TO THE SEA

 Nathan Romporti, Shiyu Zhuo, Anna Maria Vacca, Will Kim, and Luis Villarreal

We always look forward to the novel evenings of art song curated by Artistic Director of New York Festival of Song Steven Blier, who shares pianistic duties with Bénédicte Jourdois and Luis Villareal. Last night's theme was songs of the sea. We mention the pianists first because for the first half of last night's program at Merkin Hall, our attention was focused mainly on the accompaniment. This left us wondering. Did the Scandinavian composers write better for the piano than they did for the voice? Were the Scandinavian and Russian languages a bit of a stretch for the four singers?

In Rachmaninoff's "The Storm" we were captivated by Ms. Jourdois' passionate evocation of the turbulent storm, and in Tchaikovsky's "In the Garden" we were introduced to the fine musicianship of Mr. Villarreal who painted the verses in many colors.

Among the selection of songs in German, we greatly preferred the Brahms--"Die Meere", the melody and harmonies of which reminded us of Liebeslieder Walzer. Tenor Nathan Romporti and baritone Will Kim harmonized beautifully whilst Mr. Blier accompanied. Schubert has written so many songs about the sea and arguably "Auf dem See" may not be the best of them, but Mr. Blier is fond of introducing his audience to lesser known works.

Moving on to the Spanish language, Mr. Blier accompanied mezzo-soprano Anna Maria Vacca in the lovely "Mañanita de San Juan"  (from Jesus Guridi's Seis canciones castellanas)  with gentle dreamy figures in the piano. 

Mr. Romporti's tenor was particularly well suited to Reynaldo Hahn's "La barcheta" with its lovely melody and lulling barcarolle rhythm. And at this point in the concert, we realized what had been missing. We had been missing dramatic interpretation! Storytelling! Stock gestures bore us silly but when the body language interprets the text we feel involved. This Hahn song is very romantic and we felt it.

Pauline Viardot's "Havanaise" was given a winning performance by soprano Shiyu Zhuo, accompanied by Mr. Blier. This is a spirited strophic piece with increasing variety from one rendition of the simple folksy text to the next. The embellishments put Viardot firmly in the bel canto camp and Ms.Zuo rose to the occasion with stunning technique.

Adding to our delight was a performance of a duet from Pablo Sorozábal's zarzuela "La tabernera del Puerto"  by Ms. Zhuo and Mr. Romporti. The duet told a charming story of an importunate suitor and a rejecting woman. The two artists did a fine job of bringing the scene to life.

Three late-life songs by Rossini brought the evening to a delightful close.  We felt a bit disoriented listening to "La regatta veneziana", a duet charmingly sung by Ms. Zhuo and Ms. Vacca. We are familiar with a three-song cycle by Rossini with the same title but the melody was different and the gondolier being cheered on was not Momolo but Tonio!  And it was sung in Italian, not Venetian dialect. It took some investigation but we got ourself straightened out. 

This song was a setting of text by Conte Carlo Pepoli and used a more bel canto style than the later folksy tripartite cycle. Conte Pepoli was a Bolognese aristocrat and poet who wrote the libretto for Bellini's I puritani. (If you have seen that opera, you may have decided that he was a better poet than librettist.) Like Verdi, Pepoli was active in the Italian nationalist movement. Rossini's cycle in Venetian dialect came later. We consider ourself enlightened and have decided that there is room in our heart for both!

As usual, the audience demanded an encore and our four excellent singers delivered with a fine arrangement of "Moon River", written in 1962 by Henry Mancini with lyrics by Johnny Mercer. Audrey Hepburn sang it in the film Breakfast at Tiffany's. Here's a fun fact Dear Reader. The studio wanted to cut the song but Ms. Hepburn fought to have it left in.  For complete transparency, although we write every phrase by ourself, we are not above consulting AI for fun facts like the aforementioned!

© meche kroop

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

Victoria Magnusson,  Anna Maria Vacca,  Scott Rubén La Marca, Huiying Chen,  Tamara Teine-'Aulelei Bowden, Alexander Young, and Zhenpeng Zhang

Mozart wrote La Finta Giardiniera when he was 18 years old! That it has survived for 250 years is a testament to its sparkling melodies, tumbling over each other whilst suffering from a case of l'abbondanza. Mozart ha been characterized as "classical", overcoming the excesses of the Baroque period and preceding the lavish embellishments of the Bel Canto period. Watching his youthful excursion into opera, one could be forgiven for debating that assertion.

The youthful voices of The Manhattan School of Music Graduate Opera Theatre did exemplary justice to Mozart's composition. The libretto (variously attributed) is silly but no sillier than many operas of the late 18th c.  The tropes invariably involve mismatched lovers and disguises. 

The kindly servant Roberto, under the assumed name of Nardo (Zhenpeng Zhang) is taken with the devious servant Serpetta (Victoria Magnusson) who is in love with her befuddled boss the Podesta (mayor) played by Alexander Young. He, in turn, is in love with the unhappy gardener Sandrine (Huiying Chen)  who has entered his employ to escape from her former existence as The Marchioness Onesti. She is still in love with the fickle Count Belfiore (Scott Rubén La Marca) who stabbed her in a fit of jealous rage. The Count arrives at the home of The Podesta to marry the latter's demanding niece Arminda (Samara Teine-'Aulelei Bowden) who is rejecting her former lover, the loyal Cavalier Ramiro (Anna Maria Vacca in travesti).  

Got all that? If you have a few moments to spare, you might enjoy reading our humorous take on these romantic entanglements in a review from several years ago.  Here's the link. http://www.vocedimeche.reviews/2015/08/crazy-in-love.html

Actually, we saw this charming work thrice in the space of two years and always enjoyed it.

Every member of the cast was outstanding both vocally and dramatically. If we were not otherwise engaged we would return to see it tomorrow with a different but equally excellent cast and again  on Wednesday with the same cast! We had a smile on our face for two hours and are smiling again, recalling the joyful performance. We reckon that the cast enjoyed themselves equally.

The work was directed by Jennifer Williams who made the complicated relationships quite clear but did not have a solution for the weird scene in the forest which Eric Einhoirn wisely omitted in the On Site Opera production we also reviewed. In her defense, neither the Santa Fe Opera production nor The Juilliard Opera Center production made sense of it either.

But it mattered little in the overall scheme of things because by whatever deus ex machina, all the couples get sorted out by the end. Reading the program notes on the way home confirmed our opinion that the so-called "Director's Notes" should be left out of the program.  Either a work speaks for itself or it doesn't. As a matter of fact, it speaks to each of us differentially, dependent upon what we bring to it. Given a certain orientation one might even put a social class interpretation upon it, as we might on Mozart's Nozze di Figaro. We might see it as an expression of poor romantic judgment, or of forgiveness, or of emotional growth, or of acceptance of fate. Whatever!

We find mating behavior fascinating--pursuit, rejection, betrayal, reconciliation--far more than stories about terrorism, politics, and inventions. We wish more contemporary composers would write about romance. Don't we all love to see our foibles onstage?

The work was conducted with liveliness and precision by Maestro Djordje Nesic, who also served as Vocal Coach. The responsive chamber orchestra of strings was augmented by a keyboard, played by Eric Sedgwick, leading us to mistakenly hear some sounds of wind instruments.

The set by Matthew Leabo was simple with some large mirrored panels behind which characters could hide and some very apt gardening implements, including a lawn mower, which established the setting. A tray full of psychedelically colored mushrooms may have been an attempt to establish the setting as a "rave" which Ms. Williams intended, as we read after the performance.

The costumes by Asa Benally helped to establish the characters identity. and were mostly white. Sandrine and Nardo wore coveralls, the Podesta wore a natty suit suitable to his station whilst Belfiore's white suit smacked of narcissism. The pants role of Ramiro was less ostentatious. Armida, as befitting her demanding personality, wore riding boots and wielded a riding crop.

We never did figure out Serpetta's manipulation of a device which projected meaningless abstract projections on a side wall.  Oh well, we seem to be seeing projections everywhere these days and find them distracting.

The bottom line is--this is a "must see". You won't regret it!  Let us hope there are still tickets to be had.

© meche kroop

FRENCH--FINE AND FUNNY

Yeong Taek Yang

Anna Maria Vacca and Huiying Chen

What a delightful night we spent at Manhattan School of Music! We are not sure we perceived it in exactly the same way as Director John de los Santos intended, but without reading his notes in advance (as is our wont) we felt free to enjoy the connection among the three French works in our own fashion.

The evening began with the one-act opera by Massenet entitled Le Portrait de Manon. How did we not know that this charming piece existed! The curtain rose on a most apt set by Ann Beyersdorfer which you can see from the photo above. Chevalier des Grieux has aged 20 years. (In this production he appears to be much older and we had no clue that he was suffering from syphilis as mentioned in the Director's Notes.)

We did see from Georges Boyer's libretto that he was grumpy and disillusioned with love, to the despair of his young ward Jean who wants to marry the lovely Aurore, ward of his friend Tiberge. Learning that she is a niece of the deceased Manon turns des Grieux around.

This slim story offered gorgeous music referring frequently to the original Manon.  Under the skilled baton of Maestro Pierre Vallet, the Manhattan School of Music Symphony created a richly textured background against which stood out a few soloists, particularly oboe and harp. Massenet's melodic music was just right for the members of the Graduate Opera Theatre.

We were greatly impressed by the performance of Yeong Taek Yang as the unhappy Chevalier. With fine vocalism and acting, he created a character that was believable and sympathetic against all odds. As Aurore, we found the brilliant soprano instrument of Huiying Chen absolutely ravishing. There was a freedom and clarity to the high lying tessitura and a winsomeness to her acting that had us rooting for her. In the breeches role of Jean, Anna Maria Vacca was convincing. The duet sung at the fountain in which the pair discuss means of suicide was magnificently harmonized and the music let us in on the hyperbolic drama of adolescents.

As the Chevalier's impecunious friend Tiberge, Moses Sunghyun Park gave a similarly fine performance. We might like to add that the French diction was excellent all around. Although our French speaking friend found fault we were delighted to have understood every word.

The eponymous portrait served an excellent purpose in joining the Massenet work to the Ibert work to follow. Following the curtain call for the Massenet, we saw a parade of women, dressed in the most gorgeous costumes of successive periods, ending with a character from the 1920's who would appear after the intermission in the Ibert piece. It was a brilliant device although the connection from the fin de siecle to the Roaring 20's seemed a bit jarring.  It was accompanied by Gabriel Fauré's Pavane in F# minor, op. 50, the choral version which gave the large chorus an opportunity to be heard, if not seen.

The Ibert piece Angélique was a real audience pleaser with plenty of imaginative eye candy. It reminded us of Francis Poulenc's Les mamelles de Tirésius which was composed two decades later but with the same absurdity. We don't find it necessary to apologize for the theme of Nino's libretto--trying to sell a disagreeable wife. It is a piece of a certain period and not meant to be taken seriously.

As the nagging aggressive wife, Emelia Petersen gave a stellar performance, performing a seductive vocalism from an open window.  Zhenpeng Zhang as her henpecked husband Boniface was funny.  James C. Harris was excellent as Charlot, Boniface's entrepreneurial friend. The three suitors that he rounded up were French clichés.  As the Italian, Benjamin Ruiz Scott was voluble; as the Englishman, Isaiah Traylor was pompous; as the American, Benjamin R. Sokol toted an outsized rifle and sported animal skins. We thought perhaps Nino was thinking of Davy Crockett.

The unsuitably named Angélique was dispatched to hell where even the devil didn't want her. Hang Su made a very fine devil indeed.The costumes were droll and the choreography clever. If you asked us about the music we couldn't tell you a thing!  With that much distraction onstage, we can't remember the music at all but we do recall that the spoken dialogue was in English and the singing was in 

French.

It is difficult for us to think of the piece as opera or even as operetta. It struck us more as cabaret, which is not a criticism. It was, after all, very entertaining.

© meche kroop