MENOTTI'S RELEVANCE

Cast and Production Team for Gian Carlo Menotti's The Consul presented by Bronx Opera

Bronx Opera has been delighting New York audiences for over 50 years. Distance has prevented us from reviewing their productions with any great regularity.  Add to that the fact that they perform everything in English, a language which we do not enjoy hearing sung. We loathe translations and cannot name many operas composed in English for which we can drum up any enthusiasm.

However, we have enjoyed Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium (with Caroline Nye in the starring role) and decided to take a chance on The Consul, and we are happy we did so. This is a very sad opera, and the saddest part of all is that the totalitarian governments and the consequent refugee situations still exist seven decades after Menotti selected this topic and wrote his own libretto. If only art could promote political change!

It doesn't matter which decade was chosen. Here, Director Rod Gomez chose to set the work in the 1980's.  It could have been today. The direction was excellent and the piece worked well as theater. Meganne George dressed the cast in drab attire and created a bare set out of scaffolding towers which held a door, a window, and....an oven.  If you see a gun in Act I, you are waiting for someone to get shot. When you see an oven...well, we are not going to tell you about baking bread!

The scenes alternate between the poor apartment of the Sorel's in a nameless totalitarian country, and a consulate which will remind audience members of any government agency they have visited in which there are endless forms to be filled out and passive-aggressive people in charge.

Mrs. Sorel's husband is involved in some kind of anti-government resistance and is on the run from the secret police who hound poor Mrs. Sorel into a state of misery. In this role we have the splendid soprano Mary-Hollis Hundley whose fine work we have reviewed on many occasions. We mostly recall her dignified and elegant creation of the Countess Almaviva at the Santa Fe Opera, and some lovely Russian singing at the George London Competition.

Last night will, we hope, be a breakout performance for her. She created a highly sympathetic character with whom it was easy to identify and the enthusiastic applause she received at the end let us know that others shared our opinion. Menotti, like most 20th c. composers, does not give the singers much to work with in terms of melody, and English can never show off the voice the way Italian does; still we were happy with what we heard.

As her mother-in-law, mezzo-soprano Caroline Tye was similarly affecting, especially when singing to the baby in the cradle. Ms. Tye is another artist we have reviewed and enjoyed upon many occasions. We lost count of how many performances she graced at Utopia Opera but our associations ran to another Menotti opera produced by New Camerata Opera in which she took the starring role in the aforementioned The Medium--a performance which encouraged us to attend last night.

Cara Search, who is new to us, had the role of the consul's secretary, the one demanding increasing numbers of forms to be filled out. Chuckles in the audience told us how many of us have had similar experiences with government bureaucracies. It was another fine performance.

Jeremy Moore did well as Mr. Sorel, appearing in the first act and again at the end. We recall his fine performance as Eugene Onegin for Utopia Opera. Joseph Gansert made a scary secret police agent.

Every tragedy needs some comic relief which was provided by Daniel Foltz-Morrison in the role of the magician/hypnotist Nika Magadoff who entertained the group of supplicants in the consul's office.  His appearance in the final scene was of a different nature but dramatically valid.

Baritone Conrad Schmechel portrayed John Sorel's friend Assan. We have only seen him previously in roles that allowed him to express his personality--we believe it was Papageno one time and El Dancairo another time.

The group waiting for visas comprised Ben Hoyer as Mr. Kofner, Leslie Swanson as a "foreign woman", Francesca Federico as Anna Gomez, and Amy Maude Helfer as Vera Boronel.

The same cast will perform next Saturday night and we recommend them highly. We took a look at the cast for the Sunday matinee performances and recognize some major talents there as well.  In either case you won't be disappointed.

Under the baton of Eric Kramer, the Bronx Opera Orchestra performed Menotti's music as finely as one would wish. We particularly enjoyed the wind section and paid particular attention to the oboe line, so beautifully played by Jacob Slattery. In Act II, he played the English Horn, the sound of which was (LOL) music to our ears. We sat close to the percussionist, Barbara Allen, who was on an elevated platform, and enjoyed that equally.

It seemed to us that Menotti's music was most lyrical during the interludes when no one was singing. We found that strange. We also found it peculiar that the tragic finale was accompanied by grandly heroic music. Was that meant to be ironic? If you, dear reader, can contribute something to our understanding of 20th c. music, please comment below.

(c) meche kroop

THE BRONX IS UP

Steven Fredericks, Gilad Paz, Caroline Tye, Terina Westmeyer, Halley Gilbert, Heather Roberts, Christopher Grundy, and Erik Bagger

Albert Herring proved that Benjamin Britten could create comedies that were just as successful as his dramatic masterworks such as Peter Grimes and Billy Budd. A turn-of-the-last-century English village is shocked to discover that chaste young women are in perilously short supply, so bashful Albert is crowned "King of the May Festival," only to launch a night of revelry that leaves his elders aghast and his chums impressed.

The libretto, adapted by Eric Crozier from a short story by Guy de Maupassant, offers splendid opportunities for storytelling involving a motley collection of colorful characters inhabiting a small English village at the turn of the 20th century.

Britten's music, written in 1947 for a chamber orchestra (The English Opera Group), provides excellent opportunities for musicians to show their stuff, limning the stunning orchestration and sneaking in several musical references such as a motif from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde when Albert drinks the spiked lemonade.

The opera was an excellent choice for the Bronx Opera.  They have been producing opera for nearly a half-century but this is the first time we have reviewed their work.  The weather was bitterly cold and perhaps the best compliment we can pay them is that the evening was well worth the two-hour round trip.

The venue, the Lovinger Theater at Lehman College, is absolutely perfect with fine sight lines and acoustics, and an orchestral pit that descends below stage level. Musical values were splendid all around.  The dozen musicians were individually and collectively superb and finely balanced under the expert baton of Michael C. Haigler.  There was one long duet for alto flute (Lisa Arkis) and bass clarinet (Monte Morgenstern) which took our breath away.  The singers were also well-balanced, particularly in the sextet of Act I, Scene 1.

The singers were exceedingly well cast.  Each singer created a character with a distinctive personality--the aristocratic and domineering Lady Billows (Terina Westmeyer) commanded the stage with a room-filling Wagnerian soprano and a walking stick, justified by a limp; her much put-upon housekeeper Florence Pike (Caroline Tye) kept things in order with a low and resonant timbre; the straw-hatted schoolteacher Miss Wordsworth (Halley Gilbert) who used her fine soprano in a very funny scene leading her three students in a musical encomium to Albert; the controlling Mrs. Herring (Heather Roberts) who kept poor Albert tied to her apron strings with a fine mezzo; and the flirtatious Nancy (Yselle Blum) whose equally fine mezzo managed to captivate her boyfriend Sid, Albert, and the audience.

Among the men, we enjoyed tenor Erik Bagger's portrayal of the eponymous hero--at first under his mother's thumb, shy and stooped over, later intoxicated and silly, and finally joyful and liberated.  Steven Fredericks employed his rich bass to portray Superintendent Budd of the police force; Tenor Gilad Paz made an excellent conciliatory Mayor Upfold; baritone Christopher Grundy was perfect as Vicar Gedge and had admirable diction. Baritone Steven Eddy portrayed Sid, the butcher's assistant who plotted with Nancy to lead poor Albert down the primrose path.

The singing and acting could not have been better but the diction could have been improved.  The men fared better on this account than the women, with Ms. Blum being an exception.  This is a common problem when operas are sung in English.  The Bronx Opera chooses to perform all of its operas in English and one would think that the goal were to make the story clear to the audience.  In fact, the synopsis in the program made the story clear but a significant part of the dialogue got swallowed.  Fortunately, the acting was so effective that the humor succeeded.  Titles would have been welcomed.

Production values were way beyond what one would expect from a small company. Professionalism of the highest degree was noted in the fluid direction by Rod Gomez, the perfect costuming by Peter Fogel and the effective sets by Meganne George. Simple elements combined to create Lady Billows' black and white parlor with its Victorian silhouettes and Mrs. Herring's grocery with its colorful baskets of fruits, vegetables and flowers.  Lighting by Joshua Rose contributed a great deal, especially during scene-changes which recreated the images of the Victorian silhouettes.

We haven't seen Albert Herring since the Santa Fe Opera performed it 4 1/2 years ago with an all-star cast.  The production we saw last night was in no way less impressive.  If you live in the Bronx you may wish to catch today's matinee.  Otherwise there will be two more performances next weekend at Hunter College.

(c) meche kroop