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Dicapo's Young Residents Breathe Fresh Life into Rare American Opera Excerpts |
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by Bruce-Michael Gelbert | >> see bio |
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photo by Culver Pictures
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| Giulio Gatti-Casazza, Metropolitan Opera General Manager from 1908-1935 |
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Under the progressive leadership of Giulio Gatti-Casazza, Metropolitan Opera General Manager from 1908 to 1935, who came to the company from La Scala, along with legendary Maestro Arturo Toscanini, the Met championed new American opera as La Scala, with this pair at the helm, had promoted new Italian works. On March 7, at the Dicapo Opera Theatre, downstairs at 184 East 76th Street, conductor Steven Osgood, at the piano, and the young, promising singers of Dicapo's Resident Artist Program dusted off excerpts from seven of these neglected operas-which Gatti-Casazza had presented at the Met in their world, stage, or United States premieres between 1912 and 1934-and into them, breathed life anew.
In the generation or so after Richard Wagner wrought indelible change upon the sound of operatic music, classical composers generally seemed either to be trying to emulate him or, determinedly, to be rebelling against him. Most composers of the works heard here were writing, after all, for the conservative Met audience, so their operas sound most traditional and very late Romantic.
Music from arguably the most distinctive opus, Howard Hanson's "Merry Mount" (1933), with libretto by Richard Stokes, after a Nathaniel Hawthorne story, waited until the end of Dicapo's program. Set in colonial Massachusetts, its action pits Puritans, titled Cavaliers, and Native Americans against each other in ultimately bitter battle. Guided by Osgood, and making a strong case for "Merry Mount," were forceful baritone Chad Armstrong, as Puritan Preacher Wrestling Bradford, overwrought as he guiltily confessed to congregant Praise-God Tewke (Brian Ballard) to being haunted by erotic dreams; soprano Allison Leaheey, as Lady Marigold Sandys, protesting, in a soaring solo, her innocence of witchcraft; Armstrong's Bradford, fervently defending her; and the formidable ensemble, chanting the Lord's Prayer as annihilation threatens. Mezzo-soprano Selena Moretz, as Tewke's daughter, Plentiful, aired a hopeless love for Bradford here.
"Brother am I to all the trees," sang Sanjay Merchant, displaying a lyric tenor with thrust, as Nial in composer Horatio Parker and librettist Brian Hooker's "Mona" (1912), its Druids-versus-Romans plot influenced by Vincenzo Bellini's "Norma," but its Wagnerian sound and at-one-with-Nature sentiment putting one in mind of "Siegfried."
From "The King's Henchman" (1927), by composer, music reviewer, original Met broadcast commentator, and ASCAP founder Deems Taylor and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, came a passionate love-at-first-sight American answer to the "Tristan und Isolde" second act love duet, passionately sung by soprano Jessica Tivens, as Aelfrida, and tenor Michael Boley, as Aethelwold, and "Why then, my life has been a heaping of sticks under an empty pot," King Eadgar's König Marke-like lament, querying whom can he trust if not his own kinsman and henchman, the pain of betrayal eloquently conveyed by polished baritone Matthew Klauser. From Taylor and Constance Collier's "Peter Ibbetson" (1931), after George du Maurier's novel, came Peter's reminiscence, "I can see again the old garden at Passy," about Paris and his childhood love, Mimsy-Mary, later Duchess of Towers-sung, to a dulcet melody, by Stan Lacy, another worthy tenor, to Lisa Chavez, as Mrs. Deane, at Peter's uncle's party. The exchange ends with a waltz, in which Peter and Mrs. Deane promise each other friendship. Julianne Park and Casey Molino Dunn made contributions as the voices of figures out of Peter's past. In impassioned outpouring "I could never dedicate my days," sung by Jennifer Valle in a striking lyric soprano, Mary considered the passing of time.
In an extravagant solo, "As children, we walked side by side," from operetta composer and Met cellist Victor Herbert and librettist Grant Stewart's "Madeleine" (1914), after Decourcelles and Thibaut, Lynn Abeles, a soprano of Eleanor Steber-like intensity, as an opera diva alone on New Year's Day, sang to her maid, Nichette (Bethany Argiro), of the artist who is restoring a portrait of her mother, of life upon the stage, of her staff, whose wages she doubles, and of her beloved parent.
From composer Louis Gruenberg and librettist Kathleen de Jaffa's "The Emperor Jones" (1933), based on Eugene O'Neill's play about a corrupt West Indian leader, we heard baritone Gary Ramsey sing a wrenching "Standin' in the need of prayer," Brutus Jones' address to God as he unravels. Finally, from Ernst Krenek's "Jonny spielt auf" (Johnny Plays On, or Strikes Up the Band), an American jazz influenced opera dating from 1927 and brought to the Met in 1929, we heard, in English translation, two emotional selections, thanks to soprano Molly Mustonen, who sang the opera singer Anita's aria, "In the days lost in the past," from composer Max's opus, and tenor Ubaldo Feliciano Hernández, as Max, who eagerly, nervously and, apparently, in vain awaited Anita's return from Paris.
Dicapo's next operatic offering will be Gioachino Rossini's comedy "L'italiana in Algeri," on April 16 through 19. For information on tickets, priced at $60 apiece, go to www.dicapo.com.
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