Cris Frisco, David Khang, Daniella Brancato, andYulin Wang
Sponsored by the Gerda Lissner Foundation, held in the studios of WQXR, and introduced by renowned announcer Midge Woolsey, a generous program of opera arias, duets, and ensembles featured students from Mannes Opera as well as esteemed graduates. As is our wont, we will focus our comments on the students. If we are still writing about opera ten years hence, we will no doubt be overlooking these students who we expect will by then have gained fame, and we will be writing about the next crop of emerging artists.
Although New York City is home to three conservatories of music, Mannes perhaps gets less love from us due to their focus on contemporary opera and definitely not due to any lack among their students. As a matter of fact, Arthur Levy and Glenn Morton (two of our favorite voice teachers) are on their faculty and have introduced us to some extraordinary young singers.
The enthusiastic audience showed equal appreciation for the famous graduates and the not yet famous students, regardless of their choice of repertory. From our point of view, however, performing "White Moon", one of Five Songs written by Ruth Crawford Seeger, once a student at The New School (of which Mannes is a part) on the same program as "Song to the Moon" from Dvořak's Rusalka only served to point out the deficiencies of vocal compositions written in the past century. Nonetheless, mezzo-soprano Ruijia Dong used her beautiful instrument to make the former work vocally interesting and the text clear. In the Dvořak, soprano Daniella Brancato, tenderly accompanied by Bryan Wagorn's piano, relished the composer's lavish melodies and simple sentiment, setting the bar way too high for the Crawford song which followed.
Staying with the lunar theme, we had the opportunity to revisit Huang Ro's An American Soldier that we heard last year at the Perelman Performing Arts Center which strangely piped in the orchestra from somewhere else! How much better to hear a fine piano reduction sensitively played by Cris Frisco whilst soprano Hannah Cho and tenor Yulin Wang sang the "Moon Duet" facing away from one another, an appropriate stance since the ill-fated young soldier and his girl are geographically separated.
We enjoyed the opening duet a lot since baritone Sean Seungho Cha and bass-baritone David Kahng gave it their all, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in unison. "Suoni la tromba" from Bellini's I Puritani was a fine choice to show off their musical and linguistic artistry. We noticed a definite focus on the embouchure and wondered whether that is emphasized in the tutelage at Mannes. It certainly produces a satisfying warm round sound.
We thought that soprano Adrinelle Chiesa deserved better than the aria she performed from an opera being workshopped. She gave a deeply felt performance and made ample use of gesture in a work with an uninteresting vocal line, although the piano part was quite lovely. Perhaps contemporary opera should be composed by singers!
We liked a duet called "Schönste Nacht" from a work Korngold wrote for Broadway that was not performed there but was eventually produced in Germany. It was performed by mezzo-soprano Daria Tereshchenko and the aforementioned Mr. Cha.
We also enjoyed Yulin Wang's performance of "Salut! Demeure chaste et pure" from Gounod's Faust. Accompanied by Mr. Wagorn, he employed a lovely pianissimo that was well suited to a serenade. This was followed by the final trio from the opera in which Mr.Wang was joined by Ms. Brancato as Marguerite and Mr. Kahng as Mephistopheles.
Although much of the program was not our taste, we were happy to have gotten better acquainted with some of the excellent Mannes students. We vote for more canon and less creation!
© meche kroop
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