending aria.)

Seattle Opera’s tight performance schedule necessitates the double casting of the biggest roles, and general director Speight Jenkins had lined up a very impressive complement for both casts on this occasion. As the first Figaro, Oren Gradus was all impulsiveness and bounce. He sang beautifully, and I liked him so much on the Saturday that I didn’t really want to enjoy any successor equally. But aside from a couple of seriously flat phrases in “Non più andrai,” Nicolas Cavallier was equally impressive the next day in his US operatic debut. Where Gradus, a big man, had dominated the action through sheer elan, the more sparely-built Cavallier exhibited instead the steely intelligence and cool restraint that make this “new man” (in the Enlightenment sense) so potent an adversary to his aristocratic master. The young Frenchman possesses a gloriously rich and cleanly focused baritone, and is clearly an artist of major talent.

The two Susannas were perhaps less well matched. Sunday’s Elizabeth Caballero partnered her Figaro sympathetically enough, but she could not quite match either the vocal allure or the irresistible charm of Christine Brandes’s opening-night Susanna. German mezzo-soprano Daniela Sindram was perhaps the most convincingly boyish Cherubino I have seen since the incomparable Teresa Berganza, right down to the characteristically adolescent foot-tappings when she sat down; her second-cast counterpart Sarah Castle has a promising voice, but needs to work on intonation and Italian diction, especially in words ending with “r.” On the Sunday, Danish baritone Johannes Mannov made a dignified and believable Count, if a psychologically less many-sided one than the fascinatingly complex figure his gifted predecessor Mariusz Kwiecien had presented, while his Countess was the most emphatic gain in the Sunday cast. On opening night, you could see why Kwiecien’s Count might be fed up with the petulance displayed by Twyla Robinson’s Countess, even while recognizing that the petulance was fully justified; Jessica Jones softened that aspect of the character to excellent dramatic effect, and her singing was also more consistently seductive, though Ms. Robinson had certainly risen well to her final big moment.

With Joyce Castle’s keenly observed Marcellina, Arthur Woodley’s bluff and sonorous Bartolo, Ted Schmitz’s hilarious Basilio and Curzio, Leena Chopra’s canny Barbarina, and Barry Johnson’s convincingly drunken Antonio the common elements, Mozart’s magic was enthrallingly worked in both the performances I attended. The supreme moment came, as it must, with the final plea for forgiveness. Whether delivered, amid rapt stillness, by Kwiecien or by Mannov, it drew a melting utterance of the Countess’ heart-easing response. And the catharsis was all the more riveting because Kazaras had made us see these two in far more ambivalent terms than usual, with passion still lurking, ready to be reignited, just beneath the surface of a seemingly burned-out marriage.

In between these two operatic gems came the second in a series of collaborations between the Seattle Symphony and the Mark Morris Dance Group. The musical choice this time fell on Mozart’s piano concertos in F major and B-flat major, K. 413 and K. 595, with his great D-major Sonata for Two Pianos as a delectable central panel.

The musical side of things was in excellent hands, with Garrick Ohlsson characteristically subtle and fluent in the concertos, the admirable Yoko Nozaki joining him in the sonata, and Stefan Asbury drawing pointed playing from the orchestra. For the eyes, there was no less to admire–the skill of the Seattle-born Morris’s dancers; the way he does more with their arms than practically any other choreographer does with either arms or legs; Martin Pakledinaz’s neat costumes; James F. Ingalls’ brilliantly conceived lighting; the elegance of Howard Hodgkin’s splashes of color on the backcloth (reminding me of the manner of Pierre Soulages’s paintings, though brighter, less saturnine). But what enhanced and deepened the beauty of the spectacle most of all was Morris’s genius at getting inside the music.

Reviewing last year’s comparably revelatory presentation of Handel’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato on this site, I commented that “whereas Handel, in his translation of the English words into the language of music, might be said to have digitized Milton’s text, Morris’s realization of Milton-Handel on stage magically restored the airy web of words and music to the corporeal–or analog–sphere, enriching both elements in the process.” The way I would describe the comparable achievement of Mozart Dances is to say, not that Morris finds a metaphor for the music, but that he finds in the visual realm that of which the music was the metaphor.

He understands, moreover, what the classical concerto form is about. Beginning the evening with the earlier of the two concertos, K. 415, he underlined the distinction between the musical roles of solo and tutti through his marshaling of solo dancers and the corps. In the cadenza, it was, no less appropriately, every dancer for herself (the men had only a minor part to play in this part of the program). Once that division of roles had been illustrated, he was free–as Mozart was in his compositional technique–to make less clear-cut distinctions in the other two movements. In the other concerto, K. 595, he also left such matters more fluid, so that one realized the program could not have worked with his versions of the two concertos the other way round: you had to have seen the point in its rigorous first presentation, in order to take it more for granted the second time.

In both concertos, a further delight was provided by the way Morris used brief incursions of groups of dancers, who entered just for a second or two and then immediately went off again, in just the way Mozart uses his orchestral forces to diversify solo passages. In the sonata, the function of the repeated exposition in the classical form was similarly reflected in the dancing: the repeat featured essentially the same choreography as the first time, but now with two dancers executing it instead of one. Equally enchanting was the way the dance element matched the perfect fluidity of form in the slow movement, and the wit of the finale was as compelling visually as musically.

Along with solos by Lauren Grant, Noah Vinson, and others, some fantastic solo work came from Joe Bowie, a Mark Morris Dance Group veteran of 20 years’ standing (or rather dancing). He may be a little less flawless technically than some of his colleagues, but he projects so much character and individuality that I found it impossible to take my eyes off him–and he conveys so much humor that it is no surprise to learn he was once a member of Paul Taylor’s company.

One might think of dancing as a particularly evanescent art. But a work like Mark Morris’s Mozart Dances, which was premiered at the New York State Theater in 2006, and which captures the Mozartean ability to be deeply serious and hilarious at the same time, deserves its own immortality. I think, and certainly hope, that it will go on being performed at least for many more years.

Bernard Jacobson

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