Richard Sasanow - Page 9

I've already cheered tenor Javier Camarena's Herculean take on “Ah, mes amis!” in the Met's current FILLE DU REGIMENT--with 1 ½ dozen high Cs, including an encore--but there's more than the tenor in Met's current revival of the Donizetti gem to make the season suddenly seem grand. He and soprano Pretty Yende have made a potent comic once before--in Rossini's BARBIERE--but FILLE is something altogether different.

The Mason Bates-Mark Campbell opera, THE (R)EVOLUTION OF STEVE JOBS--which debuted at the Santa Fe Opera in summer 2017--walked off with this year's Best Opera Recording at the Grammys on Sunday night. Michael Christie conducted the Santa Fe Opera orchestra, and the cast. Directed by Kevin Newbury, included Sasha Cooke, Jessica E. Jones, Edward Parks, Garrett Sorenson & Wei Wu. It was produced by Elizabeth Ostrow.

Tenor Javier Camarena set a record last night with his encore of “Ah, mes amis!” as Tonio in the season's first performance of Donizetti's LA FILLE DU REGIMENT. It was the first time that anyone was called out for an encore in three different operas—in his case Rossini's LA CENERENTOLA, Donizetti's DON PASQUALE and this one. That's more than Luciano Pavarotti or Juan Diego Florez—the only others to be brought out for a bis of an aria in the last 50 years.

It wasn't so long ago that countertenors were still considered an oddity; today, you can't turn around without tripping over one, or more. Last year, for instance, when the English Concert did Handel's RINALDO at Carnegie Hall there were, indeed, three countertenors. One of them was the young Polish singer--he's 28--Jakub Jozef Orlinski, who just made his New York debut at Carnegie's Weill Recital Hall to what I can only describe as a rapturous reception. I totally agreed.

According to a quote attributed to Andy Warhol, if you want to tell a good painting from a bad one, first look at a thousand paintings; then you'll realize that there are no hard and fast rules. When it comes to performing arts and traditional repertoire, the standards are a little different. Directors, designers and cast are expected to add their two cents to work of the creators, to show their smarts and insights (or at least come up with something they think will be more meaningful to modern/younger audiences). Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte were victims of this maneuvering in the season premiere of the Met's DON GIOVANNI.

Where are our Violettas, our Salomes, our Elektras--even our Lulus--for opera to move forward as an art form for the 21 century? They're all victims of stress and suffering of one sort or another, but still worth meeting up with--not only musically but dramatically--more than once. I began thinking about this while watching the three music-theatre/new opera pieces that I visited during the opening days of the current edition of PROTOTYPE:OPERA/THEATRE/NOW--The Infinite Hotel, 4.48 Psychosis and PRISM.

New York's PROTOTYPE OperaTheatreNow Festival returns for its seventh season from January 5 to the 13th and the one thing that you can't ask about it is “What's new?” That's not because there's nothing to answer. On the contrary--there's too much, in style, in content, in the sizes of its venues: This year's Festival is larger than ever, with a dozen works, 24 composerlibrettists and over 150 collaborators.

On New Year's Eve, the Metropolitan Opera unveiled a new production of Cilea's ADRIANA LECOUVREUR, with a high-powered, audience-pleasing cast--headed by Anna Netrebko--in a production by Met favorite David McVicar, appealingly designed and costumed, and played elegantly by the Met orchestra under Gianandrea Noseda's sweeping baton.

Well, it's that time of the year again--time for a look-back on what was worth making note of during the calendar year that's about to come to an end. It's from a totally personal, subjective point of view, of course, but frankly that's the way opera-lovers always seem to like it, n'est-ce pas? The productions worth noting come from places big, small and in-between, from composers old as the hills to freshly minted or somewhere in between (likewise the performers), from traditional or boldly modern to simply stand up and sing.

Talk about baptism by fire! That's what Gustavo Dudamel--that wunderkind of the classical conducting world--faced as he reached the podium of the Met for the first time Friday night. Not only was he conducting Verdi's great opera, OTELLO, but he was doing so with a last-minute substitute in the title role. The result: All went well with the Met's production of the masterwork.

I hope somebody from New York City Opera was at BAM last weekend, because Mark-Anthony Turnage's GREEK--a modern retelling of the Oedipus myth from Scottish Opera/Opera Ventures, presented by BAM's Next Wave Festival--is just what the doctor ordered for that company. A great story, a small cast, a score that maybe won't leave you humming but moves like gangbusters, a simple production that doesn't look cheesy (except maybe in a mozzarella-ish way). And, oh yes, a happy audience for a work that deserves greater reach on these shores.

The touching, moving, brilliantly site-specific version of Gian Carlo Menotti's AMAHL AND THE NIGHT VISITORS, performed this week by New York's vibrant On Site Opera (OSO), had the audience at the Church of the Holy Apostles Church alternately in tears and cheering.

I interviewed Diana Damrau when she had just done her first Violetta, her role debut in the Met's old Willy Decker production. It was a part she lusted over from the time she saw the 1982 Zeffirelli film, but was careful about taking on--waiting for the right time in her vocal development. That was nearly six years ago and the good news is that she has developed into a first-rate Violetta, sounding better than she has in some time, and looking every inch the glamorous (yet consumptive) courtesan.

Tenor Javier Camarena--who completes his run as Nadir, the love-struck tenor lead in Bizet's LES PECHEURS DE PERLES (THE PEARL FISHERS) this Saturday--isn't finished wow-ing Met audiences for the season. Not by a long shot. He's back in February to throw off those nine High Cs in “Ah, mes amis!” the show-stopping aria--that toast to love and camaraderie--in Donizetti's LA FILLE DU REGIMENT (DAUGHTER OF THE REGIMENT) that Luciano Pavarotti made famous for modern opera audiences.

No one can accuse countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo of sitting around and waiting for projects to fall into his lap. GLASS HANDEL was first produced by the singer with Visionaire and Cath Brittan at Opera Philadelphia's (OP) O18 Operafest in September and presented in NY by OP and National Sawdust for four performances this week at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (a co-producer), GLASS HANDEL was a trip--in many senses of the word.

Handel's AMINTA E FILLIDE doesn't have much of a libretto--'nymph meets swain and complications arise,' says the program, and that's about it--and there were just a handful of musicians from Juilliard's early music program on stage at the Morgan Library's tiny Gilder Lehrman Hall. for a work that lasted less than an hour. Yet Handel's opera/pastoral/cantata goes on my list as one of the most gorgeous performances of the year in New York, under guest artist-in-residence, William Christie.

With a formidable cast of three, and a brilliant ensemble of voices and instrumental musicians, Kaija Saariaho's ONLY THE SOUND REMAINS swept through town last weekend, created with director Peter Sellars. Once again, she left us in awe of how she can fill an impossibly large theatre with what seems on paper to be the tiniest of works.

We thought things were exciting last week, when Christian Van Horn brought his Mefistofele to the Met last week, getting all his exercise for the month in the athletic staging and nailing his first big role in the house. However, that was “business as usual” compared to the mid-performance debut, just a few days later, of baritone Alexander Birch Elliott, as Zurga, in Bizet's LES PECHEURS DE PERLES (THE PEARL FISHERS) in the opera's first performance of the season.

I caught up with rising star bass-baritone Christian Van Horn the other day, to find out what the devil was going on with his starring role in the Met's first performance of Arrigo Boito's MEFISTOFELE in almost 20 years. Were you nervous as hell (pun intended) on the first night, I asked Van Horn, winner of this year's prestigious Richard Tucker Award, in your role as the Devil?

Short on financial resources but long on ambition, Utopia Opera started its eighth season last weekend with a New York premiere: Thea Musgrave's THE STORY OF HARRIET TUBMAN. It's a 90-minute chamber version, orchestrated by composer Julian Grant, of Musgrave's full-length, two-act HARRIET, THE WOMAN CALLED MOSES, which debuted in 1985 at the Virginia Opera, with some fervent portrayals by its cast of about two dozen, including the stellar soprano MaKayla McDonald as Harriet and mezzo Karmesha Peake as her mother, Rit.