Opera Review: One Little Goat

Amore Opera celebrates a decade with Meyerbeer's Dinorah.

by Paul J. Pelkonen

Looking for goats in all the wrong places: Jennifer Moore in Dinorah.
Photo © Amore Opera.

Mention composer Giacomo Meyerbeer to an opera lover and they will think of enormous five-movement works with extravagant staging requirements, lengthy ballets and tremendous orchestral and choral requirements. And yet, there was another less elaborate side to the Meyerbeer. This month, the small Amore Opera company, which is celebrating a decade of bringing intimate opera to the ears of New Yorkers, brought back Dinorah. This is an all but forgotten pastoral fairy tale, in the genre of  opera-comique that had not been staged in New York in 100 years. Sung in French and linked with spoken dialogue passages delivered in English, this proved to be a fun Saturday afternoon at the theater at Riverside Church.

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 Sleazy Life in Paris

Dell'Arte Opera Ensemble mounts Massenet's Manon.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

In a scene from Act III of Massenet's Manon, the title character (Olivia Betzen)
works her wiles on the hapless Des Grieux (Sean Christensen.)
Photo by Mark Baker for Dell'Arte Opera Ensemble.

When presenting the classic opera repertory, sometimes it is good to do a lot with very little. That is the mantra behind this handsome but economical staging of Massenet's Manon, currently running at the Nagelberg Theater, located deep within CUNY's Baruch College. This Manon is part of Dell'Arte Opera Ensemble's ongoing summer festival. Traditional in its costuming and yet modern in the staging approach of director Victoria Crutchfield, it proved a satisfying experience on Monday night.

Opera Review: The Golden Road to Samarkand

Opera Lafayette unearths Félicien David's Lalla Roukh.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Exotic: the dancers of Kalanidhi brought color to the opera Laila-Roukh,
performed Thursday night at Lincoln Center's Rose Theater by Opera Lafayette.
Image © 2013 Kalanidhi Kuchupuru Dance Troupe.

The annual Lincoln Center visits from Washington D.C.'s Opera Lafayette allow New York's opera lovers the chance to hear something exotic. Ryan Brown's company specializes in modestly scaled productions of lost classics. Their latest offering is Félicien David's 1862 opera-comique Lalla-Roukh. Although this work has vanished into obscurity in the last century, it was once among the most popular light operas in 19th century Paris.

To underline the exoticism of the setting, the performance opened with the Kalanidhi dance  troupe performing a brief two-part ballet to taped accompaniment, with jingling ankle-bells in the soft glow of blue lights. When the overture actually started, David's score proved to be a slice of "Indian" exoticism, leavened with humor and authentic French romantic melody. Although David's music fell out of favor with the rise of Wagnerism and the popularity of Massenet, a performance like this shows that a revival of interest is long overdue.

Lalla-Roukh is a perfect example of how imperial Europe saw the far East it had conquered. The story transports the classic boy-meets-girl scenario to the Silk Road, playing fast and loose with locations and history. (In case you're interested, the journey here starts in Kashmir and ends in Samarkand, a major trading point that is still a large city in present-day Uzbekistan.) David's music falls somewhere between Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio and Bizet's Carmen. In other words, this is a lightweight piece that is blessed with some good melodies.

Opera Review: La Plaisanterie Polonaise

Le roi malgré-lui at Bard SummerScape.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Motel hobbies: The Act III set for Le roi maigre-lui at Bard SummerScape.
Photo by Corey Weaver © 2012 Bard SummerScape/Bard Music Festival

The Fisher Center sits on the Bard College campus in the quiet college town of Annendale-on-Hudson. This Frank Gehry-designed theater is home to Bard SummerScape, where New York's opera lovers travel to hear works from deep in the repertory that are way off the beaten path of Verdi, Puccini and even Wagner. This year, the festival made its first comic offering: Emmanuel Chabrier's Le Roi malgré-lui ("The King in Spite of Himself") a comic confection that had just three performances at its 1887 debut--before the theater burned down.

The case for reviving Le roi malgré-lui is a difficult one. Although the opera contains some entertaining melodies, the weak libretto undermines the composer's efforts. The plot is a cross between the (failed) 1840 Verdi comedy Un Giorno di Regno and the composer's later Un Ballo in Maschera--with a reluctant ruler running afoul of an assassination conspiracy--and eventually joining it.

Here's the story: King Henri, a callow French nobleman is newly elected to take the throne of Poland. He hates his job. He abdicates, switches identities with his best friend Nangis, and joins a conspiracy against himself. Finally, he (reluctantly) takes back the reins of power and wins the girl, who happens to be married to one of his courtiers. The story contains a series of comic gyrations that can leave even the most jaded opera-goers scratching their heads.

Opera Review: All Mirth, And No Matter

Opera Boston mounts Béatrice et Bénédict.

Lady Disdain: Julie Boulianne (Béatrice) spurns Sean Pannikar (Bénédict.)
Photo by Clive Grainger © 2011. Courtesy Opera Boston.

Opera Boston continues to delve into adventurous repertory with Hector Berlioz' rarely heard Shakespeare opera Beatrice et Bénédict. Distilled from the pages of Much Ado About Nothing, the opera focuses on the romantic sparring of its two title characters. Tuesday night's performance, reviewed here, was the last of the run at the Majestic Theater. 

Tenor Sean Pannikar and mezzo Julie Boulianne made their company debuts in the title roles. Mr. Pannikar has a clear, pleasing tenor that compresses slightly when he rises above the stave. Forced to switch between sung French and spoken English for the duration of the opera, Mr. Pannikar's performance took flight the Shakespeare text yielded to Berlioz' music.

Ms. Boulianne faced similar problems, delivering the spoken dialogue with awkward flourishes. Her fine-pointed, dusky mezzo was suited to Béatrice's pert nature, but her mannerisms made this a difficult heroine to love. She improved in the second act, singing the gorgeous trio and bringing real warmth to her reconciliation and eventual marriage.

Although Béatrice is the opera's titular heroine, her cousin Hero (soprano Heather Buck) gets some of the best music to sing. The Nocturne, sung by Hero and her handmaiden Ursule, (Kelley O'Connor) wove a spell of Berliozian magic. In a manner reminiscent of the Dance of the Sylphs in La Damnation de Faust, it brought Act one to a subtle, gorgeous close.

One of Berlioz' better additions to the play is Somarone, a music master played here by baritone Andrew Funk. A conductor/composer (like Berlioz himself), this fellow's preening, fawning behavior allowed the composer to have little fun at the expense of his profession. Mr. Funk played the part for laughs, particularly the Wagnerian bit about using a particular baton to create darkness and light from his orchestra. As his performers left in disgust, one thought of Haydn's Farewell Symphony. Finally, he led the Act II Improvisation (a bawdy drinking-song) with gusto.

This is Berlioz' fourth and final opera, and his second entry in the genre of opéra-comique. In this style, spoken dialogue is used instead of recitative, interpolated between the arias and ensembles. Since French speech is usually delivered at a rapid clip, it can be challenging for an American audience to follow, even with surtitles.

The solution chosen here was to use an English translation, culled mostly from Shakespeare's text by director David Kneuss. Mr. Kneuss' treatment of the text was difficult for the actors. The characters delved in and out of Shakespeare's idiom, in a struggle to meet the needs of the libretto. The production moved the action to a 20th-century setting, in sets suggesting a Tuscan villa was a low-budget nod to Kenneth Branagh's movie version of the play.

All of the singers seemed uncomfortable delivering the dialogue, with even the lesser members of the cast falling prey to over-exaggeration. In the pit, music director Gil Rose did his best to compensate. Although the famous overture was curiously muted, the later pages of the opera sparkled, and the final double-marriage scene ended the evening on an upbeat note.