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

ANOTHER TRIUMPH FOR NYCO

Philippe Talbot and Marie Lenormand--photo by Carol Rosegg

New York City Opera closed its season with another indisputable hit--Offenbach's charming 1968 Opera bouffe, La Périchole.  The silly plot concerns a couple of down and out street singers in Lima, Peru who are so unlucky or so untalented that they cannot afford a marriage license.  Don Andrès de Ribeira, the Viceroy, falls in lust with La Périchole and offers her a position at the court; she is so hungry that she accepts.  The Mayor of Lima, Don Pedro de Hinoyoso and the First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, Count Miguel de Panatellas, are charged with finding a husband for La Périchole because the law demands that the position must be filled by a married woman.  The two men unwittingly select her beloved Piquillo, get him drunk and obtain his consent to marry.

La Péerichole recognizes the man she loves but he doesn't recognize her.  When he sobers up he is furious with her and won't present her to the court and is thrown in a prison for "recalcitrant husbands", one of whom has been trying to tunnel his way out for a dozen years.  The rest of the story deals with their escape and the obligatory happy ending.  We have Henri Meilhad and Ludovic Halévy to thank for this wacky story.  But it is Offenbach to whom our most ardent thanks are given, for his frothy melodies delight the ear to such an extent that we have been humming them for days.

We also must express gratitude to Emmanuel Plasson for his Gallic spirit on the podium; he kept the orchestra humming along with one spirited number after another.  And the chorus? They too kept the action moving along and sounded just great doing so.  It could not have been easy to find such superb singers to enchant us with their singing and delight us with their comic skills.  Our compliments to the casting director!

Mezzo Marie Lenormand is a tiny gamine with a huge personality; she met the vocal and dramatic demands of the eponymous role with talent to spare.  As Piquillo, tenor Philippe Talbot hit all the high notes of comedy and pathos.  Even funnier was bass Kevin Burdette who created a lecherous wacky Viceroy by using his long loose limbs to great comic effect.  Baritone Joshua Jeremiah and tenor Richard Troxell filled the parts of the Viceroy's two henchmen in fine form.  The three cousins who cater the Viceroy's parties and have a lot of stage time were soprano Lauren Worsham and mezzos Naomi O'Connell and Carin Gilfry.  There was not a single weakness in the casting and there was a terrific sense of ensemble.  Special credit must be given to the hilarious bartender (Philip Littell) who did not sing but whose subtle facial expressions were an additional stimulus of audience laughter, not to mention his bassoon solo.

Director Christopher Alden can be credited for his plethora of ideas; director Christopher Alden can be blamed for his plethora of ideas!  He certainly kept the laughs coming but he tends to get carried away by his ideas and overdoes things to a certain extent.  We thought there was an excess of "shtick" but the audience seemed not to mind a bit.  There was a bit with a pair of tongs that amusingly clacked along with the music but then were used in a gratuitously sexual manner.  EWWW!

Sets by Paul Steinberg were lively in color and design and modern in time period.  The prison for "recalcitrant husbands" contained a Barcalounger with wrist and ankle restraints.  Piñatas hung from the ceiling and large saguaro cacti made us think of Mexico or Arizona rather than Peru.  Costumes by Gabriel Berry were also somewhat contemporary.  In the opening scene the chorus was dressed in shorts or clam-diggers with bright printed shirts, looking like guests at a suburban backyard barbecue.  Our suspicions were confirmed when the three passive-agressive cousins started passing out hot dogs.  The Viceroy appeared in a succession of outlandish costumes we call "Early Halloween".

The running joke is that the population of Peru must pretend to be happy about the Viceroy's rule but they are completely miserable.  We wonder how the director presented the opera back in Offenbach's day; at NYCO everything that could be done to make it funny to today's audience was done--and then some! 

Still, it was a vastly entertaining evening; audience members left with big smiles.  We are thrilled to see NYCO back on its feet.

© meche kroop

BREL DONE WELL

 

Maestro Steven Blier has the Midas touch; everything he touches turns to gold.  As Artistic Director of New York Festival of Song, as pianist and arranger, as performer and raconteur, he never fails to delight.  Last night's program at Merkin Hall was a case in point.  Few of us have paid attention to the music remembered from college days but Mr. Blier paid attention to the music of Jacques Brel and Charles Trénet from a half-century ago.  It is difficult to believe that this youthful wizard is celebrating 40 years of performing onstage.

To those in the audience who delighted in this music in their youth, the recital was a delicious exercise in nostalgia.  To those who were not familiar with these songs, it was a revelation.  Mr. Blier at the piano was joined by two singers, the charming and VERY French mezzo Marie Lenormand and Philippe Pierce, a tenor with matinée idol good looks.  To complete the party, there was accordionist Bill Schimmel and guitarist Greg Utzig who also played the banjo and an instrument resembling an electronic lute.

The program opened with Mr. Pierce singing Brel's "La Valse à Mille Temps".  Maestro Blier introduced each and every song with an interesting piece of information.  Apparently, Brel was quite a rebel and was not immediately accepted but eventually won adoration both in France and in the United States.  It is hard to imagine not being won over by this powerful song that grows in speed, emotion and dissonance until the singer becomes quite breathless.

The two singers were most enjoyable in "Les Paumés du Petit Matin" a duet about dissipated youth, trust fund kids who sleep all day and party all night.  (Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.)    For Ms. Lenormand's "Rosa", we learned the meaning of the cryptic words.  An amusing duet "Les Bourgeois" followed in which we saw an event from the point of view of some rude youths and some staid lawyers.  "Madeleine" is a sad tale of a man who waits every night for a woman who never shows up.  Many of the songs were sad and dealt with disappointed love.  Ms. Lenormand's "Ne Me Quitte Pas" revealed heartbreaking neediness.  The duet "Le Diable" in which the devil enjoys all the wars, bombs on train tracks, materialism and economic inequality.  It sounded rather contemporary, n'est-ce-pas?

The Trénet songs were rather more upbeat.  "J'ai Ta Main" had a swingy accompaniment but "Vous Qui Passez Sans Me Voir" revealed the songwriter's loneliness.  "J'ai Connu de Vous" had a jazzy score and "J'ai Mordu Dans le Fruit de la Vie" referenced Mr. Trénet's sly admission of homosexuality.  The familiarity of the melody in "La Mer" delighted the audience and "Grand-maman C'est New York" made everyone laugh.  Apparently, when one dies and goes to heaven one learns that heaven is...New York!  And indeed it is heaven when we have such wonderful music and such superb performers to bring it to life.

(c) meche kroop