Opera Review: Just a Small Town Girl

Emmeline takes off at Manhattan School of Music.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Living in her lonely world: Blair Cagney as Emmeline.
Photo by Carol Rosegg for the Manhattan School of Music.

Composer Tobias Picker returned to his alma mater,  the Manhattan School of Music last week bringing a new staging of his first opera, Emmeline. A searing re-telling of the Oedipus myth among the hardscrabble folks of a small New England town, this opera helped put the Santa Fe Opera Festival on the map. Here, the work received a new staging from director Thaddeus Strassberger, and an update to the libretto to better reflect the troubled 21st century. Touches like home shopping channel footage and even texting (used brilliantly in the projected titles at one point made the whole show a reflection on the current screwed-up state of affairs in this country.

Opera Review: Out of the Deep Freeze

Manhattan School of Music stages The Snow Maiden.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Forest from the trees: Shelén Hughes as the Snow Maiden.
Photo © 2018 courtesy Manhattan School of Music press department.

Nikolai Rimksy-Korsakov is one of the most important opera composers of 19th century Russia. A member of the "Mighty Handful", he revised works by Mussorgsky, taught Stravinsky and was a master of orchestration and melody. However, outside of a few concert works, the bulk of his music, most notably a long catalogue of operas, receives little attention. This made it all the more interesting that the Manhattan School of Music's Senior Opera Theater decided to mount The Snow Maiden, an enchanting fairy tale opera and the composer's personal favorite.

Opera Review: When the Shoe Finally Fits

MSM Opera unearths Nicolo Isouard's Cendrillon.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

What Cendrillon is all about: the shoes. 

In recent years, the Manhattan School of Music's opera program has become a cabinet of curiosities: a clearing-house for little-heard versions of familiar operatic stories by unfamiliar composers. The latest of these, seen Saturday at the school's temporary performance space, the Florence Gould Auditorium at the French Institute/Alliance Francaise is Cendrillon, in a 1810 opera-comique by the Maltese composer Nicolo Isouard.

Who?

Opera Review: The Treasure Hunters

Manhattan School of Music unearths Die Zigeunerbaron.

by Paul J. Pelkonen

True love wins the day in the last scene if Die Zigeunerbaron.
Photo courtesy Manhattan School of Music.

Johann Strauss Jr. was the most popular composer of the Austrian Empire, and his waltzes still provide the social soundtrack of Vienna for the tourists that visit that city every year. However, with the exception of Die Fledermaus, his stage works have disappeared from the operatic repertory. This is a reflection of the general state of light opera and the changing tastes of a fickle public. The Manhattan School of Music has taken a huge step to correct this by choosing to end their spring season with Der Zigeunerbaron (”The Gypsy Baron”) an energetic operetta that is rarely seen anymore outside of a Viennese theater.

Opera Review: Nature Red in Tooth (and claw)

Manhattan School of Music presents a cunning little Vixen.

by Paul J. Pelkonen

Right before the feathers fly: the Vixen Sharp-Ears (Shantal Martin, foreground)
gets ready to ravage a chorus of chickens. Photo courtesty Manhattan School of Music.

Adaptations of cartoons and comics as popular entertainment are now commonplace in popular culture. A hundred years ago, that form of entertainment was opera, and it was Moravian composer Leoš Janáček who had the idea of taking a popular children's comic strip from a Brno paper and making it into an opera. Příhody lišky Bystroušky (literally "The Adventures of Vixen Sharp-Ears", also known as "The Cunning Little Vixen" was way ahead of its time. On Thursday night, the Senior Opera Theater of Manhattan School of Music unveiled a new bare-bones staging of this challenging three-act opera (sung in English) with a cast of young singers applying themselves to recreating the woodland fantasy of this vivid, vital opera.

Opera Review: Après de La Belle Epoque

The Manhattan School of Music offers a French double bill.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Images related to L'Enfant et les Sortilèges (left) and Persée et Andromède
presented as a double bill this week by the Manhattan School of Music.

French opera in the 1920s was marked by a spirit of wild experimentation. Composers, shocked by the destruction of the First World War, explored subjects from childhood or Greek mythology in an attempt to reach some sort of musical truth. This week, the Manhattan School of Music presented a pair of these works from 1924: Jacques Ibert's Persée et Andromède and Maurice Ravel's L'Enfant et les Sortileges, in the conservatory's final opera production of this current season.

Concert Review: To Battle the Giants

At the head of an army of performers, Kent Tritle takes on Mahler's Eighth.

by Paul J. Pelkonen

Gustav Mahler conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. Painting by Max Oppenheimer © 1935 Estate of the Artist.

You don't hear the Mahler Eighth much. 

Nicknamed the "Symphony of 1,000", it is the orchestral equivalent of Rabelais' medieval giant Gargantua. It requires two mixed choruses, children’s chorus, eight vocal soloists and an army of musicians with extra brass and wind, organ and a phalanx of strings. The score itself is another giant a 90-minute Pantagruel consisting of just two movements. For reasons known only to himself, Mahler paired the medieval hymn “Veni, creator spiritus” with a setting of the final scene of Part II of Goethe’s Faust, a gauzy exercise in German mysticism that depicts the long-suffering title character’s final transit into Heaven.

Opera Review: An Overwhelming Sense of Gilt

The Dangerous Liasons bows at MSM.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The Comte de Valmont's favorite piece of furniture in The Dangerous Liasons.

Since its publication in 1782, the French novel Les Liasons Dangereuses has had many incarnations. It has spawned six film adaptations, a hit Broadway show and kept corset-makers in business. In 1994, composer Conrad Susa and librettist Philip Littell turned it into an opera: The Dangerous Liasons  which premiered in San Francisco with an all-star cast. Mr. Susa's version  arrived this weekend at the Manhattan School of Music, with three performances (featuring two seperate casts) at Borden Auditorium.

Opera Review: Between Sun and Moon

The Manhattan School of Music mounts Die Zauberflöte.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The Queen of the Night by Erté.
Image by Erté © the estate of the artist.

Mozart's Die Zauberflöte is one of the most popular operas in the repertory, but staging  successful performance of it remains elusive. This Wednesday night, it was the Manhattan School of Music that accepted the challenge of staging the singspiel in a new production by director and dramaturge Jay Lesenger, imported to the conservatory following successful performances in the Midwest.

Opera Review: Double Toil, Double Trouble

MSM Opera unearths Ernest Bloch's Macbeth
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Uneasy lies the head...Composer Ernst Bloch, creator of Macbeth. 
Photo © G. Schirmer, image alteration by the author. 

The ever-searching and ever curious musical minds that program operas for graduate level performers at Manhattan School of Music have really dug up a doozy. On Wednesday night, MSM presented artistic director Dona D. Vaughan's staging of Macbeth, an innovative adaptation of Shakespeare's Scottish tragedy by composer Ernst Bloch. This was the New York premiere of the opera in its original French text, and the first staging of the Bloch Macbeth in New York since 1973.

It was well worth the wait.

The Superconductor Interview: Melvin Stecher and Norman Horowitz

The founders of the New York International Piano Competition.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Melvin Stecher and Norman Horowitz (left).
Photo from the Stecher Horowitz Foundation.

Melvin Stecher and Norman Horowitz know a good pianist when they hear one.

New York-based and partners in pianism for over six decades, (they met at the age of 17) they are the creators of the New York International Piano Competition, which starts June 23 at the Manhattan School of Music. In a telephone interview with Superconductor these two pianists (now 81) discussed their piano competition with energy and eagerness, occasionally interlocuting for each other with the ease of long musical partnership.

Opera Review: The Reality of Their Surroundings

MSM presents Haydn's Orlando Paladino.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Loco del calor: Kidon Choi (left) and Cameron Johnson in Orlando Paladino.
Photo © 2014 Manhattan School of Music.

It's not always easy to make opera appeal to contemporary audiences. When that opera is Haydn's 1782 opera Orlando Paladino, a court opera written for the private theater of Prince Esterhazy and based on an Italian epic poem that premiered in the year 1513, the task is doubly difficult. Happily, the Manhattan School of Music and director Robin Guarino have closed out their season with this bold, innovative production that explored the increasingly blurred line between the packaged insanity of so-called "reality" television and the terrifying reality of actual insanity.

Opera Review: When Mother Came Home

The Mother of Us All at Manhattan School of Music.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

History lesson: Noragh Devlin as Susan B. Anthony in the MSM production of The Mother of Us All.
Photo by Carol Rosegg © 2013 Manhattan School of Music.

Ever since Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea, the portrayal of historic figures has been central to the genre of opera. And no other opera packs in more history than The Mother Of Us All, the second collaboration between composer Virgil Thomson and the poet Gertrude Stein. That opera, which premiered in 1947 at Columbia University returned to Morningside Heights on Wednesday night. This new production at the Manhattan School of Music told the story effectively, but felt a bit fusty, like a school trip to a long-lost wing of the Smithsonian Institution.

Opera Review: The Return of Fun City

MSM presents Kurt Weill's Mahagonny.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

 Peter Tinaglia (left) Rachelle Pike and James Ioelu are the founders of Mahagonny.
Photo © 2013 Manhattan School of Music.

On Wednesday night, the brilliant and enthusiastic student artists of the Manhattan School of Music mounted a new production of Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (" Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny") at Borden Auditorium, delivering the show's searing moral message with a performance of high artistic quality. A taut performance from the MSM Orchestra under the baton of Kynan Johns caught the wry humor in Kurt Weill's score, with aural references to American jazz, Mozart and even Wagner's Parsifal shining through the aural fabric.

Opera Review: The Serenity Now

The Manhattan School of Music mounts Thaïs.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Spiritual seeker: Rebecca Krynski sings the title role of Thaïs at MSM.
Photo by Jeffrey Langford © 2012 Manhattan School of Music.

Jules Massenet's Thaïs is a strange girl.  In telling the story of an ascetic monk's disastrous obsession with the title character, a famous (fictional) prostitute in 4th century Egypt, the composer was striving to show the clash between pagan belief and the Christian world. What he got was an uneasy alliance between the soul-searching of Wagner's Tannhäuser and the heartbreak of Verdi's La Traviata.

In other words, when the goddess of love met early evangelism, there were no winners.

Happily, this production at the Manhattan School of Music (seen Friday night with the second cast) overcame the composer's florid mix of (Verdian) pathos and (Wagnerian) piety to create sympathetic, believable portraits of these outsized characters. The singers were couched within a simple, pleasing production (designed by André Barbe and originally seen at the Opera de Montréal) that used a contrast of bright colors (the lighting is by Guy Simard) and costumes (also by Mr. Barbé, from the Opera of St. Louis) to create an attractive show that evoked Massenet's Egypt with minimal means.

The severe vocal challenges written into the title role are one factor that keeps Thaïs off the world's stages. Soprano Rebecca Krynski made a convincing case for herself in the part, tracing the courtesan's path from bordello to cloister with a powerhouse performance that anchored the whole show. Elegant and teasing in the first act, Ms. Krynski managed to make Thaïs' lightning-quick conversion in Act II into a believable theatrical coup.

Opera Review: The Glittering Undead

The Manhattan School of Music resurrects The Ghosts of Versailles.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Marie Antoinette.
Painting by Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun.

In 1991, John Corigliano's opera The Ghosts of Versailles was the toast of New York. The witty libretto (by William Hoffmann) fearlessly combined Beaumarchais' robust comedy with the grief of an uncertain afterlife and the bloody nightmare of the French Revolution. Mr. Corigliano's music is a perfect complement, a polymath score rife with references and musical riddles, incorporating modern music alongside classicism. Its vibrant, emotional heart is wrapped in gilt.

Following one revival at the Met, Ghosts was silenced in New York. This sparkling revival is mounted by the Manhattan School of Music. (The school also happens to be Mr. Corigliano's alma mater.) Due to limitations of the Borden's orchestra pit, certain large instruments (percussion, harps) had to be played elsewhere in the school, and digitally mixed with the main performance.

These performances were also the first New York stagings of a smart, spiffy production by Jay Lesenger. The massive orchestration was also carved down (by orchestrator John David Earnest) to a lean 48 players under the taut control of Steven Osgood. These two artists (exiles from New York City Opera after that company's recent turmoil) worked together to create a grand evening, and one of the most enjoyable opera performances of this spring season.