The Merola Opera Program was conceived as a summer workshop whose primary focus was on training and developing the finest young opera singers, coaches, and stage directors from around the world. In the past participants would be actively involved in the production of two full-length opera productions, preceded by a program of semi-staged arias. The workshop would then conclude with a Grand Finale of opera excerpts with a unified approach to staging created by a student stage director.
As was reported at the end of this past May, this plan had to be abandoned this summer due to the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, the annual Summer Festival was planned around these limitations, beginning with a program entitled What the Heart Desires, co-curated by tenor Nicholas Phan and mezzo Ronnita Miller (Merola ’05), which served as a platform for a 90-minute program of art song performances by the “Merolini.” While I was not able to attend this performance at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, this afternoon I had the opportunity to view its video recording.
By way of a disclaimer, I must confess that, for my own personal tastes, the opera productions were the high points of every Merola season I have attended. The arias program that preceded the first opera always had more diversity than mind could manage and always felt that it was going on for too long. The same could be said for the Grand Finale, no matter how imaginative the staging was in its efforts to provide some unification of the diverse offerings.
In that context I must confess that What the Heart Desires may well be the longest 90-minute experience I have ever had to endure. The program presented a total of eighteen art songs, almost all of which involved awkward fits between words and music, often with those words and music coming across as clunky even in isolation. As a result none of the performances involved presented a well-formed coupling of words and music as one might find in Aaron Copland’s approach to Emily Dickinson or Benjamin Britten’s approach to W. H. Auden (not to mention Cole Porter’s prodigious invention of both words and music). Even the music of the most familiar composer on the program, Harry Burleigh, never came across as convincing, let alone compelling.
These problems may have been due to the fact that neither the vocalists nor their accompanists managed to find the “sweet spot” that connected with the intentions of the composer. However, there were clearly songs in which the composer did not seem to have any intention other than choosing the right notes to hang on each of the syllables of the text. Stacy Garrop, on the other hand, simply provided “background music” for a recitation of one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s newspaper columns, reflections that are so detached from current conditions that reading them (let alone listening to them recited) today would be a disquieting, if not painful, process.
What the Heart Desires was clearly a road paved with good intentions, but we all know where that road leads.
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