The Metropolitan Opera
Verdi’s Rigoletto
Metropolitan Opera House, New York April 6, 2000
This season, it appears that the Met is serving Rigoletto Lite. The Zack Brown sets and costumes are as magnificently atmospheric and beautiful as ever, but the heavier, darker aspects of the drama are being given rather short shrift in the current performances. Kim Josephson’s jester was beautifully sung. His tone was firm and focused; it poured forth quite prodigiously and he shaped the musical line with all appropriate finesse and musicality. But the basic nature of Josephson’s voice is one of sunshine and health, not a sound intrinsically suited to revealing the dark, sad and twisted aspects of Rigoletto’s tragic soul. I suspect Mr. Josephson is simply too well adjusted a guy to go into such bleak places and dwell there for any length of time. Sometimes, his hunchback all but disappeared as if he forgot that he was supposed to be deformed and suffering and he just stood up straight. I’d love to hear him as Figaro, or Mozart’s Count. These roles would seem to suit his temperament and vocal quality better than this darkest and most angry of all baritone roles.
Also light was the Gilda of Youngok Shin, following a long tradition of casting light sopranos in this part. Like Violetta – with its coloratura first act aria giving a mistaken idea of the nature of the rest of the role – Gilda is a heavier part than “Caro Nome” would indicate. Even though the orchestration is transparent for Gilda’s music, ideally, the vocal line needs a darker tone in places where Shin was unable to supply one. That said though, her beautifully sung performance offered many delights. Her tone was exquisite, clear and radiant with a joyful, pealing quality that reminds me of the recordings of Amalita Galli Curci. Her style was first-rate, with sparkling trills and turns and a beautifully gauged portamento. Her perfect placement and crystal clear projection assured that she was exactly audible throughout this large house.
There was both lightness and shadow in Frank Lopardo’s Duke, where too often in this part there is only bombast. Lopardo is an elegant artist, as we have heard in his Mozart and bel canto roles, as well as in Puccini. He is not afraid to sing softly – with a spinning tone that always carries – and he offered a suavely appealing Duke who caressed the musical line with suppleness and a variety of dynamic gradations.
Robert Lloyd’s Sparafucile, on the other hand, was anything but light, offering the evening’s only proper notes of darkness and gloom. The cavernous bass tones and murderous demeanor were those of a world-class operatic assassin. Wendy White’s buxom beauty and sensuous mezzo sound were a tremendous help. Her Maddalena struck just the right balance of warmth and cunning and her acting was most convincing, helping Lloyd’s Sparafucile to anchor this Rigoletto Lite to the Met floorboards so that it wouldn’t just float away and evaporate entirely. Maestro Nello Santi, exuberantly applauded by an appreciative audience, kept the performance rolling forward in a spirited manner, touching all the landmarks along the way but never quite reaching Rigoletto’s dark night of the soul. —Freeman Günter
The Minnesota Opera
Rossini’s Semiramide
Ordway Hall, St. Paul, MN,
April 11, 2000
I approached the Ordway Theater in St. Paul with a certain amount of trepidation. At its premier a few days earlier, Minnesota Opera’s new postmodern production of Rossini’s 1823 Semiramide had been harshly booed. Some attendees, expecting to be transported to Assyria, 800BC, were not at all pleased to find themselves a few millennia, even a few planets, off course. As an ultra-conservative bel cantist I was not at all sure that I would be pleased with a misguided “concept” production at odds with the composer’s intentions. At least I had been warned. The day before, Artistic Director Dale Johnson explained to me that because the opera is nearly four hours long, the producers feared that the audience would leave at halftime if faced with a traditional production. As I had seen this happen in Chicago at a marvelous performance of a shorter opera, Rossini’s Otello, I understood his concern. Johnson explained that the idea was to add “a visual quality to the emotion of the music” as well as “a sense of pace and propulsion to the piece.”
I can now report that the production, staged by Travis Preston, was unabashedly bizarre, inappropriate and immensely entertaining, an eye-exciting mish-mash of World War II news footage, Soviet propaganda films, extreme technokink and so very much more. Nobody walked out of the performance. Oddly, all this never interfered with the singing or characterizations. The 4 hour score, cut by 15 minutes, seemed short.
The musical end of Semiramide was upheld gloriously. Brenda Harris, as the eponymous Babylonian queen, is a soprano of immense accomplishment and stunning technical control. Her powerful voice, remarkably even in every respect throughout its phenomenal range, seems capable of all and everything that this style of vocalism could demand. Her flawless trills, including a most remarkable one sustained for seemingly ever between high B and C#, were a wonder, as were several marvelous pianissimi in alt. This was golden age singing. A stunningly beautiful woman, she was every inch the Queen of Assyria and a magnetic stage presence as well. Denis Sedov, as Assur, almost matched her. This Russian singer, 26 years old, would seem to have it all: A huge, dark bass of amazing range coupled with the requisite flexibility to sing Rossini’s ornate vocal lines, a handsome and riveting stage presence, and the dramatic ability to become the evil Assur down to the last sneer. His reception was immense. Voices of such quality come along once or twice in a century – maybe. The major opera houses are expressing interest. If he continues to develop his great talent and is careful in doing so, the operatic world will be at his feet.
Arsace was sung by Viveca Genaux. This lovely and feminine singer, garbed in army attire to disguise those facts, actually came off as a believable general, albeit an extremely young one. Her small stature was cleverly disguised by having her sing atop various structures (some more appropriate for a cannery or oil refinery than Semiramide) and the trick worked, not only in making her seem larger, but to help project a voice that, while flexible, is more lyric than dramatic. Her singing was as stylish and accurate as one could hope, and in the duets with Harris, splendidly synchronized. Dramatically, Genaux was an intense Arsace, missing none of the character’s passion or predicament.
Bruce Fowler sang fluently and with honeyed tones the terrifically difficult tenor music of Idreno. One is again reminded that voices capable of performing such music are rare and Fowler is one of the best of a very small group. The charming Azema, a thankless part, was nevertheless wonderfully sung with a bright, clear voice by one of Opera Minnesota’s new talents, Lyndee White, who also had the advantage of wearing something that suggested Babylon.
The priest Oroe was sung magnificently by bass Andrew Gangestad, a Metropolitan Opera Auditions finalist and member of Minnesota Opera’s Young Artist Program. This is an extremely beautiful voice, powerful, wonderfully controlled, and his singing was exceptional and stylish. One hopes to hear him again. Not many voices give this much pleasure. Kudos to the excellent chorus which could scarcely be improved on. This was wonderful work.
Guiding these musical forces was a most remarkable young conductor, unfamiliar to me, named Marco Guidarini, who knows singing and expression. He understands the musical line and the pulse – the breathing – of the music. And he understands singers, what they need and what they need to accomplish, as few conductors do. That this almost four-hour performance remained exhilarating from beginning to end is very largely due to his shaping and pacing of the music, his ability to make it electrifying without sacrificing the singers or the singing. Guidarini proved himself a singers’ conductor in the best sense, not patronizing them, but understanding them and inspiring them to their very best efforts. His tempi were fast -very fast – but such are his skills that the singers were always with him, even in a “Giorno d’orror” duet of such speed as to choke a Sutherland. This was highly impressive conducting, and Marco Guidarini is a conductor to watch. That this opera can now be staged with no compromises or weak links shows the revival of bel canto, now championed by Opera Minnesota, to be in fine condition. The Minnesota Opera’s ambitious, even daring, production of Rossini’s Semiramide – despite some boos from the purists – was a triumph.
—Howard Bushnell.
Beyond Limits
an opera masterclass
by Lucinda Winslow and Daniel Ragone Riverside Church, New York City
With the wealth of masterclasses, workshops, and other post-university training programs available to the singer community, particularly in New York City, it becomes an overwhelming task to discern which program would be an effective way to increase the skills needed to advance career potential. Singers are understandably wary of “scams,” both financial and artistic. Unless personally recommended to a program, a “financially challenged” singer (and is there any other kind?) would often rather forego an opportunity for more training if not assured of success in taking his or her artistry to “the next level.” This is the lofty goal of “Beyond Limits,” a series of masterclasses in New York City, currently held at The Riverside Church. Coach and pianist Daniel Ragone and stage-director Lucinda Winslow have been collaborating since 1994, helping singers integrate “what they already know” (an empowering phrase, oft-repeated in the two-hour class) into “spellbinding performance.”
Singers are instructed to enter from the wings, announce their name, the name of their chosen aria, song or oratorio selection, and perform an already polished piece in “performance mode.” The Riverside Church provides a ghastly lit but acoustically generous auditorium with a raised proscenium stage, where the other participants and various auditors further aid the impression of a typical performance with a bona fide audience.
The number of participants is kept intentionally small, for more individualized attention; the singer is usually allotted approximately 20 minutes in stage time. The class I attended had an unusually gifted set of singers; most were obviously well trained and comfortable with their musical and dramatic skills. After a first run-through of the aria, Winslow and Ragone would refer to their “Instant Checklist,” which is the basis of their method of helping the singer to improve his performance. Some of the items on this list include “First Impressions,” “Musicality,” “The Voice,” and “Interpretation.” All of these are considerations that singers have all taken into account at one point or another in their performing careers, but it is the total product these instructors are interested in, the bottom-line result being successful auditions, i.e., getting hired!
One element on this checklist that seemed to be a focal point of Ms. Winslow’s instruction was that of “Body Language,” more specifically, the sub-heading asking if the “gestural system clarifies and supports text and music?” For example, for a soprano singing “Do Not Utter a Word” from Vanessa, Ms. Winslow discussed the singer’s own rather staid “center of gravity” versus the character’s changeable dynamic (very “Norma Desmond”). In an extremely effective move, the singer and Ms. Winslow agreed that the aria had five different sections, and they talked specifically about the moods of each, and how gestures would organically grow from those differing musical and textual sections. In the first run-through, it was apparent the Soprano knew her music extremely well, had the proper voice type for the aria, and possessed a generally dramatic physical presence. However, upon adding the “gestural life,” the performance gained a new depth, without taking away from the singer’s original concept or hard work.
Both Ragone and Winslow know the repertoire they are coaching. I noticed Ms. Winslow had copious notes attached to the copies of the arias that were being performed, and she demonstrates a vast referential view. She was able to refer to relevant plot points in the various operas to help bring the aria into context, both for practical and artistic ends. It is clear she is an opera lover and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the characters and libretti. For example, a soprano who sang “Porgi amor” was told that she came across as perhaps the Marschallin and not the more youthful Countess, acknowledging the obvious spiritual ties between the two operatic characters. Along with a suggestion for a physicalized “gravitational lift,” the soprano was able very easily to change the mood of the character, and therefore captured more of the essence of the Countess in a very short time. Likewise, Mr. Ragone, who played the myriad musical styles with sensitivity and authority, seemed very well attuned to the inseparable nature of music and drama inherent in operatic performance. His musical coaching, although exacting, always seemed to facilitate the dramatic intensity of the aria being performed.
Mr. Ragone and Ms. Winslow have a friendly yet professional rapport with one another, which translates to their instruction and treatment of the singers. They seem to have eliminated some of the pitfalls many singers have doubtlessly experienced during a masterclass – too much information, vague generalizations regarding technique, ego-based judgements, et cetera – by adhering strictly to their aforementioned “Instant Checklist.” This guide seems perhaps generic or self-explanatory on the surface, but really contains everything (and more) required by singers for a “dazzling” performance. Both seem really to have internalized each item on the checklist, most of the time agreeing upon the improvements to be made without consulting each other mid-class. Typically they suggested incremental changes to the framework the singer had already established, and the checklist was a practical way of pinpointing any deficiencies without demeaning the singer’s work.
The classes are a good value, charging no more than a (very) reasonable New York City coaching fee. One wishes that Mr. Ragone and Ms. Winslow would conduct them on a more consistent basis, because another avenue to artistic development is naturally repetition of helpful concepts and putting them into practical use in a performance setting. “Beyond Limits” is an empowering to the singer on many levels, and offers practical solutions to the sometimes conflicting, costly, and convoluted world of operatic training in a professional yet down-to-earth atmosphere.
—Elisabeth Lang
