Opera Review: Dinner and Two Shows

On Site Opera stages a gala benefit at The Harmonie Club.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Not the marrying kin: Leah Partridge as Miss Havisham at On Site Opera.
Photo by David Andrako for On Site Opera.

The Harmonie Club stands on E. 60th St. just steps from Central Park. Its staid exterior protected by a blue awning and an antique revolving door, surmounted by a polite plaque reading "Members Only." Founded in 1852 by German Jews who were blackballed from the nearby Metropolitan Club, it is New York's second oldest continually operating gentleman's club, a throwback to a New York that now mostly exists in the imagination of writers.

Opera Review: Blood, Breakfast and Broken Hearts

Opera Manhattan presents Women on the Verge.

Francois Poulenc's La voix humaine was featured at Opera Manhattan.

With the vast and diverse opera scene in New York City, one never knows what might be on the stage as Valentine's Day approaches. Sometimes it's romantic melodrama--the Met this year is offering Ernani. Others, it's darker works, including one memorable season with a Feb. 14 production of Wozzeck.

This year, the run-up to this Hallmark® holiday was marked by Women on the Verge, a bold production of three monodramas, offered by Opera Manhattan, a small, but brave company that does much of their work with a piano as the sole musical accompaniment. The production, offered in the penthouse space at Shetler Studios, may have been spare but the young vocal talent on display was rich indeed.

The performance led off with Sofia Dimitrova as Lady Macbeth. This was not Verdi or Horovitz, but rather a setting by contemporary American composer Thomas Pasatieri. Ms. Dimitrova evoked the steely strength of Shakespeare's murderous queen in this setting of five monologues from the Scottish play. Ms. Dimitrova (no relation) has a potent dramatic instrument, almost overwhelming in the little theater. She sang the crescendo leading up to the murder of Duncan with real power, and evoked the suffering and child-like state of madness required in the Sleep-walking Scene. 

Another Pasatieri work followed, his one-act opera Before Breakfast which was first heard at the City Opera in 1980. The original play was an experiment by Eugene O'Neill dating from 1916. (He wanted to see how long audiences would stand a single monologue.) O'Neill's play predates the 1924 premiere of Schoenberg's monodrama Erwartung, although the composer had written that opera in 1909. 

Before Breakfast  follows the morning routine of Mrs. Charlotte Rowland, a housewife (Jayne Skoog) who discovers that her shiftless, two-timing husband (an unemployed poet) has another lover who is about to have a baby. This is tough, two-fisted drama, where the singer is required to switch rapidly through a convoluted set of emotions as the evidence is discovered, reminisces are touched upon, and the little story boils to an unhappy climax.

Ms. Skoog made the most of this work's wide dynamic range, drawing the listeners into this little kitchen and the misery of a morning where the only relief comes from a little silver flask. This was a powerful, scenery-chewing performance which also was an effective display of a bright-toned instrument with ringing top notes.

The most familiar work on this program was François Poulenc's La voix humaine, a monodrama in the form of a telephone call. Written and premiered in 1959, the opera is based on a 1930 play by Jean Cocteau. It tells the story of a young woman who is breaking up with her lover in the course of a long, agonizing telephone call. (Cocteau's play reflects the notoriously dodgy phone service in Paris in the '30s.

Soprano Roza Tulyaganova gave a pointed, convincing portrait of this young woman's breakdown, from the desperate pleas to her lover to evocations of their tender past. The work is filled with stops and starts, staccato figures that indicate the ringing of the telephone. Like the two monodramas that preceded it, Poulenc's work requires a wide dynamic and dramatic range. It was an intense, intimate experience.

None of these works would have worked without the sensitive accompaniment of pianist Tristan Cano. He used his piano to create a wide range of effects, from the minor-key chords in Lady Macbeth's sleep-walk to the twisted waltzes that accompany sections of Before Breakfast. This bright young pianist was at his best in the Poulenc work, creating the composer's complex, yet lyric sound-world and occasionally interrupting the dream-like music with the harsh staccato as the phone rang and reconnected.

Opera Review: Three Faces of the Void

City Opera experiments with Monodramas.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Soprano Anu Komsi in La Machine d'etre.
Photo by Carol Rosegg ©2011 New York City Opera

On Friday night, the City Opera unveiled Monodramas, a triptych of modern operas, each with a single female protagonist. Though two of the works lacked anything resembling a plot, it was a fascinating evening of experimental opera--a bold gesture from a company that nearly went dark two years ago.

La Machine d'etre, ("The Machine of Existence") led off, the first opera by downtown jazz-rebel John Zorn. This was the world premiere of Mr. Zorn's piece, and served as the City Opera debut of soprano Anu Komsi. She was slowly unwrapped, appearing like a Wagner heroine to sing wordless melismas against Mr. Zorn's jagged rhythms and shifting tonal palette.

The plotless work, inspired by the drawings of Antonin Artaud, opened with a memorable image: the City Opera company concealed and rendered genderless by gray burkhas. The performance featured Mr. Artaud's illustrations, animated above the stage on two "flying" cartoon word-balloons. Beneath them, Ms. Komsi displayed an impressive vocal technique. It would be pleasing to learn how this Finnish soprano sounds when she has words to sing.

Kara Shay Thomson, lost in the woods in Erwartung.
Photo by Carol Rosegg © 2011 New York City Opera

Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung is the only familiar opera on this program. Written in 1909, it is the story of a nameless woman (Kara Shay Thomson, in her company debut) lost in a forest at night. Veering on the edge of madness, she encounters the dead body of her lover. Schoenberg's expressionist score captures the madness and torment of the woman. Ms. Thomson's performance was that of a promising dramatic soprano, navigating her big voice through the tricky, and often exposed passages of the half-hour work.

George Manahan emphasized the rich, melodic content of Schoenberg's score, and the City Opera orchestra was in top form. As with the first work, Ms. Thomson was slowly revealed from beneath her burkha. She was surrounded by a small group of silent, female doppelgangers, all wearing identical white dresses, a memorable image. The most mind-blowing moment of Erwartung arrived in the closing bars: an imaginative, superbly executed time-reversal effect that stopped the opera in its tracks.

Cynthia Sieden (left) and the mirrored boxes of neither.
Photo by Carol Rosegg © 2011 New York City Opera

neither is an apt title for the final work on the program, a lengthy excursion into form and function by American minimalist Morton Feldman. Feldman is an expert at writing stretched-out textures on an enormous canvas. (His String Quartet No. 2 lasts six hours if you play all the repeats.) neither is a setting of a text by Samuel Beckett, and true to this composer's style, each word is stretched out to its breaking point over a series of repeated figures in the orchestra.

Cynthia Sieden did a commendable job of singing the work, a formidable task since she had to hit the same pitch again and again for the first half with absolutely no melodic or harmonic development. The words are stretched distorted to the point where not even the supertitles help with comprehension.

The stage action featured skilled physical movement, at a glacial pace that recalled the productions of Robert Wilson. The action, such as it was, took place inside an iridescent, shimmering cube, adorned with colored lights and 66 (I counted) mysterious mirrored boxes that raised and lowered slowly from the ceiling, hanging in mid-air like miniature avatars of the 2001 monolith. It looked really cool. And it was all very mysterious.