Opera Review: Slaughter on 12th Avenue

On Site Opera presents Blue Monday at The Cotton Club.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Before the bullets fly: Joe (Chase Taylor) and Vi (Alyson Cambridge) canoodle in the Cotton Club.
Photo by Richard Termine © 2013 On Site Opera.

The current incarnation of Harlem's fabled Cotton Club may be an echo of the establishment's heyday, when Duke Ellington led the orchestra and Fletcher Henderson reigned supreme. But on Monday night, Eric Einhorn's young opera company On Site Opera made the Harlem venue culturally relevant again with a production of Blue Monday, the 1922 one-act jazz opera by one George Gershwin.

The Superconductor Interview: Eric Einhorn

The director brings Blue Monday to Harlem's historic Cotton Club.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The sign of the historic Cotton Club. Image from FotoPedia.

In order for opera to evolve, it has escaped from the stuffy confines of the opera house.

The last five years have seen an uptick in the number of companies willing to take chances and present opera outside its usual venue. From coffee barges moored off of Red Hook to the landscaped walks of the Bronx Zoo, opera is busting out all over.

One young company that is taking advantage of this trend is Eric Einhorn's On Site Opera, a troupe devoted to performing rare repertory in unconventional locations. This Tuesday, OSO will present its second show: George Gershwin's jazz opera Blue Monday on the hallowed dance floor of The Cotton Club in Harlem.

Recordings Review: The Battle of Vienna: 1928

Exploring Ernst Krenek's Jonny spielt auf. 

The stage set for the train station scene in Jonny spielt auf, 1928.
Photo from the Vienna State Opera Archives © Wiener Staatsoper.

On Dec. 6. Decca Classics' latest slate of back-catalogue opera reissues includes the important  Leipzig recording of Ernst Krenek's jazz opera Jonny spielt auf..

An Austrian of Czech descent, Krenek (1900-1991) was no jazzman. He was in fact a fiercely eclectic, modern composer whose music veered from tonality to serialism and sometimes back again in the course of a long, brilliant career. Today, he is best remembered as a music educator and for making the first attempt to edit the score of Mahler's Tenth Symphony. He is also an important, underrated composer in the 20th century whose cerebral music deserves more exposure.

A pack of Austrian Jonny cigarettes ca. 1928.
This is not an endorsement, nor is it intended
to promote the use of tobacco in any way.

Jonny (the title translates as "Jonny Plays On") was the hot opera of 1928. Krenek was inspired by the jazz revue Chocolate Babies. The opera premiered in Leipzig in 1927 and was an instant success. It is the story of a love affair between Max, an intellectual composer (Krenek himself?) and Anita, a soprano. The title character, an itinerant African-American musician (usually played by a white actor in black-face sets the world dancing after he steals Max's violin.

When Jonny-mania hit Vienna, Krenek's innovations drew the ire of that city's leading music critic, one Julius Korngold. The father of composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the elder Korngold worked hard to promote the virtues of his son's more conservative (but equally brilliant) opera, Das Wunder der Heliane. But he did so by writing negatively about Krenek's opera. The effort backfired, and Heliane fizzled.

The competition between operas extended as far as the smoke shops of the Austrian capital. Ostereiche Tabakregie promoted the elegant, expensive "Heliane" cigarettes as an alternate to the cheap "Jonny" blend. Like Krenek's opera, the plebian taste proved more popular. (You can still buy Jonny cigarettes in Austria. In interest of public health, this blog does not recommend you do so.)

Krenek had a bona fide smash on his hands. Jonny crossed the pond, with the Metropolitan Opera mounting the work in 1929. The libretto was rewritten so that Jonny was no longer an African-American, but the role was played by a white actor in blackface. It ran for seven performances, and has never been revived.

The rise of Adolf Hitler led to both operas being labeled "Entarte Musik," examples of what Nazi censors called "degenerate" art, and then banned..  Jonny languished in obscurity for the next 50 years. Although it never regained a place in the repertory, it is staged occasionally, with productions in Vienna (2005) and at the Teatro Colon in Argentina in 2006. Both composers emigrated to America. Krenek became an academic and wrote an important Violin Concerto. Korngold went to Hollywood and found fame writing film scores.

The recording in question comes from the 1990s, when Decca started a program to record and preserve these specific operas that were declared "degenerate." Both Jonny and Heliane were recorded as part of that series. The jazz opera was preserved on this excellent two-CD set, featuring the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by Lothar Zagrosek. The cast features heldentenor Tom Krause as Max, and soprano Allessandra Marc as Anita. Thanks to this reissue, you can discover Jonny for yourself.

You can learn more about Ernst Krenek and his opera at the Ernst Krenek Society.

Opera Review: The New Cruelty

Berliner Ensemble present Threepenny Opera at BAM.

Swinging London: Macheath (Stefan Kurt, center)
about to be hanged in Act III of Threepenny Opera. 
Photo by Leslie Leslie-Spinks © 2011 Brooklyn Academy of Music.

It is entirely appropriate that this year's NextWave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music chose to mount the acerbic Three- penny Opera (in a production by the Berliner Ensemble and Robert Wilson) during the Occupy Wall Street protests. Coincidence, but entirely appropriate.

Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Jazz-Oper is well known in this country as the source of "Mack the Knife", a jazz standard and a pop hit for Bobby Darin in 1959. In this production, using the original German text and the bare-bones vision of director Robert Wilson, Threepenny regains its sharp teeth. Brecht's bitter commentary about man's inhumanity was especially resonant last night--the audience roared approval at that line about bankers being worse than murderers.

Mr. Wilson's staging emphasizes Brecht's "theater of alienation." His production removed most of the sets, trappings and even props from the action, forcing the listener to focus on the text. The effect: this sordid tale of London's back alleys (based on The Beggar's Opera by British composer John Gay) becomes a strange, alien ritual, conducted by just-landed extraterrestrials with the rogue Macheath as the sacrificial victim.

Opera Review: In Search of New Roots

City Opera Explores Treemonisha in Harlem

Scott Joplin, composer of Treemonisha.

On Monday night, the New York City Opera gave a concert performance at Harlem's Schomburg Center, performing excerpts from Scott Joplin's too rarely heard opera Treemonisha. Joplin is remembered today as the father of ragtime but struggled all his life to be counted as a composer of serious music.

Those who know Joplin from the "Maple Leaf Rag" or "Solace" (played before the opera by Mr. Roy Eaton) might be surprised by the soaring arias and rich choral textures of Treemonisha. The two-act opera has passages inspired by Handel, Beethoven and Wagner, shot through with Joplin's own gift for memorable melody. One number, the closing "A Real Slow Drag" was so memorable that it wound up a major hit--for Irving Berlin, who hijacked the melody to write "Alexander's Ragtime Band."

Like Wagner, Joplin wrote his own libretto, creating a small town where a local girl (the title character, found under a tree as an infant) overcomes superstition and the depradations of three traveling con artists to rise up and become a pillar of her community. In some way, the uplifting Treemonisha is a counterpart to Carlisle Floyd's later opera Susannah, in which a child of nature is destroyed by a lustful preacher.


The excerpts were performed by a cast of five singers and two dancers, accompanied by pianist Bradley Moore. Soprano Marsha Thompson soared in the title role. Baritone Kenneth Overton and mezzo Krysty Swann sang with fine, powerful voices. Ms. Swann reached powerful heights with "The Sacred Tree", chronicling Treemonisha's birth. Tenor Robert Mack and bass-baritone Kevin Thompson were also an important part of the ensemble, creating rich barbershop-style textures in ensembles like "Bag of Luck" and "We're Going Around."

The program, hosted by Roy Eaton combined a jumble of scenes and numbers from the opera with spoken poetry from several important African-American poets (including Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou) evoking the importance of dreams. A slide show depicted Joplin's Harlem roots, and Mr. Eaton spoke eloquently of the parallels between Joplin's piano "rags" and the "serious" works of Chopin and Brahms.

For the past three years City Opera has previewed important works at the Langston Hughes Auditorium. But following the company's announced decision to uproot itself from Lincoln Center, this performance carried new meaning and a chilling portent of what may be in store for the diminished, downsized company. Let's hope that the company's next stab at Treemonisha will be as Scott Joplin intended, in a proper opera house with a full band in the pit and company of singers and dancers onstage. That would be a good dream.