Queen Elizabeth rules Toronto

Wednesday night in Toronto: the Canadian Opera Company performed Gaetano Donizetti's dramatic opera, Roberto Devereux. The central character of the story is Queen Elizabeth I of England. We see her during the overture as a decrepit old woman who has outlived her legend. One of the last things she holds on to is her love for the commander of her army, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. She suspects him of betraying her for another lover. Her jealous suspicion is well founded. 

Robert has fallen in love with Sarah, one of Elizabeth's ladies-in-waiting. Beyond the danger of incurring Elizabeth's wrath, Robert has also been accused of treason by Parliament for showing mercy on England's enemies. Robert's only defender is his friend the Duke of Nottingham (and Sarah's recent husband). Elizabeth still hopes that she can command Robert's heart, but nothing will end well for this quartet.

The role of Elizabeth is one of the most vocally unforgiving in the bel canto repertoire. The late Beverly Sills claimed that this role shortened her career by ten years. Fortunately, American-born soprano Sondra Radvanovsky (now a resident of Ontario) showed no signs of vocal distress in this, the seventh and final performance of the run. Her Act Two finale was a clinic in bel canto style: endless breath control, pianissimos floated at will, secure and flexible ornamentation. I was about to add a seemingly limitless upper register, but I wish she had taken her final notes in each act down an octave. She opted for the high notes, but they were a touch shrill and they won't do anything to extend her career.

As Devereux, Italian tenor Giuseppe Filianoti had a satisfying lyric quality with the right amount of heroic heft. His tone was endearing in soft dynamics but got a bit ragged when pushed above the staff. Still, his aria in the Tower before execution was highly commendable. Canadian mezzo-soprano Allyson McHardy was equally satisfying as Sarah, with a resonant chest register, clear diction and dramatic savvy.

Canadian baritone Russell Braun's performance of Nottingham had mixed results. As an actor he drew an effective portrait of the twice-betrayed husband and friend. Vocally, however, his pitch rode sharp most of the evening. Italian conductor Corrado Rovaris led the orchestra well, but some of the vocal ensembles could have been rhythmically tighter. 

While not perfect, this was about as fine a performance of Roberto Devereux as you could expect to see these days. The opportunity to see Sondra Radvanovsky at the peak of her career justified the drive from Boston to Toronto. 

Don Quixote in Canada

The evening began at Torito, a tapas bar on Toronto's Augusta Avenue. A glass of bone-dry Txakoli set up the lamb's lettuce and balsamic vinaigrette of the apple and pear salad with burata cheese. The Spanish omelet was perfection, with tasty, tender potatoes in a nicely seasoned soufflé, accompanied by a slow-roasted aioli dipping sauce. The meatballs were a savory balance of peppered lamb, tomato preserves and mint sauce. A thimble of Manzanilla, with the metallic saltiness of Spain's ocean climate, capped the dinner.

The evening's entertainment was the Canadian Opera Company's production of Jules Massenet's Don Quichotte. The opera is based not so much on Cervantes's vast novel, but on Jacques Le Lorrain's stage adaptation. This allowed five compact acts that ran two and a half hours with one intermission. 

At the top of Act One we met Dulcinée, the object of Don Quixote's passion. Georgian mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili had a plummy voice and a voluptuous stage presence that suited the role perfectly. You could imagine her Dulcinée as an ancestor of Bizet's Carmen. 

Enter Don Quixote on his scrawny horse, Rosinante. Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto, now sixty-five years old, still has the voice to carry to the top balcony. With a lifetime of stage experience behind him, he knows how to maximize dramatic effect with ecomomic means. 

Sancho Panza followed on his donkey. Hawaiian baritone Quinn Kelsey comically portrayed the bumptious sidekick, yet was sympathetic in his steadfast devotion to his misguided master.

The set was a shifting configuration of gigantic tomes, representing the tales of chivalry that unhinged Quixote's grip on reality. Gigantic quills in gigantic ink pots became the windmills that the hero mistook for menacing giants. Lighting effects set the stage spinning, and Furlanetto gamely climbed a stack of volumes to end up sprawled on the ledge of a gigantic book spine.

A quintet of flamenco dancers augmented the chorus to give movement and a sense of specific location to the crowd scenes. The orchestra was sure-footed in the score's Franco-Hispanic idiom, and the musical interludes drew particular applause. The entire evening went so smoothly that you would never have guessed that Derek Bate was just the fill-in conductor for this one performance. Bravo!

¡Olé, BPYO!

Sunday afternoon at Sanders Theatre in Harvard Square: The Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra presented a Spanish-themed program, although none of the composers were actually from Spain. Guest conductor James Blachly opened the performance with Maurice Ravel's Rapsodie espagnole. I would describe Blachly's reading as orderly but not very beguiling. He brought the orchestra to a convincing crescendo in the fourth movement but missed several opportunities to push the momentum forward. 

Principal conductor Benjamin Zander took the podium for Alberto Ginastera's Harp Concerto, and the orchestra responded with more punch. Ginastera was a 20th-century Argentinian composer, and this work showed textural similarity to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The fast sections were rhythmic and percussive, the slow sections sparse and atmospheric. Harpist Anna DeLoi was masterful in the required range of articulations, from the biting needlework of the opening passage to the popped harmonics and pedaled lifts of the solo cadenza. There was even some hand-rapping on the soundboard. 

The third item on the program was Richard Strauss's Don Quixote, described as "fantastic variations on a theme of knightly character." Cellist Jonah Ellsworth portrayed the idealistic hero, and violist Gerald Karni depicted his blustering sidekick, Sancho Panza. Ellsworth attacked his cello in much the same way that the beclouded knight attacked his imagined enemies. Yet when the hero regained his sanity, Ellsworth coaxed tenderness from his bow and showed Quixote's elevated dignity in the face of defeat. Benjamin Zander was successful in drawing forth all the colors of Strauss's score, and the conductor was visibly moved by the achievements of his young musicians. The audience was equally moved, as evident by the respectful silence after Quixote's death and the subsequent ovation.

Rain Dogs unleashed at Oberon

Several times a year the Peter Mulvey Band puts on the musical disguise of the Crumbling Beauties and covers Tom Waits's 1985 album, Rain Dogs. For the last two years they have joined forces with burlesque dance troupe Babes in Boinkland (aka Lipstick Criminals) for a multi-discipline extravaganza at Oberon in Harvard Square. Here is a distillation of the set list:

Singapore – "We sail tonight for Singapore, we're all as mad as hatters here." The band chugs along as the dancers trawl with distressed fishnets.

Clap Hands – Sugar Dish peels off her red satin gloves and pleather corset to reveal her tattoo. A dancing bear, appropriately enough.

Cemetery Polka – There's something disturbing about this trio in sports jackets and Clark Gable masks.

Jockey Full Of Bourbon – Abby Normal's house is on fire.

Tango Till They're Sore – Sugar Dish, Dinah Deville and Pixy Dust languish in the balcony with confetti in their hair.

Big Black Mariah – Call the police wagon for Dinah's criminal Bump and Grind.

Diamonds And Gold – How's tricks? Not good for working girl Pamela Passion.

Hang Down Your Head – A terminally perky Belle Gunz tries to blunt Honey Pie's razor sadness. That's what friends are for.

Time – A heartbreaker with a singing saw accompaniment to soothe the mood (and vocal chords). By this point Mulvey is drinking straight from the honey jar.

<< Intermission >> 

Rain Dogs – Side Two unleashes a pack of jackals in yellow slickers.

Midtown – An instrumental taxi chase on acid.

9th & Hennepin – "All the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes." The ladies channel their heroin chic.

Gun Street Girl – Honey Pie works the mezzanine and rattles a rusty chain. 

Union Square – Look what crawled out of the trash – it's Belle!

Blind Love – Dinah and Pamela partner in a white swan/black swan pas de deux to a cowboy ballad.

Walking Spanish – Pixie tries to bust out of her orange jumpsuit in a death row strut.

Downtown Train – This is the closest Waits ever came to a pop tune, with covers by Bob Seger and Rod Stewart. His career survived anyway. Under a spinning mirror ball the Lipstick Criminals pay homage to another Waits classic, Pasties And A G-String.

Bride Of Rain Dog – The DJ spins a spoken-word track, "He's the man who won't fit in."

Anywhere I Lay My Head – A holler with dictated power chords, then the band takes it home. The ladies shimmy in gold lamé under a rainfall of mylar. The audience exits in a trail of shiny silver squares.

Kissin at Symphony Hall – past report 3/16/2014

Sunday evening: pianist Evgeny Kissin at Symphony Hall. In the first half he played Schubert's 'Gasteiner' Sonata in D major. After intermission we heard Scriabin's Sonata no. 2 and several etudes from opus 8. It was gratifying to see a modern master at the peak of his abilities. Now 42, Kissin has hit that sweet spot where technical prowess and interpretive maturity intersect nicely. More importantly, he looked comfortable in his own skin and even smiled a few times during his bows.

We were treated to three encores: a stately, structured Bach piece, another torrid Scriabin etude, and a crowd-pleasing Chopin polonaise. I expect the artist was exhausted after such a performance, but I could easily imagine the the Steinway collapsing with the final blow.

The sorrows of the Met's Werther – past report 3/15/2014

Saturday afternoon at the Met: Werther. Goethe wrote in his novel The Sufferings of Young Werther that revising a published story was bound to fall flat, because the original version would be strongly imprinted in the reader’s mind. I had a similar experience seeing the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Massenet’s Werther. I had recently watched a DVD of the 2010 Opéra de Lyon staging with German tenor Jonas Kaufmann as the title character and French mezzo Sophie Koch as his unattainable love Charlotte. The sets used broad, sparse images that allowed emotions to fill the stage. A sudden swell of light on the words “And you, sun, flood me with your rays” reminded us that this was an impressionistic world where the senses govern reality.

Kaufmann and Koch reprised their roles at the Met, but this production left no element of the storytelling to the imagination. During the overture we were given a pantomime show of the actual moment of death for Charlotte’s mother, her funeral procession and the family’s return from her grave. The widowed father is distraught, the children are sad. Got it? In the prelude to Act Two we see video projections of the change of seasons and Charlotte signing the wedding register with her long-betrothed Albert. All of these events happen “off camera” in both Massenet’s opera and Goethe’s novel. The event is not as important as how it affects the central characters.

Act Two is framed by the preparation of a festival banquet to celebrate the local pastor’s anniversary. The Met made a showcase of setting up the trestle tables, spreading the tablecloths, laying the plates, the napkins, the silverware, placing the chairs. The stage was populated with supernumeraries that had no vocal existence in Massenet’s score. They spent most of the act milling around up left. I fully expected them to sit down to dishes of buttered peas and then floss and brush their teeth. That’s what people do, isn’t it? In trying to show the society that Werther didn’t fit into, the Met lost sight of the tragic hero’s isolation.

During the prelude to Act Three in the Lyon DVD Charlotte stands with her back to the audience in sidelit solitude. We are left to ponder her thoughts and emotional state through the flow of the music. In the Met production Charlotte goes to the parlor stove with Werther’s letters, opens the stove door to burn the letters, stops midway, then pulls back and shuts the stove. She goes to her desk, writes on a blank piece of paper, reads what she has written, then crumples it up and throws it away. She takes a book from atop the harpsichord, flips through some pages, tosses the book aside. She is agitated, indecisive and distracted. Got it?

By Act Four I was so inured to the external world that I couldn’t focus on Werther’s final moments before death. What were those two trombonists talking about in the orchestra pit? It seemed important. My one consolation is that this performance was part of the Met’s HD broadcast series and will eventually make its way to DVD. It will be interesting to see if the stage concept satisfies more in a cinematic framework.

Wide awake at La sonnambula – past report 3/14/2014

Friday night at the Met: La sonnambula (The Sleepwalker). This opera is a gem from the bel canto (beautiful singing) era of 200 years ago. Gracious melodies alternate with acrobatic passages to showcase vocal artistry. You expect the soprano to be excellent, and Diana Damrau was. Despite the florid nature of the style, Damrau avoided gratuitous ornamentation. Every leap and trill was tied to her character's physical movement or emotional state.

Any concerns about the tenor were quickly dispelled by Javier Camarena's first entrance. He had a clear, ringing voice with rounded tone and a nice ping at the top. He produced a dazzling array of vocal curlicues without being too fussy about it. And he could act! (We were truly spoiled this evening.) And what was that, a high D in act two? A little tight, but hit and held clean -- he just about stole the show.

This production is staged in the present, in a rehearsal studio for a company preparing La sonnambula; an opera within an opera. I overheard several audience members complain that the production didn't make sense. On the contrary, I felt the principals and chorus were entirely engaged and had fully fleshed out their characters. The setting allowed some whimsical visual images: the soprano is seen sleepwalking outside on a window ledge several stories above Amsterdam Avenue; she then literally walks the plank fifteen feet out above the orchestra.

After her final display of melismatic mastery, how did Diana Damrau close the show? With not one, but TWO cartwheels. Is there anything this Wundersopran can't do? For all the complaints at intermission, the audience was certainly on its feet and roaring during curtain calls.

Don Giovanni goes to school – past report 3/30/2012

This was my first time in the renovated theater at Boston Conservatory, and I was impressed by the audience side of the new hall. I'm not sure what technical improvements were made backstage, because the production values of this Don Giovanni were modest: latticework flats that could be pushed around in varied configurations, a few archways flown in, set pieces wheeled in by the chorus, that was it.

Yet the intimacy of playing on a modest stage to an audience of 325 brought an immediacy to the performance that was very appealing. There were some judicious cuts (nobody seemed to miss "Metà di voi qua vadano") with only one jarring tonal splice during the Act Two finale (Donna Elvira entered just after the table is laid, curtailing the Don's dinner music).

The highlight of the evening was Katy Kelly's Donna Anna. I felt privileged to see an early performance in what should be a distinguished career. That she made the singing look easy and brought out a many-faceted interpretation of her role is the definition of secure technic and artistic mastery.

Evan Ross played Leporello for big laughs and succeeded, especially to a warm house of fellow students. His diction was impeccable in the quick moments of the score.

As Giovanni himself, Isaac Bray (unfortunate name for a singer) carried off "Finch' han dal vino" brilliantly, as if the Don were catching the inspiration for the coming night's diversion right at that instant. No jaded wastrel he.

Katelyn Parker jumped a few of Zerlina's entrances, so we got several phrase repetitions that Da Ponte and Mozart didn't intend. Masetto and the Commendatore were harmless, which brings us to Ottavio. 

Salvatore Atti showed himself a perfectly respectable tenor in the recitatives, but he ran into trouble in both arias, losing his way when the melodic line took broad leaps down and then up. I was willing to enjoy the good parts, but I couldn't help flinching a half dozen times.

And finally Donna Elvira. Erin Hannon has the skills that should make her an excellent performer. She brought a comic undertone to Elvira, and had the vocal power to hold her own as a prima donna. Unfortunately she proved herself underprepared for the role. Her pitch was imprecise in her passage work, and she missed at least four entrances.

There are people like me who have seen or listened to Don Giovanni dozens (if not hundreds) of times. We can instantly recognize when things go awry and take no pleasure in hearing 80% of a performance. With a work that has been in the repertory for over 200 years, a work that is one of Mozart's signature pieces, the performers have to be 100% secure in the music and then add the magic that lifts it off the page. This was an instructive student production, and I hope the students learned that you need to own your role every time you perform.

Thoughts on student recitals

Last week someone asked if I ever go to student recitals. The answer is rarely. I admit that they are a great way to get exposed to classical music, and the price is appealing (usually free). So why don't I go more often?

I have been disappointed by a handful of recent conservatory experiences. A faculty evening of Beethoven Trios never got off the ground. A student performance of Don Giovanni was marred by a soprano who could barely cover the role of Donna Elvira. In a work as iconic as Don Giovanni this is unacceptable. You have to start with 100% of what's written and then layer your interpretation on top of that. 

Tonight I went to the New England Conservatory for a vocal recital by a masters student. The event had been on NEC's concert calendar for months, and I was looking forward to hearing an up-and-coming soprano. When I got to the facility a security attendant checked his system and showed that the hall was dark for the evening.

Either his system was wrong and a hopeful audience was being turned away, or the event had been canceled and no one had updated NEC's calendar. Either way it was a fruitless night out, and now I am even less inclined to go to student recitals.

A second implicit question is why do I go to so many professional concerts? I go in the hope of witnessing excellence. Most of the time that hope is fulfilled, enough so that I can look beyond any flaws. On rare occasions I witness transcendence, and those are the moments that justify everything.

The great Florida tour – past report 11/2013

Saturday I landed in Orlando, visited my brother in Cocoa Beach and continued on to Vero Beach for a concert by the Space Coast Symphony Orchestra. This fledgling ensemble premiered two works by living American composers: Voyager by David Asher Brown, and Rush by Kenneth Fuchs. I loved the expanded percussion section, including four mallet instruments. I'm a sucker for the 5-octave marimba.

The second half of the program featured a film by Jeff Thompson, documenting life on his father's citrus farm. The orchestra provided the soundtrack with Frederick Delius's Florida Suite. The modest string section occasionally slipped out of tune, but the overall presentation left a warm and fuzzy feeling.

The concert was woefully underattended; what this ambitious group needs is spin. Two premieres and a multimedia tribute to Florida's 500th anniversary should have been a cultural event.

Sunday to Tuesday I was back in Orlando celebrating my father's birthday with the extended family. There were several renditions of "Happy Bithday to You" – with harmony!

Wednesday was Die Fledermaus at the Sarasota Opera: Holy snap! A breakneck overture, and the entire night popped like a cork. It would have been easy to trot out a hackneyed war horse, but this production had new-car smell. The young American cast used intentionally broad melodramatic gestures to comic effect. Both dialogue and lyrics were performed in English (instead of a frequent 50-50 approach), which kept the singers engaged in the fun. Three hours of empty calories, but what a guilty pleasure.

Thursday I heard the Florida Orchestra in a sold-out morning coffee concert at Mahaffey Theater in St. Petersburg. It's a beautiful auditorium that allows the orchestra to play softly while still carrying to the balcony.

One of the works, Kol Nidrei by Max Bruch, featured Lev Mamuya, a 17-year-old cellist from Newton, Mass. He was this year's winner of the Sphinx Competition and had a gorgeous, singing tone. The orchestra finished with a crowd-pleasing performance of Gershwin's American in Paris.

Saturday brought me to the Orlando Philharmonic. I think it was Zubin Mehta who said that Mendelssohn never wrote a sad note in his life. That may be true, but the Hebrides Overture is certainly one of his steelier works, depicting the seascape of northwest Scotland.

The looming wind and waves set the stage for Shostakovich's brooding Violin Concerto No. 1. There wasn't a lot of melody to grab on to, but soloist Cho-Liang Lin moved up and down the neck masterfully. He made convincing work of the he cadenza, which could have seemed like so much double-stopped sawing.

The second half of the program was Beethoven's 7th symphony, which is a study in dance rhythms. Conductor Joel Revzen maintained the rhythmic drive, whipping the orchestra into a galloping finale.

Postcript: Orlando's Bob Carr Performing Arts Centre, with its continual up-and-down flights of stairs, is not a very accessible venue. And without a center aisle, some ticketholders need to scooch past 30 or 40 other patrons before reaching their seats. The auditorium has the dry acoustics of a recording studio and would benefit from a good dose of natural reverb. Tear it down.