Opera Review: He Sleeps With the Fishes (and Everyone Else)

The Juilliard Opera mounts Don Giovanni.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Take my wife, please. Masetto (Gregory Feldman, right) looks on as the Don (Hubert Zapiór)
woos Zerlina (Jessica Niles) in a scene from Act I of Don Giovanni.
Photo by Richard Termine.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's music is timeless. But are the ribald, sexist opera libretti of Lorenzo da Ponte still workable on the stage in this era of #metoo? That is the question asked by the Juilliard Opera and director Emma Griffin. Her new staging of Don Giovanni bowed Wednesday night at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater. In its two acts, Ms. Griffin sought to turn this opera, the story of a rabid sexual predator at play in the streets of Seville, Spain on its head and deliver a message about today's sexual ethics.

She partly succeeded.

Concert Review: The Kids Are Alright (though one is a brat)

The Juilliard Orchestra plays Debusssy and Ravel.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Conductor Emmanuel Villaume led the Juilliard Orchestra on Monday night.
Photo by Paul Leclaire.

The combined forces of Juilliard Orchestra and Juilliard Opera students came together on Monday night to give an evening of Debussy and Ravel, a set of performances that offered a much needed beacon of musical hope in what is a particularly dark and troubled time for the arts community around Lincoln Center. The program, under the direction of French conductor Emmanuel Villaume offered a major work by each composer and a Ravel rarity to boot.

Opera Review: We Don't Have To Take Our Shoes Off

Juilliard Opera lifts off with Jonathan Dove's Flight.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Stuck in the aurport with you: the Refugee (Jakub Józef Orliński, left) and anunhappy couple in a scene from Flight. Photo by Rosalie O'Connor for The Juilliard School. 

It is rare to encounter a contemporary opera that is, at once musically rich, dramatically moving and funny as hell. Such an opera is Jonathan Davis' 1998 opus Flight, which landed on the stage of Juilliard's Peter Jay Sharp Theater on Wednesday night. This is the second New York production of this contemporary masterpiece, with a witty libretto owing something to Lorenzo Da Ponte. Flight is a comedy for our modern age, chronicling the travails of anonymous travelers trapped in an airport terminal overnight, their trips delayed by an electrical storm.

Opera Review: There Goes the Neighborhood

Juilliard offers a hipster Die Zauberflöte.

by Paul J. Pelkonen

Next they'll be buying a stroller. Theo Hoffman (right) and Kara Sainz as Papageno and Papagena
in Act II of Die Zauberflöte at Juilliard. Photo by Richard Termine for the Juilliard School.

The wave of gentrification sweeping New York this decade has included the presentation of operas in the most unlikely venues: a Bushwick bus terminal, a Gowanus back alley, even a coffee barge moored at the old Marine terminal in Red Hook. This week, the Juilliard School offered a new production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte by director Mary Birnbaum. Although mounted in the confines of the Peter Jay Sharp Theater in the school's Lincoln Center home, this new staging has its roots in those aforementioned outlier opera productions and the ideas of contemporary urban renewal.

Opera Review: The World Has Gone Mad

A modern double bill opens Juilliard Opera.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

"HALLO-HALLO!" The Drummer (Amanda Lynn Bottoms, right)
announces the Emperor's intentions in a scene from Der Kaiser von Atlantis.
Photo by Nan Merriman © 2015 The Juilliard School.

As I write this, our world as we know it is under siege. In Paris, religious fanatics fire machine-guns into crowds, punishing people for daring to go out-of-doors. Here in America, capitalist fanatics engage in racist rhetoric in  an attempt to become the leader of the free world. It is apt, then that the Juilliard Opera chose to open its 2015 season with a double-barreled blast of cynicism: Poulenc's Les Mamelles de Tirésias and Ullmann's Der Kaiser von Atlantis.

Opera Review: An Old-Fashioned Wedding

Juilliard Opera stages Le Nozze di Figaro.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Shenanigans: The Count (Takaoki Onishi, center) confronts Susanna (Ying Fang, right)
as Cherubino (Virginie Verrez) looks on. Photo by Ken Howard © 2015 The Juilliard School.

On Friday night, Juilliard Opera opened its last production of the spring season, a Stephen Wadsworth staging of Le Nozze di Figaro with a stellar young cast and a staging approach that was refreshingly true to the opera's text. This is the third (and final) Mozart/Da Ponte opera to be mounted by Mr. Wadsworth at Juilliard on the stage of the Peter Jay Sharp Theater. With designer Charlie Corcoran, he continues to rely on simple multi-proscenium sets, period costumes, lots of stage action, and young singing actors thoroughly steeped in performance tradition.

Opera Review: The Music of the Future

Juilliard presents Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The cast of Iphigenie en Aulide at Juilliard.
(L.-R. Ying Fang, Virginie Verrez, Brandon Cedel, Yunpeng Wang.)
Photo by Marty Sohl © 2015 The Juilliard School.

The composer Christoph Willibald Gluck was a key figure in the transition from the baroque era to the so-called classical period that followed. The agency of this revolution was opera, specifically his seminal works Orphée et Eurydice and  Iphigénie en Aulide. The latter of these was his first work for the Paris stage and was presented Tuesday night in a new production at the Juilliard School's Peter Jay Sharp Theater.

Opera Review: Fezzes Are Cool

Juilliard Opera takes on Rossini's Il Turco in Italia.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Hyesang Park as Fiorilla in Il Turco in Italia.
Photo by Ken Howard © 2014 The Juilliard School.

The Juilliard Opera opened its 2014 season this week with a new production of Rossini's Il Turco in Italia, a genial comedy of manners that never caught fire with the opera-going public of the composer's day. Turco was viewed as an inferior sequel to the composer's wildly successful L'Italiana in Algeri and its libretto, chronicling the bed-hopping adventures of a licentious and married woman at a resort near Naples was considered immoral in Rossini's day. And it is a rarity: this was the first fully staged New York performance of the score since a New York City Opera production from 1978.

Opera Review: An Invasion, Tastefully Decorated

The Juilliard School presents Handel's Radamisto.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Radamisto (John Holiday) consoles Zenobia (Virginie Verrez) in a scene from Handel's Radamisto.
Photo by Nan Melville © 2013 The Juilliard School.

The Juilliard Opera is more than just a student ensemble--this is one of the most innovative companies at Lincoln Center. Each season, the students and guest artists at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater find ways to present a vast and diverse repertory. On Wednesday night, Juilliard opened its 2013 opera season with a new production of Handel's Radamisto by James Darrah. The performances, featuring the school period ensemble Juilliard 415, marked the conservatory debut of conductor Julian Wachner.

Opera Review: Fur is Murder

Juilliard Opera presents The Cunning Little Vixen.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The Vixen Sharp-Ears (left, standing center) instructs her brood as the Fox (Karen Vuong, right) looks on.
Photo by Nan Melville © 2013 The Juilliard School.

The unexpected renaissance of Czech opera at Juilliard continues with the Juilliard Opera's energetic, season-ending production of Leoš Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen, seen April 30 at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater. This production, combining some of the best singers from the conservatory's upper and lower divisions, offers a fresh take on this beloved opera. The opera was performed in English and without intermissions.

Opera Review: Damascus, on a Budget

A semi-staged Armide bows at Juilliard.

New kids on the block: Emalie Savoy (standing) Wallis Giunta (l.) and Devon Guthrie (r.) in Armide.
Photo by Nan Melville © 2012 The Juilliard School/Metropolitan Opera.

On Wednesday night, Juilliard Opera unveiled the second result of the school's collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera: a semi-staged performance of Gluck's 1777 opera Armide at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater. The sparse non-production featured the Juilliard Orchestra and Chorus onstage and elegantly clad young singers performing in front of the band. Period performance specialist Jane Glover conducted.

Armide was Gluck's favorite among his own operas. The composer's innovative writing for the orchestra and chorus are to the fore, with memorable, dark textures in the 'cellos and basses driving the action forward. (This is what Berlioz idealized and strove to imitate in Les Troyens.) Another feature: the composer's compact, vocal lines, which create each character with firm, yet melodic phrases. The work is also a precursor of Wagner's leitmotiv technique.

Gluck's opera requires an overpowering female lead who can range from sweet seduction to overpowering rage in the final scene as the sorceress is abandoned. Emalie Savoy met both of those extremes. She was most potent in the scene where Armide summons the forces of Hell (in the persons of the chorus and soprano Renée Tatum) to end her romance with the knight Renaud. She recants in the middle of the scene, pulling a hard dramatic shift in temperament that created sympathy for this sometimes oblique character.

Ms. Savoy's performance was enhanced with a strong supporting female cast. Throughout the opera, the sorceress was flanked by two attending ladies, sung by  Wallis Giunta and Devon Guthrie. Hearing these three singers together was the chief joy of the opera's second act. Also impressive: Ms. Tatum was effective, but not hammy in the role of La Haine, the hellish embodiment of hate and heroic French opera style.

The opera's anti-heroine would be pretty lonely without a pious knight to seduce. Renaud was played by David Portillo, a lyric tenor with a pleasing, sweet tone. However, the character spends much of the action ensorcelled by Armide. He is a noble, but passive character until rescued by his even more pious buddies.

As those two questing knights, baritone Luthando Qave and  tenor Noah Baetge made a fine comic pair. Armed with half a brass curtain rod, they beat back hordes of invisible demons and great monsters that seemed to spring out of the woodwork of the Sharp Theater. They then had to contend with lovely minions of Armide, testing their virtues in a manner that recalls Sir Galahad's adventures in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. 

Yes, the drama is hokey, and the theatrical sensibilities of 16th-century Italian Renaissance poetry stand at far remove from our own age. But the value in this performance rests in the potent cast of young singers, and in appreciating Gluck's economy of expression and brilliant orchestration. The score was played with crisp severity by the Juilliard Orchestra under Jane Glover, who kept one eye turned to her cast as she conducted from the middle of the stage. 

In the minds of New Yorkers, it may be difficult to separate Gluck's work from Rossini's 1817opera Armida, presented at the Met in 2010 as a big-budget star vehicle for Renée Fleming. Although the two works share story points, characters and a common origin (in Torquetto Tasso's 1581  Italian romance Gerusalemme Liberata) they are very different operas. Gluck's work is a far superior product.

Opera Review: An Imitation of Life

Kommilitonen! has its U.S. premiere at Juilliard.

Party all the time: the Communist officials from Act II of Kommilitonen!

Photo provided by the Juilliard School. © 2010 Blind Summit Theatre.

Kommilitonen!, the eighth opera from British composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, is an uncompromising look at the effects of student protests and oppression in the 20th century. But no one could have predicted the political circumstance surrounding its premiere in New York City on Wednesday night.

The premiere happened one day after the New York Police Department, acting under orders from Mayor Michael Bloomberg decided to "evict" the Occupy Wall Street protestors from Zuccotti Park. The action resulted in 200 arrests, journalists being beaten, and the destruction of the protestors' property, including books, laptop computers and musical instruments. Sometimes, art imitates life.

David Pountney's libretto ties three historical incidents together:

• 1943: the White Rose resistance in Hitler's Germany and the executions of activists Joseph and Sophie Scholl. Their student newsletter gives the opera its title.


• 1962: the race riots that accompanied the enrollment of James Meredith, the first African-American to attend the University of Mississippi.


• 1966: the murder of teachers and ultra-violence of the Cultural Revolution in Mao Tse-Tung's China.

Over two acts, the stories are presented interleaved, coming together at the close to make their common point: "Believe, Survive, Endure."

The production, by Mr. Pountney, shifts rapidly between Germany, Mississippi and China. Swastika banners, Red Chinese flags and a chalkboard are primary visual components. Ordinary tables doubling as beds, desks, and even tables. The actors move the props on and off the stage rapidly, changing on the fly as the music shifts underfoot. The Chinese scenes also feature some impressive puppetry by the troupe Blind Summit Theater. They depicted the murdered school-teachers. In a later scene scene, they made a comic mockery of the local Communist Party.

To accompany this complex set of stories and time-slides, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies has written an astonishingly fluid score. The music of Kommilitonen! flips like a TV remote. An onstage marching band competes with a lone erhu player in the Chinese scenes. Wallis Guinta was impressive in the trouser role of Wu, the son of the two murdered  teachers who ultimately joins the party. As Zhou, the Red Guard member who participated in the killing, Karen Vuong gave a convincing portrait of the banality of evil.

Mississippi has a gospel flavor, with the chorus singing a variant on "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore" in contrast with Will Liverman's soliloquies as James Meredith. Mr. Liverman was something of a cipher as Meredith, but maybe that's because the ever-shifting libretto does not penetrate his story-line with the same amount of depth. That is reserved for the White Rose story, with the Scholl siblings movingly portrayed by Deanna Breiwick and Alexander Hajek. Their death ended the opera, but not before they painted graffiti denouncing Hitler across the stage and dropped Kommilitonen! leaflets from the balcony.

The German scenes take their musical idiom from composers banned by the Nazis: Weill, Krenek, and maybe a dash of Ullmann. They also incorporate an excerpt from "The Grand Inquisitor", the most famous chapter from Fyodor Dosteyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. This is a parable where the Inquisitor interrogates Jesus Christ. The interrogator was played by baritone AubreyAllicock. Jesus was an empty chair. Tenor Noah Baetge narrated as the Evangelist.

Conductor Anne Manson held this complex score together with tight, sprung rhythms in the orchestra and clear delineation of tone-rows in the woodwinds. Add in  the marching band, the offstage chorus and singers up in the balconies, and this opera becomes a tough set of challenges. It came off razor-sharp.

Following the performance, the audience was greeted with a small party of Occupy protestors. They had decided to take their "people's microphone" to Lincoln Center that night. Sir Peter, walking past the little group, stopped to talk to the Occupiers as thirty or so cops stood around. He clearly approved.

The Super-Conductor Opera Preview Part II: The Pooh-Bah Edition

Brought to you by the Lord High Everything Else.

The Lord High Everything Else

Yes, we already published the annual Metropolitan Opera Preview.

It's in that box over there to the right, where we break down the coming season of high drama and music drama at the big limestone skyscraper-on-its-side on what used to be W. 64th St and Amsterdam Ave.

Here, we break down the rest of the coming opera season, from the New York City Opera on down to smaller (but beloved) regional companies in the outer boroughs. This schedule is not complete, and links go to the websites of the respective opera companies and venues.

Anyway, there's some really good stuff coming. Here we go!

September 2011:

• The opera season gets off to an early start with a run of Francesco Cavalli's Giasone at Le Poisson Rouge in the first week of September. 
• Les Arts Florissants revives their staging of Atys by Jean-Baptiste Lully, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, starting Sept. 18. William Christie conducts.

October:

• BAM starts the month off with a run of Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera. Also, Tosca opens the 30th anniversary season of the Dicapo Opera, a charming "jewel box" house on the Upper East Side.
• The Amore Opera continues the tradition of chamber opera in the East Village with a "Fall Figaro Fest": Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro, Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia and the U.S. premiere of Mercadente's Il due Figaro, an unauthorized continuation of the adventures of the Almaviva clan, written in 1826.

Peter Maxwell-Davies.

November:

• Two exciting premieres this month: Juilliard launches their 2011 opera season with the U.S. premiere of Kommiltonen! by composer Peter Maxwell-Davies. 
• This month also features world premiere of Nico Muhly's opera Dark Sisters by the Gotham Chamber Opera. The new work will run for 10 performances at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College for Criminal Justice. 
• Angela Gheorghiu makes her one New York appearance of the season, as the Opera Orchestra of New York presents Adriana Lecouvrer at Carnegie Hall.
• Chelsea Opera offers Menotti's The Medium, and Brooklyn's Regina Opera presents Madama Butterfly.

December:

• Yale in New York mounts an annual concert series at Carnegie Hall. In the downstairs Zankel Hall, the company will perform William Walton's rarely played one-act opera The Bear. 
• The Dicapo Opera mounts Tchaikovsky's Iolanta. 

January 2012

• Wagnerians are already excited at the OONY's plans to mount a concert version of Rienzi at Avery Fisher Hall. Eve Queler conducts. Nice to have Wagner without spinning planks.
• Opera Lafayette, a period ensemble from Washington D.C. makes its annual visit with Le Roi et le Fermier by Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny. 
• Another Menotti opera. This time, it's The Consul, presented by the Dicapo Opera.
• The Bronx Opera presents a rare work by Ralph Vaughan Williams, The Poisoned Kiss. All performances are at Lehman College.

The death of vinyl: Janis Kelly in the Manchester premiere of Prima Donna.
Photo by Tristram Kenton.

February

• Claiming "all of New York" as its stage, the revamped New York City Opera opens at...BAM. The company will offer a Jonathan Miller staging of La Traviata (from their old partners at Glimmerglass Opera.) Also, the eagerly anticipated U.S. premiere of singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright's anticipated opera Prima Donna.
• The Met and Juilliard present a co-production of Armide featuring promising young Juilliard artists. This is a follow-up to last year's The Bartered Bride. Gluck's opera will be conducted by Jane Glover. This may be a tough ticket, as it is (probably) a sneak preview for an upcoming Met production.

Not Rigoletto: Charles Laughton (left) as Quasimodo
with Maureen O'Hara in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
© 1939 RKO Radio Pictures.

March

• City Opera moves again, to the Lynch Theater for a new production of Mozart's Così fan tutte. On a happier note, Dicapo Opera presents The Most Happy Fella, and the Regina Opera offers Cavalleria Rusticana, paired with a short concert. 
• Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra present a concert performance of Franz Schmidt's Notre-Dame, a rare setting of Victor Hugo's story of a love-struck hunchback. (Not Rigoletto. The other one.)
• Finally, OONY offers a TBA opera with Placído Domingo. Betting books will open before the announcement is made. Well, not really.

April

• As the Met's Ring creaks into high gear, Gotham Chamber Opera will present a rare Mozart work: Il Sogno di Scipione. At the Lynch Theater at John Jay.
• Dicapo pits their Violetta against the Met's with their own production of La Traviata. (No Ikea furniture is involved.) 
• Also, the Juilliard School mounts another staging of Don Giovanni. This one is by Stephen Wadsworth.

May

• In their final migration of the season, New York City Opera presents Telemann's Orpheus at El Museo de Barrio on the Upper East Side.
• The Bronx Opera winds down their season with Hansel und Gretel at Lehman College.

Opera Review: Farce, In Any Language

L'heure Espagnole and Gianni Schicchi at Juilliard
by Paul Pelkonen

Costume design for Don Iñigo Gomez in  L'heure Espagnole.
Design and drawing by Vita Tyzkun  © 2011 The Juilliard School.

On Wednesday night, the Juilliard Opera finished their strong season with an unusual pairing of one-act comedies by Ravel and Puccini. Juilliard alumna Keri-Lynn Wilson conducted both operas in razor-sharp performances, expertly played and timed.

Time is at the heart of Ravel's L'heure Espagnole ("The Spanish Hour.") This is the story of an unfaithful clockmaker's wife (Cecilia Hall) who juggles three suitors while her husband is out setting the city clocks each week. This is pure French farce, with two of the would-be lovers hiding themselves in large clocks, while the studly young muleteer (Andreas Andriotis) carries them up and down the stairs.


Ms. Hall shone as Concepción, the young wife who is considering the poet Gonzalve (Daniel T. Curran) and the banker Don Iñigo Gomez (Alexander Hajek) who finds himself locked in his clock. The opera was lightly played, with crisp ensemble singing and a tight account of Ravel's intricate score.

This fine cast switched places for Puccini's Gianni Schicchi, with Mr. Hajek taking the title role. He made a brash, memorable Schicchi, with good comic acting and a commanding presence. He made Schicchi's ode to Florence (where he warns the gathered relatives of the perils of their scheme to rewrite the will of the deceased Buoso Donati) the emotional heart of the piece, displaying a fine lyric baritone laced with poisonous wit. And the idea of having Schicchi cue the light changes and set the scene? Perfect.


The Korean soprano Jung van Noon, a student of the great Renata Scotto, made a stellar impression as Lauretta. Her "O mio babbino caro" was sung with such melting beauty that half the audience (not knowing where the piece ended) applauded early. She made the prospect of throwing herself into the Arno River a realistic one, arching into the high phrases and pouring out the heartfelt emotion that is required for convincing Puccini.

Schicchi and daughter were surrounded by a memorable group of players. Daniel T. Curran was Rinuccio, Lauretta's suitor and the one good egg in the rotten Donati basket. Timothy Beenken and Carla Jablonski were strong as Simone and La Cieca, the oldest members of the family with their sights set on the biggest shares of the estate. The other members of he company gave good comic performances, including a brief, hilarious cameo by character tenor Said Pressley as the hapless Doctor.

Andreas Aroditis returned as the notary Amantio, a shady figure in leather and aviators. As appropriate for this modern-dress program, he was flanked by two straight-outta-Brooklyn witnesses: Pinnelino "the cobbler"(Drew Santini) and Guccio "The Dyer" (Philip Stoddard. This comic trio upped the level of humor and intensity. As this comic confection whirled to a close, the audience was cheerfully prepared to forgive the hell-bound Gianni Schicchi for his schemes. And with singing like this, why not?

Opera Review: Cashing the Czech

The Bartered Bride Marries Met and Juilliard.

by Paul J. Pelkonen

Layla Claire and Alexander Lewis in Act II of The Bartered Bride.
Photo © 2011 The Juilliard School/Metropolitan Opera

The Metropolitan Opera's new collaboration with the Juilliard School got off to a winning start with Stephen Wadsworth's production of The Bartered Bride, seen Thursday night at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater. The Czech opera was performed in a new English translation by J. D. McClatchy, and incorporated 20th century references into the libretto.

Bedrich Smetana's comedy of small-town romance and arranged marriages has been away from New York stages for the last 15 years. This thrilling performance, conducted by James Levine made this writer wonder why we've had to wait so long. Maestro Levine led an enthusiastic reading that brought out the charm, laughter and joy in this underrated score. And he was a little caught up in it: the Met's music director was heard merrily singing along with the score.


He was helped by a fine young cast, led by soprano Layla Claire as Marenka, the bride-to-be who finds herself at the eye of a romantic hurricane when her planned marriage to Jenik is thrown over in favor of an arranged match with the son of Mischa, a rich farmer to whom her father owes money.

This is a complex, multi-dimensional role with a high tessitura and a number of rapid-fire emotional changes that can challenge any singing actress. Ms. Claire mined the rich comic vein of the score but also generated pathos, particularly in the heartbreaking spotlight aria that serves as the (serious) climax to the final act.

Marenka is deeply in love with Jenik, (tenor Paul Appleby), who manipulates events throughout the opera to produce a happy result. Mr. Appleby brought a brash attitude to the part and a pleasing tenor with light baritonal coloring. His performance took wing in his rapid-fire "contract duet" with the marriage broker Kecal, played with great comic gusto by bass Jordan Bisch.

Jenik's competition is Vacal, the most challenging part in this opera. Smetana was a fearless innovator, and he created what might be the only tenor role to be hampered by a musical stutter. As played by Alexander Lewis, Vacal's handicap became a source of charm, and the opera's most uplifting moment comes when the singer overcomes his alalia syllabaris and sings out. When he starts dancing in the third act, it is a moment of real joy.

Mr. Wadsworth's staging moved the action to a chic Czech café, sometime in the 20th century. The choristers slowly change from street garb to traditional kroje costumes. When a "real Czechoslovakian" circus hits the sleepy little town in the third act, the whole production takes a welcome turn for the surreal, complete with dancing bears, a bearded lady (dancer Miles Mykkanen, on point, like a ballerina) and a remarkable contortionist (Jacob Stainback).

This thrilling revival of one of the greatest operatic comedies of the 19th century plays for only one more performancer, but fear not, opera lovers, it's slated for the Met--sometime in 2014.