Last night in the War Memorial Opera House, the Merola Opera Program wrapped up its annual Summer Festival with its Merola Grand Finale concert. Each of the 25 vocalists that served as Merola Artists over the last few months was given at least one opportunity to perform, and the entire production was staged by another Merola Artist, Matthew J. Schulz. As in the past, the set was kept to a minimum; and all the vocalists wore formal evening attire. The orchestra was conducted by Patrick Furrer, who launched the evening with the overture to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 492 opera The Marriage of Figaro. The entire performance (including one intermission) ran for about three hours.
As usual, most of the content involved familiar composers and, for the most part, familiar operas. Indeed, Schulz chose to follow the overture with the opening scene of K. 492, the pair of duets sung by the title character (bass-baritone William Socolof) and his bride-to-be Susanna (soprano Ashley Marie Robillard), which lays down the foundation for the many complications that will follow over the course of the opera’s four acts. The selection was followed by most of the “usual suspects” of nineteenth-century opera. In “order of appearance” these were Charles Gounod, Georges Bizet, Hector Berlioz, Gaetano Donizetti, Giacomo Puccini, Giuseppe Verdi, and Pietro Mascagni. Following past tradition, the program concluded with “Tutto nel mondo è burla” (everything in the world is a jest), which concludes Verdi’s Falstaff.
However, what made this Finale different from all other Finales (if the reader will pardon that appropriated turn of phrase) was the inclusion of two African-American composers from two successive centuries. The first of these was William Grant Still, represented by the performance of a selection from his one-act opera “Highway 1, USA,” first performed in 1963. The score was originally composed in the Forties with a libretto by Verna Arvey that would anticipate the tribulations-of-being-Black narrative that would come to public attention when Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959. Like Hansberry’s Younger family, Arvey’s characters are a husband (Bob) with dreams beyond his grasp (baritone Scott Lee) and his frustrated wife Mary (soprano Aida Evans). Still composed nine operas over the course of his prolific career, and even a slight taste of his approach to opera was welcome indeed.
The other composer was Jeanine Tesori, who is probably better known for her five Tony Award nominations than for her ventures into opera. Composed in 2019, Blue is a two-act opera that marks a significant departure from the world of Broadway and off-Broadway. She worked with Tazewell Thompson as her librettist, who, in turn, drew upon accounts of “the black experience” by writers such as Claude Brown (Manchild in the Promised Land), James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time), and Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me). The lead character is a Mother (mezzo Veena Akama-Makia) living in a Harlem apartment with her husband and her son.
Kitty Oppenheimer (Nikola Adele Printz) expressing her strained relationship with her husband Robert (William Socolof), who is absorbed only in the Manhattan Project (photograph by Kristen Loken, courtesy of Carla Befera & Co.)
From a personal point of view, the most welcome offering on the program was a reencounter with “Am I in your light?” sung by Kitty Oppenheimer (mezzo Nikola Adele Printz) in John Adams’ Doctor Atomic. This opera was premiered by the San Francisco Opera on October 1, 2005. Since Adams’ Antony & Cleopatra will be receiving its world premiere in the Opera House this coming September 10, this brief selection from an earlier opera served to whet the taste for Adams’ latest undertaking.
No comments:
Post a Comment