GUILTY AS CHARGED

Jennifer Black and Amy Owens in On Site Opera's production of Darius Milhaud's "La Mere Coupable" (photo by Fay Fox)

It was a grand idea of On Site Opera to present little known musical adaptations of Pierre Beaumarchais' trilogy of plays about la famille Almaviva. Two years ago we thrilled to Paisiello's version of The Barber of Seville.  Last year we thrilled to Marcos Portugal's iteration of The Marriage of Figaro. Last night we did not thrill to Darius Milhaud's The Guilty Mother, the final entry of the trilogy, taking place twenty years after The Marriage of Figaro. The superb performances were there. Eric Einhorn's direction worked well. The site chosen was interesting.  Maestro Geoffrey McDonald conducted the International Contemporary Ensemble with his customary artistry.

What went wrong?  Why would we be happy to hear the Paisiello and the Portugal again but not the Milhaud? The fault lay in the libretto and the music.  Great music can survive a flawed libretto and some stories are so compelling that mediocre music can be tolerated.  In this case, we found the libretto deficient in the sense that it was confusing in its adaptation from the Beaumarchais play, which was written in 1792, just before his exile. The fact that the adaptation was performed by his wife Madeline gives us a clue that this was a case of nepotism.

If you've ever wondered what happened after the Count and Countess reconciled and Figaro and Susanna were wed, here it is, according to Beaumarchais. The Count left on a long business trip. The Countess spent the night with Cherubino and bore a son named Leon. The Count was always suspicious of Leon's parentage. Never mind that he himself committed adultery and has taken the female child Florestine into his home to raise. She and Leon are in love.

A snake-in-the-grass, a scheming Tartuffe-like figure named Begearss has wormed his way into the household, taking advantage of aristocratic helplessness. Begearss plans to marry Florestine and acquire Almaviva's fortune. Thanks to bold action on the part of the resourceful Figaro, Begearss is thwarted and the two young lovers learn that they are not related by blood and are free to wed.  Happy ending.  Comedy?  Not quite! There may have been opportunities for comedy but they were missed.  This is a dreary work and the poorly fleshed out characters fail to win the audience's sympathy. What we love about the music of Mozart and Rossini is that it matches the characters and their actions.  That would seem to be a basic minimum requirement for writing an opera!

We understood that, at one point, Andre Gretry proposed setting this play to music and what a pity the project fell through. Putting this story into the hands of Darius Milhaud was not a fortunate move. The 1966 score is replete with ugly dissonances and never seems connected with the onstage action. The vocal lines are devoid of melody or any form of lyricism. The singers gamely did their best with the non-melodic vocal lines and projected well over the dense orchestration, with the exception of poor Andrew Owens whose allergic affliction left him inaudible. We do recall his sweet sound from Aureliano at Caramoor. We didn't mind because he acted well!

As the guilty mother, soprano Jennifer Black sang with strength and conviction. We last caught Ms. Black at the Met in the role of Lisa in  La Sonnambula. As Florestine, lovely coloratura soprano Amy Owens, so well remembered as Zerbinetta in Santa Fe, handled the high tessitura beautifully and very much looked the part. Mezzo-soprano Marie Lenormand, whom we enjoyed previously as La Perichole and also singing with NYOS, handled the part of Susanna very well and, as Figaro, baritone Marcus DeLoach made a forceful opponent to the slimy Begearss, well portrayed by bass-baritone Matthew Burns. 

The Count himself was sung by Adam Cannedy who has a fine baritone that showed up so well in the recent Glory Denied,: here he looked too young for the part. This was supposed to take place 20 years after the action of Marriage of Figaro. Come to think of it, Ms. Black also looked too young for the Countess.  Perhaps her night with Cherubino restored her youth!

Bass Christian Zaremba, last scene as the Commendatore in  Venture Opera's Don Giovanni,   was excellent in the small role of the notary who appears in the last scene. It was just in the last ten seconds of the opera, in the septet, that we heard a little bit of music to which one would want to listen.  Not enough! But it shows that Mr. Milhaud was capable of writing something listenable and chose not to do so.

The site chosen for this opera was an enormous garage near the West Side Highway.  Instead of scene changes, the two acts were staged in different parts of the huge space, with audience seating moved to accommodate. During the first act, we felt as one might feel at a tennis match with much head turning and neck stiffening in order to read the titles which were on either side and perpendicular to the stage. The second act offered some relief with titles projected above the action and readily readable.

We have no idea why the action was set contemporaneously with Mr. Milhaud's composition. It made no sense unless the characters underwent some sort of Rip Van Winkle phenomenon. And why was the furniture threadbare and the costuming so dowdy? In the play, the Count has been spending down his fortune to cheat Leon of his inheritance but he certainly wasn't spending it on furniture or clothing, nor on pay for his servants!

We will decline to mention the production team responsible for this ugliness but will say that Shawn K. Kaufman's lighting was fine and that the French diction was quite good all around thanks to Jocelyn Dueck.

Perhaps this was the only opportunity we will ever have to witness the sequel and for this we thank On Site Opera for this courageous (but misguided) bit of programming. It was, in fact, the United States premiere but was produced recently by the Theater an der Wien as a piece of shocking regietheater. This production was part of New York Opera Fest 2017 presented by the New York Opera Alliance, of which On Site Opera is a member. Partnership with the Darius Milhaud Society was a feature and the production was dedicated to the memory of Katherine Warne, a composer and founder of the society.

(c) meche kroop

(AD)VENTURE OPERA

Christian Zaremba, Marquita Raley, Amy Shoremount-Obra, Yujoong Kim, Philip Cutlip, Eric Downs, Matthew Patrick Morris, Cecelia Hall

We are always excited about a new opera company and eager to see what they have to offer. Every now and then we experience a company with a vision that goes beyond the standard one of providing performance opportunities for young singers or attracting a new audience.  Last night we witnessed the birth of an exciting new company--Venture Opera--without any excruciating labor pains. We are sure that much labor went into their production of Mozart's Don Giovanni but we missed all that.  We got to greet the welcome new baby in all its glory.

Thursday night we heard Jonathon Thierer sing at the Classic Lyric Arts Gala (reviewed beneath this review) but last night he wore a different hat--that of Founder and General Director of Venture Opera. We welcome this new baby with open arms.

Ordinarily we don't like to see our favorite classics altered in any way, but this non-traditional presentation did not take anything away from Mozart's tragicomic masterpiece but rather added something new that led to a more visceral understanding of librettist Lorenzo da Ponte's message.

The production was designed and directed by Edwin Cahill with a sure hand. The arc of the story moved along swiftly and all the encrusted clichés and tropes were swept away. The inherent tragedy was made even more poignant by the framing device which was set up during Mozart's portentous overture.


The ghost of Tirso de Molina, the author of the original Don Juan story, (Joel Reuben Ganz in a non-singing role) calls up the souls of the characters from Purgatory and, when the actual opera begins,  they relive their lives and their sins. They are barefoot and their fingernails and toenails are painted a ghostly white.

Both Tirso de Molino and Lorenzo Da Ponte were born Jewish and obliged to convert to Catholicism, even becoming priests--the former in late 16th c. Spain and the latter in 18th c. Venice. What better venue for this work than the Angel Orensanz Center, a deconsecrated 19th c. synagogue built in the Gothic Revival style of the grand cathedral of Cologne. Most of the action was staged on the pulpit but the aisles and balconies were put to good use as well.

The eponymous Don Giovanni in this performance, as played by the formidable baritone Philip Cutlip, is sinful in many ways--he is a rapist and a serial seducer, he abuses his servant, he lies and tricks people. Mr. Cutlip's Don oozes menace, not charm.  He is a corrupt priest of the Catholic church who abuses his power.   Lust, gluttony, greed and pride color his every action.

Most of the characters are guilty of manipulation. Donna Anna, powerfully sung by the stunning soprano Amy Shoremount-Obra, manipulates her fiancé Don Ottavio, stringing him along, clearly never intending to marry him.  Her bright and well-focused instrument was well employed in the service of the character.

The peasant girl Zerlina, marvelously portrayed by Cecelia Hall, has her fiancé Masetto, well sung by sturdy bass Matthew Patrick Morris, wrapped around her finger, much as she wraps him in the white cloth that later serves as the sheet on their nuptial bed. She betrays him on their wedding day and uses her sexuality and hyperbolic offers of submission to win his forgiveness.

Leporello, portrayed without the customary shtick by baritone Eric Downs, is a coward and easily bought by the Don's money, even if it is stolen from the collection plate. He is an accessory to the Don's crimes.

Only Donna Elvira is straightforward. Marquita Raley sang the role with great power. Her voice is a special one with lots of texture and overtones that made her seem a force with which to be reckoned. She is protective toward Zerlina, warning the peasant girl--and not just because she wants the Don for herself.

She is capable also of forgiveness but guilty of self-deception, like many women who think they can reform a bad dude. She suffers from wrath and also envy.  Just see her smirk at the finale! Donna Anna has Don Ottavio. Zerlina has Masetto.  She has nobody and will enter a convent. Surely she begrudges others what she cannot get.

Don Ottavio comes across as the only good guy onstage. We reviewed Yujoong Kim three years ago at Juilliard and wrote that we wanted to hear more of him. He has a beautiful sweet ringing tenor that is filled with romantic promise. He was an ardent suitor in this production and sang "Il mio tesoro" with great lyricism and finesse. "Dalla sua pace" was omitted but again..."We'd like to hear more".

We don't know why this noble soul wound up in Purgatory, nor why the Commendatore was there either. Perhaps they committed sins we hadn't heard about! Christian Zaremba sang the role of the Commendatore with a substantial and grounded bass.

In sum, the casting was perfect and each singer was as superb dramatically as he/she was vocally. The musical values were excellent. Maestro Ryan McAdams has an energetic style just right for this opera and commanded his orchestra effectively.

The orchestra was situated off to the side so that his back was to the singers and he was obliged to turn around from time to time. During the party scene, the musicians playing the rustic tune departed the orchestra, which was playing a minuet, and sat on the opposite side of the stage--a novel and effective way to illustrate the differing tastes of the different social classes present.

Pauline Kim Harris played the lute solo onstage during the serenade scene.  Every opportunity to make use of this interesting and acoustically wonderful venue was seized.

Costume Design by Bradon McDonald was apt. Don Giovanni and Leporello were dressed in vivid red and black. The women were dressed in white, grey and touches of black. Don Ottavio wore a white dinner jacket. It all seemed to fit with their characters. Effective lighting was by Yael Lubetzky.

All through the performance we were noticing little things that meant a lot toward underscoring the inherent violence of the tale. Donna Anna dons her dead father's bloody glove.  Elvira twists a scarf in her hands as she thinks of strangling Don Giovanni. Don Ottavio threatens with a red pistol.

The only directorial choice that struck us as wrong was in the final scene when Don Giovanni snorts cocaine instead of indulging his gastronomic gluttony. If you understand the Italian or if you are reading the titles, the discrepancy between action and words is unsettling.

We can scarcely wait to see what Venture Opera comes up with for their next adVenture.

(c) meche kroop