Opera Reviews and Interviews

Because I am unable to see this production, no review is pending. Los Angeles Opera La bohème

Suzan Hanson, Roberto Perlas Gomez and Chorus. Photo by Keith Ian Polakoff.

Things go crazy/wonderful in Long Beach Opera’s high-spirited productions of two short surrealist works: Bohuslav Martinů’s “Tears of a Knife” (with libretto by Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes) and Francis Poulenc’s “The Breasts of Tiresias” (with libretto by Guillaume Apollinaire).

Review by David Gregson, Monday, March 12, 2011

Let’s see. Whom do I love? I have a little windmill on my head that draws up these deep thoughts from my solar plexus.

I love the Long Beach Opera because only it would be mad enough to produce a double bill of surrealist operas. Surrealist operas are distinctly different from- and-than serialist operas, by the way, although newspaper proofreaders have been known to confuse the two terms — thereby encouraging torrents of readership invective to rain down like drops of adamantine absinthe upon their music critics.

I love the music of Francis Poulenc, who admired Stravinsky despite his suspicion that Stravinsky would not admire him. Poulenc wrote innumerable really beautiful songs, many of them set to texts by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. In fact, it’s almost impossible to find a song by Poulenc that is anything less than gorgeous. His opera, “The Breasts of Tiresias” (“Les Mamelles de Tirésias’), sounds exactly like his wonderful songs and is being performed now in Long Beach. “Mamelles” sounds like “mammals,” and mammals have breasts, although “les poitrines” are a notable feature of many women in France as well as internationally.

I would love to love the music of Bohuslav Martinü, but his works are not performed very often around these parts; as a result, I have not yet developed a scalding passion. The “Tears of a Knife” — that is to say “tears” as in the French “les larmes” for “teardrops” as opposed to things that rip you up — is only the second Martinü opera I have ever seen in my life, the first being the full-length “Mirandolina” at the Wexford Festival in Ireland. Wexford, like Long Beach, does unusual things (thank goodness), which is why I love both Wexford and Long Beach and am happy to have seen “The Tears of a Knife” which I most certainly would have not have done had LBO’s superb artistic and general director Andres Mitisek not decided that it was an awfully good idea and then gone so far as to conduct it with an orchestra in which only two persons (the concert master and a trumpet player) are not listed as a “principals”. You can’t go wrong when everybody is a principal. Read about these terrific principals below!

I love Roberto Perlas Gomez, an excellent and amazingly versatile baritone whom I have seen in every role he lists in the program — except for his “signature” role of Figaro in “The Barber of Seville,” which must be like rolling off a log for him considering some of the astounding parts he has already tackled, the title role in Vivaldi’s “Motezuma” to name but one. I also didn’t see him in Manila creating the role of Rizal in “Rizal,” although I am willing to bet I am the only other person here to have read José Rizal’s novel “Noli Me Tangere” over a dinner of sinigang and kare-kare at the Barrio Fiesta in the Philippines.

Gomez plays the hanging man in “Tears” (and is surrealistically wasted, since the role is mute), but he is also the Theater Director and Gendarme in “Breasts,” and is of course excellent — not to mention rather hilarious.

Roberto Perlas Gomez, Robin Buck. Photo by Keith Ian Polakoff.

I love soprano Ani Maldjian (Eleonore in “Tears” and Thérèse and Tiresias in “Breasts’). She is a truly marvelous singer and a clever instinctive actress with a lovely, clear, stable and really sizable sounding voice. I admit, however, to having been in the front row. Her breasts fly away, sort of (they are helium balloons) and, fed up with the burdens of French womanhood, she becomes a man. Her nameless husband, baritone Robin Buck (whom I also love, naturally) responds to this feminist gesture by wearing a dress and through astounding parthenogenesis, sires legions of children. Buck, who always impresses, scored in the “Tears” opera as well by being the ubiquitous Mr. Satan who has farcical powers of life and death — a necessity, really in an opera that features a young girl determined to marry a corpse.

Ani Maldjian. Photo Keith Ian Polakoff

I also love Suzan Hanson. I mean, who wouldn’t? She has “been in everything” in Long Beach and hasn’t had a turkey yet, nor laid an egg (both surrealistic possibilities). She was the Mother in “Tears,” fruitlessly urging her hanged-man-obssessive daughter to marry Satan instead. He lives just next door. But, like Suzan Hanson herself in real life, Satan is everywhere and can do anything. If you read about Suzan Hanson (a super multi-talented polymath almost beyond credibility) you wonder if she didn’t write the operas as well. She is the real thing in a surreal world. Seriously.

I think I have named (below) all the excellent dancers and ensemble artists who add immeasurably to the success of these operas. I cannot overlook Benito Galindo as Monsieur Presto and Doug Jones as Monsieur Lacouf, especially as they — flying in the face of an opera which like Richard Strauss’s “Die Frau ohne Schatten” wants us to all go home and start having babies — seemed, as I say against all odds and logic, to be be playing a gay couple. Whatever the case, they were welcome vocal presences with a fine sense of physical comedy.

Benito Galindo and Doug Jones as Presto and Lacouf. Photo by Keith Ian Polakoff.

My melting watch covered with ants tells me I have gone on long enough. I think I’ll watch Bunuel’s “Exterminating Angel” and go to bed.

Martinů’s TEARS OF A KNIFE and Poulenc’s THE BREASTS OF TIRESIAS

TEARS OF A KNIFE
Hangman – Roberto Perlas Gomez
Eleonore – Ani Maldjian
Satan/Saturn – Robin Buck
Mother – Suzan Hanson
Ensemble – Linda Alexander, David Blair, Eric Carampatan, Jennifer Miller, Dabney Ross Jones, Shawn Taylor

Robin Buck and a few of his babies. Photo Keith Ian Polakoff.

THE BREASTS OF TIRESIAS
Theatre Director/Gendarme – Roberto Perlas Gomez
Therese/Tiresias – Ani Maldjian
Husband – Robin Buck
Monsieur Lacouf/Reporter/Son – Doug Jones
Monsieur Presto – Benito Galindo
Newspaper Vendor – Suzan Hanson
Dancers – Lucie McGrane, Daniele Manzin
Chorus – Linda Alexander, David Blair, Eric Carampatan, Scott Levin, Jennifer Miller, Dabney Ross Jones, Nandani Sinha, Shawn Taylor
Actor – Paul Oppenheim

Conductor – Andreas Mitisek
Stage Director/Choreographer – Ken Roht
Set Designer – Alan Muraoka
Video Designer – John J Flynn
Light Designer – Azra King-Abadi
Costume Designer – Lake Sharp

Long Beach Opera Orchestra of Principals. Alyssa Park, concertmaster; Sai-ly Acosta, second violin; Caroline Buckman, viola; Timothy Loo, cello; Karl Vincent, bass; Teri M. Christian, flute and piccolo; David Kossoff, oboe; Douglas Masek, saxaphone; Todd Palmer, clarinet; Maciej Flis, bassoon; Daniel Rosenboom, trumpet; Dustin McKinney, almost principal trumpet; Stephanie O’Keefe, horn; Noah Gladstone, tenor trombone; Steve Trapani, bass trombone; Paul Sternhagen, percussion; Nada Kandimirova, piano; Timothy Loo, orchestra manager. Bravi, bravissimo!

Center Theater, Performing Arts Center, Long Beach
Sun. March 11, 2012 – 2PM
Sat. March 17, 2012 – 8PM

90 minutes, 1 intermission

Long Beach Opera tickets and information

Charles Castronovo and John Del Carlo. Photo by Ken Howard.

Saturday, March 10, 2012
Review by David Gregson written March 12

Either I have mellowed (which is very likely) or the David Gately Wild West Don Pasquale is simply a great deal better this time around.

Back in 2002, our local KPBS-FM station carried an ad boasting that this San Diego Opera production had “More laughs than Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles,” causing me to complain that two distinct groups had thereby been offended – Mel Brooks fans and bel canto buffs. My point was that Donizetti’s opera buffa contains passages of unsurpassed lyricism that would not be out of place in Donizetti’s most serious works — and that too much horsing around interferes with the singing.

Writing in Opera News I argued, “While the Donizetti/Giovanni Ruffini libretto allows for alternating moments of comedy and serious romance, this production placed in the ‘American West of the 1800′s’ by stage director David Gately and set designer Tony Fanning, became an exercise in non-stop hilarity, with nobody on stage or in the pit pausing to smell the cactus flowers. Comic schtick of every conceivable kind seemed to be going on in both the foreground and background of virtually every scene.”

In short, I thought back then that the intended laugh riot ruined the music. Tenor Matthew Polenzani was the cowboy hero, Ernesto; and soprano Ying Huang was Norina, Ernesto’s mischievous inamorata who ultimately tricks her way out of a forced marriage to a foolish man much too old for her, the eponymous title character of the opera. Comic basso Bruno Praticò sang Pasquale, in this production an elderly Wild West hotel owner, and baritone Christopher Schaldenbrand was his friend, Dr. Malatesta (to whom, as I noted, “Donizetti assigns much of the score’s most beautiful material.”)

But after several years of much more egregious damage dealt to Donizetti worldwide by “directors’ theater” productions, this Gately romp seems relatively innocuous, even cozy and charming. It’s total kitsch, of course, but after all, we do live in that corner of the US where the great film director John Ford created a celluloid Mythic West for all the world to see. So, the 19th-century Roman locale becomes 19th-century northern Arizona or southern Utah. We see Don Pasquale’s “hotel lobby” and “office,” a room in “Norina’s ranch,” and, of course, “Miss Kitty’s” cathouse. A cyclorama of northern Arizona’s Monument Valley dominates the background. Ernesto might as well be John Wayne. Miss Kitty, I assume, is a reference to Gunsmoke, though that Miss Kitty was a saloon owner, not a madam, if I recall correctly. Never mind that Monument Valley is a Navajo Nation Reservation and even was one way back when Ford was making it a Western American icon.

And so to this current revival: I have been a big fan of soprano Danielle de Niese ever since I first encountered her in some Rameau and Handel DVDs. She is utterly charming on stage, and her voice has darkened recently, becoming fuller and more mature. She made a superb Norina, that mischievous imposter, never for a moment having drawn breath in a convent; nonetheless, she had great fun pretending to be the ingenuous innocent thing Pasquale believes her to be. Her arias were fine, and she excelled in her duet with her leading man.

Danielle de Niese as Norina. Photo by Ken Howard.

Tenor Charles Castronovo, one of a vast new army of vocally gifted male opera singers who also seem buff and ready to bare it all on stage, sang gorgeously all evening. A beautiful solo trumpet prelude preceded his Act II aria “Cerchero lontana terra,” which he delivered with confident aplomb even from the depths of a bubble bath into which his naughty companions coyly dropped toy boats. He also excelled in the garden serenade of Act III, “Com’ è gentil,” with a sleepy Mexican band clowning in the background.

Bass-baritone John del Carlo, whom I heard only very recently live at the Met (and in HD video transmissions) in this role, really cannot be equaled for comic timing, and I think he brings just the right amount of pathos to the role. After all, the plot places him in a rather cruel situation. The story is a time honored one that ridicules the entire notion of an elderly man taking a youthful wife — or of even thinking about doing so. It’s a tired ageist concept, I fear. Del Carlo, by playing the part as a credible human being, lends dimension to a shallow joke.

Contributing to all the headaches (the name Dr. Malatesta seems to suggest an onslaught of migraines) was baritone Jeff Mattsey who impressed immediately with his Act One “Bella siccome un’ angelo,” even if the tone spread a little. He became much stronger as the evening progressed. Meanwhile, conductor Marco Guidarini made sure that the San Diego Symphony played stylishly. He clearly has an affinity for the music of Donizetti — a composer, by the way, who wrote many excellent operas that never seem to be played anymore anywhere that I am aware of. I have LP shelves full of works I never expect to hear live!
—-
Why this review is late: On opening night, I returned from the Don Pasquale saying “it just may turn out to be the biggest success of the season — with apologies to the Great White Whale! It has a superb cast, is beautifully conducted, and the John Ford production concept (with a view of Monument Valley in the distance) is a winner with the audience. Unfortunately, I have to hit the road at the crack of dawn to take a party of Long Beach Opera fans up the coast for a matinee double bill of Poulenc’s The Breasts of Tiresias and Martinu’s Tears of a Knife. Plans for very early rising complicated by the “spring-forward” time change make it difficult to write about anything sensibly at the moment. But I had to take the time to say the evening was a total pleasure.”

Jeff Mattsey as Dr. Malatesta. Photo by Ken Howard.

THE CAST

Don Pasquale: John Del Carlo
Norina: Danielle De Niese
Ernesto: Charles Castronovo
Dr. Malatesta: Jeff Mattsey
Notary: David Marshman
Hop Sing: Robert Dahey

Conductor: Marco Guidarini
Director: David Gately
Scenic Designer: Tony Fanning
Costume Designer: Helen E. Rodgers
Lighting Designer: Harry Frehner
Wig and Makeup Designer: Steven W. Bryant
Chorus Master: Charles Prestinari
Principal Pianist: Dorothy Randall
Supertitles: Ian D. Campbell
Italian Diction Coach: Emanuela Patroncini

Saturday, March 10 at 7 p.m.
Tuesday, March 13 at 7 p.m.
Friday, March 16 at 8 p.m.
Sunday, March 18 at 2 p.m.

For more info on tickets

Alek Shrader as Albert Herring, with Daniela Mack as Nancy and Liam Bonner as Sid. Photo by Robert Millard.

Review by David Gregson
March 6, 2012

I rather feel as if all I need to do is reword my comments about this opera and this particular production of it which I first saw in Santa Fe in 2010. The only thing that makes the remounting of this production at Los Angeles Opera less than ideal is the mildly painful reality that the Santa Fe Opera’s sets do not so neatly fit into the vaster expanses of the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

To quasi-plagiarize myself (in the sincerest form of semi self-flattery): Superbly conducted by James Conlon (with a select group of Los Angeles Opera players who actually took to the stage at curtain call) and benefitting from Paul Curran’s canny, clever and amusing stage direction, Benjamin Britten’s comedy, “Albert Herring”, is a charming addition to the current LAO season, albeit one that reflects some of the financial belt tightening brought about by the Achim Freyer “Ring Cycle” with incidental music by Richard Wagner. I am virtually alone among opera critics’ voices crying in the wilderness about Freyer’s memorably awful Wagnerian desecration, a kind of kinetic art installation with “The Ring” as an aural accompaniment!

LAO’s “Albert Herring” is excellent in almost every way, although I have never counted the opera among my favorite Britten works. The caricatures of small village types (stereotypes, really) have always struck me as a little cloying and self-consciously cute on the part of their creators, librettist Eric Crozier and the composer himself. I suspect today’s audiences, especially those who have been following “Downton Abbey” on PBS, find this opera’s English village and its aristocratic meddler, Lady Billows, a bit drab after experiencing a heady diet of upstairs-downstairs soap opera in which immorality and wild happenings are the rule of the day. “Herring” opera-goers were seen to be fleeing at intermission, but those who stayed loved it — or at least they seemed to.

The opera’s plot is not too complicated to explain in a few sentences: Because the unbearably priggish Lady Billows (wonderfully sung and acted by soprano Janice Kelly) cannot find an acceptably virtuous local girl to be Queen of the May in the town’s seasonal festival, she, with considerable prodding from her housekeeper (fabulous mezzo-soprano Ronnita Nicole Miller), the schoolteacher Miss Wordsworth (played to fidgety perfection by soprano Stacey Tappan), and the town vicar, the mayor and the police superintendent (all excellent and listed below), she chooses the innocent, pure and supposedly simple-minded working ox, Albert Herring, as King of the May. The aggressively heterosexual couple, Sid and Nancy (in fabulous incarnations created by baritone Liam Bonner and mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack ) help precipitate Herring’s fall from grace. Sid spikes Albert’s lemonade with rum, and before the festival day is over, Albert is on a rampage — and proud of it. Essentially he no longer gives a damn what anybody thinks, even his suffocating mother (hilariously performed by mezzo-soprano Jane Bunnell).

The work’s eponymous hero is naive virtually to the point of incredibility. It’s one thing to be a mama’s boy working as a shopkeeper in Loxford, East Suffolk (a fictional locale), and quite another to have never tasted alcohol nor, at his, age to have even attempted to try it — nor to be able to recognize it when he drinks it in a glass of lemonade. Albert also gets very drunk rather quickly. I am certain Crozier and Britten know East Suffolk better than I do, yet when I lived in a British village as a young man, my English “parents” and their children went to the local pubs together and there were drunks on every corner after “closing time”. How can one so long be shielded from such a reality?

Stacey Tappan as Miss Wordsworth; Robert McPherson as Mr. Upfold, the Mayor; Richard Bernstein as Superintendent Budd; Jonathan Michie as Mr. Gedge, the Vicar. Photo by Robert Millard

As for the role of Albert himself — it will be many years before anyone will come along as good as tenor Alex Shrader. For me, he will always be Albert Herring. Not only does he sing gorgeously, he brings the part a distinct and palpable masculine attractiveness that makes the character all the more interesting. Underneath the nerdy exterior, we know there is a real man waiting to be unleashed. Certainly one did not feel this so strongly with Peter Pears!

I tend to see Herring as a metaphor for Britten’s experience with homosexuality in the UK. At one time to engage in homosexual acts was actually illegal and there was considerable intolerance in society at large. On some level Herring’s ultimate liberation is symbolic of a coming out of the closet. Many of Britten’s works appear to be encoded with messages about his personal feelings of oppression and marginalization as a gay man, although to assert this is to be guilty of the “biographical fallacy” most critics of my generation usually reject. Surely “Albert Herring” — and “Peter Grimes,” for that matter — can be appreciated without reference to Britten’s private life.

On a personal note, I have to mention that Albert’s final liberating gesture — the throwing his King of the May boater hat into the audience — directly affected my seat companion at whose feet the Frisbee-like, tattered and prop-worn hat, landed with a plop. Sadly, she had to surrender it to a backstage prop man upon our exiting the row — and she was awarded with a T shirt as a consolation prize. “I caught Albert Herring’s hat and all I got is this damned T-shirt,” is essentially the amusing sentiment posted on her site.

Finally — while “Albert Herring” is not an opera I love to distraction, I greatly admire the skill and inventiveness of the overall composition. Britten explores all sorts of musical forms in marvelously complex and often very humorous numbers and ensembles, and while the piece is not especially moving (it is a comedy, after all), it is deftly accomplished and witty throughout. I would absolutely recommend this excellent production, and although Janis Kelly is excellent as Lady Billows, Christine Brewer fans should note that she takes over the part on March 14.

Alek Shrader as Albert Herring and Christine Brewer as Lady Billows. Photo by Ken Howard from Santa Fe Opera.

CAST
Albert Herring: Alek Shrader*
Lady Billows (Feb 25 – Mar 11): Janis Kelly*
Lady Billows (Mar 14 – 17): Christine Brewer*
Nancy: Daniela Mack*
Florence Pike: Ronnita Nicole Miller++
Miss Wordsworth: Stacey Tappan
Mr. Gedge, the Vicar: Jonathan Michie*
Mr. Upfold, the Mayor: Robert McPherson*
Superintendent Budd: Richard Bernstein
Mrs. Herring: Jane Bunnell*
Sid: Liam Bonner*
Emmie: Erin Sanzero*
Cis: Jamie-Rose Guarrine*
Harry: Caleb Glickman

CREATIVE TEAM
Conductor: James Conlon
Director: Paul Curran*
Scenic and Costume Designer: Kevin Knight*
Lighting Designer: Rick Fisher*
Assoc. Conductor: Grant Gershon

* LA Opera debut artist
+ Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program member
++ Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program alumnus

LA Opera Website

San Diego, CA.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Update by David Gregson.

After a reported illness forced tenor Ben Heppner to withdraw from the current San Diego Opera performances of Jake Heggie’s “Moby-Dick” (reviewed below at this site), the central role of Captain Ahab was taken over by tenor Jay Hunter Morris.

Morris had been, in fact, originally slated to sing the part here, but he was lured away to superstardom singing Siegfried in the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Morris, who was superb in last night’s performance, will stay in San Diego for the remainder of the run.

Tenor Jay Hunter Morris as Captain Ahab. Photo by Photografeo, © 2011.

San Diego Civic Theater
Remaining performances are February 24 and 26, 2012

San Diego Opera for more information and tickets

Bass Jonathan Lemalu as Queequeg and tenor Jonathan Boyd as Greenhorn. Photo by Ken Howard.

San Diego, Saturday, February 18
Ahab Nearly Sinks a Spectacular “Moby-Dick”
Review by David Gregson

Jake Heggie’s opera “Moby-Dick” has been a hit with audiences since the work was premiered at the Dallas Opera in 2010. In fact, San Diego Opera co-commissioned this work with Dallas, Calgary Opera, the State Opera of South Australia, and, last but far from least, the San Francisco Opera which will stage eight performances of it this coming October. Tenor Ben Heppner is slated to sing Captain Ahab in six of these presentations before tenor Jay Hunter Morris takes over for two.

You are warned San Franciscans! Unless Saint Elmo’s fire descends upon poor Ben’s vocal cords, you will want to purchase tickets for Jay Hunter Morris’s appearances in the role. Last night in the opening performance in San Diego’s Civic Theater, Heppner, wrestling with a voice that flickered like a flame on dying embers, almost sank Heggie’s magically appealing opera. Such a sad spectacle! Here is a man who has sung Tristan, Walter von Stolzing, Lohengrin, and Florestan in some of the most memorably brilliant performances it has been my pleasure to witness. Many years ago I was one of “The Friends of Ben,” a small group of San Francisco Ben Heppner fans that couldn’t hear enough of him. Now I fear it is truly time for him to retire. He cannot come through another vocal crisis (he has a history of them) and hope to continue his career. I don’t think this one night alone is an exception: a 2010 “Lohengrin” in LA was similarly shabby.

If one is unprepared for it, Jake Heggie’s “Moby-Dick” comes as a bit of a surprise musically. You might expect something heavy as a whale and tonally challenging, like Aribert Reimann’s “Lear,” for instance, or Harrison Birtwistle’s “The Minotaur,” an English-language opera which has enjoyed a big success in London recently despite its assault on the eardrums. The whole score of “Moby-Dick,” far from being aggressive and terrifying, possesses a quality of sweet, wistful nostalgia. A kind of nameless grief seems just beneath the surface. All of the music is of one piece, most of it seemingly generated by the slightest of musical motifs. Everything fits and the vocal writing is fluid and unforced — that is to say, Heggie never seems in doubt as what to do with the vocal line. What he writes clearly comes from the heart and nothing ever sounds like desperate doodling in search of a tune, a quality of many contemporary works. The work has an immediate appeal — a fact loved by audiences but probably considered a fault by academics and die-hard supporters of truly new music.

If one is looking for comparisons, a work like Douglas Moore’s “The Ballad of Baby Doe” springs to mind. I think Heggie is a much better composer than Andrew Lloyd Webber, but Heggie shares Webber’s instinct for melodies that stick in the brain. Puccini also used this device. In any case, “Moby-Dick” cannot really be grouped with the tonal operas of Philip Glass and John Adams, either stylistically or in terms of content. Adams and Glass steer away from drawing upon established literary masterpieces, whereas Heggie zeroes in on one. We’ve seen a lot of this in American Opera (“The Great Gatsby,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “The Aspern Papers,” “Of Mice and Men,” and “A View from the Bridge” to name but a few). Glass and Adams have, in a sense, revolutionized opera by not going that route. But Heggie and his librettist Gene Scheer DO go there, and with considerable success.

Tenor Ben Heppner as Captain Ahab. Photo by Ken Howard.

Tenor Jay Hunter Morris (in same scene as shown above) in a photo taken during the 2011 production in Adelaide, Australia. Photografia © 2011.

I recently started rereading “Moby-Dick” in preparation for this opera. I regret to say, I haven’t made it to the end yet, but I recognize how carefully and accurately Scheer and Heggie have selected their materials and condensed them into a performable work of less than three hours’ length. I have to say, however, in this adaptation, Starbuck clearly trumps Ishmael (Greenhorn) as the most interesting character. Herman Melville, of course, uses Ishmael as the narrator (we must beware of equating the fictional Ishmael with Melville himself), so as readers we tend to see Ishmael as the central figure. But in this opera. Starbuck’s defiance of Ahab is the most compelling dramatic action and inspires a gorgeous passage (beautifully sung by Morgan Smith as Starbuck) at the very end of Act One.

Despite the book’s enormous length, the story is very simple. The nearly demented, utterly obsessive Captain Ahab seeks revenge on Moby-Dick, a great white whale that has taken one of his legs away. The voyage of the ship, the Pequod, is doomed and everybody ultimately dies in the pursuit except for one character, Ishmael, who takes his tag line from the Book of Job: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” The book stresses the friendship between Ishmael and the pagan “cannibal” harpooner, Queequeg, whose empathy, altruism and heroism (despite being non-Christian) is demonstrated when he rescues Pip from drowning. The friendship of the two men, especially Ishmael’s racial tolerance, scandalized readers in the 19th century and possibly still shocks.

In reading the novel, by the way, I was surprised to see how the first mate Starbuck instantly leaps into conflict with Ahab. I thought it might take a chapter or two or more, but no. We need more Starbucks in this world. Ahab is the nightmare authority figure, totally obsessed with his own insane agenda. Getting even with a dumb beast that has taken his leg off is more important than the welfare and livelihood of his men and, frankly, the entire ethic of capitalism. Ahab could be any number of world leaders or, at present, political candidates.

The opera is impressive in the way it treats the dynamic relationships between pairs of men. As a friend of mine remarked, you really come to care about them and there are a number of highly effective scenes such as the one in which Ahab confronts the offstage voice of Captain Gardiner (superb baritone, Malcolm Mckenzie) who is looking for his lost son.

With the exception of Heppner, whose vocal troubles and largely unfocused characterization (more enfeebled lame man than a man possessed) mar the whole project, this San Diego Opera “Moby-Dick” is a stunning success in every department. The staging (please see credits below) is extremely well crafted with fascinating projections that, at first, transform a galaxy of stars into sea charts and skeletal CGI blueprints of the Pequod, Ahab’s doomed ship. Ropes, harpoons, small whale boats, and flying shards of wood also make animated appearances. Special effects abound. Men scramble up perilous ladders at the back of the stage to go whaling and to die. Pip (the usually beautiful soprano Talise Trevigne dressed here as an ordinary cabin boy) is swept away in the waves and floats among the billows high above the stage. The whole Pequod seems to come to life, and surprising openings and closings occur in the stage machinery.

So, in short, for those who have never been to an opera before, this is a great show — something to write home about.

Morgan Smith as Starbuck and Ben Heppner as Ahab. Photo by Ken Howard.

The opera is also extremely well sung and acted. As suggested before, Morgan Smith as Starbuck is a superb foil to Ahab’s lunacy, and he uses his resonant baritone to great effect, lyrically and dramatically. Samoan basso Jonathan Lemalu, seems the perfect choice for Queequeg, a character who must be sympathetic and more than a little off-putting at the same time. Melville’s character is perhaps even more exotic than Scheer’s, but Lemalu wins us easily with his imposing physical and vocal presence. Baritone Robert Orth’s Stubb (Ahab’s second mate) is charmingly delineated and sung, as is Flask (third mate) by tenor Ernest Pinamonti. And when Talise Trevigne is through with Pip, I want to hear her in some standard rep! She has a great voice and talent. And our sole survivor, Greenhorn, played by tenor Jonathan Boyd, impressed with his singing, even if his character seemed less interesting than almost any other.

Karen Keltner, originally assigned to conduct this opera, was replaced on account of illness (according to press releases). So it was Joseph Mechavich to the rescue, and I cannot imagine the work better conducted. The orchestra sounded lush and magnificent from my vantage point in the acoustically superior mezzanine. Leonard Foglia’s stage direction seems in every way excellent and will be, for sometime I imagine, definitive.

Choral work, lighting, acrobatics, costumes, sets (please see lengthy credits that follow) are unusually excellent.

Cast:
Captain Ahab – Ben Heppner
Starbuck – Morgan Smith
Queequeg – Jonathan Lemalu
Greenhorn (Ishmael) – Jonathan Boyd
Pip – Talise Trevigne
Flask – Matthew O’Neill
Stubb – Robert Orth
Tashtego – Ernest Pinamonti
Daggoo – Kenneth Anderson
Nantucket Sailor – Chad Frisque
Spanish Sailor – James Schindler
Captain Gardiner – Malcolm MacKenzie

Conductor – Joseph Mechavich
Director and Dramaturg – Leonard Foglia
Composer – Jake Heggie
Librettist – Gene Scheer
Scenic Designer – Robert Brill
Costume Designer – Jane Greenwood
Lighting Designer – Donald Holder
Revival Lighting Designer – Gavin Swift
Projection Designer – Elaine J. McCarthy
Revival Projection Designer – Shawn Boyle
Choreographer – Keturah Stickaan
Fight Director – James Newcomb
Stunt / Climbing Coordinator – Fletcher Runyan
Wig and Makeup Designer – Steven W. Bryant
Chorus Master – Charles F. Prestinari
Principal Pianist – Paul Harris
Supertitles – Charles Arthur

San Diego Civic Theater
February 18, 21, 24 and 26, 2012

San Diego Opera for more information and tickets

Soprano Talise Travigne as Pip. Photo by Ken Howard.

Placido Domingo as Simon Boccanegra. Photo by Robert Millard.

Los Angeles, February 15, 2012
Review by David Gregson

“Simon Boccanegra” has a confusing plot, even for Verdi whose “Il Trovatore” has usually been the target of criticism for its convoluted storyline; but I dare say, “Boccanegra” may hold the record for the number of important events that occur offstage and/or in the past and which we hear about only in bits and pieces during the course of many narrative arias.

One thinks of Verdi has having had an unerring instinct for the dramatic, but it seems to have let him down badly in “Boccanegra,” with its twisted libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, based on a 1843 play by Antonio García Gutiérrez. The operagoer who has not studied the work beforehand is certain to be baffled by the political struggles that form a kind of background noise to everything that happens on stage; and then there is the matter of the pirate Boccanegra (later Doge of Venice) who has been the lover of Maria, the daughter of his enemy Jacopo Fiesco, and who is shocked to find Maria dead but cannot offer up his bastard daughter, Amelia, as a peace offering to Fiesco because — well, he doesn’t know where she is! She got carried off after an old woman caretaker died. Or something like that. The mind reels.

Then 25 years pass. At this point it’s best for the opera lover striving desperately to be moved by the music and the story to boil it down to the usual “boy loves girl despite parental obstacles” plot. The boy in this case is Gabriele Adorno, sung by tenor Stefano Secco, an artist gifted with a plangent, beautiful lyric voice that never lets him or the listener down, and who looked (on this occasion) exactly like a hero sprung from the pages of a 1915 edition of the “Victor Book of the Opera.” The girl is Amelia (daughter of Simon and Maria, much to everyone’s confusion), sung by fabulous soprano Ana Maria Martinez who, I have to say, would be worth the price of admission even if the rest of the cast were not as excellent as it is.

Placido Domingo, of course, is the commanding presence of all of this, both as the Doge of Venice, the father of Amelia, and as a 71-year-old superstar who can do no wrong — even if one would much rather hear a true baritone in this role. He was up against some impressive heavies, too — the excellent Paolo Gavanelli (who as Paolo Albiani fatally poisons Boccanegra) and imposing, resonant basso Vitalij Kowaljow, who is amazingly reconciled with his foe, Simon, in the blanket clemency of the opera’s finale. The central Council Chamber scene, of course, is the opera’s most thrilling moment, with all hell breaking loose with patricians and peasants alike, but it always awfully puzzling to figure out just why everybody doesn’t end up dead or trampled to mush in the middle of it.

James Conlon, of course, lends the music a sense of unity and forward propulsion which the score itself truly seems to lack. The lighting of Duane Schuler was way too dark at first, and nobody seemed able to find a place on stage where a spot of illumination might catch their faces. The asymmetrical Italian perspective designs of Michael Yeargan seemed too budget conscious for the grand old LA Opera and were a far cry from the elaborate settings in the Met’s recent “Boccanegra”. Meanwhile. the director Elijah Moshinsky failed to clarify anything that was going on and characters were forever moving about in unmotivated stage crosses.

On the whole, however, I enjoyed this “Boccanegra” more than any other I have ever seen — and that is, I regret to say, quite a few. Not my favorite Verdi, but this one is better than you may have heard!

Cast:
Simon Boccanegra – Placido Domingo
Amelia – Ana Maria Martinez
Jacopo Fiesco – Vitalij Kowaljow
Gabriele Adorno – Stefano Secco*
Paolo Albiani – Paolo Gavanelli
Pietro -Robert Pomakov

Creative team:
Conductor – James Conlon
Director – Elijah Moshinsky
Set Designer – Michael Yeargan
Costume Designer – Peter J. Hall
Lighting Designer – Duane Schuler
Assoc. Conductor – Grant Gershon
Chorus Master – Grant Gershon

* LA Opera debut artist + Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program member ++ Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program alumnus

Saturday February 11, 2012 7:30 p. m.
Wednesday February 15, 2012 7:30 p. m.
Sunday February 19, 2012 2:00 p. m.
Tuesday February 21, 2012 7:30 p. m.
Sunday February 26, 2012 2:00 p. m.
Thursday March 1, 2012 7:30 p. m.
Sunday March 4, 2012 2:00 p. m.

RUNNING TIME Approximately three hours, including one intermission. Evening performances: 7:30-10:30 p. m. (approximately) Matinee performances: 2:00-5:00 p. m. (approximately)

Peabody Southwell and ensemble in Long Beach Opera's production of Piazzolla's "Maria de Buenos Aires." Photo by Keith Ian Polakoff

Astor Piazzolla: “Maria de Buenos Aires” at Long Beach Opera
Review by David Gregson, January 30, 2012.  Photos by Keith Ian Polakoff

“Yo soy Maria de Buenos Aires / de Buenos Aires Maria ¿no ven quién soy yo?
Maria Tango, Maria del arrabal,
Maria noche, Maria pasión fatal,
Maria del amor de Buenos Aires soy yo.”

Maria is the tango. She is passion both profane and semi-divine. She is the history and heart and soul of Argentina. She is the sum of the immigrants whose cultural synthesis is symbolized in the tango. She is the subject that inspires and animates the poetry of Horacio Ferrer and lives vibrantly in tandem with the inventive and inspired music of Astor Piazzolla.

In Long Beach Opera’s current production staged in a fabulous old art deco movie palace (The Warner Grand) in San Pedro, she is transformed into a victim of the so-called Dirty War that spread violence throughout Argentina between 1976 and 1983. People “disappeared,” and we see them vanishing in a dramatic B&W projection on the scrim before the stage. We also see their missing notices in the theater lobby. Andres Mitisek, LBO’s governing factotum, has tweaked the “Tango Operita’s” story (such as it is) into a commentary on Argentina terrorized by a repressive regime that kidnaps, rapes and tortures Maria — which is to say, Argentina itself.

The Older Payador (Gregorio Luke) and a scrim full of disappeared faces that gradually drop to the floor. Photo by Keith Ian Polakoff.

Mitisek is conductor, concept originator, stage director, and production and video concept designer. I don’t know if he also sweeps the floors.

His one failure in this show was that he could not obtain a bandoneon player. You’d think candidates would be beating down the door to play for the LBO, but no. We had to settle for an accordion. However well played, it doesn’t really sound like a bandoneon, and if Maria IS the tango, Piazzolla IS the bandoneon! The ensemble, however, was quite good: two violins, viola, cello, bass, flute, piano, percussion — plus that accordion. The recording I own also has a double bass and a chorus.

Projections form an important part of this production. The scrim never rises. We see all that goes on through the gauze and smoky haze that fills the theater. Older Payador (Gregorio Luke) recalls the Dirty War and his lost Maria (the superb Peabody Southwell). We are taken back to dance bars and romantic meetings, to the marriage of Maria and the Young Payador (the excellent Gregorio Gonzalez), to Payador’s arrest before the revolution, to Maria’s search for her lost lover, and to her capture, rape, imprisonment and torture. It’s a depressing saga, but redeemed and made somehow transcendent by Piazzolla’s music.

The original score is altered in many significant ways for this LBO show, but LBO so often plays entirely by its own rules. This is an experience nobody who loves musical theater should miss, even if calling it an opera hardly succeeds in describing exactly what it is. One must bear in mind that the definition of opera has been expanding lately into works of art, like those of John Adams and Philip Glass, that abandon traditional operatic narratives for something less directly dramatic. More and more we are seeing emblematic rituals and/or metaphoric pageants that are as far from “Tosca” as one can possibly get.

I should not forget to commend the Nannette Brodie Dance Theatre for its memorable contribution to the complex and evocative visual imagery in this superlative production.

PERFORMANCES
Astor Piazzolla: “Maria de Buenos Aires”

(Younger Payador) Gonzalez and Maria (Southwell). Photo by Keith Ian Polakoff

Sun. Jan 29, 2012 @ 2pm
Sat. Feb 4, 2012 @ 8pm
Warner Grand Theatre, San Pedro
Duration: 70 min, no intermission
Sung in Spanish with English Supertitles

Cast:
Maria: Peabody Southwell
Older Payador (El Duende): Gregorio Luke
Younger Payador: Gregorio Luke
Marco: Mark Bringelson
Friends/Enemies/The “Disappeared”/Guards/Spirits: Nannette Brodie Dance Theatre

Accordion: Nick Ariondo

Conductor: Andreas Mitisek
Concept/Director/Production Designer: Andreas Mitisek
Choreographer: Nannette Brodie
Video Designer: Adam Flemming
Light Designer: Dan Weingarten
Sound Designer: Bob Christian

Lise Lindstrom as Salome and Greer Grimsley as Jochanaan in San Diego Opera's "Salome". Photo by Ken Howard

San Diego, Saturday, Jan. 28
Review by David Gregson

Few passages in the history of opera evoke erotic ecstasy with an intensity to equal those sensational final utterances of “Salome” in which Richard Strauss’s monstrous anti-heroine proclaims, “Ah! Ich habe deinen Mund geküsst, Jochanaan!” (“Ah! I have kissed thy mouth, Jokanaan!”). If you were hearing this music on recordings and did not know that the singer is lavishing her passion on the severed head of John the Baptist, you might think it was the most passionate love music you had ever heard.

Then, of course, the horrific truth of the situation crashes in musically as Heriod cries, “Man töte dieses Wieb!” (“Kill that woman!”), and, in the original stage directions, “The soldiers rush forward and crush Salome beneath their shields,” something that does not happen, incidentally, in the San Diego Opera production that opened the new 2012 season in Civic Theater Saturday night.

Strauss, of course, was taking his text from the Oscar Wilde play, originally written in French and translated into English by Wilde’s inamorato, Lord Alfred Douglas. Douglas writes that very same stage direction with the flowery overstatement that characterizes Wilde’s deliciously decadent drama: “The soldiers rush forward and crush beneath their shields, Salome, daughter of Herodias, Princess of Judaea. CURTAIN.” These things considered, the SDO’s final tableau, as concocted by stage director Seàn Curran, is an enormous disappointment. There is nothing in it to match the violent crashes of music that end the opera.

Lindstrom (Salome) and Panikkar (Narraboth). Photo by Ken Howard.

On the other hand, this is an opera that defies staging in several departments. The heroine needs to be a soprano who looks and sounds like a young girl but who has the lungs and stamina of a Valkyrie. She also has to be able to negotiate one of Strauss’s really wonderful bad ideas, the long so-called Dance of the Seven Veils. This is one awful number for a soprano to pull off, and I, quite frankly, have never seen a stage performance in which the physical dancing provides an adequate component to what’s going on in the lavishly scored, sensual, and ultimately frenzied music. Usually we get lots of careful prowling around, most of it both campy and embarrassing, and recent trends seem to demand that we see some bare tits. Several years ago, soprano Maria Ewing bared it all (and no body stocking, either) in Los Angeles. Now every diva wants to get in on the striptease act, or so I am informed by a reliable source who claims it’s the singers themselves, not necessarily the directors, who want Salome to appear naked. And we all, of course, are shocked. Shocked! Gracious me Maud!

Well, Strauss was trying very, very hard to shock his audiences back in 1905. How could he anticipate a world in which his opera no longer seems shocking but like the work of a little boy trying to gross you out with a box full of spiders? What makes it still tolerable, of course, is an utterly brilliant score, and one of the really important ones written in the early 20th century.

Lindstrom (Salome) and Glassman (Herod). Photo by Ken Howard.

The current San Diego production is worth seeing for several reasons, although I have my own extremely subjective reasons for not liking several things in it. Soprano Lisa Lindstrom successfully conveys the image of a spoiled young girl who wants her way no matter what and who is swept away by irrational and uncontrollable sensuality, but I had a hard time hearing her throughout her middle and lower range. Only the top came through clearly for me. I also felt Stuart Bedford’s conducting lacked propulsive drive. At least for the first 30 minutes or so on opening night, everything on stage and in the pit appeared to be transpiring in a desultory fashion. And the whole evening was, to these ears, underwhelming orchestrally. Perhaps it sounded more imposing down front or in the upper sections of Civic Theater. No one likes to mention it, but there are sonic dead zones in that auditorium.

The rest of the cast was excellent on opening night. Tenor Allan Glassman made a particularly fine Herod who avoided comic vocal caricature to a refreshing degree. I cannot recall ever having seen Herodias played as a silly floozy, but this approach made sense and the role was very well sung by mezzo-soprano Irina Mishura. (I did not care for Curran’s idea to have Herodias deliver Jochanaan’s head in a cloth bag to Salome, if only because Salome has requested that it be brought out on a silver platter.) Bass-baritone Greer Grimsley, one of my favorite artists no matter what he does, was an incomparable Jochanaan. Sri Lankan tenor Sean Panikkar (someone to watch out for!) was a superb Narraboth, the character who exits early by committing suicide with nobody noticing. We can also be grateful for Suzanna Guzmán as “A Page” and for all the other singers listed below. The quarreling Jews were especially fine, and “props” go to Ian Campbell for not censoring their speech in the supertitles, a PC gesture I have seen elsewhere only recently.

The Jews: Frank, Jones, Esper, Hu. Photo by Ken Howard.

I have enjoyed Bruno Schwengl as a scene and costume designer ever since I first encountered his work at the Wexford Festival in Ireland years ago. His Salome set is a striking modernist creation, a sort of brief tunnel or shaft that culminates at the back in a huge circular vault with a heavy cover and moving iris for an door. This important symbolic moon shape is echoed to the left of the stage by a giant pipe-like entranceway. The vault serves as the “cistern” in which Jochanaan is imprisoned. Wonderful lighting effects and huge shadows are imaginatively manipulated by lighting designer Christopher Maravich.

Curran’s stage direction is largely very effective and his efforts to make the dance look like something other than ridiculous are commendable. I love the fact that out of the blue, as it were, Salome decides to dance for Herod and then comes on with a troupe of trained assistants who provide her with each veil individually. That is to say, she does not start out with seven veils and then remove them. They are delivered in a carefully choreographed sequence, one by one, and our willing suspension of disbelief requires us to ignore that all of this terpsichorean feat could not possibly be spontaneous. It’s a convention of musical theater that we do not question such things.

Jochanaan, before he loses his head, moves about the stage chained (or roped) like an animal. Lindstrom tripped over one of these lines early on but recovered nicely. Despite this, the whole show made a strong and memorable visual impression. I do think, however, that bringing on many of the actors 10 minutes before the show actually starts is NOT a good idea when you are still projecting supertitle advertisements for American Airlines, Facebook, Point Loma Nazarene University, Sycuan Casino and whatnot — while the orchestra is tuning up. Very crass. The ads should go if we are watching the show already! (Did Point Loma provide real Nazarenes I wonder?)

I hate the way all stage directors handle the head business these days. It is a distraction that says, “Look, look how outrageously shocking we are up here.” I wish they would just leave the damn thing on the floor (covered up, preferably) until the kiss. Most prima donnas look absurd instead of horrific. Montserrat Caballé in particular. If you want to be truly horrified, see if you can still locate the You Tube link I found quite by accident several years ago — a live video of Islamic terrorists sawing — sawing! — the head off a living hostage and then holding the thing up to the camera. I was physically ill seeing this and did not sleep for three days. The staging of “Salome” swiftly dropped to the bottom of my list of anything I could ever, ever again accept as entertainment.

But, I still love the music.

Lindstrom (Salome) and the head of John the Baptist

THE CAST

Salome: LISE LINDSTROM
Jochanaan: GREER GRIMSLEY
Herod: ALLAN GLASSMAN
Herodias: IRINA MISHURA
Narraboth: SEAN PANIKKAR
A Page: Suzanna Guzmán
First Soldier: Jamie Offenbach
Second Soldier: Philip Skinner
A Cappadocian: Ashrof Sewailam
A Slave: Patricia McAfee
First Jew: Joseph Frank
Second Jew: Doug Jones
Third Jew: Simeon Esper
Fourth Jew: Joseph Hu
Fifth Jew: Kristopher Irmiter
First Nazarenne: Scott Sikon
Second Nazareen: Nick Munson

Conductor: STEUART BEDFORD
Director: SEÁN CURRAN
Scenic Designer: BRUNO SCHWENGL
Costume Designer: BRUNO SCHWENGL
Lighting Designer: CHRISTOPHER MARAWICH
Choreographer: Curran himself!
Wigs and Makeup: Stephen W. Byrant
Supertitles: IAN D. CAMPBELL

Saturday, Jan. 28 at 7 p.m.
Tuesday, Jan 31 at 7 p.m.
Friday, Feb 3 at 8 p.m.
Sunday, Feb 5 at 2 p.m.

San Diego Civic Theater